A History of Britain, Volume 3 (48 page)

There was ample recruiting ground, in other words, for an army of the indignant. The Land League’s tactics, officially at any rate, were supposed to be aggressive but non-violent: the social ostracism of landlords who were known to impose summary evictions. The wretched Captain Charles Boycott, an English farmer who leased land from an Irish absentee aristocrat, Lord Ernle, but collected both his own and the landowner’s rents, was selected for exemplary and shockingly successful ostracism. Ernle was actually murdered. And despite the League’s protestations of innocence there were epidemics of livestock mutilation, rick-burning, shots fired into houses as ‘a warning’ and the occasional assassination. Faced with this chronic lawlessness, many of Gladstone’s own colleagues in the cabinet, especially the new chief secretary of Ireland, William Edward Forster, were in favour of an equally fierce counter-campaign of ‘order’, including, if necessary, the selective suspension of habeas corpus and detention without trial. They were also deeply suspicious of Parnell, who, they believed, condoned the violence even as he pretended to deplore it.

For Gladstone, matters weren’t as simple as a choice between passivity and repression. Even though, as yet, he had nothing to do with Parnell personally, he understood that the Land League was no longer a mere movement of aggrieved tenant peasants. Parnell himself, the half-American, Cambridge-educated, ostensibly Protestant (but actually agnostic) gentleman–landowner from the rolling hills of conservative County Wicklow (all horse shows, cucumber sandwiches and fêtes), was evidence that Davitt had succeeded in attracting all kinds of Irish people – teachers, shopkeepers, publicans, doctors, lawyers – to its ranks as the voice of Irish national, as well as social, aspirations. ‘We created Parnell and he created us,’ said another Leaguer, Tim Healy, a little boastfully but not inaccurately.

Years before he was formally committed to Home Rule, Gladstone had already understood the gathering Irish crisis as a fork in the road for the history of Britain itself: a test to see whether the constitution of the
Union,
both in respect of the land reform that Ireland needed and the more independent local government that it deserved, could take the strain and still survive. Previous generations of liberals like Charles Trevelyan had assumed that, whatever the sorrows of past history, there could be no greater fortune than to be part of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. But Trevelyan’s son, George Otto (historian as well as politician), was now in Gladstone’s government and he, like the prime minister, could see that some measure of land reform was needed to make continued membership of the Union legitimate. As a taster, in 1870, Gladstone had presented to parliament a bill designed to compensate evicted tenants for improvements they had made to their plots (although, as Roy Foster has pointed out, the kind of peasants who were ‘improvers’ were those least likely to be evicted). In any case, although this modest proposal was passed by the Commons it was shot down in the Lords as an unconscionable interference with private property. Taken aback by the tactical failure, Gladstone began to listen more carefully to his cabinet colleagues who insisted (as the tempo of rural violence increased) that coercion had to precede land reforms. In January 1881 a Protection of Persons and Property Bill went before the Commons, authorizing preventive detention. Outraged, the Irish bloc went into obstructionist mode, filibustering through the night; they tied up the business of the House so completely that on 3 February a resolution was passed to ‘set aside’ ordinary procedure. Infuriated Irish MPs, including Parnell, had to be forcibly removed.

After the stick, the carrot. With the Coercion Act in place Gladstone felt free to introduce his land bill in April without worrying about accusations of making concessions under pressure. None of its ‘three Fs’ – fair rent, free sale and fixity of tenure – was without its problems, not least for Gladstone himself, who fretted about their compatibility with the sanctity of private property. But the paramount need was to provide some sense of equity for the tenant smallholders of Ireland, and so to de-fang the violent wing of the Land League. Under the act, tenants who paid their rent could not be evicted (for example to enable the consolidation of small lots into large estates). More radical still, a government-appointed land court and a Land Commission were to arbitrate the ‘fairness’ of those rents. Gladstone needed to speak at 58 sittings of parliament to see the bill made law.

But if he had thought the bill would satisfy the Land League he was made to think again. Parnell (who supported the bill) continued to go on the attack, demanding rent reductions and an amnesty for arrears. More ominously, he began to talk of the connections between Britain and Ireland as if they were up for severance. Picking up the gauntlet,
Gladstone
in his turn threatened that any attempt to dissolve them would be met by the full weight of government. In October he went still further and had Parnell and other members of the Land League arrested and incarcerated in Kilmainham gaol on the outskirts of Dublin.

