A History of Britain, Volume 3 (49 page)

Gladstone’s tactics for bringing his party with him were at best peremptory. In mid-December 1885, with an election campaign under way, a kite was flown in the form of a newspaper story claiming to set out the Home Rule principles to which Gladstone was committed. He immediately repudiated it and insisted that what he had in mind was just a local-government scheme; but the shock waves inside the Liberal party
were
massively damaging. Both Whigs and imperialist radicals like Chamberlain were appalled that they were being committed to a policy without consultation or consent, and began to pack their political bags. Most seriously, to his radical friends and colleagues, Chamberlain began to present the causes of domestic social reform and Irish Home Rule as mutually exclusive; the necessary improvements to the ‘condition of England’ held hostage to the obsessions of one old man, himself bewitched by an Irish quasi-traitor.

The election produced an Irish bloc of 86 MPs, which precisely and arithmetically held the balance between the two parties. Gladstone offered to support Home Rule if proposed by a Tory government. But the young stars of the Tories, Randolph Churchill and Arthur Balfour, led the charge against it, playing on the already militant paranoia of Ulster Protestants who were fearful that they were about to be swamped by a semi-independent ‘ignorant’ Catholic Ireland and that they would pay the price for generations of the Protestant ascendancy. Balfour, throwing scruples to the wind, told Unionists that Home Rule would mean they would be ‘put under the heel of a majority which is greater than you in number [but which] is most undoubtedly inferior to you in political knowledge and experience – you the wealthy, the orderly, the industrious, the enterprising portion of Ireland, are to supply the money for that part of Ireland which is less orderly, less industrious and less … law-abiding’. From the refined lips of the Oxford philosopher–scholar came the authentic strain of Ulster Red-hand Unionism.

When the Tories, unsurprisingly, opted for coercion Gladstone grasped the nettle himself. A bill providing for an Irish parliament within the empire was hastily prepared, much along the lines of what had been agreed between Parnell and Gladstone. Shortly afterwards another land bill was introduced to make good, in effect, on Mill and Campbell’s argument that tenancy in Ireland brought with it virtual proprietorship. Landlords who sold to their tenants were now given the chance of compensation from a government fund. It was perhaps the most revolutionary thing Gladstone had ever put his name to.

On 27 May 1886 the Strangers’ Gallery was packed early, and MPs crowded the chamber for the second reading of the Home Rule Bill. In a dramatic gesture of concession to dissidents in his own party Gladstone proposed that the vote be only on the
principle
of Home Rule; and that, if passed, a third reading would take place only after another election. Then followed, for 3½ hours, the speech of his life – the noblest thing he ever did, and the most doomed. This was, he told the House, ‘one of the golden moments of our history – one of those opportunities which may
come
and may go, but which rarely return’. And with the grievous hindsight of everything that has happened since, who is to say he was wrong? His oratory rose to Ciceronian heights as if he could overcome the adverse lobby arithmetic that was staring him in the face by sheer force of eloquence, embodying Quintilian’s definition of a true orator as a good man who speaks well. That day Gladstone spoke well, and perhaps all the sanctimoniousness, all the exasperating contradictions, all the acts of impulsiveness and intolerance that had marked his long, prodigious career faded away into nothing beside the deep truth and goodness of what he was saying, nowhere more urgently and more poignantly than when this most historically minded of all Britain’s prime ministers (until Churchill) asked parliament to forget, this once, British history. Ireland was asking, he said, ‘for what I call a blessed oblivion of the past. She asks also a boon for the future, and that boon … will be a boon to us in respect of her honour, no less than a boon to her in respect of happiness, prosperity, and peace. Such, Sir, is her prayer. Think, I beseech you,’ he implored in his peroration, ‘think well, think wisely, think, not for the moment, but for the years that are to come, before you reject this Bill.’

The prayer was not answered: 341 members voted against the second reading, 311 in favour. Voting against were 91 of Gladstone’s own party: a greater number than had been anticipated, even on the prime minister’s most pessimistic assessment, and including Chamberlain and the old warhorse of the liberal conscience, John Bright. Chamberlain was greeted by howls of ‘Judas!’ from the Liberal loyalists. The election that followed – the second in six months – was, as Gladstone honestly put it, ‘a smash’. The Liberals mustered only 191 seats; the Conservatives gained 316 and the Parnellites got 85.

