Dilke (20 page)

Parnell's arrest was but the beginning of the battle. The Land League immediately proclaimed a rent strike, and the Government could respond to this only by proscribing the organisation and sending its officers to join Parnell. Throughout the next six months the picture in Ireland was one of agrarian chaos and mounting violence, with a host of new secret societies and terrorist organisations springing up from month to month. By the spring both sides were prepared to try a new approach. Parnell, although not subjected to the full rigours of prison life, was weary of Kilmainham Jail. Personal and political factors joined to give him a new desire to be out. His child by Mrs. O'Shea had been born in February (and was to die in April). At the same time he wished to reassert his leadership over the various factions of Irish
nationalism; he was worried not only by the extreme violence, but also by the independence of the new terrorist organisations. On the Government side it was obvious to almost the whole Cabinet that the policy of repression had proved sterile. The first move towards a better atmosphere was to allow Parnell a period of parole, ostensibly so that he might attend the funeral of a nephew in Paris, but also that he might go to Eltham and see his own child before her death.

He left Kilmainham on April 10th and returned there in accordance with his undertaking on April 24th. During his absence negotiations for an informal treaty had begun between Captain O'Shea and Chamberlain. The Captain, who was at that time moderate Nationalist member of Parliament for Clare, had a great hunger for office and a considerable complacency towards his wife's relations with Parnell; but he was also a willing go-between, and the negotiations proceeded well. On April 29th, O'Shea returned to London from a visit to Parnell at Kilmainham, bringing with him a letter which set out the heads of agreement. The Government was to introduce a bill to extend the benefits of the Land Act to tenants who were in arrears with their rent, and in return Parnell was to give his support to the Act, to discourage further illegality and to work generally with the Liberal party. The arrangement was accepted by the Cabinet, although not without dissension. Forster, the Chief Secretary, had been sullen throughout the negotiations, and he held Parnell's assurances to be vague and unsatisfactory. He was supported, almost to the end, by Selborne, the slow-witted Lord Chancellor; and by Lord Cowper, who had been Lord Lieutenant without a seat in the Cabinet and had left the Government a week earlier, nominally on grounds of ill-health, but in fact because he did not feel able to adjust himself to a new policy of conciliation. On May 2nd Forster resigned. On May 4th Parnell and his associates were released from Kilmainham.

Gladstone had already decided that Spencer should be the new Lord Lieutenant, but his being already in the Cabinet created a difficulty about the Chief Secretaryship. It was a firm tradition that only one of these two Irish ministers should
be a member of the Cabinet. Dilke and Chamberlain allowed for this rule, but apparently assumed that Spencer would step down. They thought that the Chief Secretaryship was almost certain to be offered to one or other of themselves. Chamberlain had been (by and large) the principal challenger in the Cabinet of the policy which was being discarded; and Dilke was the man outside with the strongest claim to promotion. The arrangement he preferred was that Chamberlain should go to the Chief Secretary's Lodge and that he should succeed him at the Board of Trade. Rather curiously, Dilke in his diary attributed this preference to his own strong views in favour of Home Rule. It seems far more likely that he wished for this arrangement because the Irish problem never aroused his enthusiasm. “. . .
you
(and not I) are the man because you believe in success and I don't,”
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he wrote to Chamberlain at this time. “The fact is that I never could see my way clearly on Ireland,” Dilke wrote on another occasion. A somewhat pessimistic indifference was indeed his natural attitude to the problem. He was too much of a radical to put his faith in coercion or to wish to resist Home Rule; but he was too much of an English imperialist, believing in the superiority of his race, to have much liking for the Irish nation or sympathy with their problems.

At this stage, however, the issue did not present itself. No offer was made either to Chamberlain or Dilke.

