Gladstone: A Biography (78 page)

He did however indulge, to use Morley’s oxymoron, in ‘intellectual sentimentality’. In this category could be placed his references to the Zulus and to the Afghans, both of
whom he saw as the pawns of Disraeli’s showy imperialism, which was as cruel to its overseas victims as it was corrupting to the appetites of its home supporters. Of the Zulus 10,000 had been
slaughtered ‘for no other offence than their attempt to defend against your artillery with their naked bodies, their hearths and home, their wives and families . . .’. Of the Afghans,
his audience was called to remember that ‘the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eyes of Almighty God as can be your
own’.
²¹
To balance this there was the immense seriousness of the arguments which he put before his mass audiences. In the Edinburgh Corn
Exchange, for instance, he spoke to 5000 for one and a quarter hours on the most intricate and statistical detail of Disraeli’s financial profligacy. At West Calder he spoke to almost as many
on the details of foreign policy and on why quack remedies (that is, protection) were no answer to the current agricultural depression.

He never pandered or talked down to his audiences. He treated them to the same full rigour of his elevated and erudite if somewhat tendentious style of argument as he deployed before the House
of Commons. The flattery lay in assuming their seriousness and judgemental capacity. And given the reverence he excited this increased the self-respect of those who came to his meetings and thereby
gave them a satisfying experience. They felt that they had been raised to membership of some mystical tribunal of the nation. To his mass 20,000 standing audience in the Waverley Market (at which
he noted that people who had fainted were ‘continually handed out over the heads . . . and were as if dead’),
²²
few of whom were within
miles of the county franchise, he gave the same accolade of dignity. You ‘who do not fear to call yourselves
the working men of Edinburgh, Leith and the district’
were nonetheless part of the great assize of Britain.

In the second week of the campaign Gladstone gave overt expression of the truth that the object was much wider than winning Midlothian and deserted Edinburgh for other Scottish towns and cities.
On Monday, 1 December, he made speeches at Inverkeithing, Dunfermline, Aberfeldy and Perth (two, one to a civic gathering of 1500 in the City Hall for the conferment of the Freedom and the other to
an open-air meeting of 4000). The Friday was his Glasgow day, beginning with his rectorial address before an audience of 5000. He had devoted far more preparatory attention to this than to any
other speech of his Scottish fortnight. It was essentially an attack on the plutocratic values which in the 1870s were widely perceived as having gained as much ground as they were again to do 110
years later in the 1980s.

The anti-plutocratic theme was an interesting and delicate one for Gladstone, for he most certainly was not an egalitarian. Ruskin, staying at Hawarden in January 1878 (‘In some respects
an unrivalled guest, and those important respects too’),
²³
had suggested that Gladstone was in the category of those who believed ‘one
man [was] as good as another’. ‘I am nothing of the sort,’ Gladstone was reported as replying. ‘I am a firm believer in the aristocratic principle – the rule of the
best. I am an out-and-out i
nequalitarian
.’
²⁴
He believed that men should have the opportunity to accumulate large fortunes. Some of his
strongest provincial supporters, moved by his moral fire although mostly Nonconformist and not sharing his Anglicanism, were engaged at the time in doing precisely that. And he perhaps believed
even more strongly in the hereditary principle. But he was against the flaunting of wealth, whether it was old or new. He took this view partly, but only partly, on conservative, social-order
grounds. He did not want the poor stirred up by profligacy into an unwillingness to accept their lot.

He also believed that the flaunting of great wealth was morally bad. What he liked best was an austere duke of large fortune (he had had too much trouble with the Newcastles to want poor dukes),
public spirit, intellectual interest and Liberal views, living well within his income and ploughing the rest back to secure the future of his estates and his heirs. Trollope’s Duke of Omnium
(Plantagenet Palliser before he succeeded, not the self-indulgent and corrupting old Duke) was very much to his taste, except that had Trollope lived to write sequels in the late 1880s, they would
almost certainly have portrayed Omnium as a Liberal Unionist. What Gladstone liked next best were men like Samuel Morley,
a Congregationalist teetotaller who became a
Nottingham hosiery magnate. Morley devoted much of his immense fortune to building Dissenting chapels and to general philanthropy, subsidizing both the Liberal
Daily News
(of which he was
principal proprietor) and the political career of his son. This son, Arnold Morley, became Gladstone’s Home Rule Chief Whip after the Brands and the Glyns and the Grosvenors had defected.
What Gladstone liked least was plutocratic display, particularly when it was accompanied by any fondness for Disraeli’s imperialism. His least favourite ducal family was probably the
Marlboroughs, of whom he harshly said in 1882: ‘there never was a Churchill from John of Marlborough down that had either morals or principles.’
^25
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There was no absence of either morals or principles in his Glasgow University address. Apart from his repudiation of luxury and the obsessive pursuit of mammon, he extolled ‘the
intellectual dignity’ of a vocation ‘in the Christian ministry’, elevated ratiocination to the centre of human experience (‘thought is the citadel’), and left his
audience with four guides which they should follow in controversy: ‘truth, charity, diligence and reverence’. The address lasted one and a half hours and sounds austere fare for the
traditionally rumbustious rectorial occasion. ‘The blue caps [the Tory students] as well as the red [Liberal] cheered fervently, at the close,’ he wrote.
²⁶
The explanation which John Morley gave was that all, even those for whom the topics and the treatment were not particularly sympathetic, were so captivated by the sheer
quality of the physical performance that they were sorry, even after ninety minutes, ‘when the stream of fascinating melody ceased to flow’.
²⁷
To believe that the students wanted still more is perhaps a tall order, but the indisputable fact remains that, in contrast with some more modern Glasgow rectorial occasions,
there were no eggs, no catcalls and sustained applause. And it took place at a time of tense political controversy.

