Gladstone: A Biography (51 page)

Gladstone did not flounce out of the leadership (nor is there much indication that he was near to so doing), but he resolved to move no more amendments of his own and indeed became somewhat
fitful, for a leader of the opposition, in his Commons attendance, except on the Reform Bill. But on that he had to endure at least two more humiliations and one unvalorous retreat. On 9 May he
supported another attempt to deal with the problem of compounding (paying rates through the landlord) and ‘Spoke earnestly and long for Comp. Householders: in vain. Beaten by 322:256. Much
fatigued by heat and work.’
²⁰
Then in the middle of May there was the most bewildering of all Disraeli’s shifts of position. Hodgkinson,
whom Gladstone patronizingly described as ‘a local solicitor little known in the House’ (this form of words may have been occasioned by a stab of jealousy on account of his both being
member for Newark and getting away with his amendment), had put down a form of words which simply abolished ‘compounding’ and therefore the problem of the
compounder by providing that within boroughs no rate could be levied which was not individually paid. There was a competing and better-drafted amendment down from H. C. E. Childers, who was
regarded as a mouthpiece of Gladstone, and that was sufficient to make the Hodgkinson amendment relatively attractive. So Disraeli, apparently without consultation with Derby or any other member of
the Cabinet, simply accepted it. It added nearly half a million voters to the electoral rolls, in other words doubled the effect of the bill. ‘Never’, Gladstone wrote, ‘have I
undergone a stronger emotion of surprise than when, as I was entering the House, our Whip met me and stated that Disraeli was about to support Hodgkinson’s motion.’
²¹
The speed and irresponsibility with which Disraeli moved left Gladstone floundering.

Once Hodgkinson’s amendment had been accepted (even though its form proved impracticable and had to be replaced by a government redraft) most of the other previous subjects of argument
fell away as irrelevant. The fancy franchises, plural voting and the £5 franchise were all transcended. The remaining controversial issues were female suffrage, on which John Stuart
Mill’s amendment was comfortably defeated by 196 to 73, with Gladstone voting in the majority, and the enfranchisement of lodgers, who were regarded as a dangerous voting group. Eventually,
provided they did not move often and occupied rooms of an unfurnished rateable value of £10 (which meant they were fairly lavish) they were allowed in. (By 1869 only 12,000 had met the
qualifications, of whom two-thirds were in Westminster or Marylebone, only twentyeight in Manchester and one in Birmingham.)
²²

Third reading took place on 15 July and extracted from Gladstone an extraordinary confession of the weakness of his position on the bill: ‘A remarkable night. Determined at the last moment
not to take part in the debate: for fear of doing mischief on our own side.’
²³
Without provocation from Gladstone this stage passed without a
division (as he had wished). The Lords, under Derby’s control, were amenable, thereby showing that their partisanship was more a matter of party than of issues. They made no more than a
handful of amendments, of which only one, designed to protect minorities in three-member boroughs (such as Birmingham) by giving each elector only two votes, survived the return to the Commons. The
bewildering bill, which enfranchised approximately a million new voters, as opposed to the 400,000 which is
all that the too radical Russell–Gladstone bill of the
previous session would have done, was safely law by 15 August.

Gladstone had already departed for Penmaenmawr on 10 August. He could not look back on the session with much satisfaction. There was a wave of complaint that as party leader in the Commons he
was remote and chilling and would not fraternize. His old friend Sir Thomas Acland wrote, taking as he said ‘a great liberty’, to tell him a few home truths.

Morley wrote that Gladstone lacked the little civilities and hypocrisies of political society, and Phillimore on one occasion told him that if he would only say something to a particular member,
even if it was to abuse his views or tell him that he smelt, instead of ignoring him completely and implying that he knew neither his face nor his name, that member would immediately become his
most devoted follower (perhaps a little difficult to believe). What is striking about this catalogue of complaint is that it is so familiar. It has been heard about every political leader from Peel
to Churchill, from Balfour to Heath. The only man of whom it was manifestly not true was Baldwin, and although his qualities were somewhat underestimated for half a century after his withdrawal
from office, he does not provide the most outstanding example of dynamic leadership or bold statesmanship.

Gladstone therefore had no great need to worry about this shower of nervous, well-intentioned but tiresome advice. In fact, as is often the case, he was being asked to improve his leadership
performance by changing the personality which had made him, and not twenty-five or thirty other equally available men, leader in the first place. There is no evidence that the issue worried him at
Penmaenmawr, where he remained (with twenty-five sea-bathes that year) for almost a full month before retiring to Hawarden for ten weeks, interrupted only by one night in Liverpool with his brother
Robertson and five at Holker (near Carnforth) with the Duke of Devonshire.

There was then a brief autumn session (the first since 1854). It had been called to provide credits for a punitive expedition against King Theodore of Abyssinia. As, however, that particular
Lion of Judah was
generally held to have behaved very badly by rounding up and holding in chains all available British subjects this did not cause much controversy or take
long. The session was over inside two weeks, and by 3 December Gladstone was back at Hawarden for another hardly interrupted two and a half months.

