Dilke (10 page)

“To say these things is not to condemn the monarchy, because they are no necessary part of the monarchy, although the opposite idea—that of promotion by merit alone and of the non-recognition of any claims founded upon birth—is commonly accepted as republican. I care not whether you call it republican or whether you do not, but I say that it is the only principle upon which, if we are to keep our place among the nations, we can for the future act.”
¹²

Leeds was followed by an equally easy meeting at Middlesbrough, but Bolton, on November 30th, was the most difficult of the series. The meeting had been organised by the local Liberal Association, but this body, under the lead of J. K. Cross, later under-secretary for India, withdrew its support at the last moment, and the chairman also refused to appear. Perhaps encouraged by these defections, the opposition decided completely to wreck this meeting—and they succeeded. “There was a fearful riot,” Dilke wrote, “at which a man was killed and a great number of persons injured by iron nuts and bars being thrown through the windows by the Tory roughs outside the hall.”
¹³
It was believed by some that Dilke himself was in danger of his life. George Harwood, who was present at the meeting and who was later Liberal member for Bolton, described the scene many years afterwards:

“The crowd was very thick and very fierce,” he wrote, “having declared that Sir Charles should not get away alive; but when the excitement was hottest, Sir Charles came out of the main door and stood quietly in sight of all, then struck a match and lit his cigar, and walked unguarded and unaccompanied through the thickest part of the crowd. His cool courage took everyone's breath away, so not a sound was uttered.”
¹⁴

Dilke, however, denied the story, saying that “there was a large force of police in the street when I lighted (
sic
) my cigar and the mob could only howl.”
¹⁵
After the meeting eight of those who had started the riot were brought to trial. The principal defence put forward on their behalf was that Dilke's opinions were so unpopular that his presence alone constituted an intolerable incitement. This was apparently accepted by the jury, who acquitted them all.

After Bolton, Dilke went to Birmingham. He spoke to a full Town Hall at the beginning of the week of greatest anxiety about the Prince's health. The meeting was a noisy one, according to Chamberlain's biographer, with the “monarchists” throwing cayenne pepper about the hall.
¹⁶
But according to Dilke the opposition was dealt with in a typically ruthless Chamberlain way. “. . . (he) had the whole borough police force present or in reserve,” Dilke wrote, “and had every interrupter (and there were several hundred) carried out singly by two policemen, with a Conservative Chief of Police to direct them; after which I delivered an extremely humdrum speech to a very dull assembly.”
¹⁷
The Birmingham Town Hall was then a safer place for radical politicians than it was to be when Chamberlain became an imperialist.

An excess of zeal on the part of the Birmingham police force was not required, however, to make Dilke deliver a dull speech. The excitement which his meetings aroused owed everything to his opinions and nothing to his oratory.

“. . . given the fact that my speaking was always monotonous,” he was later rather engagingly to write, “and that at this time I was trying specially to make speeches which no one could call empty noise, and was therefore specially and peculiarly heavy, there was something amusing to lovers of contrast in that between the stormy heartiness of my reception at most of these meetings, and the ineffably dry orations which I delivered to them between cheers of joy when I rose and cheers of relief when I sat down.”
¹⁸

During the early months of 1872 Dilke did not continue his platform campaign. The Prince of Wales's recovery was followed, on February 27th, by a national thanksgiving service in St. Paul's, to which both the Queen and the Prince drove in procession, through scenes of great enthusiasm.
^[2]
The tide was running strongly the other way, and Dilke was troubled by rumours that an official Liberal was to be put into the field against him in Chelsea,
^[3]
and by social ostracism. The first danger he took sufficiently seriously to discuss with Chamberlain the possibility of a move—Cardiff and Dewsbury being suggested as alternative constituencies. Social ostracism he certainly did not like, and, for a short period, it was so intense that, except for G. O. Trevelyan and Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, he had no friends in London and lived in almost complete isolation.