It would be six years before Gladstone was back in power for the last time, a very old man, now with a chance to bring Home Rule before the country again. But everything had changed, not least the fate of the Irish party and its leader. In 1889, Captain O’Shea brought a suit for divorce from his wife on the grounds of her adultery with Parnell. The Liberals, including Gladstone, professed to be shocked. The Catholic Church, which had been a crucial supporter of his Home Rule leadership, now excoriated him as a wicked fornicator. His mass support in Ireland, except in Dublin, crumbled away to a small group of die-hards. In Kilkenny they threw mud at him. Two years later, on 6 October 1891, he died, just 45 years old, at Brighton, in the arms of Katherine, now his wife. But in 1893 it was not only Chamberlain, now a Conservative, who was a gung-ho imperialist and as such unlikely to countenance the break-up of the empire, the reduction of Great Britain to a ‘Little England’. ‘All Europe is
armed
to the teeth,’ Chamberlain said. ‘Meanwhile our interests are universal – our honour is involved in almost every land under the sun. Under such conditions the weak invite attack, and it is necessary for Britain to be strong.’ Besides, why should the social and economic interests of the solidly loyal Welsh and Scots, or for that matter Londoners and Mancunians, not to mention Canadians and New Zealanders, be sacrificed to the compulsion to accede to Irish nationalist blackmail? The Home Rulers were nothing but terrorists in thin disguise – they didn’t fool
him
– and, besides, he claimed outrageously, it was now common knowledge that Parnell had been behind the Phoenix Park murders all the time. The lesson of the defeat of Home Rule, Chamberlain declared, was that ‘the great majority of the British nation are proud of … the glorious and united British empire’. Many of the rising stars of Gladstone’s own party, like the Foreign Secretary Lord Rosebery, were just as hot for imperialism – and they could cite the Gladstone of Majuba Hill and Egypt as their precedent. Tolerating a third reading of the Government of Ireland Bill was just a matter of humouring the Grand Old Man (since its defeat in the House of Lords was a certainty) before he was pushed out of the leadership and before long into his tomb. Not everyone was prepared to let him go in peace, however. In adamant opposition, now Tory–Unionist, Chamberlain made a personal attack on Gladstone of such malicious ferocity that to the Irish politician T.P. O’Connor it seemed like the voice of a ‘“lost soul” in hell: the Prime Minister calls “black” and they say, “it is good”; the Prime Minister calls “white” and they say “it is better”. It is always the voice of a god. Never since the time of Herod has there been such slavish adulation.’

Not a god, perhaps, but a prophet who had, for that matter, been prophetic. The chance of satisfying Irish self-government
within
the Union would never again in British history come so close to peaceful realization; certainly not in 1911 or 1917, when there were further last-ditch efforts and Ireland was even more hopelessly crushed between hard-line Republican separatism on the one hand and equally hard-line Unionism on the other. Those who care about both Ireland and Britain may be allowed just a touch of wistfulness (doubtless sentimental) that we are still living with the consequences of that missed opportunity.

The failure of Home Rule was in fact more than a turning point in Irish or British history. It also marked the epitaph of the much older Liberal ideal of gradualist self-government, mooted in all seriousness and all sincerity by Macaulay a half-century before. Although Joseph Chamberlain liked to believe that the empire would actually be stronger with the sacred cow of Home Rule slaughtered, frozen and locked away,
he
was, in the long term, staggeringly wrong. At the very moment when moderate Irish nationalism was attempting to find some sort of self-expression within the empire moderate Indian nationalists were doing exactly the same thing: 1885–6 was not just the moment of truth for Home Rule but the inaugural year of the Indian National Congress. It was founded, of course, by Allan Hume, the famine dissenter from Lytton’s government, who had finally decided that the good intentions on which the empire had supposedly been founded, and which continued to be trotted out as the justification for its massive military power, would never actually be realized; not, at any rate, voluntarily.

