Dilke (24 page)

The discovery of Gordon's deceit, had different effects upon Dilke and Gladstone. “Mr. G., from the first moment when Gordon broke his orders,” Dilke wrote, “was for disavowing him, stating that he was acting in defiance of instructions, and leaving him to his fate. Hartington was equally strong for an expedition.”
³⁰
Dilke was on Hartington's side. He was firmly for evacuation, and he had no great respect for Gordon, of whose insubordination he was convinced, but he did not believe that the latter could be abandoned. On the contrary he was prepared to work hard for an expedition to cover Gordon. “Met at night with Hartington and Chamberlain,” he wrote on February 7th, “and decided on more vigorous action.”
³¹
This secret and ill-assorted meeting was intended to prepare the ground for the Cabinet on the following morning. But it failed to secure a decision: “Cabinet called at our wish,” Dilke reported. “I, Hartington, 2, Self, 3, Harcourt, 4, Chamberlain, 5, Northbrook, 6, Carlingford were for asking Gordon if a demonstration at Suakim would help him. Mr. G. and Lord G. very strong the other way, broke up the meeting sooner than agree.”
³²
Four days later, at another Cabinet, Granville weakened and Gladstone, standing alone, was overruled. A decision in principle to send British troops to Suakim was taken.

A decision in principle, however, proved quite different from a directive to action. It was August before the expedition sailed. It was October before it was ready to leave Wadi Halfa and advance into the Soudan. The intervening months had been passed in almost endless Cabinet discussion of what exactly was to be done. There was the dispute about Zebehr, the former slave-trader whom Gordon wished to commission as his principal lieutenant, a course which Gladstone—most strangely—was at first alone in favouring. There was a proposal that a minister should be sent out to Egypt to make decisions on the spot: “Chamberlain . . . suggested that I should go,” Dilke wrote. “. . . Hartington evidently thought
that somebody should go, and thought he had better go himself. Lord Granville would not have either, as might have been expected, for it was doubtful which of the two propositions would make him the more jealous.”
³³
There was the question of timing, with five members of the Cabinet (Gladstone, Granville, Harcourt, Kimberley and Dodson) arguing until April that an autumn expedition would be premature. There was the associated question of its scope, in their approach to which ministers were greatly influenced by their varying views of the objects it was to achieve. Dilke and Chamberlain, who wanted a neat evacuation, were divided from Hartington, who wanted a prolonged occupation and consequently favoured a larger-scale enterprise. Indeed, in Dilke's view, Hartington's desire to mount a major offensive was an important cause of the long delay. “Hartington was determined to give Wolseley his big job,” he wrote after a discussion on May 31st. “If the early suggestion for an expedition by 1,000 picked men, or Roberts's suggestion of a wholly Indian expedition, had not been vetoed by Hartington and Northbrook, Gordon would probably have been saved.”
³⁴

There were the questions of the interest on the Egyptian foreign debt, of whether the Cairo government should be made bankrupt, of whether the powers should agree to “cut the coupon,” of whether an international conference should be summoned. All these matters formed part of the Government's Egyptian agenda and most took precedence over Gordon and the Soudan. At the beginning of August, Dilke wrote to Chamberlain: “We always have two subjects—(
a
) Conference, (
b
) Gordon”; and the latter replied: “The first always taking up two or three hours, and the second five minutes at the fag end of business.”
³⁵
Cabinets were frequently acrimonious and almost invariably long drawn out. Northbrook, the First Lord of the Admiralty, to whose views Dilke was usually opposed, was a particularly difficult man with whom to argue. On one occasion, “instead of sleeping (his usual practice at a Cabinet),” he fainted and had to be carried out.

