Gladstone: A Biography (64 page)

She concluded with dark hints of abdication:

What was worse was the letter which Ponsonby (despite his position as a firm ally of Gladstone’s and – privately – a stern critic of the Queen on all these public engagement
matters) wrote to Gladstone on 15 August:

This drove Gladstone into resentful indignation, which he expressed in his reply to Ponsonby with perhaps some exaggeration springing from exasperation of the moment but also with an underlying
bitterness which suggested permanent damage:

Six weeks later Gladstone reached Balmoral for just over a week’s stay as minister in attendance. In the interval he had been in lodgings at Whitby in North Yorkshire, where his son Willy
had become MP in 1868, for two weeks of sea-bathing and had spent another three weeks at Hawarden. On his way to Balmoral, moreover, he had made a political
progress, with warm
receptions at Perth and then at the intermediate stations to Aberdeen, where he had spoken three times, once in the main assembly rooms, once to a working men’s club, and once at a Lord
Provost’s luncheon. ‘There was much enthusiasm for the Government,’ he recorded.
²⁰
His main speech at Aberdeen, where he received
the freedom of the city, might in fact have carried the Queen’s agreement, for it was one of the most anti-Irish that he ever made, accusing that nation of ingratitude in its lack of response
to the two reforming measures of 1869 and 1870, and fifteen years later was singled out by Lord Randolph Churchill as the last anti-Home Rule speech that Gladstone ever made.

Nevertheless this may not have been the most tactful way in which to approach Balmoral, particularly in view of the August interchange with Ponsonby, but there was no suggestion that it was the
reason why she let him wait several days after arrival before seeing him. That was due more to her still making the most of her slowly recovering health and perhaps to continuing resentment on her
part too. Altogether it is difficult to judge how frosty the atmosphere was during this Balmoral visit. When he eventually saw the Queen his diary entry ran: ‘Long interview with H. M. She
was very kind: & much better.’
²¹
And he wrote to his wife on the next day: ‘I bade farewell reluctantly to Balmoral, for it is as
homelike as any place away from home can be, and wonderfully safe from invasions.’
²²

On the other hand he wrote to Glyn, his Chief Whip, on the Sunday: ‘I go from here Wednesday morning, unless invited to stay on a little.’ He left on the Wednesday. More significant
was a passage in a 1 October letter to Granville, to whom he found it easier to expose a bruise than to either his Whip or his wife: ‘Her repellent power which she so well knows how to use
has been put in action towards me on this occasion for the first time since the formation of the Government. I have felt myself on a new and different footing with her.’
²³
On balance the petty issue of the date of the Queen’s 1871 departure for Balmoral probably did mark a significant point in the decline of their
relationship. It need not have been an irrevocable decline had the Queen in particular had the will to reverse it, but she did not; and Gladstone was passing into a mood in which he accumulated
grievances with a certain grim satisfaction.

This deterioration was underpinned by their next serious argument, which was on a matter of more substance than the Balmoral departure nonsense. At the beginning of November 1871 the Prince of
Wales
caught typhoid staying at a country house near Scarborough. Lord Chesterfield, a fellow guest, and the Prince’s groom, who were also infected, both died. So nearly
did the Prince. He was desperately ill at Sandringham for the first two weeks of December, but miraculously rallied on the 14th, the tenth anniversary of his father’s death in somewhat
similar circumstances. It was very bad luck for Sir Charles Dilke, who was launched on an autumn campaign of republican meetings and found that his movement around the provincial centres, from
Newcastle to Bristol to Leeds to Bolton to Birmingham, was punctuated by increasingly alarmist bulletins about the Prince which produced increasingly hostile audiences. The developments might have
been regarded as even worse luck for the Prince, although when his fever eventually receded it became apparent that the momentum of the English republican movement had gone with it. His six weeks
of illness had done more for the stability of the Throne than had his previous thirty years of life.

The first and lesser impact of the Prince’s illness and recovery upon Sovereign–Prime Minister relations was concerned with the place, date and form of the national service of
thanksgiving which was generally agreed to be called for. This was not allowed to be easy. St Paul’s and 27 February 1872 were settled on without too much difficulty, but there were a lot of
other problems to worry about. The service must be short and simple; the Queen could not absolutely commit the Prince or even herself to attend, and if they did should she and the Prince and
Princess ride in one carriage as she wanted or in two as they appeared to want? Eventually all was sorted out and the public enthusiasm gave her much gratification. It was Blackfriars Bridge writ
large.