There was then a late luncheon (and another speech) in the second great hall on the University’s new (opened in 1870) Gilmore Hall site. After a pause of little more than an hour he was on
his way to the St Andrew’s Hall, the home of Glasgow music until it was destroyed by fire in 1962, where he addressed 6500 for another one and a half hours.
Then at nine
he went on to the City Hall where he spoke, without apparent flagging, to another 2500. ‘Did not God in his mercy wonderfully bear me through?’
²⁸
he laconically (for once) mused.

The next day he received the Freedom of Motherwell and Hamilton before spending a Saturday to Monday at Dalzell, the middle Clyde Valley house of a Liberal MP. Then he returned by train to
Hawarden, through another series of station demonstrations at Carlisle, Preston, Wigan, Warrington and Chester. These railway crowds brought those whom it was calculated he had addressed (in thirty
speeches and over his fifteen-day circuit) to the precise figure of 86,930.
²⁹
As a less friendly observer also calculated that he had delivered
himself of 85,840 words during this fortnight, there was a close balance between output and audience.

Gladstone arrived back at Hawarden in high morale. Lucy Cavendish, who was there, recorded in a phrase as vivid as it is dated that, while her aunt took to her bed in a state of exhaustion,
Uncle William was ‘as fresh as paint’. Moreover, she thought him, for the first time, ‘a little
personally
elated’.
³⁰
His mood and behaviour were that of a general after a decisive battle, anxious to pause and write his despatches rather than to be off in hot pursuit and in search of the next engagement. On the
first day he stayed in bed until mid-morning ‘nursing my throat’. Then he felled a sycamore in the afternoon as well as revising his rectorial address for publication by John Murray,
writing to the
Scotsman
to refine some point, and beginning the revision of all his Midlothian speeches, also for publication, which he was surprised, a few days later, to discover amounted
to a book of 255 pages. He showed no desire to exploit his triumph by going to London, seeing his colleagues and adding to the turbulence which his thunderous campaign had already created for the
official Liberal leadership.

There had been a divisive plan to give Gladstone a London banquet on his return from Midlothian, which would in effect have been an anti-Hartington rally. That had been dropped, wisely if
Liberal unity on the threshold of a general election was regarded as desirable. Then there was a proposition, strangely headed by A. J. Mundella, Radical MP for Sheffield and a leading instigator
of anti-Turkish indignation in the autumn of 1876, that there should be a banquet of loyalty to Hartington in February. Next, with one of those pieces of elephantine subtlety beloved of whips and
other political fixers, it was thought that circles could be squared and the embarrassment of the principals combined with the entertainment of the audience by getting Gladstone to preside
over this feast. Two hundred and forty Liberal MPs subscribed to the projected pageant, and Gladstone unenthusiastically consulted Granville about whether he should accept.
Fortunately Hartington had the robust good sense to turn it down flat. The 240 MPs got their money back, and Gladstone was saved having to make a speech even more rich than usual in convoluted
obscurities and qualifying sub-clauses.

Hartington shared with William Harcourt, and with almost no one else who worked closely with Gladstone, the quality of being undazzled by him. Many of the others were often irritated by and
sometimes (behind his back) deeply critical of Gladstone. But they were nonetheless to a greater or lesser extent swept away by the force of his personality. Hartington and Harcourt, although
sharply different characters in other respects, who moreover ended up in diametrically opposite political camps, were the only two batsmen who were not intimidated by his fast bowling, Hartington
because he just stood there, letting the balls bounce past him, and Harcourt because he hit back with confidence if not always with skill. Hartington’s phlegmatic character was brilliantly
caught by a description which Derby wrote in his diary after a visit by him to Knowsley in October 1879. Hartington, although in many ways the quintessential Whig aristocrat in politics, never got
on particularly well with his fellow landed magnates, neither Derby himself, whom he once dismissed as no more than an owner of Liverpool ground rents, or Salisbury, who was too much of a
non-sporting intellectual for Hartington’s taste and who, when they were working in close alliance in 1891, retaliated by complaining that ‘Hartington is at Newmarket and all political
arrangements have to be hung up till some quadruped has run faster than some other quadruped.’
³¹

Derby’s description of Hartington was:

This picture of Hartington as an early and cisatlantic exponent of the style of speech practised by some East Coast American gentlemen and known as ‘Long Island
lockjaw’ is a vivid one. Hartington, however, was both more intelligent and more ambitious than conventional wisdom allows. After a shaky start he had come quite to enjoy being Liberal
leader and probably thought that his efforts in this role meant that he deserved to be Prime Minister, even though his mixture of realism and negligence made him unwilling to
fight for the top job in either 1880 or 1886. Nevertheless he was seriously discussing (with Granville and Forster) as late as October 1879 the possibility that Gladstone might be prepared to serve
under him as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and during the 1880 election campaign he bestirred himself to make no less than twenty-four speeches, well in excess of Gladstone’s own fifteen. They
did not have the same resonance, although their impact was far from negligible and, like Gladstone’s, they were subsequently collected into a book. His criticisms of Disraeli were sharp, and
there were indications of further measures of Liberal reform, affecting local government, the franchise and even land tenure. He was then forty-six years old, and was undoubtedly trying.

Gladstone stayed at Hawarden over Christmas and ten days into the New Year. His seventieth-birthday thoughts were even more than usually a mixture of exultation at the strength which God
personally gave him, somewhat routine self-criticism and an old man’s awareness that he must be approaching the end of his life: