Gladstone: A Biography (104 page)

As Parnell walked away from this scene of superficial endorsement, Morley at last fell in with him and read him Gladstone’s letter. Parnell took it with some equanimity, being able to
inform Morley in return of his re-election and thus hardly needing to say that the letter had become otiose. So as an appeal it had, but not as an excommunication, into which the triumvirate
proceeded to turn it. Within an hour or so it was given to the press and became the major political sensation of the next few days. There was, perhaps inevitably, some dispute about who among the
three cried forward and who cried back.

What is more certain is that publication turned Parnell from a disciplined auxiliary of Gladstone into a bitter enemy (within a fortnight he was referring to him as ‘an unrivalled
sophist’, and denouncing the unsatisfactory form of Home Rule which, Parnell suddenly claimed, was all that he had been offered during the Hawarden visit). He also set himself up as
henceforward the firm foe of any British political alliance. Anglo-Irish trust was dead. The virulence of Parnell’s reaction was no doubt made the greater by the highly unbalanced state to
which his ill health (he was to be dead within a year) and his other vicissitudes, all playing on an inherently unstable personality, had reduced him.

There may also have been a more subtle factor at work. F. S. L. Lyons thought that by 1890, independently of the divorce case and indeed before its impact, Parnell’s position ‘in his
own country and even in his own party had begun . . . to exhibit ominous signs of deterioration’.
¹⁵
His absorption with Mrs O’Shea
(and maybe other features of his character) had led to his taking for granted both his nation and his colleagues. It was, amazingly, five years since he had made a speech in Ireland, and at least
two years since he had played any effective role in Parliament. He had stood back completely from the Plan of Campaign which Dillon and William O’Brien had launched in the autumn of 1886 and
which for the closing years of the decade had been the main form of on-the-ground protest in Ireland. The effect of this disdainful neglect produced only a gradual and tentative alienation. On a
person of Parnell’s temperament, however, any slow recognition of this was likely to make him more and not less imperious, and his judgement worse and not better.

The publication of the Gladstone–Morley letter also had the effect of throwing a burning brand into the tinder box of the Irish parliamentary party. They had been
bounced into agreeing to Parnell’s re-election, but they were far from willing to follow him in a repudiation of the Liberal alliance which had brought them almost within sight of the
promised land. It was Parnell himself who had taught them that the constitutional route was the correct one, and the wrench at the last stage of falling back on the violence of the ‘hillside
men’ was more than most of them could contemplate, agonizing though was the conflict of loyalties. They were also no doubt influenced, to greater or lesser extents according to their
individual positions, by the solidifying of the Catholic hierarchy against Parnell.

These various tensions were poured into the cauldron of the unparalleled, sometimes bitter, immensely long-drawn-out Committee Room 15 debates of 1–6 December. From a Monday to a Saturday
in gothic gloom at the end of the upstairs corridor of the House of Commons, the Irish parliamentary party thrashed out the issue. There were mostly about seventy members present. One session
lasted eleven hours. Parnell presided throughout and added a farcical touch by some procedural rulings straight out of
Alice in Wonderland
. But there was always more drama than boredom in
the proceedings. Timothy Healy’s Saturday taunt – ‘and who is to be mistress of the party?’ – in reply to John Redmond’s complaint that Gladstone was ‘the
master of the party’ was as unforgettable as it was unforgivable, but it was no more than the culmination of a series of memorable and increasingly vicious exchanges.

The only other party since the building of the present Palace of Westminster which it is possible to contemplate indulging in such a feat of self-absorbed yet semi-inspired navel-gazing is the
1950s Labour party, and even those stalwarts of brotherly distrust would not have had this degree of stamina. The immediate result was that the Irish split nearly two to one against Parnell and
henceforward sat in the chamber as two parties, their relations characterized by a bewildering mixture of intense hostility and occasional rather dream-like acts of mutual courtesy and
friendliness.

Parnell set off to put to the proof his thesis that Ireland was with him even if its craven representatives were not. Dublin remained enthusiastic for its ‘uncrowned king’. Cork, his
own constituency, was more equivocal. By the stringent test of by-elections, however, he met defeat after defeat. Kilkenny North before Christmas, North Sligo in April 1891
(his best result) and Carlow in the early summer.
¹³⁰
He consumed his small remaining reserves of strength in these and other campaigns. He
married Mrs O’Shea in June. He was dead aged forty-six in October.

Gladstone retained the leadership of the Liberal party, for the majority of the Irish parliamentary party had acted as he had asked them to do. But his leadership had nonetheless become
‘almost a nullity’. The golden prospect of a large Home Rule majority depended upon the fervent atmosphere of the ‘union of hearts’ holding Irish Catholicism and British
Nonconformity in improbable alliance. And the ‘union of hearts’ depended upon two commanding if utterly different leaders, Gladstone and Parnell, working together in amity. Could more
have been saved from the wreck if Gladstone had preserved the goodwill of Parnell by taking the risk of extending the hand of tolerance towards him and genuinely leaving it to the Irish to decide
untrammelled? Gladstone would no doubt have had to face a barrage of protest, but his authority was great and he was too old to be frightened.

Nor was he without supporters who thought that, in a fraught situation, this might be a wiser course. Morley might cluck and Harcourt might glower, but Spencer who after nearly nine years as
Viceroy knew more about Ireland than either of them, and Asquith, who was to be the most effective member of the weak 1892 government and the first (and last) major Prime Minister of a Liberal
government after Gladstone, both thought that this would have been the wiser course. It would not necessarily have saved Parnell. The influence of the hierarchy might have disposed of him in any
event. But it might have avoided the death throes (politically as well as almost literally) of Parnell being turned against the English connection, and his consequently leaving a legacy which over
thirty years proved fatal to the solution of the Irish problem within a British context.

