Dilke (18 page)

Chamberlain gave some proof of his own friendship by taking Dilke's son, who was by no means an easy child, to live with his own children at Highbury. He remained there for more than two years until he went to school.

The new Government, to which Dilke and Chamberlain had been admitted after so much travail, was very much of a Whig affair. Gladstone compensated for his own incipient radicalism—and also gave full play to his “Scottish toadyism”—by giving six Cabinet posts (of a total of fourteen) to peers, five of whom were hereditary magnates, and a seventh to Hartington, who certainly counted as a nobleman despite the accident that he sat in the House of Commons. Still worse, Gladstone began his premiership on this occasion without any-clear sense of purpose. In 1868 he had announced that his mission was “to pacify Ireland.” The Parliament of 1880 was to be dominated by Irish affairs to a far greater extent
than that of 1868, but Gladstone had no conception of this when he took office. His policy was the negative one of undoing as quickly as possible the moral harm of “Beaconsfieldism.” But in foreign affairs he found it difficult in practice not to accept the
status quo
in most fields—quite apart from the fact that he was soon bombarding Alexandria with an enthusiasm which Disraeli himself would have found it hard to surpass; and at home the fact that he was his own Chancellor of the Exchequer concentrated his mind upon the pettiest details of government expenditure in a most undesirable way. In Ireland he improvised rather than struck out along a consistent line of policy, and the result was a series of violent and confusing oscillations between conciliation and coercion.

In addition, the Parliament, which would in any event have been a bitter one, partly as a legacy of the Prime Minister's, own Midlothian campaign and partly as a result of the rise of “Parnellism,” was bedevilled by the Bradlaugh controversy. Whether the militantly atheistic member for Northampton should be allowed to take the oath of allegiance or to affirm, whether he should be allowed to sit at all, whether the majority of the House of Commons should dictate to Northampton or to any other constituency whom it could or could not elect—these were all questions which racked the House for more than three years, which aroused some of its worst instincts, which frequently placed in a minority the Prime Minister, who despite his hatred of atheism was consistently liberal on the issue, and which acted as an open wound draining away much of the strength of the Government.

In these circumstances the Administration could not in any event have been a happy one in which to serve. It was made worse by internal dissension. All British Governments are coalitions, but this was a more rickety one than most, with the perforation between the Whigs and the Liberals always clearly apparent to all the world. Within three months one Whig magnate in junior office—the Marquess of Lansdowne—had resigned on the Irish land issue, and his defection was followed, still within the first year, by that of the Duke of Argyll. A year later the Chief Secretary,
W. E. Forster, resigned as a protest against conciliation in Ireland, and three months after this John Bright resigned because of the forward policy in Egypt. In addition, Chamberlain and Dilke kept the Government in constant agitation by a series of threatened resignations. Gladstone's own practice under other Prime Ministers did not entitle him to much consideration in this respect, but even making full allowance for this, Chamberlain and Dilke behaved almost intolerably. “The only way in which I can get anything done is by threatening resignation,” Dilke wrote on one occasion in 1882. “Lord Granville is so sick of these threats,” he added, “that he tells me that nothing should be so sacred as the threat of resignation.”
¹⁸

Furthermore, Dilke was always prepared to threaten to go out whenever Chamberlain was restless. “Our relations are so close,” he wrote to Lord Granville, “that I should resign with him if he were to resign because he thought Forster did not have his hair cut sufficiently often.”
^19
[6]
Chamberlain, however, perhaps because he was more satisfied with his office, was not prepared to give quite such indiscriminate support to Dilke, and on two of the eight occasions between May, 1880, and July, 1882, when Dilke was threatening to go out, Chamberlain was not with him. These were both at the beginning of 1881, in January when Chamberlain was loath to go in opposition to a Coercion Bill for Ireland—“Chamberlain's position at this moment was that he personally did not believe in coercion, but that the feeling in the country was such that any Government would be forced to propose it, and he was not sufficiently clear that it was certain to fail to be bound as an honest man to necessarily oppose it,”
²⁰
Dilke noted; and in March, when Dilke was
insistent that the Government should give stronger support to Greek claims to frontier rectification against Turkey. On at least six other occasions, however, Dilke and Chamberlain were prepared to resign together: in support of an Irish Land Bill in July, 1880; against coercion without the Land Bill in November of the same year; against an aggressive policy towards the Boers of the Transvaal in March, 1881; against the carrying on of diplomatic relations with the Vatican through the agency of a private gentleman—the Errington mission—in February, 1882; against a marriage annuity for the Duke of Albany in March, 1882; and in
favour
of resolute action against Arabi, the Egyptian nationalist leader, in July of that year. They did not always secure complete victories. “I suppose there'll be a compromise once more,” Dilke wrote on one occasion, and this was indeed what usually happened. But the method by which compromises had to be exacted is a dismal indication of the atmosphere within the Government, even in its early days.

Dilke's mind, it is clear, ranged far beyond his departmental duties as under-secretary at the Foreign Office. He was automatically informed by Chamberlain of everything that passed in the Cabinet; and as he himself admitted:

“I was rather given to interfering in the affairs of other offices, which is not as a rule a wise thing to do; but then it must be remembered that I was in the position of having to represent the interests and opinions of the men below the gangway, and that they used to come to Chamberlain and me in order to put pressure upon our colleagues through us, and that I was the person approached in all Indian, Colonial, naval and military questions, and Chamberlain in domestic ones.”
²¹

Sometimes Dilke's methods of exerting pressure were unusual for a member of a government. Thus, within two weeks of taking up his duties, having discovered that Forster's mind was moving rapidly in the direction of coercion, he used his henchman, Hill, the editor of the
Daily News
, to move against such a policy.

“On the night of May 13th, between one and two o'clock in the morning,” he wrote, “I did a thing which many will say I ought not to have done—namely, went down to a newspaper office to suggest an article against the policy of another member of the Government. Under the circumstances, I think that I was justified. I was not a member of the Privy Council or of the Cabinet, and the interests of the party were at stake, as subsequent events well showed. . . . The result of it was that the
Daily News
had an article the next morning which smashed Forster's plan.”
²²

Against this unorthodox conduct must be set the fact that other members of the Government, including some in the Cabinet, were using the Press most freely at this time. Chamberlain used to pass a great deal of secret information to Escott of the
Standard
, and Forster used both
The Times
and the
Leeds Mercury
(of which Wemyss Reid, later his biographer, was editor) for his own purposes. In addition, both Chamberlain and Dilke were in almost daily touch with John Morley, who had just become editor of the
Pall Mall Gazette
. “It would be worth silver and gold and jewels,” Morley wrote to Dilke as soon as the latter had taken office, “if I could have ten minutes with you about three times a week.” And he added later, with a characteristic Morley touch:

“I should be very grateful if you would tell one of those brutal Cerberuses at the door of the House of Commons to let me pass to-morrow. If you have no time, never mind; but if it occurs to you it will save me quarter of an hour's chafing and fuming at the indignities put upon the spiritual power by the d——d temporal.”
²³

In the midst of these preoccupations, Dilke did, however, find some time for his work at the Foreign Office. Here his relations with Lord Granville, the Secretary of State, were of paramount importance. “Puss” Granville was an indolent but highly experienced Whig politician of great charm of manner who combined easy relations with the Queen and
Court with a deep if occasionally rather tolerant loyalty to Mr. Gladstone. He had been an intimate friend of Dilke's father, but in spite of this (or perhaps because of it), Granville clearly disliked Charles Dilke at the time that the latter became his undersecretary. Dilke himself attributed the offer at one stage in the negotiations of the Colonial rather than the Foreign under-secretaryship to the fact that Granville would “like me in anybody's office but his.” Later, after the interview at which he had been offered the Foreign Office post, Dilke recorded:

“Lord Granville made a disagreeable little speech in his most agreeable way as I went away, saying that he thought he had shown great forgetfulness of the past in being so pleased to have me in his office as his representative in the House of Commons; but for the life of me, I cannot remember what it was that had caused the coldness which seemed for some time before this to have existed between us, and there was no trace of it when we were in office together; although he may have been jealous of me—as people said.”
²⁴

