Dilke (27 page)

Dilke may have been influenced by having received from Randolph Churchill, at dinner on May 17th, the first news that the Tory party would bid for the Irish vote by coming out against coercion. He no doubt realised then that the Irish stakes were to be substantially raised. Nevertheless, his choice of an issue on which to go was extraordinarily inept, and Chamberlain was right in seeing this. It was so inept, indeed, that the suspicion that Dilke's judgment had been temporarily clouded by personal worry cannot be avoided. Perhaps he had received another anonymous letter. Perhaps it was merely the general and slightly malicious stir to which the spreading news of his engagement was giving rise. “Pray do not vex yourself about the gossip here,”
²⁰
Chamberlain had written to Mrs. Pattison on the day on which Randolph Churchill told Dilke of Lord Salisbury's Irish intentions.

Manning, who preferred his political friends to be ministers, was also opposed to Dilke's action.

“No third party (is) possible at this moment,” he wrote to him on May 26th. “Two parties and two parachutes will only make us (as) weak and useless as the French Chamber. The just demands of Ireland are a destiny to which Whig and Tory must give way. But if you and the like of you leave the Whigs they will fall back and unite in resisting you. So long as you are in contact with them they will yield to reason. These are the thoughts of an Old Testament Radical.”
^[5]
21

When Dilke received this letter he was in Dublin. His
position there was ambiguous in two respects. In the first place he was half in and half out of the Government. The radical resignations were not generally known, and to all appearances Chamberlain (who had gone to Paris for a Whitsun holiday) and Dilke were still members of the Cabinet. Gladstone, who was also beset by a conditional resignation from his Chancellor of the Exchequer, felt unable for the moment to do more than put their letters into suspense. Secondly, Dilke was nominally in Ireland on Housing Commission business, but he was in fact more concerned in canvassing the Lord Lieutenant, his host at Vice-Regal Lodge, in favour of Chamberlain's scheme. His urgency became greater as the visit—the only one he ever paid to Ireland—proceeded. What he saw turned his mind increasingly towards a drastic constitutional solution. It was not the glowing prospect of a union of hearts which impressed him, but the utter hopelessness of the existing system.

“Early in the morning of Saturday, the 23rd,” he wrote, “before the meeting of my Commission at the City Hall, I had had a long talk with Spencer, and I felt, more strongly than I ever had before, that his position in Dublin was untenable, and that he ought to be allowed to go. On Whit Sunday I attended church with Spencer, and in the afternoon took him for the only walk which he had enjoyed for a long time. We passed the spot where Lord Frederick Cavendish was killed, and accompanied by a single aide-de-camp, but watched at a distance by two policemen in plain clothes, and met at every street corner by two others, walked to the strawberry gardens, and on our return, it being a lovely Sunday when the Wicklow Mountains were at their best and the hawthorn in bloom, met thousands of Dublin people driving out to the strawberry gardens on cars. In the course of the whole long walk but one man lifted his hat to Spencer, who was universally recognised, but assailed by the majority of those we met with shouts of ‘who killed Myles Joyce?'
^[6]

while some varied the proceedings by calling ‘murderer' after him. A few days later, when I was driving with Lady Spencer in an open carriage, a well-dressed bicyclist came riding through the cavalry escort, and in a quiet, conversational tone observed to us, ‘who killed Myles Joyce?' At his dinner party on the Sunday evening Spencer told us that a Roman Catholic priest who was present . . . was the only priest in Ireland who would enter his walls, while the castle was boycotted by every Archbishop and Bishop. On Monday morning . . . I paid a visit to the Mansion House at the request of the Lord Mayor of Dublin, taking by Spencer's leave the Viceregal carriages there, where they had in his second Viceroyalty not been before, and was received by the Lord Mayor in state. . . .”
²²

Altogether it was not surprising that Dilke summed up his impressions by writing to Mrs. Pattison: “What a life is Spencer's—cut off from nearly the whole people—good and bad! What sense of duty, what high-mindedness, and what stupidity!”
²³

On May 27th Hartington arrived in Dublin, and Dilke had two Whigs instead of one with whom to argue. But Hartington was not a man for argument; after a few hours of it he pronounced himself suddenly ill and stayed in bed. Dilke left the following evening, slept on the boat in Kingstown Harbour, crossed on the Friday, spent a few days at Dockett Eddy, and returned to London on Tuesday, June 2nd, ready for the last week of the Government's life.

