Dilke (53 page)

In 1891 he published, jointly with Spenser Wilkinson,
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a civilian military expert, a wider-ranging work entitled
Imperial Defence
. In the course of writing this book Dilke had been slowly converted by Wilkinson to a belief in the primacy of the navy. Britain's best means of defending her scattered imperial possessions was to possess and concentrate a naval force capable of destroying the enemy's own sea-power. Thereafter he never deviated from this view, and in the controversies of the next century he became one of the best-informed supporters of the “blue-water” school.

Imperial Defence
also advocated—and here the idea was Dilke's own—a much closer co-ordination of the two services at home and of the various military resources which were scattered throughout the Empire. Dilke wanted a General Staff and he wanted it to operate on an imperial and not merely a United Kingdom level. “The very existence of a General Staff,” he wrote, “would constitute a form of Imperial military federation.” One aspect of these ideas was pressed by Dilke soon after he returned to the House of Commons. At the beginning of 1894 he organised the writing of a public letter signed by himself, General Sir George Chesney (a backbench Unionist), H. O. Arnold-Forster (later to be Secretary of State for War under Balfour) and Spenser Wilkinson. It was
addressed to Gladstone as Prime Minister, to Salisbury and Balfour as the leaders of the Conservatives in the two houses, and to the Duke of Devonshire (as Hartington had become) and Chamberlain as the leaders of the Liberal Unionists. Two striking proposals were made in the letter. The first was the uniting of the two services under a single political head. Either a convention should be established by which the man who was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty should also be made Secretary of State for War, or, still more drastically, there should be a formal legislative union of the two offices. The second was that a chief of the staff should be appointed in each service, who would be the adviser of the “defence minister” and the Cabinet, and who would be responsible in the sense that he would hold office only so long as his advice was accepted.

This letter was received with uneven enthusiasm by those to whom it was addressed. It reached Gladstone when he was on the point of resignation, and it did nothing to make him wish to change his mind. He replied cryptically (for his resignation had not then been announced. “. . . I fear I ought to confine myself to assuring you that I have taken care . . . it should come to the notice of my colleagues.”
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This was the last letter which Dilke received from his former chief, and the last which was heard of his memorandum from the Liberal side.

From the Unionist leaders the response was more encouraging. It was upon Balfour that Dilke had placed his greatest reliance.

“I had sooner discuss this matter first with you,” he had written to him a few weeks before, “. . . than with Chamberlain, because he is, oddly enough, a much stronger party man than you are, and would be less inclined (on account of national objects which to him are predominant) to keep party out of his mind in connection with it.”
¹⁷

Dilke's faith was not misplaced. Balfour argued against some of the details of the plan—he thought, for instance, that the concentration of naval and military advice through two
individuals would weaken civilian authority but he showed an eager interest in the problems with which it sought to deal. In a debate which followed the publication of the letter he committed himself sufficiently for Dilke to withdraw the motion which had initiated the discussion. In the next period of Unionist Government a loose form of Committee of Imperial Defence was brought into existence. And in 1903, under Balfour's own premiership, the Committee was given a much more closely defined and important form. The Prime Minister became its chairman, the professional (as well as the political) chiefs of the Admiralty and War Office were made permanent members, minutes were kept and a secretariat was established.

Most of Dilke's work in the field of national defence was conducted on an equally non-party basis. Apart from Wilkinson, Arnold-Forster remained his closest civilian collaborator; and he carried on a large and friendly correspondence with a wide range of scarcely radical generals and admirals. These service chiefs often wrote in insistent terms about the quality of Dilke's knowledge and the value of his work. “I am always delighted to answer any question you may ask me,” Admiral Lord Charles Beresford wrote in 1897, “as I consider that you are the only member of Cabinet rank in either party who really understands the question of Imperial Defence in all its requirements or indeed in any particular.”
¹⁸
“You cannot think how grateful I am to anyone who takes an intelligent interest in the Army,”
¹⁹
came from General Sir Evelyn Wood in the following year.

From the moment of his return to Parliament Dilke acted independently of his party on defence questions. Sometimes his independence wore a radical appearance, as when, in 1893, he voted against the appointment of the Duke of Connaught to the command at Aldershot. More frequently, however, it led him into a temporary Conservative alliance. The most notable of these latter occasions was the “cordite vote “in June, 1895. This, the last occasion upon which a government was forced into resignation by defeat in the House of Commons, was a vote of censure upon Campbell-Bannerman for not having been quick enough to procure supplies of cordite for
the army. There was a short debate and a small vote, but the Government was defeated by seven. Dilke made no speech, but he voted with the Opposition, and was the most prominent of the handful of Liberals who took this course. “For this vote,” Dilke's official biographers baldly state, “Campbell-Bannerman never forgave him.”
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Such a judgment is necessarily something of a surmise, but it is supported, as has been already seen, by the disparaging and bitter terms in which Campbell-Bannerman wrote about Dilke in 1900; and it is in no way contradicted, as will be shown later, by the events associated with the formation of the Liberal Government of 1905.

Outside politics, Dilke's life during the 'nineties and over the turn of the century pursued a mixed course. He was popular in the Forest of Dean, respected throughout the Labour movement, and a major social figure in Paris. In English politics and society, however, he was not allowed to strike more than a minor key. By the end of the 'nineties when his friendship with Chamberlain was dead, there was no political figure of the front rank, with the doubtful exception of Morley, with whom he was on intimate terms. Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice would occasionally suggest a week-end and G. O. Trevelyan would accompany him for Sunday afternoon walks in London. This was the nearest to the centre of political power that his friendships took him. Life at Sloane Street and still less at Dockett Eddy and Pyrford was not solitary, however. Particularly at Dockett during the summer there was a stream of visitors—oarsmen, Balkan diplomats, French actors, and collaborators of Dilke's in particular enterprises like Spenser Wilkinson and D. F. Steavenson. There was a wide periphery of acquaintances but little to put in the centre. There was no core of all-purpose friends such as had existed at Sloane Street in the late 'seventies and early 'eighties.