Cheering broke out from the hard men in the cabinet and the party. At last the Old Man understood what it took to lay down the law in Ireland (altogether reminiscent of Lytton’s 1878 Vernacular Press Act, which gagged the uppity and seditious Indian press). But, although Gladstone joked at a dinner party about becoming accustomed to coercion ‘much as a man might say (in confidence) that he found himself under the painful necessity of slaying his mother’, he was in fact deeply uneasy about governing by force, and never thought it could possibly be anything but the shortest-term answer to Ireland’s distress and anger. In Naples in the early 1850s his stomach had been turned by the despotic Bourbon monarchy’s treatment of political prisoners, and he had written that such regimes were in violation of natural rights and God’s ordinance. Truly legitimate governments, he believed, could survive only so long as they were grounded in the ‘affections’ of the people. Whatever else liberalism meant in the age of the gunboat and the Gatling gun, it surely had to mean at least that.

So the prime minister opened secret negotiations with the imprisoned Parnell through the intermediary of Katherine O’Shea, the wife of another Irish MP but also the mistress of Parnell and the mother of his children. The oddest of couples, the two men needed each other – or at least, in 1882, thought they did. Gladstone needed Parnell to master the champions of nationalist violence, to try to persuade the Irish MPs that their wish for greater self-government could be met within the Union. Parnell needed Gladstone to deliver a more radical dose of land reform (especially a restraint on the collection of arrears) and to repeal or at least moderate coercion. An agreement – the secret ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ – was struck. Parnell would be freed, the better to bridle the hotheads; Gladstone would deliver the arrears bill. But in Parnell’s personal absence the hotheads, incensed by his imprisonment, had got fierier, not cooler. In May 1882 the brand-new chief secretary of Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and his permanent under-secretary, Thomas Burke, were murdered, while walking in Phoenix Park in Dublin, by terrorists committed to assassination and calling themselves the Invincibles. For Gladstone, the atrocity was doubly horrifying. Long surgical knives had been used to cut the victims’ throats from ear to ear, and Burke’s head had been all but severed from his body. And Cavendish was not just another political appointee; he was Freddie, a nephew of Gladstone’s wife and a frequent guest at Hawarden.
Horrified,
Parnell, who had just been released under the terms agreed at Kilmainham, now offered to resign his leadership of the Irish party. But it was precisely in situations like this that Gladstone’s instinct of Christian magnanimity served him well. He not only declined Parnell’s gesture but promised closer collaboration and moved ahead with the arrears bill just a week after the murders. For some of his colleagues this was further proof that the Old Man had gone mad. Revolt was only pre-empted by the passage of another Coercion Act, in direct response to the Phoenix Park murders, extending powers of search, arrest and detention and creating special tribunals to act without the inconvenience of an Irish jury.

Despite the two measures cancelling each other out, Parnell and Gladstone did not yet break off their covert collaboration. Katherine O’Shea continued to bear messages and babies. (By this time Gladstone certainly knew, if he hadn’t before, of her relationship with Parnell.) There was, the prime minister thought, a way out: through local government boards; these, the pet project of Joseph gas-and-water Chamberlain, could be directly elected by the Irish without affronting the constitutional principles of undivided sovereignty. Under the scheme, however, there was also to be a Central Board in Dublin for all-Irish business, appointed by the British government. The Central Board was a sop to those who thought local devolution was the thin end of the wedge. But it was taken by Conservatives and Unionists in precisely the opposite sense: as the embryo of a true Home Rule government. Red flags went up. The measure went down.

Parnell never quite believed that Gladstone had done everything in his power to promote it; or, if he had, that he no longer had the political muscle to make it happen – much less the substantial Home Rule measure he really wanted. The Old Man was frequently ill; at the height of a crisis he had fallen in the snow and cut his head badly, prompting him to say that he could feel the bleeding
inside
his skull. Who knew – perhaps there had been some serious damage? He seemed no longer master in the house of his cabinet: Whigs and Radicals were at each other’s throats and both sides suspected the prime minister of bad faith. Chamberlain – whose allegiance to true devolution seemed, as the years passed, less and less solid – was waiting impatiently in the wings to seize the leadership. What was more, Gladstone, the scourge of imperialists, had, in South Africa and especially in Egypt, revealed himself to be just as partial to gunboat diplomacy and impetuous military expeditions as the vainglorious Beaconsfield. In 1881 there had been an uprising of military officers against the Khedive, whose profligate government – even after the sale of the Suez Canal shares to Britain – had amassed so huge a debt that it had
put
even a pretence of sovereignty into receivership. And the receivers were of course the Western powers, Britain and France, who assumed control over the revenues of Egypt to ensure proper service of the debt. (This was, in fact, an almost exact African replay of the beginnings of British rule in India in the 18th century, with European colonialists insisting on intervening to clean up the mess that they had been largely responsible for creating in the first place.)