A
FTER THE
P
ARNELL
débâcle and the smash-up of the Irish party Gladstone became a half-broken man. His optimism
before these events had perhaps been excessive. On the basis of twelve by-election victories he regarded a massive Liberal majority at an 1891 or 1892 general election as a virtual certainty. This
majority allied to a solid and moderate Nationalist phalanx under Parnell’s firm command would intimidate the House of Lords so that a Home Rule Bill could be quickly enacted. With this
crowning pediment placed upon his life’s work Gladstone could then hand over the premiership (to whom, had he been allowed to exercise his preference, was never consistently clear) and devote
such years as remained for him to a quiet communing with his God. He no longer saw himself as writing great works of theology, but he did see the need to settle his soul after the secular
buffetings of sixty years in politics. This prospect led him into a series of remarkably benign end-year musings. The self-flagellation (metaphorical as well as literal) of
circa
1850 was
far behind him. On his eightieth birthday at the end of 1889 he wrote: ‘Excellent sermons. All things smile.’ And two days later: ‘And so the year has rolled into the great bosom
of the Past. We had a grand dinner of 12 at the Rectory. S[tephen] & I played backgammon. The Castle topsy turvy as usual at Xmas: but many are made innocently happy.
Benedictus
benedicat
.’
¹

His mood a year later was transformed, and very much for the worse. The new sombreness, however, took a little time to settle. It required evidence both from Ireland of Parnell’s
destructive fighting strength on the ground and from England of a decisive change in the electoral trend. The latter turned on the Bassetlaw by-election, in which polling took place in
mid-December. Gladstone if anything invested it with too much importance, as he had perhaps done with the favourable results of the previous two years. On 11 December he went there himself and
addressed meetings in Retford and Worksop, the two principal towns of the somewhat amorphous and uninformatively named Nottinghamshire constituency. It was familiar ground for him with Clumber
Park, where
he had begun his political career by waiting on the Duke of Newcastle fifty-six years before, almost in the suburbs of Worksop. But it was far from a familiar
gesture from a party leader, particularly one who had been three times Prime Minister. Even in the third quarter of the twentieth century party leaders stood back from bye-elections, and in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century such an intervention was wholly unprecedented. Nor did it work. Bassetlaw, which in 1885 had produced a narrow Tory majority of 295 (in 1886 the seat was
uncontested), dramatically broke the previous trend and put the Tory majority up to 725.

Gladstone, who was at Hawarden,
¹³¹
at first received the news, even in the privacy of his diary, with a superficial ‘looking on the bright
side’ worthy of a modern party spokesman: ‘Bassetlaw defeat. A lesson: but the reading of it not yet clear.’
²
On the next day,
however, Morley, calling for a morning and luncheon visit on his way from Dublin to London, found him looking like ‘some strange Ancient of Days: so different from the man I had seen off at
King’s Cross [for Retford] less than a week before’. Morley then recorded Gladstone as saying: ‘Bassetlaw looks as if we were going back to 1886. For me that is notice to quit.
Another five years’ agitation at my age would be impossible –
ludicrous
(with much emphasis).’
³

This was not exactly the way in which he saw the prospect in his year-end summing up of 1890. The horizon had certainly darkened, and most oppressively so: ‘We may if things do not go
decisively well in Ireland lose hold of that margin which in the constituencies spans the space between victory and defeat. Home Rule
may
be postponed for another period of five or six
years. The struggle in that case must survive me, cannot be survived by me.’ But he still saw himself as a conscript – even if the commander-in-chief – in the army of justice for
Ireland. It was his hopes for a furlough before the end which was the certain casualty, not necessarily the Irish goal or even his own part in securing it:

‘Undoubtedly it is a new and aggravated condition of my life’, he continued, ‘if I am finally to resign all hope of anything resembling a brief rest on this
side the grave.’
⁵
Gladstone did not succumb. By this
stage he was almost constitutionally incapable of giving up. But the
new and gloomier prospect lowered his spirits and took some of the zest out of even his sanguine temperament.

Between December 1890 and the date which Salisbury chose for the 1892 election (about a year before the statutory limit on the life of the Parliament) there was an interval of eighteen months.
During this period Gladstone continued to hope for but hardly to expect an adequate victory, and there is a feeling that his life was on a lower key than had ever previously been the case. It
would, for instance, have been difficult to imagine his repeating in February 1891 or 1892 the visit, lasting no less than eight days, which he paid to All Souls College, Oxford, in that month of
1890. There he charmed everybody, and particularly the most die-hard Tories, of which All Souls had a fair quota, by his courtesy, his innocence and the range of his reminiscent conversations. The
pleasure was mutual and he wrote to his wife: ‘I am reading the Lessons and all sorts of things – such pranks!’,
⁶
while to his
diary he gave an impression of unrelenting entertainment and enjoyment: ‘9–11¾. Breakfast at Magdalen: a gigantic dissipation. Luncheon at Exeter (Prof. Pelham). Dinner at the
Vice Chancellor’s (St. John’s) with the Club [a still extant Oxford institution, not to be confused with Dr Johnson’s foundation, The Club, in London]. Read Shakespeare –
Tracts on Oxford. Residue of time filled with conversations.’
⁷