“On May 3rd,” Dilke wrote, “Chamberlain, who had decided to take the Irish Secretaryship if offered to him, was astonished at having received no offer. At 11-30 p.m. on the same day, the 3rd, I found that the appointment had been offered to and declined by Hartington; but the offer to, and acceptance by, his brother, Lord Frederick Cavendish, came as a complete surprise both to me and to Chamberlain.”
⁵

Cavendish, who had previously been Financial Secretary to the Treasury, accepted the office without the Cabinet. The eventuality which Dilke and Chamberlain had not considered therefore took place. “It will be seen that it had never occurred
for a moment to either Chamberlain or myself,” Dilke wrote, “that the Irish Secretaryship would be offered without a seat in the Cabinet; but we counted without remembering Mr. Gladstone's affection for Lord Spencer and Spencer's vanity.”
⁶
By appointing Cavendish, Gladstone strengthened the Whig faction within the Government and gave a further indication of his view that radicals should be satisfied with their good fortune in having himself as Prime Minister. The only sop which he offered was that of interviewing Dilke on the evening of Friday, May 5th, and discussing with him, presumably with a view to an early promotion, his attitude to the Royal Grants. But on that evening there seemed no reason why a further vacancy should offer itself for some time to come.

On the following day Lord Frederick Cavendish was murdered. He was attacked, within a few hours of his arrival in Dublin, when walking with his permanent under-secretary in Phoenix Park. Dilke heard the news in London at a party of Lady Northbrook's.

“On the night of May 6th,” he wrote, “the scene at the party at the Admiralty was most dramatic. Mrs. Gladstone
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had come there from a dinner party at the Austrian Embassy, not knowing of the murder, while everybody else in the room knew. At last she was sent for suddenly to Downing Street to be told, and went away under the impression that the Queen had been shot, for she was assured that it was very dreadful, but ‘nothing about Mr. Gladstone.'”
⁷

Next morning—a Sunday—Dilke received a visit from Parnell, accompanied by Justin McCarthy. He found Parnell “white and apparently terror-stricken” and attributed this to fear that the secret societies were running wild and would assassinate him next. Parnell's purpose in coming to see Dilke was apparently to discover what were the chances of a radical replacement for Cavendish—he went immediately afterwards
to Chamberlain—and he received from Dilke the assurance that the events of the previous day would not make him refuse the Chief Secretaryship if it were offered. But Dilke would still have preferred Chamberlain to take that particular post, and indeed, on the following morning, he wrote to Chamberlain reiterating this view and offering, in rather extravagant terms, to give Chamberlain any help that he might need. “Still I would act or serve under you,” Dilke wrote, “and if it were thought I could be of any use I would join you in Dublin on the day the House was up, and spend the whole autumn and winter with you as your chief private secretary. I could always have the work of my London post sent over in boxes.”
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One of the causes of Dilke's mood of obeisance was his sudden conviction that his own way might long be blocked. “On thinking matters over,” he wrote again to Chamberlain on that same day, “I think the Queen's object is to keep me out of the Cabinet for her life, and in this I think she can succeed.”
⁹

At three o'clock that afternoon the body from which Dilke believed himself to be so permanently excluded assembled in 10, Downing Street. Across the road in the Foreign Office, Dilke sat in his room. The unusual procedure of the Cabinet, in session, trying to appoint a Chief Secretary was then followed. The first intimation which Dilke received was a message from Chamberlain saying: “Prepare for an offer.”

