A History of Britain, Volume 3 (47 page)

What was worse, the paranoia often led directly to fiasco (and thus another round of penal taxation). In 1878, Lytton finally succeeded in engineering the Afghan war, for which he had been manoeuvring since the very beginning of his tenure as viceroy. The pretext was the emir’s refusal of British ‘help’ in repelling what Lytton insisted was an immediate Russian military threat – although in fact it was nothing more than the appearance of a Russian diplomatic mission in Kabul. The usual British invasion was followed by the equally time-honoured local uprising and wholesale slaughter of the British mission, which as usual required a second, punitive campaign – in this instance punitive for the British in the losses of both men and money. Pyrrhic victory in Afghanistan was made no more palatable when it transpired that the famine-relief fund so piously established had been pillaged for the campaign.

Disraeli had been against the Afghan strategy from the beginning and had only been persuaded to support it against his better judgement by a new Secretary of State for India and Lytton devotee, Lord Cranbrook. When the news of the expensive disaster came in the prime
minister
was appalled, but put a brave face on it. In the same year, 1879, another British imperial army was torn to pieces by the Zulu king Cetawayo at Isandhlwana. By the time the damage was contained in South Africa another £5 million had gone down the drain and Britain had – just as it had often done in India – destroyed one of the few viable African nations in the name of bringing peace and security. Perhaps this is what Lord Beaconsfield (as Disraeli became in 1876) meant when he spoke in the Lords of the ‘millions bound to us by military sway [a nice euphemism for coercion] because they know they are indebted to it for order and justice’. Increasingly, however, Gladstone felt bound to retort, what ‘order’? What ‘justice’? And he got very angry indeed at the cant of ‘liberty’: ‘Liberty for ourselves,’ Beaconsfield might have said, ‘and empire for the rest of the world.’ Gladstone’s increasing irritability and contempt for the extravagances of empire signified a new turn in the politics of liberalism. There had always been, of course, an element among the Liberals, especially orthodox free traders like the MPs John Bright and Richard Cobden, who were suspicious of expensive imperialist adventurism. But it was only in the late 1870s that a more self-consciously crusading anti-jingoism found its most eloquent voice in Gladstone himself. With Disraeli in the Lords and a shadow of his former self, it was Gladstone who for a moment – though just an opposition MP and not even the leader of his party – had the moral theatre all to himself; between 1876 and the election of 1880 he used it to put on the greatest one-man show in the whole of Victorian political history.

Gladstone’s political crusades drew their power not just from moral fervour, but from thorny self-interrogations and exhaustive reading and reflection. At the beginning of his premiership in 1869 he had read a weighty discussion of the Irish land problem by an Indian civil servant, George Campbell. As Fenian (republican) militancy was becoming more serious, Campbell had visited Ireland and been startled to discover how closely the problems of its peasant tenants resembled those seen in parts of India. There, too, peasants who could not produce hard, English-style legal contracts of ownership were written off as ‘tenants-at-will’, subject to summary rent increases and eviction for default, without any compensation for the improvements they had made. Cultivators who had farmed the same plot for generations were turfed off and turned into pauperized, landless labourers. As the British had become more educated in Indian land customs they had come to recognize that, in much of India, occupation over the generations was equivalent to a kind of ‘moral co-proprietorship’ that protected the peasants from being treated as mere tenants-at-will. This, Campbell felt (along with John Stuart Mill, who had
written
in much the same vein), ought also to be the case in Ireland. Although Campbell had grown up very much in the hands-off school of Trevelyan, he none the less believed that there was a place for government to act as the guardian of the defenceless. True liberalism would be honoured, not violated, by such an engagement. The alternative would be yet more cycles of bitter violence.

As Gladstone read on in his temple of peace at Hawarden, something crucial for him and for the history of British liberalism began to make itself felt: that there were places in the empire – India, Ireland and probably the dark places of industrial England, too, for that matter – where the old gospel of pure self-reliance had become a bankrupt platitude. Not that this new awareness made Gladstone a radical interventionist. The main thrust of the Irish reforms in his first administration was still the dismantling, not the building, of state institutions – especially the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. But even as a pragmatist (not a radical) he was beginning to understand the force of the Birmingham Liberal activist Joseph Chamberlain’s arguments that good local government in the industrial cities of Britain often meant the aggressive assertion of public power to provide for the basic social needs of citizens – adequate housing, transport and medical welfare. The test of righteous liberalism in modern Britain, then, could not just be freedom of trade and property. Or rather those freedoms, if they were to survive, would have to be complemented by attention to social justice. For it was, as Campbell had said, the sense of being robbed of that justice that drove men to fury and violence – whether in the relief-camp strikes on the Deccan, in the dockyards of Britain, or, especially, in the countryside of the west of Ireland. ‘Ireland is at your doors,’ Gladstone told the House of Commons in typically prophetic manner, introducing a land bill that took a modest step towards protecting tenants from eviction for reasons other than default of rent; ‘Providence has placed it there. Law and legislature have made a compact between you and you must face these obligations.’