He was again much preoccupied that autumn and winter with Homeric studies, but there is also a sense of detachment from the affairs of day-to-day politics, a gazing at the more distant future
rather than a reaction to short-term shifts in the political weather. No doubt this was to some extent a reaction against recent parliamentary buffetings and humiliations. His fifty-eighth
birthday, however, passed with only the most cursory of introspective reflection: ‘Another year of mercies unworthily received is added to the sum of my days: of wanderings and backslidings:
of much varied experience in the world & in private life. I long for the day of rest.’
²⁵

Tree-felling, then in its tenth year, became a dominant and hazardous Hawarden activity. On 23 December: ‘Willy and I felled a good tree. . . . A splinter struck my eye, causing some
inflammation: and in the evening Dr Moffatt came and sent me to bed’; and on the 24th: ‘In bed and in the dark all day. Much rumination: on imperial concerns – & on Homer
– among other matters’; and on Christmas Day, ‘Kept to bed till 1am [
sic
]’. However, Gladstone was always a great man for the recuperative effects of bed, and by 27
December he was back at the slaughter in the park: ‘Today a tree we were cutting fell with Harry [his third son, then aged fifteen] in it. He showed perfect courage and by God’s mercy
was not hurt.’ A month later he was himself again the victim and had to ‘put off letters on account of a finger a little bruised in the chances of woodcutting in the
afternoon.’
²⁶
There arises the thought that, in spite of his sparse frame and taut movements, he might have been a little clumsy. From the
September day twenty-five years before when he had shot off the forefinger of his left hand (and subsequently always wore a black stall, or occasionally a glove) while reloading one barrel of a gun
with the other fully cocked, he had shown some proneness to accidents.

At the end of February 1868 Disraeli became Prime Minister. Derby was sixty-eight, well younger than Palmerston or Russell, but a combination of his gout and his doctor made it impossible for
him to carry on, and the last Prime Minister to be born in the eighteenth century disappeared from the scene and died a year later. Disraeli had a genuine affection for Derby, but was nonetheless
delighted to have ‘climbed to the top of the greasy pole’. In March he gave a grand reception to
celebrate the event, and borrowed the new Foreign Office from
Derby’s son Stanley for the occasion: Mrs Disraeli thought 10 Downing Street ‘so dingy and decaying’. The party was a dazzling symbol of Disraeli’s rise (although he himself
was reported as looking ‘impenetrable’ and ‘low’, while his wife looked ‘ill and haggard’). There were present princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses,
ambassadors and prelates – and the Gladstones. Gladstone did not exactly enthuse over the event: ‘Dined at Mr Cardwell’s. . . . Mr Disraeli’s party and Speaker’s
Levée at night’
²⁷
was the only mention it got in his diary. But he went, and thereby kept up the
convenances
of mid-Victorian
politics. The emphasis should be on
mid
, for it is much more doubtful whether, had a similar celebration taken place nine or ten years later, he would have done so, or would indeed have been
welcome.

Five years the elder, Disraeli had thus got to be first minister ten months before Gladstone was to do so. Despite the symbiosis of their relationship in the sixth, seventh and eighth decades of
the century, however, there was one event in Gladstone’s life in that winter of 1867–8 which was still more important to his future than Disraeli’s accession to the foremost
place. As he ruminated around the political horizon during the long Hawarden weeks of recess, so the words of his 1845 letter to his wife (‘Ireland, Ireland! That cloud in the west, that
coming storm, the vehicle of God’s retribution . . .’) came to have more meaning for him than when he had written them; and when he made his major speech of the 1867 autumn, at
Southport on 19 December, it was almost entirely devoted to Irish issues. Thereafter, except during his preoccupation with Bulgarian atrocities and wider aspects of the Eastern Question in
1876–80, his mind was never to be free of Ireland and the Irish.

P
ART
T
HREE

THE FIRST PREMIERSHIP AND THE FIRST RETIREMENT

1868–1876

‘M
Y
M
ISSION IS TO
P
ACIFY
I
RELAND
’

I
N SPITE OF THAT HAUNTING
1845 phrase, Gladstone for the first fifty-eight years of his life had applied himself very sparingly to Hibernian problems.
His principal practical impact upon Ireland had been his 1853 budget decision to bring it within the scope of the income tax, from which it had been spared by both Pitt and Peel. While this
unionist approach could be interpreted as a mark of confidence in the metropolitan as opposed to the colonial status of Ireland, it did not exhibit much sensitivity to the difference between the
socio-economic structures of the two islands, and it was naturally not popular in the second island. Nor had he ever made a speech as sharply if flippantly penetrating of the paradoxes of
Anglo-Irish relations as Disraeli had in 1844.
⁶⁹

In 1867–8 Gladstone had never visited Ireland. He had planned an 1845 visit with Hope-Scott and Philip Pusey, the great Pusey’s elder
brother, who was then MP
for Berkshire, but almost at the last moment the plan fell through. In this respect, however, he was no worse than Disraeli, who never crossed St George’s Channel, or than many other fellow
politicians. Gladstone, like Asquith, did go for one proper visit, but this was not until 1877, when he was nearly sixty-eight years old and had already been a Prime Minister much concerned with
Irish problems for five years. Also, in 1880, he slipped ashore from a yacht on a Sunday morning, but only to attend a service in the Anglican cathedral of Christ Church. His proper 1877 visit
lasted nearly a month, but its impact upon him was limited by its being confined to official and ecclesiastical Dublin together with stays in five ‘ascendancy’ mansions of the Irish
home counties.