She was also in an unusual supplicatory position towards the Prime Minister that winter because she had conceived a great desire to go to Baden-Baden at Easter to see Princess Feodore of
Hohenlohe-Leinigen, her twelve-year-senior half-sister, who she rightly thought might be nearing the end of her life. She appeared to accept that she needed the permission of the government for
this expedition, and approached securing it in a very submissive tone, rather like a young officer trying to get a week’s special leave from his colonel. She first raised it in a letter of 10
January, and after making a very strong case for a last visit to ‘her dear Sister’ (who did in fact die eight months later) whom she had not seen for six years, she continued:

Gladstone replied a little sternly, recognizing the case for the visit but suggesting several reasons, including the need to make dispositions about the future of the Prince of Wales, against
the Easter timing. The Queen was determined but not peremptory. She sent him a letter she had just received from Princess Hohenlohe in the hope that the tale of suffering it contained would melt
his heart. It did, to the extent of his tacitly withdrawing his opposition provided the plans were kept secret for as long as possible. On 19 February, however, still five weeks before departure,
she wrote to say that more or less public plans would now have to be made, and in doing so illustrated a startling contrast between her eager ingenuity when she wanted to do something and her
magnification of obstacles when she did not. A three-country journey of 600 miles became much less of a burden than a drive along the Embankment to the City of London.

In spite of the sadness of her mission there is a touch of throwback to the spontaneous enthusiasm of Guedalla’s Victoria I about her approach to the journey, and she may be thought to
come more attractively out of this correspondence than did Gladstone. As he hinted in his first letter, he was limbering up, somewhat laboriously, to use the aftermath of the illness of the Prince
of Wales to push through a scheme which had been for some time maturing in his mind. This was intended to fulfil the double objective of providing a pediment for the three columns (the first the
Church Bill, the second the Land Bill and the third the University Bill of 1873) of his policy of pacifying Ireland and at the same time providing employment for the Prince.

There was general agreement, embracing certainly the Queen, and up to a point the Prince himself, that such employment was desirable. At the time of his typhoid he was
thirty years of age, had been married for eight and a half years, had five children, was a leader of fashion, which he tempered with a mild easy-going liberalism, or at least reaction against his
mother’s rigidities, but was best known for idleness, self-indulgence and dissipation. However, there was a hope that his long fever and narrow escape had washed away his sins as well as his
vitality and that with the rebirth of his innocence there was an opportunity for a new beginning on a life of greater public service. The Queen gave to his elder sister, the Crown Princess of
Prussia, an affecting picture of him at Osborne in mid-February: ‘It is like a new life – all the trees and flowers give him pleasure, as they never used to do, and he was quite
pathetic over his small wheelbarrow and little tools at the Swiss cottage. He is constantly with Alix [the Princess of Wales], and they seem hardly ever apart!!!’
²⁶

It was a narrow window of opportunity for by May she was back to complaining that he was gadding about too much, and Gladstone may have missed the window by a few weeks, for he submitted his
memorandum of serious proposals only on 5 July. But the timing seems unlikely to have been crucial. The proposals united in opposition the Queen and the Prince, which was a deadly although by no
means an inevitable alliance. In a long (3000 words) and lucidly argued letter Gladstone first reviewed several canvassed proposals for the special association of the Prince with one or other of
several departments of state, the Foreign Office, the India Office or the War Office, and found them unsatisfactory, as he did that for a special fostering role in relation to art, science and
philanthropy. He then came to his recommended solution, which was that for the winter season the Prince should reside for several months in Dublin and take over the role of Viceroy, which office
would be abolished, thereby releasing to him the salary and other considerable emoluments of that office. (This was a clever bait, for the Prince was finding it difficult to live on his income.)
The Chief Secretary would, however, continue in being with responsibility for Irish administration, although the Prince by working closely with him would gain experience in executive
government.

For the rest the Prince (and the Princess) should for the London summer season take over from the Queen the (undischarged) responsibility for providing from Buckingham Palace an active Court and
the leadership of society. Somewhat curiously he had supported this in a
previous letter to Ponsonby by saying: ‘I am convinced that society has suffered fearfully in
moral tone from the absence of a pure Court.’
²⁷
It was curiously and somewhat tactlessly put because from the Queen it had not had an impure
Court (although she could have interpreted his words otherwise) but no Court at all, and from the Prince it was quite likely to get the reverse.

Gladstone summed up his proposals in a way that made them sound a little like a regime of long runs and cold baths prescribed by a
mens sana in corpore sano
schoolmaster: ‘Four to
five months in Ireland, two or three in London, the Autumn manoeuvres, Norfolk and Scotland, with occasional fractions of time for other purposes, would sufficiently account for the twelve
months.’
²⁸
There was no chance of the proposals being accepted. The Prince was filled with no nostalgia for his 1861 escapade at the Curragh
(when a young actress had been smuggled into his quarters) and hated the idea of nearly half a year of exile. The Queen (with some justification) thought that there could be constitutional
complications about the Prince’s position in Ireland, and half tried to sugar the pill for Gladstone by saying that there, ‘placed at the head of a smaller and inferior society to that
of London . . . he will be surrounded by Gentlemen of the Irish conservative party who will endeavour to attract him to their views’.
²⁹
Her
rejection of the Buckingham Palace Court suggestion on the other hand contained no sugar and a smart snub: ‘The Queen considers [this] to be a question which more properly concerns herself to
settle with the members of her family as occasion may arise.’
³⁰