In part this was due to the piecemeal, rather unco-ordinated pattern which Dilke's political interests had assumed. In part too it was due to the social ostracism which continued to operate against him. The Court, at least until the death of the Queen, never wavered in its hostility, despite a series of
attempts by the old republican to circumnavigate the excluding barriers. In 1896 he wrote to the Prince of Wales to ask if he might recommence his attendance at levées. Knollys replied rather negatively—“You are doubtless aware that the matter is not one in which (the Prince) can officially interfere, as he only represents the Queen at Levées and co.”—but saying that he had sent Dilke's letter on to the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Latham. Latham referred it to the Prime Minister, who spoke to the Queen, and then wrote to Latham for forwarding to Dilke an elliptical but firm refusal:

20 Arlington Street,
February 27

My dear Latham,

Sir C. D.'s Letter

The Queen has intimated to me that in her judgment it is not desirable that Sir C. D. should pursue in respect to the matter to which he refers a course different from that which he has followed up to this time.

Yours very truly,
Salisbury
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In the following year, on the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee, Dilke tried again. On June 23rd the Speaker led a procession of four hundred members to Buckingham Palace in order to convey to the Queen the congratulations of the House of Commons. Dilke, conspicuous in the levée dress of a Privy Councillor, took his place in the procession, but his presence was adversely commented on in some parts of the Press and was not welcomed, he felt, by the Queen herself. In consequence he wrote to the Prince of Wales, partly by way of self-justification and partly to ask the Prince's advice as to whether he should attend a parliamentary garden party which the Queen was giving at Windsor and to which a summons had automatically been sent to Dilke and his wife. Knollys replied more warmly on this occasion.

“I am desired by the Prince of Wales to thank you for your letter, and to say that he is much touched by it and
that he especially appreciates the tone in which it is written.

“His Royal Highness directs me to let you know that he thinks you were quite right to accompany the Speaker to Buckingham Palace, and that though he understands the reason which prompts you and Lady Dilke to hesitate about going to Windsor to-morrow, he is at the same time of the opinion that you should both ‘obey Her Majesty's commands.'”
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Three and a half years later the Queen died, and the Prince of Wales, generally more tolerant and specifically more friendly, ascended the throne. The Court then ceased to be the centre of resistance to the social rehabilitation of the Dilkes. Sir Charles attended the Accession Council, and noted, perhaps attributing his own feelings to others, that relief was a more widespread reaction than sorrow. Thereafter he took his normal place, as a senior Privy Councillor, at all Court functions. In 1902 Lady Dilke was re-presented, which had not previously been possible since her second marriage, and in the autumn of that year there was even talk of a royal visit, very much under Dilke's auspices, to the Forest of Dean.

Lady Dilke was the moving spirit in this somewhat laborious ascent to royal favour. But even in her case the ascent was not made for its own sake. The most important purpose of her later life was to make the world recognise that it had wronged her husband. King Edward was a useful instrument for the achievement of this end. By the time that he could be used, however, the possibility of a complete recovery of Dilke's political career had disappeared. In 1892 at the age of forty-eight all things appeared still to be possible. In 1902 at the age of fifty-eight the prospect was much more limited. Given Dilke's age, his career would in any event have suffered at this
stage from the long period of Unionist hegemony. Morley's did so. But Morley had been a member of the Cabinet of 1892-5 and remained one of the inner council of the Liberal party during the years of opposition. Without either of these qualifications Dilke could not hope for a central position in the next Liberal Government. The best for which he could hope was a peripheral position in the Cabinet. He would not exercise great power, but for the first time for twenty years he might again be officially recognised. Whether this comparatively modest hope would be fulfilled was the question which exercised the mind of Lady Dilke (and to a slightly lesser extent that of her husband) as the first years of Balfour's premiership marked the beginning of Unionist decline.

Lady Dilke did not live to see her hopes for her husband put to the test. Her health had never been very good, and in the last few years of her life she was forced to reduce her activities. But at the very end she was able to round off some of her manifold interests. In the spring of 1904 she went for two months to Paris and helped to prepare an exhibition of French primitive art. After spending the summer at Dockett she travelled to Leeds in the first week of September for her sixteenth successive Trades Union Congress. From there she went to join her husband in the Forest of Dean for their regular autumn visit. Then, on Thursday, October 20th, she went to London for a meeting at the Chelsea Town Hall. Dilke, at the beginning of a campaign which he had concerted with friends and which was to be half radical propaganda and half personal rehabilitation, was to address his old constituents for the first time for many years. The meeting was a success, but later that night Lady Dilke became very ill. She insisted on travelling to Pyrford on the following morning, and once there she seemed to improve. But on the evening of the third day, after what Dilke described as “one of our happiest Sunday afternoons,” she died in his arms.

The loss was a severe one for Dilke, although he was soon able to look back on his second marriage with a satisfaction which bordered on complacency. “The two people with whom I was most closely associated in my life,” he wrote a year or so later, referring to his grandfather and his second wife, “both died saying that I had given them perfect happiness.”
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As in the case of his grandfather so in the case of his second wife, Dilke sought to complete this felicity and express his sense of loss by composing a memoir and publishing it as an introduction to a selection of the subject's own writings. This tribute to Lady Dilke appeared under the title of
The Book of the Spiritual Life
in 1905. It was the last of Sir Charles's full-length publications.