Apparently in both India and Ireland the Liberals couldn’t deliver on promises of self-government and economic and social justice, and the Conservatives wouldn’t. Instead of bringing on the educated classes of the colonized to take responsibility for their own justice and government, British imperial power, especially as embodied in the Men on the Spot who claimed a superior, tougher wisdom than the remote idealists in London, was more than ever determined to keep them out. When Gladstone’s genuinely liberal viceroy, Lord Ripon, perhaps the most decent India ever had, attempted to pass the Ilbert Bill, which would have allowed Europeans to be judged by Indian magistrates, cries of white outrage erupted from Calcutta to Madras. Inevitably the government was forced to beat a retreat; the presumptuous piece of legislation was withdrawn. In his sketch of the manners and mores of the post-Mutiny British,
The Competition Wallah
(1864), George Otto Trevelyan condemned ‘That intense Anglo-Saxon spirit of self-approbation, which, though dormant at home, is unpleasantly perceptible among vulgar Englishmen on the Continents [and which] becomes rampant in India.’ Nauseated by the snobbery, racism and hypocrisy of the sahibs, he saw only too clearly what had happened to the lofty ideals his father had hoped for in the 1830s. At the annual race meeting at Sunapur (originally an Indian festival of purification), where ‘The wife of the Judge of Boglipore looks forward for months to meeting her sister, the Collectrix of Gya’, amidst the croquet and the betting, Trevelyan saw ‘a tall raw-boned brute’ rush at a gathering of well-dressed, well-to-do Indians and flog them with a double-thonged hunting whip until they had fled from the enclosure. ‘One or two civilians said to each other it was “a shame”, but no-one seemed astounded or horrified, no-one interposed, no-one prosecuted, no-one objected to meet the blackguard at dinner.’ These were the kind of scenes that increasingly became commonplaces in the late-19th-century Raj, and in its literature, at exactly the time when lip service was being paid to the gradualism of self-government
and
sententious words were being uttered about the ‘unreadiness’ of the natives for the responsibilities of citizenship. Worse still, some of the most blatant race prejudice was articulated at home. The most shaming thing that can be said, perhaps, of British politics in the age of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee is that those radicals like Sir Charles Dilke and Chamberlain, who were most eloquent on behalf of the underclass in Britain, should also have been most ferocious in their conviction about the manifest superiority of the white race and the self-evident altruism of the British Empire.

At the turn of the century, then, there was an extraordinary gulf between the rhetoric of the Diamond Jubilee, Pax Britannica – pompously self-righteous, architecturally swaggering, militarily Maxim-gunned – and the embittered disillusionment of its subject peoples. Over the mass graves of the loyal fallen, Chamberlain after the Boer War and Curzon after the First World War might pretend (or even actually believe) that the empire had never been more united; but they were both deeply deluded. During the first two decades of the 20th century the failure to make good on Macaulay’s, Disraeli’s or Curzon’s promises came home to roost, and in ways the makers of those promises could never have anticipated. Instead of the classical language of liberalism being used to advance an agenda drawn from English constitutional history, nationalists in India and Ireland repudiated the whole book and turned back to their own traditions (even when they had to reinvent them). Irish nationalism became coloured by the Gaelic movement, whose literary and political leaders such as Padraig Pearse developed a cult of peasant mysticism that was deliberately meant to move as far away as possible from the polite, reasonable ‘my dear chappishness’ of liberalism. Along with it, much less happily, went the development of a cult of violence and blood sacrifice that achieved its mythic consummation in the Easter Rising of 1916, with Pearse as one of its many victims.

Precisely the same chronology was followed in India. The more Westernized, constitutionalist-minded leaders of Congress – Surendranath Banerjee and the Poona Brahmin Gopal Krishna Gokhale – lost ground to charismatic neo-traditionalists like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, also a Chitpavan Brahmin but much more invested in the history of Maratha resistance to the Raj. In orchestrating the cult of Sivaji, the Maharashtra Maratha prince, Tilak may have been heavily embellishing his actual history, but he was liberating India from an equally preposterous British historical mythology that represented the continent as a place of darkness, poverty and anarchy before the advent of the peace-loving Clive and Wellesley. Instead of invoking John Stuart Mill, Tilak used precisely
the
elements of Hindu culture that British imperialists deemed to be politically infantile – the Ganpati festivals – to mobilize a mass following. Instead of using Oxbridge English he played the vernacular presses like a sitar. Instead of ‘improving’ Western art, Tilak revelled in the modern iconology of Ganesh and Kali. He even had Lord Bentinck turn in his grave by resisting a well-meaning attempt to raise the eligible age of marriage.