As a background to these deliberations and delays, innumerable and confusing telegrams from Gordon poured into
London. “Twelve telegrams from Gordon of the most extraordinary nature,”
³⁶
Dilke recorded on March nth. “We were evidently dealing with a wild man under the influence of that climate of Central Africa which acts even upon the sanest men like strong drink,”
³⁷
he summed up the situation at this time. Six months later the story was still the same. “A telegram from Gordon which shows he's quite mad,” Dilke wrote in September, adding with faint surprise: “Some of the other telegrams from him sent at the same time are sane enough.”
³⁸
But by then the story was nearly over. Communications with Khartoum became increasingly sporadic and eventually ceased altogether. Meanwhile the expeditionary force was slowly making its way up the 850 miles of river between Wadi Haifa and Khartoum. It took three months to cover the distance, arriving on January 28th, 1885. The citadel had been stormed and Gordon killed on January 26th.
*

Early on the morning of February 5th the news became known in London, and, in the words of Sir Philip Magnus, “Gladstone's reputation touched the lowest point in his whole career.” The Queen sent him her famous unciphered telegram, which would be memorable for its syntax if for nothing else: “These news from Khartoum are frightful, and to think that all this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too fearful.”
³⁹
This was handed to
Gladstone at Carnforth Junction when he was on his way to London from Holker, where he had been taken by Hartington to stay with the Duke of Devonshire. His reaction, Dilke tells us, was a mixture of annoyed dismay and a shrewd inquisitive-ness about the Carnforth station-master's politics and hence the probability of the contents of the telegram becoming known. But it was not the displeasure of the Queen alone that the Prime Minister and the Government had to face. Public opinion, particularly in London, became hysterically jingo. There were crowds in Downing Street and outside the House of Commons, ready to hoot at Gladstone on every possible occasion; and he was execrated in innumerable music halls as the murderer of Gordon. In the House there was a general collapse of Liberal morale and some defection. A vote of censure against the Government's Egyptian policy had been defeated by the fairly comfortable margin of forty-four in the previous May; but when a similar motion was put at four o'clock on the morning of February 28th, the Government majority fell to fourteen. Dilke wished to go out on the issue. “Mr. G. now
wishes
to be upset,” he had written to Grant Duff on February 20th. “He thinks the party will permanently suffer by the Soudan war if in power at the elections (Nov.-Dec, I fancy), and had sooner be out soon and come in again after them.”
⁴⁰
Dilke tended to agree with this view, particularly as Chamberlain, violently opposed to Hartington's desire for full pacification and a long-term occupation of the Soudan, had been in a resigning humour for some time. Believing this, Dilke was inclined to interpret the cryptic “that will do” with which Gladstone greeted the result of the division as meaning that it was enough of a blow to justify resignation.

In Cabinet at noon the next day, the Prime Minister presented quite a different face. He appealed to the “manhood” of his colleagues and carried the day for continuance in office against the opposition of Granville, Derby, Hartington, Chamberlain, Northbrook and Childers. The Government had received a most damaging blow, for which the only
compensation—the accession of Rosebery
*
—was hardly adequate. Internal dissensions were worse than ever. But there was still a majority in the House of Commons; the Parliament was more than two years short of its term; and the Prime Minister, aged seventy-five and at the nadir of his popular fortunes, preferred power to repose. Gladstone's second Government had a few months still to live.

During the summer of 1884 the Government—and particularly Gladstone—had been much more occupied with the problems of the franchise than with those of General Gordon. The third of the great reform bills of the nineteenth century, conducted mainly by the Prime Minister himself, completed its passage through the House of Commons on June 27th. It increased the electorate from three to five millions; household suffrage was extended from the towns to the counties; and for the first time since 1829 Ireland was treated upon a basis of full equality.