Rarely, if ever, can an Administration have been quite so ripe for its end. The death of Gordon and the proclamation of the Unauthorised Programme, while at first they tended to neutralise each other, were both in the longer run weakening factors. Then in the spring there was a crisis over Afghanistan. The Russians had recently annexed Turkestan and were engaged in a boundary dispute with the Amir, who was under British protection. On March 31st, the Russians broke in upon the Afghans at Penjdeh and heavily defeated them. Gladstone became suddenly bellicose, and for a time war
seemed near. The Prime Minister was strongly supported in his firmness by Dilke, who knew a great deal more about the subject than any other minister, but not by Harcourt, and the issue became yet another cause of dissension within the Cabinet. At the beginning of May the Russians unexpectedly withdrew and the crisis was over. But by that time the Government was quarrelling hard about Ireland on the one hand and the Budget on the other. In the four weeks from the middle of April the Prime Minister received resignations in one form or another from no less than nine of his colleagues.

In the event, however, it was not the greater issue of Ireland but the lesser one of the Budget which precipitated the Government's end. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer had brought forward in March a proposal to increase the beer duty this had met with radical hostility, and Dilke had predicted that it would kill the Government. What the radicals wanted was an increase in direct taxation, as was suggested in the Unauthorised Programme, and when Childers offered the compromise of limiting the beer increase to one year and compensating by raising the wine duty, Dilke took the lead in resisting this also. He argued that it would cause needless trouble with the French, and carried with him all the Cabinet except for the Chancellor himself. The defeated Childers then offered his resignation and walked out of the room.

When the Finance Bill was presented to the House for second reading on June 8th it was without the wine proposal and the Government was almost without a Chancellor. His resignation had not been withdrawn, and his position was as indeterminate as that of Dilke and Chamberlain. The Cabinet was in no position to sustain a challenge. This came in the form of a reasoned amendment moved by Hicks Beach and regretting amongst other things the increased duty on beer without any corresponding increase on wine.

The Government case was argued by Childers, Dilke and Gladstone, but in vain. The division was taken at 2 a.m., and the Government was defeated, unexpectedly, by 12. The result was the first fruit of the Irish-Tory alliance. Thirty-nine Parnellites voted in the Opposition lobby, and proclaimed the
result with shouts, not of “cheaper beer,” but of “no coercion.” But these votes alone would not have sufficed to defeat the Government. There were also six Liberals who voted for the amendment, and more than seventy, mostly radicals, who abstained or were absent unpaired.

The issues were confused and the cross-currents were numerous, but it was not possible to doubt that the Government had had its day. None of its members questioned this. At the Cabinet on the following day they reached a decision to resign with a speed and unanimity that they had shown on few other issues. There were a few more Cabinets to dispose of routine business, but by June 24th Lord Salisbury had kissed hands as head of a minority Government. On the same day Dilke left his office at the Local Government Board, having handed over to Arthur Balfour, the new President.

DILKE LEFT office without regret. Partly this was because he was tired and had been complaining for the past month that he was without energy, although quite well. Mainly, however, it was because his political confidence was high. His ambition was unlimited and his prospects were far brighter than those of most ex-Cabinet ministers. First there was his status as a foreign affairs expert. His position in this respect was one which has rarely been paralleled in British politics. There was hardly an area of the world about which Dilke did not have detailed knowledge. When a dispute arose, perhaps about some small piece of territory, Dilke would know exactly where the frontier ran and what the terrain was like. He would know where the old frontier had been prior to the convention of 1837 and all the other diplomatic antecedents. In addition the leading statesmen on both sides of the dispute were likely to be familiar figures to him, as he would be to them. In France, in Germany, in Greece, in Russia, in Afghanistan, in Australia and in many other places his repute was far greater than could be accounted for by the ministerial offices which he had held.