Nevertheless, although Dilke was by now fully aware that a continuation of the agitation was politically pointless, he felt that he could not drop the subject until he had repeated in the House of Commons the arguments which had provoked so sharp a reaction outside. He sought to provide an occasion for this by moving to set up a Select Committee to enquire into the Civil List, but a day could not be obtained for such a motion until March 19th. Even then, George Dixon had something of a prior claim to be the mover, for he had given notice in the previous session that he wished to bring forward a similar proposal. In the event, however, he was only too anxious to leave the matter to Dilke. “Of course,” he added, according to Dilke's report, “I shall go into the lobby with you if you divide the House”; “but . . . he did nothing of the kind,” Dilke commented bitterly. “Neither did George
Trevelyan,”
¹⁹
he added. Nor did Fawcett, who even spoke against Dilke during the debate, nor Cowen, who had been chairman of the Newcastle meeting, nor Fitzmaurice. Auberon Herbert seconded the motion and acted with Dilke as a teller, while the lobby was composed only of Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the temperance reformer—“the wit of the public platforms, but a dismal man enough in private,” as Dilke described him—and George Anderson, one of the Glasgow members.

Dilke stood up in a crowded House and was received with a loud and prolonged hostile demonstration. One Conservative member attempted to get the Speaker to refuse him a hearing on the ground that he had violated his oath of allegiance. When the noise died down, Dilke delivered a speech which was long, dull, and painstakingly factual. Towards the end members were trooping out of the chamber and amongst the few who remained conversation was so general that the speaker could scarcely be heard. “. . . my want of vivacity,” Dilke noted, “tended to prevent the interruptions which had been organised. . . . This was exactly what I wished and intended. . . .”
²⁰
Gladstone followed, and delivered a full-scale, declamatory attack upon Dilke. He had the House behind him, but the unequalness of the battle gave him no desire to cut it short. “He simply tried to trample upon Dilke,” Lawson wrote. After the Prime Minister, Auberon Herbert insisted on speaking, and did so in terms which were much more provocative and much less soporific than Dilke's. Not merely at the beginning, but throughout his speech, the House was in an uproar. In the middle strangers were spied by Lord George Hamilton, and the Press having been removed, the noise became still worse. When he concluded the division was taken, and Dilke was beaten by 276 votes to 2.

Honour being thus satisfied, Dilke could abandon a campaign which had brought him national fame (or notoriety) but which had rapidly become a political embarrassment to him. His summing-up, written many years later, was that “at Newcastle I made references to this subject (Court expenditure)
which were accurate, though possibly unwise.”
²¹
He never changed his basic beliefs about the Civil List or about monarchy in general, and even when he became a Minister he was pedantically careful not to vote for proposals against which he had committed himself a decade earlier. But he never again attempted to take the issue to the public. He realised that to link the fortunes of British radicalism with those of British republicanism would be to deliver a damaging and unnecessary blow to the former cause.

Although Dilke's republicanism temporarily cost him many acquaintances, it restored to him the friendship of a near neighbour in Sloane Street, Miss Katherine Sheil, and precipitated his marriage with her. Miss Sheil was an orphan, a year older than Dilke, who lived with a Miss Courtenay, a family friend of the Dilkes. Her father, a captain in the 89th Foot, had died young. Her mother came of an old, well-connected Devonshire family and left her property in that county which brought her about £1000 a year. Dilke, writing in 1895, described his reconciliation with her in somewhat curious terms:

“I had seen a good deal of Miss Sheil in 1869 at Lady Heathcote-Amory's, but we had quarrelled, as she generally managed to quarrel with her friends from her violent temper and unwillingness, in spite of the possession of strong opinions upon many points, to brook contradiction. For a long time we avoided one another, and I was only forgiven when the attacks on me in November, 1871, and the Bolton riot led to an expression of sympathy on her part, a sympathy which she had been far from having shown on previous occasions when it had been less needed, but might also have been pleasant.”
²²

On January 30th, 1872, the wedding took place. The ceremony was at Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, Dilke's parish church. Only three persons besides the participants were present—Dilke's grandmother, his great-uncle from Chichester, and a stranger—and only four others, Trevelyan, Fitzmaurice,
Ashton Dilke and Miss Sheil's maid, knew that it was to happen. “I walked home with my great-uncle,” Dilke recorded, “after seeing my grandmother into her new home, which was next the church, while Katie, who had her brougham waiting, drove to Miss Courtenay's and told her, and then to the station where we met.”
²³