At every stage in his long career Gladstone (like Moses, to whom his faithful often compared him) had found the True Path from moments of revelation, especially of the adversary – ‘the hosts of Pharaoh’, whom he was called on to smite hip and thigh. (Sometimes that adversary was himself and, after meetings with the many fallen women he felt he had to redeem, beginning in his days at Oxford, he would flog the impurity out of his flesh.) Political and theological enemies received merely the lashing of his verbal or written rhetoric. Those first foes had been ‘rational Christians’ – Unitarians and their like, allied with the iniquitous reformers of 1832 – whom the young, solemnly High Church Gladstone
believed,
along with Wordsworth and Coleridge, were leading Britain down the primrose path to godless egalitarianism. (His hostility to the Reform Act of 1832, an acute embarrassment to the franchise reformer of the 1860s, he later put down to excessive youthful zeal and ‘delusion’.) The second cohort of villains consisted of those wicked men – especially, of course, Disraeli, whom Gladstone from the beginning detested as a self-glamorizing opportunist – who had crucified his sainted Peel. For Gladstone, who himself came from a manufacturing background, Peel’s no-nonsense plainness, his self-evident integrity and the tormented way he had put devotion to the truth before personal power or even party was the epitome of virtue in politics. Those who had destroyed him while purporting (in Disraeli’s case, he thought, preposterously) to represent the ‘traditional’ interests of landed Britain were guilty of a masquerade that was not only stupid but wicked.

What especially stuck in Gladstone’s craw was the pretence by the likes of Disraeli to represent an authentic Britain of rolling acres and the true Church. The true Church! Disraeli! Who never went down on bended knee (much less applied the penitent lash) except with a wink and a nod to pure form. And by what right did he apostrophize the working people of Britain as their true friend and protector while appealing, as had the generally disgraceful Palmerston, to the worst instincts of their belligerent vanity? It was he, Gladstone, along with the real soldiers of God like Cobden and Bright, who represented the genuinely moral Britain. In his own origins and apprenticeship were woven the fibre of the true Britain – Scotland, Lancashire, Oxford; the factory and the theological college, the university and the loom. Everything he had done he had done, he felt, responsibly: not deceiving the working class into expectations of imminent full democracy, but counselling patience; offering the reward of the franchise to those who, by dint of industry, education and hard-earned property, truly merited it and could be expected to use it with wisdom and temperance.

And now, in 1876, with his old adversary raised into the realms of Beaconsfieldism, but a prime minister still capable of mischief and iniquity, Gladstone felt summoned once again to undeceive a public who might have been bewitched by Disraeli’s ‘Judaic’ manoeuvres into believing that a policy designed for an ‘Asiatic empire’ – supporting the Turk; buying an Egyptian canal; putting a notorious opium-addicted madman like Lytton in charge of the destinies of the Indian empire – that all this exoticism could actually be worthy of the greatness of Christian Britain! The brutality of the Ottoman onslaught on the civilian population after an uprising in eastern Roumelia (modern Bulgaria) – the burned villages,
rapes
and sodomies; the mutilation of women and children – hit the British press in the spring of 1876 and triggered an immediate outcry against Disraeli’s pro-Turkish foreign policy. Hundreds of meetings were convened up and down the country. Far from leaping into the breach, Gladstone (who was formally supposed to do what he was told by the Whiggish leaders of the party, Lord Granville and the Marquis of Harrington) held back until late in the year. But the opportunity for a politics of impassioned virtue finally proved too much to resist. His ‘Bulgarian Horrors’ pamphlet, written in the temple of peace, was an immediate best-seller and a few days later Gladstone was on the stump, sermonizing the faithful in an electrifying address on London’s Blackheath in a rainstorm. Whatever effect it may or may not have had on the politics of the country, those who were there, like the radical journalist W. T. Stead, remembered it as a moment of conversion.