The Egyptian revolt – a mix of military and Muslim unrest – put both powers in the position of either cutting their losses or going in for the kill, and for the long term. When the French rather shrank from the logic, not to mention the expense of the latter, Gladstone, to the amazement of many, dived in with guns blazing. The Royal Navy bombarded Alexandria. An army sent on a lightning 40-day expedition annihilated the Egyptian rebels. Gladstone the anti-imperialist ordered victory bonfires to be lit around the country. Many of his oldest friends were aghast at the apostasy, especially when Gladstone, like any colonial proconsul – or, indeed, like Disraeli – went on and on about how the expedition had been launched only in the interests of ‘peace’ and ‘stability’ and not to establish a British colony in Egypt, heavens no, merely the restoration of the ‘legitimate’ rule of the Khedive. He would, of course, need the odd British soldier or two for the foreseeable future to maintain that legitimacy, as well as to collect on funds owing to the likes of the Barings. No one was more distressed at Gladstone’s foray into imperialism than his old comrade John Bright. At least Disraeli was candid about
his
imperialism. Gladstone, on the other hand, seemed pathetically deluded, wrote Bright: ‘He seems to have the power of convincing himself that what to me seems glaringly wrong is evidently right and tho’ he regrets that a crowd of men should be killed, he regards it almost as an occurrence which is not to be condemned as it is one of the incidents of a policy out of which he hopes for a better order of things.’

Instead of the ‘better order’ in Egypt, Gladstone got the General Gordon disaster at Khartoum. To be fair, this was not of his making, for Gordon, faced with the huge
jihadi
army of the Mahdi – the Chosen One – sweeping up from the southern Sudan, had been ordered to evacuate Khartoum smartly but had chosen instead to stay and court martyrdom. Furious with Gordon, Gladstone was personally prepared to grant him his wish; but it was politically unthinkable. Lord Wolseley was sent on a relief expedition up the Nile, which arrived at the end of January 1885 just a few days too late to save Gordon. Gladstone bore the odium for having ‘sacrificed’ the Hero, not least from Queen Victoria, reinforced in her aversion for everything about William Ewart Gladstone.

All these troubles persuaded Parnell that Gladstone’s power was on the wane, and that he should look elsewhere for the furtherance of at least his short-term aims. Although in retrospect the tactical turn towards the Conservatives seems perverse, Parnell was in fact being heavily (and irresponsibly) wooed by the Tory magnate Lord Carnarvon, to the point where he believed that, if his Irish bloc defected from the Liberals, they could, together with dissidents in Gladstone’s own party, bring down the government. His price to Lord Salisbury was the land bill and the dropping of a crimes bill that Gladstone had been unable to get through parliament. He got his wish. In June 1885, the Liberal government was defeated on a parliamentary vote through the abstention of a large number of their own number and the opposition of the Irish. But the Parnellite–Tory alliance was too unnatural a thing to last, especially since Parnell was plainly driving for full-scale Home Rule – an Irish parliament for everything except foreign policy.

This was a step too far, not just for Salisbury but for many among the Liberals, including the increasingly imperialist Joseph Chamberlain, for whom any talk of Home Rule was the same as secession and the end of the Union. But Gladstone had undergone another of those revelatory changes of heart. He had been deep amidst the stacks in the temple of peace again, and after intensive historical research had come to believe that, when the majority of the Irish people questioned the fruits of the Union, they had, in fact, a point: many iniquities and injustices had been inflicted on them. The choice – if not now, then at some inevitable stage in the future – was not between coercion and Home Rule, for coercion could not be perpetuated in a truly liberal Britain. It would be a choice between Home Rule and out-and-out separation. Conceding Home Rule was the best possible way to pre-empt a much more drastic break. Once convinced, he attempted to persuade the Queen (a hard case) that Irish self-government would be, in the truest sense, a conservative measure; agreed with Parnell (via Katherine O’Shea) that an Irish parliament was the way forward; and only then deigned to tell his own party what he might have in mind, informing Lord Derby at Hawarden that the Union was ‘a mistake and that no adequate justification had been shown for taking away the national life of Ireland’.