“I was somewhat surprised at this,” Dilke wrote, “because Chamberlain knew that I would not take it without the Cabinet, and that I would take it with the Cabinet, whereas his note seemed to imply a doubt. At four he came across himself, and the first difference that had ever occurred between us took place,
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because, although he knew that I would not accept, he urged acceptance of the post without the Cabinet. He argued that it carried with it the Privy Council, that it established great personal claims upon the party, and that it afforded a means of getting over the difficulty with the Queen. I declined however without
hesitation and with some anger. It was obvious that I could not consent to become ‘a mere mouthpiece.' Mr. Gladstone and Lord Carlingford
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then sent back to say, personally from each of them, that I was to be present at the Cabinet at every discussion of Irish affairs; and I then asked: ‘Why, then, should I not be in the Cabinet?' Carlingford came back to the Foreign Office again and again, and cried over it to me; and Lord Granville came in twice, and threatened me with loss of prestige by my refusal, by which I certainly felt that I had lost Mr. Gladstone's confidence. I was angry with Chamberlain at having placed me in this position.
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Had he acted on this occasion with the steadiness with which he acted on every other he would have told the Cabinet that the offer would be an insult; because he knew that this was my view. . . . Lord Granville came in finally, and said in his sweetest manner (which is a very disagreeable one) that he had vast experience, and had ‘never known a man stand on his extreme rights and gain by it.' This I felt to be a monstrous perversion of the case. . . .”
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Despite these remonstrances Dilke persisted in his refusal, and on the following day G. O. Trevelyan, previously Financial Secretary to the Admiralty, was promoted over his head to the vacant office, accepting it without the Cabinet. Trevelyan undoubtedly counted as a radical (although his first duty was to introduce a new coercion bill), and this made Dilke's loss of seniority more marked than would have been the case had another Whig, like Cavendish, been elevated. Dilke was fully
aware of the political risks involved in his refusal. “I have certainly lost Mr. G.'s confidence by my refusal,” he wrote to Mrs. Pattison, “which now makes it certain that I shall not rise above my present place as long as he lasts. . . . I fear they'll all be cold with me and think me a very conceited fellow.”
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He also feared that the public might believe he had been influenced by personal cowardice, although he subsequently considered this view to have gained no currency. But he was certain that his decision was right, and once taken, it was greatly fortified by his stubbornness and pride. The clearest expression of his motive is conveyed in a letter to Grant Duff.
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“I should have had to defend any policy that Spencer chose to adopt, without having a voice in it,” he wrote. “Acceptance would not have been only a personal mistake; it would have been a political blunder. Outside the Cabinet I should not have had the public confidence, and rightly so, because I could not have had a strong hand. I should have inherited accumulated blunders, and I was under no kind of obligation to do so, for I have never touched the Irish question. Never have I spoken on it from first to last. Many of the measures rendered necessary by the situation are condemned by my whole past attitude; but they have really been made inevitable by blunders for which I had no responsibility, and which I should not have been allowed to condemn.”
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Dilke's judgment that he had permanently sacrificed Gladstone's confidence proved pessimistic. Either the Prime Minister was more forgiving or Dilke was more powerful than had been anticipated. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1882 there were strong rumours of Gladstone's impending retirement. At the beginning of July Chamberlain was persuaded that he was going immediately and in November Dilke was even more certain. “Mr. G. has finally decided not to
meet Parliament again in February,” he wrote, “Hartington is to be P.M.”
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In the event, however, the reconstruction, which came in December, merely involved Gladstone shedding the Exchequer to Childers, who had until then been Secretary of State for War, and a series of consequential changes. These created two new Cabinet vacancies, for Hartington succeeded Childers at the War Office, and was himself succeeded at the India Office by Kimberley, who had been Colonial Secretary since the formation of the Government, and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster since the resignation of Bright in July, 1882. The Colonial Office went to Derby. He had been Foreign Secretary under Beaconsfield until 1878, and, despite a rapid subsequent move towards the Liberal party,
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his earlier assumption of office might have seemed inappropriate.

The other vacancy, it had been decided, was to go to Dilke. Gladstone probably neither understood nor liked him very well, at this or any other time. He greatly preferred Bright, and even after the latter's resignation, in protest against his own Egyptian policy, he could still remark: “Just compare his (Blight's) high principles with those of Chamberlain and Dilke and the new style of radicals, who are all opportunism.”
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Gladstone was nevertheless capable of treating Dilke with great courtesy and consideration—when the latter was ill for a few weeks in 1880, for instance, the Prime Minister had been quick to pay a call of enquiry to 76, Sloane Street—and he had slowly acquired a great respect for Dilke's parliamentary and administrative ability, if not an equivalent one for his “high principles.” Indeed, at about this time, if we are to believe the testimony of Lord Acton, Gladstone began to look on Dilke as a possible successor, at least as leader of the House of Commons. Looking to a time when he himself would have retired and Hartington would have become Devonshire, Gladstone is reported as saying: “The future leader of H. of C. was a great puzzle and difficulty. Sir Charles
Dilke would probably be the man best fitted for it; he had shown much capacity for learning and unlearning, but he would require Cabinet training first.”
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