Gladstone: A Biography (102 page)

‘T
HE
U
NION
–
AND
D
ISUNION
–
OF
H
EARTS
’

G
LADSTONE
’
S HOPE THAT
if an ‘anti-Irish’ government were allowed quickly in it could be got quickly out proved
ill founded. The second Salisbury administration, despite its unclear majority, lasted with authority for six years. This was principally due to the mounting implacability of the Liberal Unionists
towards Home Rule and therefore towards the prospect of a fourth Gladstone government. At the beginning of 1887 Chamberlain flirted with the possibility of Liberal reunion, and there was a
round-table conference at which Harcourt performed as an eager rather than a neat bridge-builder. Gladstone gave him some discretion, but not too much, for he did not really want Chamberlain back.
As a result the enterprise achieved little except for the return of Trevelyan, which might have happened in any event.

Chamberlain, who was a naturally implacable man, then moved hard in the other direction. Hartington stood back from these negotiations at least as much as did Gladstone, and gave the impression
that he was glad to be free of the Liberal cage, although this was paradoxical given that he had fled from it in company with Chamberlain, the man principally responsible for making its confines
intolerable to him. Hartington was, however, highly susceptible to that anti-Irish
furia
which infected many otherwise calm Englishmen of his and the next generation. When Parnell was ruined
by the O’Shea divorce case he told the Queen with an uncharacteristic lack of generosity, particularly in view of his own domestic arrangements with the Duchess of Manchester (not regularized
until two years later), that ‘I never thought anything in politics could give me as much pleasure as this does.’
¹

The Conservative government also gained authority through a successful ministerial performance. Randolph Churchill as Chancellor blew himself up within five months and Hicks Beach retired hurt
from the Irish Office three months later. But their replacements were successful ministers: first Goschen, that nominally cross-party figure of weight and
talent, a
forerunner of Milner and Waverley (John Anderson); and second Arthur Balfour, who so ruthlessly demonstrated his languid steel in Ireland that his sobriquet changed from ‘Pretty Fanny’
to ‘Bloody Balfour’. Also successful was W. H. Smith, who at the same time moved from the War Office to the leadership of the House of Commons with the grand title of First Lord of the
Treasury, which Gladstone thought improper for Salisbury to separate from the premiership. Together they constituted a formidable House of Commons trio.

Balfour was the key figure of the three. He was the agent of Salisbury’s perception, in contrast with Gladstone’s, that Ireland could be governed from London for another generation.
Gladstone’s long-term view was both more clear-sighted and more imaginative than Salisbury’s. He saw that quick Home Rule offered the only prospect of keeping Ireland permanently within
the British connection. But Salisbury’s short- to medium-term judgement was cooler. Gladstone convinced himself in 1885–6 that civic order was about to dissolve in Ireland. That
conviction, together with his age, made him in a hurry.
¹²⁶
Salisbury thought that Gladstone’s imagination had become fevered, that the resources of coercion were not yet exhausted,
and that it was mostly a question of nerve. And in Balfour, literally nepotistic though his appointment was, Salisbury found the ideal instrument of unsentimental repression, combined with the
intelligence to mingle a little reform with the iron fist. Balfour’s determination both secured his own passport to the premiership and strengthened the evolving alliance with Hartington and
Chamberlain, the key to the twenty years of Unionist hegemony which began in 1886.

Despite these adverse underlying political currents Gladstone’s morale was on the whole high during the first four years of that Salisbury government. By the end of this period he was aged
nearly eighty-one, and with this advance there undoubtedly went some failing of powers. Both his hearing and his eyesight deteriorated, the former to such an extent that he found theatre-going,
which had played a great part in his life for the previous twenty years, had become pointless. This was after an intermediate phase when he tried by a special dispensation the device of sitting on
a corner of the stage. In the same way poor vision caused him somewhat to restrict his reading (although not as much as in his fourth government), and was one of the reasons for his growing
addiction to backgammon, which consumed after-dinner hours when in
earlier years he might have read. His memory, particularly for names but also for recent events, although
not for more distant ones, showed signs of fading. From the spring of 1887 there began to be occasional gaps in his diary entries because when he came to write them up in the evening he simply
could not remember the names of some to whom he had written in the morning.

On the other hand his physical stamina remained formidable. He felled his last tree a few weeks before his eighty-second birthday, but for a couple of years before that final event he had begun
to substitute for arboreal activity the almost equally strenuous one of first sorting and then moving (mostly by wheelbarrow) large quantities of books to St Deiniol’s Library in Hawarden
village. This institution for residential scholars he founded as a sort of advance memorial in 1889; unlike American presidential libraries however it was not a shell for Gladstone memorabilia but
a serious theological and historical research library.

He continued to walk well and to be physically agile. When earlier in that same year of 1889 he was knocked down in London by a passing cab, he got up, pursued the errant driver and held him
until the police came. His stamina also showed in his ability to address large audiences for long periods, although this had become almost a reflex action on his part. In the autumn of 1888, on a
return National Liberal Federation visit to Bingley Hall in Birmingham, although in contrast with 1877 without Chamberlain as master of ceremonies or even in the audience, he had addressed 20,000
for one and three-quarter hours.

The essence of his good morale during these years was that he was of settled mind so far as his own political future was concerned. He would remain leader of the Liberal party so long as he
could see the prospect of settling the Irish question. He had one more river to cross, and that, if not the river Jordan, was a mixture of the Liffey and the Thames, for it was not simply justice
in isolation for Ireland, but the reconciliation of Ireland to Britain which inspired him. From his own point of view the advantage was that it gave a continuing but not time-fixed purpose to his
life in his late seventies and early eighties. The frequent menace of old age is that it imprisons its victim in a departure lounge of life,
¹²⁷
awaiting with a mixture of apprehension
and impatience the announcement that the aircraft is ready. Gladstone’s sense that he had ‘one fight more, the best and the last’ (in the words of Browning’s
Prospice
) was a tremendous prophylactic against senile futility. While he had a cause,
the future lay before him, unbounded except by the prospect of a final success.
His energies might be running out but his life was not running down. For the 1890 session he even rented a London house of his own, 10 St James’s Square, now the Royal Institute of
International Affairs, which had been previously lived in by two other Prime Ministers, Chatham and Derby.