Relations between the two men improved once they were in office together. There were occasional acerbities, usually beginning with an outburst of irritation from Dilke and ending with an apology from the same source;
^[7]
and their correspondence suggests that they were never on terms of intimate friendship. But Granville gained a high respect for Dilke's
knowledge and assiduity, and found him less difficult to work with than he had anticipated. This may in part have been due to the Foreign Secretary's decision, wise from his own point of view, to channel off much of Dilke's assiduity into the detailed work of the Commercial Department. Dilke accepted this special charge with an expression of misgiving which goes some way to explain Granville's anxiety that he should have it. “I should have preferred to keep free of all departmental work in order to attend to larger affairs of policy,” he wrote.

This special responsibility kept him very busy, especially during the long negotiations for a new commercial treaty with France, which lasted in one form or another for nearly two years, which took Dilke to Paris for three or four months, and which concluded, as he had always expected would be the case, in failure. It also detached him from Granville, who was not much interested in the minutiae of commercial arrangements, but brought him close to Gladstone, who most certainly was. The Prime Minister was impressed by Dilke's work, was pleased to discover that his interest in the details of the tariff on printed calico squares or on ivory and pearl buttons was as great as his own, and wrote letters of warm commendation. Granville also wrote letters of commendation, but they were perhaps a little less warm. “Many thanks for your constant reports on the progress of the negotiations,” he wrote on one occasion. “They are as interesting as the lists of the betting in the newspapers just before the Derby. I hope you win the race.”
²⁵

Whatever Lord Granville may have wished, Dilke's work could not be confined to the Commercial Department. Except when the Prime Minister intervened, which was frequently, he was the spokesman of the Foreign Office in the House of Commons. This meant that he had to answer in the first instance all questions which were put down—Gladstone sometimes could not forbear from providing his own diffuse replies to supplementaries. These questions were not nearly as numerous as to-day, but there were usually several on two days a week, and Dilke's answers acquired a considerable reputation for succinct tact. His talent for satisfying the
House without embarrassing the Government abroad was regarded as remarkable.

One of the most delicate subjects with which he had to deal in this way related to the appointment of a new French Ambassador to London. Léon Say, whom Dilke regarded as “by far the best French Ambassador that we ever had,” returned to Paris in June, 1880, to become President of the Senate. The French Government proposed the Marquis de Noailles, but, as Dilke wrote to Mrs. Pattison, “the Queen has been told that Mme. de Noailles before her marriage used to have four lovers, one for each season of the year, and that M. de N. was only the summer one.” In consequence the Queen refused her
agrément
and that proposal had to be abandoned. The alternative suggested was M. Challemel-Lacour. He was not on the face of it much better, for he was accused both “of living with a washerwoman who posed as his grandmother” and of having shot a large number of monks when he was Prefect at Lyons in 1871. Dilke discounted these charges, saying, not fully reassuringly, that Challemel was “really only objectionable because he had the worst temper with which perhaps any human being was ever cursed.” The Prince of Wales, however, who in Dilke's view suffered in his knowledge of French politics from believing everything which he read in the
Figaro
, protested violently against Challemel, and tried to persuade Dilke to intervene with Gambetta against the appointment.

An Irish member then put down a question in the House of Commons which specified all the charges against Challemel. Dilke refuted the allegations, but the member concerned—O'Donnell—was not satisfied and attempted to press the matter on the adjournment. This led to a procedural debate of several hours, to general disorder, and to Gladstone moving that O'Donnell be no longer heard. Dilke received a note from Gambetta—“Let me thank you from the bottom of my heart for the lofty manner in which you picked up the glove thrown down by that mad Irish clerical”—suggesting that he had been wise not to intervene on behalf of the Prince of Wales. The Prince's doubts he assuaged by
telling him that Challemel was “not of the Clemenceau type”; but he was much surprised to discover that the Prince when he eventually met the new ambassador found him very agreeable.