Miss Courtenay did not allow failure to inform her beforehand to prejudice her against the arrangement. “A very suitable marriage,” she commented. “You are neither of you in love with one another, but you will get on admirably together.” “Miss Courtenay was, perhaps, at this time not far wrong,” Dilke reflected evenly. “I had a profound respect for Miss Sheil's talent and a high admiration of her charm and beauty; and I think she had more liking than love for me.”
²⁴

Elsewhere in the same document, written long after her death, he supplied more details of her talents and beauty as well as of some of her other qualities:

“. . . her extreme attractiveness of appearance, her singing, and her wonderful power of mimicry had given her a considerable position in society. On the other hand people were afraid of her . . . and she was known to have a violent temper. She was accused by her many enemies of laziness (but this only because very doubtful health caused her to lie down a good deal), of pride, of violence, and of mercilessness in ridicule. On the other hand (
sic
) with her exquisite prettiness of appearance, with her perfect taste in dress, and with her extraordinary powers of conversation, hers was a marked figure in every room. She did not go out very much on account of her health, which had been largely owing to a disappointment in love of which I knew. Her great talent and extraordinary powers of sarcasm made her the terror of the ordinary ‘dancing idiot,' and her love affair had been with a man old enough to be her father, a very handsome man of great distinction, who was either married or believed to be by some; a fact which caused others to interfere and stop a half-engagement.
Some used to speak of Katie as exquisitely lovely. She had features which would ruin most reputations for beauty—a large mouth, small eyes, and a turned-up nose. Her eyes, however, which had the blue-white so seldom seen, were, in spite of their smallness, perhaps her greatest attraction. Her voice was perfect. Her greatest beauties, however, were her arched hand, her neck, the pose and shape of her head, and her tiny ears. . . . She insisted on marrying me without settlements as far as personalty was concerned, and with only a curious kind of settlement as to her Devonshire estates, intended to facilitate their sale, upon which we were resolved and which took place at once. Her lawyer, to his horror, knew nothing of the marriage until he received a note from her on the day on which it took place. She was extravagant, and spent her capital as income—chiefly on horses and dress.”
²⁵

This difficult, distinguished woman was also a singer of some note—“the favourite pupil of Delsarte”—and a croquet player of match standard. The latter talent Dilke shared with her, and they used frequently to drive down to Wimbledon to play on the All England lawns there, as well as spending long weeks at the Granville Hotel, Ramsgate, which commended itself by the unusual possession of a ground so well drained that play was possible even in the wettest weather. It was there that they travelled when they met at Victoria Station after their clandestine wedding. Any more extended marriage journey was made temporarily impossible, both by Dilke's conviction that he must first face his critics in the House of Commons, and by his unwillingness to go abroad again while, as he believed had been the case on the occasion of a visit at the end of 1871, he was likely to be watched by the French police. They suspected him, falsely in fact, of assisting in the smuggling out of ex-Communards. Eventually, at the instigation of Louis Blanc, Dilke received a written assurance from Casimir-Périer, later to be President of the Republic, but at the time writing on behalf of his father, the
Minister of the Interior, that there would be no more surveillance.

By Easter both of the obstacles had been removed, and the Dilkes were able to leave for an extended visit to Paris. Here they “attended sittings of the Assembly at Versailles, drove over the battlefields, dined with the Louis Blancs to meet Louis's brother, Charles Blanc, the critic and great master of style . . . met, at the Franquevilles, Henri de Pène and Robert Mitchell, the Conservative journalists; and saw
Mignon
, Katie's favourite opera, and
Rabagas
.”
²⁶
Incomparably more important than all this, the visit marked the beginning of the close friendship between Dilke and Gambetta. They had met briefly the previous December, but it was during this Easter honeymoon that they got to know each other well. Whether arranging for the transportation of his father's body from St. Petersburg or taking his wife on a
voyage de noces
, Dilke was never too occupied to make new contacts.