Neither Lord Hartington nor the Conservative party liked the bill. But just as the Whig leader thought it undesirable to carry his public opposition beyond a few growling speeches in the country, so the Tories judged it unwise to provoke a head-on collision upon the issue. Resistance in the Commons was half-hearted, and attention became concentrated upon what the Lords would do. On July 8th they gave their answer. They would decline to pass the franchise bill until the Government also presented them with a measure for the redistribution of constituencies. On the face of it this was not an extreme challenge. The Government was already committed to redistribution, and if the Lords had not existed, the Liberal party—and particularly the radical element—would have been almost as anxious for this as for the franchise bill itself. It was nevertheless a clever manoïuvre, and one which Disraeli had recommended for exactly these circumstances. A redistribution bill would take some time to draft, and even longer to pass. It would arouse great local jealousies, in the midst of
which both bills might founder. Furthermore, any period of delay carried with it the possibility that the Government itself might collapse. “The Tory game,” Dilke had written as early as May 24th when the first bill was still in the Commons, “is to delay the franchise bill until they have upset
^[1]
us upon Egypt. . . .”
¹
The possibility of Gordon destroying Gladstone had not diminished by the time that the Conservative peers came to take their decision.

The apparent moderation of the Lords did not therefore make their attitude acceptable to the Government. There quickly developed a stronger tension between the two Houses than had existed since the great days of 1831-2. Gladstone earned an early rebuke from the Queen for the strength of his language against the peers, and was little comforted by her assuring him that the Lords reflected the “true feeling of the country” better than did the Commons. But the violence of the Prime Minister's attack was as nothing compared with that which Chamberlain was to mount during the late summer and early autumn. He began, somewhat surprisingly, at a house dinner of the Devonshire Club, and he continued with a series of speeches at Bingley Hall in Birmingham, at Hanley, Newtown and Denbigh. He denounced the “insolent pretensions of an hereditary caste he threatened to lead a march of a hundred thousand Midland men upon London, and, if necessary, to give Lord Salisbury a broken head on the way; and he was implicated in the organised radical attack on Lord Randolph Churchill's meeting in Aston Park, which led to one of the worst political riots in recent British history, to several serious casualties, and to the narrow escape from the mob of Churchill and Sir Stafford Northcote. John Morley was giving full expression to the Chamberlain point of view when he coined “mend them or end them,” the most memorable slogan of this period. The Queen's anger at Chamberlain's pronouncements made her even less grammatical than was her habit. “The Queen will yield to no one in TRUE
LIBERAL FEELING,” she wrote to the Prime Minister, “but not to destructive, and she calls upon Mr. Gladstone to
restrain, as he can
, some of his wild colleagues and followers.”
²

Dilke gave full encouragement to Chamberlain. “Speak as strongly as possible to-night and to-morrow,” he telegraphed to Highbury before the Hanley and Newtown speeches. He acted frequently as a buffer for complaints which Gladstone relayed from the Sovereign. Furthermore, he greatly strengthened his ally's position whenever, as at the end of October, the Queen wanted Chamberlain's dismissal, by insisting that, if this happened, he would go too. Beyond this, however, he played no part in the agitation. The reason seems clear. He was an eager advocate of the franchise bill, and wished to see it passed quickly into law, both because this would be a blow to the prestige of the Whigs, and because it would improve the electoral prospects of the radicals. In addition, he had no respect for the pretensions of the peers, and would have been delighted to see them sustain a clear defeat. At the same time the terms which Lord Salisbury offered to the Government had great attractions from Dilke's point of view. The franchise bill had been the work of the Prime Minister, assisted by Harcourt and by James, the Attorney-General. Dilke had not been closely concerned. But a redistribution bill would be a different matter. He was to be the minister with the primary responsibility. The work of drafting a scheme, of negotiating with the Opposition leaders, and of piloting the bill through the House of Commons would give him a far greater opportunity than he had previously enjoyed. He would be the central figure of the next session. And the task would be most neatly fitted to his talents. It would call for hard work, a grasp of detail, and an ability to negotiate smoothly with those with whom he did not agree.

Even without the Lords, of course, there was a probability that the Cabinet would decide to proceed with redistribution. But there would not be the same urgency. The Government was manifestly rickety—no one was more aware of this than was Dilke—and it was by no means impossible that the second measure, which Lord Hartington liked little better
than the first, would be left to await a new Parliament. Dilke was therefore influenced by two conflicting motives. Acting on the one, and on his constantly held belief that thorough preparation never did any harm, he began, early in July and without instructions from the Cabinet, to draft a rough scheme of redistribution.