On this basis of expectation he was content to spend long autumns at Hawarden, followed over the turn of the years 1887–8 and 1888–9 with six- to eight-week excursions to Florence on
the first occasion and Naples on the second. Each trip was rounded off with a few days in Cannes, which under Rendel and Acton auspices was becoming a favourite resort. At home his country-house
visiting, particularly to the very grand establishments, became less frequent. There were many fewer Whig magnates whom he wished to visit or who would have enjoyed entertaining him. He did,
however, make a twelve-day West Country Whitsun tour in 1889, which included visits to four houses as well as five nights on the yacht of a Rothschild daughter and several speeches. He was
‘
delighted
’ with the still incomplete Truro Cathedral and regarded Sir William Harcourt’s equally new example of the style sometimes known as Parliamentary Tudor,
appropriately set in the New Forest, as ‘a marvellous creation’.
²
He paid only one constituency visit between the general elections of 1886 and 1892, but that was a
substantial one, lasting a week in the autumn of 1890. Lady Rosebery, still a young woman, was dying at Dalmeny, so he stayed with the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates in the Edinburgh New Town. He
made four major speeches, two minor ones and visited the newly opened Forth railway bridge.

In general his non-parliamentary speech-making was active during those years. He addressed the annual meetings of the National Liberal Federation not only on the already mentioned Birmingham
occasion in 1888, but also at Nottingham in 1887, and Manchester in 1889. He had previously decided to miss the Sheffield gathering in 1890, which was lucky as it fell in the immediate shadow of
the Parnell divorce case, to the considerable embarrassment of Harcourt and Morley, who had to perform in his absence. At Newcastle in 1891, to cast forward a little, he was again present and
orating, but more mechanically, more floridly and less magisterially than usual. Despite his often imperious attitude to constituencies and followers, he was the first party leader to make a
fixture of party conferences. He also addressed major provincial meetings at Swansea, Cardiff, Plymouth and Dundee.

Neither his advancing years nor his concentration upon, almost his obsession with, a single political objective produced any marked diminution in his intellectual
activity. Despite his increasing eyesight problem, he was still reading voraciously. His count of books and pamphlets read in 1890, his eighty-first year, for instance, gave the almost incredible
figure of 419, supplemented by 39 periodical articles. And his writing also remained prolific. In that same turn-of-the-decade year he earned from articles and reviews a sum of just over
£1915,
³
the rough equivalent of £95,000 today.

Gladstone’s contemporaries, and some who were younger, began to drop around him almost like flies. Phillimore, probably his oldest friend had gone in 1885; in 1889 Bright went in March, as
did Gladstone’s sole surviving brother, Sir Thomas; in 1890 Döllinger and Newman died; in 1891 Granville, his oldest political collaborator; and in 1892 Manning and Tennyson. Gladstone
took all these deaths with fortitude. This may have been partly because of the strength of his Christian faith. But it also owed much to his sense of his mission and responsibilities as a great
commander who, when he heard painful news of illustrious casualties, whether on his own side or the other, could not be distracted from his duties and his strategy. He may indeed have been more
affected by the deaths, a couple of years later, of his doctor, (Sir) Andrew Clark, and his valet, Zadok Outram, who after many years in Gladstone’s service became an alcoholic and then
drowned himself in the Thames. They were operational staff, necessary for the conduct of the campaign.

That strategy, which particularly in the two years from the second half of 1888 to late 1890 (when twelve seats changed from Conservative to Liberal at by-elections) showed strong signs of
working well, depended crucially on the partnership with Parnell. This prospered and then festered with an heroic reversal of fortune more akin to the heights and depths of Greek tragedy than to
the normally mild landscape of Victorian England. This final phase of Gladstone’s relations with Parnell revolved around two of the most famous lawsuits of the late nineteenth century, which
was the classical age of not only parliamentary politics but also of great trials with gladiatorial advocates and dramatic denouements. The librettos of Sir W. S. Gilbert were the house ballads of
both the Palace of Westminster and the Royal Courts of Justice. These two legal processes were separated from each other by little more than eighteen months, but produced violent fluctuations in
Parnell’s reputation and hence, perhaps more inevitably than admirably, in Gladstone’s attitude to him. In April 1887
The Times
produced a damaging and, as
was demonstrated nearly two years later, entirely unfounded libel of Parnell. They published forged letters in which Parnell appeared to apologize to some of his nationalist
supporters for his ‘tactical’ denunciation of the Phoenix Park atrocity. He hesitated to sue because of suspicion about the prejudices of a propertied London jury. Eventually, however,
the government set up a most unfavourable form of enquiry, which was a Special Commission of one lord justice of appeal and two puisne judges, Unionists to a man, who, moreover, were set to
investigate every alleged Fenian crime of the previous ten years or more. In spite of this penumbra of obfuscation the Special Commission could not avoid, on its fiftieth sitting day, 21 February
1889, getting to the gravamen. Pigott, the purveyor of the letters, was then so mauled by Parnell’s counsel, Sir Charles Russell, that he fled to Madrid rather than face another day’s
cross-examination, and there committed suicide. Asquith, at the time only a junior barrister standing in for an exhausted Russell, completed the rout by exposing the prejudiced irresponsibility of
Macdonald, the manager of
The Times
.