The charismatic re-emergence of the blazing prophet may have deceived Gladstone into thinking he could do no wrong (however much hurrumphing the Hartingtons and Granvilles did). He was wrong. His attack on Disraeli for taking the country to the edge of conflict when Russia went to war with Turkey badly misjudged the public mood, whipped up by Disraeli’s campaign into a lather of belligerent jingoism. Returning from his peacemaking at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, having obtained concessions from both Russia and Turkey, Disraeli was crowned, not stoned. By the end of 1879, however, the public mood had changed again with the expensive disasters in Zululand and Afghanistan. Innocent blood – both British and native – had been spilled, Gladstone thundered, in the name of vain adventurism. ‘The sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan’ was ‘as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God’ as that of every Briton at home.

And at home, the Liberals were presented with the political gift of a severe and sudden depression. The Almighty, Gladstone implied, was punishing those who indulged in the fleshpots for the wickedness of their Conservative rulers. Modern plagues were upon the back of Britain: bankruptcies, soaring unemployment, collapsing agricultural prices, stoppages of trade – even a potato blight in southwest Ireland. Basking in his popularity as the man who had brought ‘peace with honour’, and enjoying the divisions in the Liberal party, Disraeli had written Gladstone off as a tedious crank. But he had not reckoned with the extraordinary bolt of electrifying, almost messianic energy that seemed to have struck his old adversary, setting his oratory on fire – nor with the strikingly contemporary means he used to broadcast his withering attacks on the bungling extravagance of Beaconsfieldism. On 24 November 1879, Gladstone,
accompanied
by his wife, Catherine, boarded a train from one of his political heartlands, Liverpool, and travelled to another, lowland Scotland. Travelling through Wigan, St Helen’s and on to Carlisle, Galashiels and finally Edinburgh, the old boy became a political locomotive himself; the pistons of his magnificent self-righteousness pumping away, the orator roared from platforms, waved from train windows, was escorted to hotels by rapturous crowds where he made speeches from balconies. In Glasgow, Gladstone gave his inaugural address as rector of the university and was treated to the spectacle of a torchlight parade, as if he were the prophet of a great evangelical revival – which, indeed, Gladstone thought he was. Some 85,000 people at 15 venues heard him in two weeks. The Midlothian campaign was the most American campaign Britain had ever seen, and it was an undoubted triumph.

When he had called the general election in March 1880, Disraeli assumed he would have no trouble in getting another Conservative majority. It turned out to be a massive miscalculation. The Liberals were returned with more than 100 more MPs than the Tories. ‘Beaconsfieldism’, Gladstone wrote jubilantly, ‘vanished like some vast magnificent castle in an Italian Romance.’ Italian romances were not the Grand Old Man’s sort of thing.

Along with 351 Liberals and 239 Tories in the parliament of 1880, however, were 65 Irish Home Rule MPs. They did not, as yet, hold the balance of power; but, disciplined as a force by their new leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, who had replaced the Irish Tory Isaac Butt, they could not exactly be ignored either. Even if their presence had not been so numerous, it is unlikely that Gladstone could, in fact, have stayed aloof from the open sore that was ‘The Irish Question’. For one thing the country, especially in the west, seemed to be disintegrating into lawlessness as a result of the anti-eviction campaign mobilized by the Land League. Its founder, the formidable Irish activist Michael Davitt, came from County Mayo, the heart of the pro-French uprising in 1798 and among the worst-hit of all the famine counties. He had gone to Lancashire to find work, had lost an arm in an industrial accident at the age of 11 and been imprisoned for gun-running before travelling to the United States to raise funds and consciousness about what needed to be done to change the lives of the Irish poor and the destiny of the nation. By the late 1870s, he and militant comrades had set up the Mayo Land League in the west, which, as the expanded Land League of Ireland, spread rapidly through the country. Its enemy was billed as ‘landlordism’, and its goals were rent reductions – by intimidation if necessary – and resisting eviction. In fact, the pace of evictions in Ireland had slowed markedly
from
the all-out dispossessions of the 1850s. Charles Trevelyan’s vision of a modernized Irish agriculture dominated by commercially minded large farmers, whether graziers in the west or arable farmers in the east, was well on the way to materializing. But capitalist farming is seldom socially pretty. The more profitable Irish agriculture became, the more inequitable was the distribution of its profits. And when – as at the end of the 1870s – it hit a slump, those who had depended on it for wages were of course the first to go; and those who were hanging on to their smallholdings were the first to be pressed with higher rents.