The danger of such an excess of expertise is that it makes its possessor a glorified civil servant rather than a major politician. This was not a very pressing danger in Dilke's case. As the former leader of English republicanism and as the unshakable ally of Chamberlain, the most controversial figure in politics, he could hardly be accused of a bureaucratic preoccupation with facts as opposed to policies. He not only knew a lot, but he stood for definite objectives as well. He
was a leader and not merely a political encyclopedia. As such he was something more than the best qualified candidate for the Foreign Office in another Gladstone ministry. Should the G.O.M. retire he was also a strong possibility for the leadership of the Liberal party. Disraeli's prophecy that Dilke would be Prime Minister, made more than five years before, had not become less likely with the passage of time.

But what made it likely? Why should an ex-President of the Local Government Board in a defeated Government, and a man moreover whom most people regarded as less forceful than his ally Chamberlain, view the future with especial optimism? The question needs to be answered on a number of different levels. First, what were the prospects of the early return of a Liberal Government? Here Dilke was completely confident. He regarded the Tory hold on power as slight, even with the temporary Irish alliance. There could be no elections until the late autumn when the new constituencies and electoral registers would be ready. These should ensure a Liberal victory at least as decisive as that of 1880. “We shall be in office again in January,” Dilke wrote to Grant Duff on June 16th; and his prophecy was to be true about his friends although not about himself.

Under whose leadership was such a Government likely to come in? Gladstone was seventy-five, and his retirement, which had been strongly rumoured for some time, was clearly made more probable by the end of his premiership. But Dilke, who in the previous winter would have been indifferent, had become suddenly convinced that a continuation of Gladstone's leadership was highly desirable. On the evening of the resignation of the Government he had proclaimed this in a much-publicised speech at a dinner of the City of London Liberal Club. The battle of the future must be won, he said,” not only with his (Gladstone's) great name, but under his actual leadership.” This faith did not prevent him, two weeks later, from engaging in one further brush with the G.O.M., about a baronetcy conferred upon Errington, the unofficial representative of the Foreign Office at the Vatican. Dilke regarded this honour as a highly undesirable public expression
of the late Government's gratitude for Errington's activities against Dr. Walsh, and threatened in consequence to withdraw from his seat on the Front Opposition Bench and sit below the gangway. But the terms in which he withdrew his threat were significant.

“. . . (Harcourt) tells me that you have accepted a proposal to stand again for Midlothian,” he wrote to Gladstone on June 29th. “This is so great a thing that smaller ones must not be allowed to make even small discords, so please put my letter of Saturday in the fire, and forgive me for having put you to the trouble of reading and replying to it.”
¹

Dilke's new-found enthusiasm for Gladstone's leadership was probably due more to Ireland than to anything else, to his conviction that a quick solution had become essential, and to a final impatience, as a result of the negotiations of the spring, with the perpetual delaying tactics of Hartington and the Whigs. “There is no liking for Ireland or the Irish,” he had also told Grant Duff in his letter of June 16th, “but an almost universal feeling now that some form of Home Rule must be tried. My own belief is that it will be tried too late, as all our remedies have been.”
²
Dilke thought that Gladstone's new mood on Ireland offered the best chance of driving hard enough to avoid this fatal delay. And if the “almost universal feeling” did not extend quite far enough for all the Whigs to accept this hard driving, there would be some advantages in that. He was a shrewd enough tactician to see that Gladstone was an invaluable ally in the battle against Hartington. The Unauthorised Programme could obviously not be implemented until the Whigs were driven out of the Liberal party. But this could be accomplished more safely under Gladstone than by Dilke and Chamberlain; and once it was done the way would be open, when Gladstone came to retire, which it was thought could not in any event be long delayed, both for the radical programme and for radical leadership.