Gladstone: A Biography (106 page)

Within this disappointing national result, Gladstone’s own strength in Midlothian collapsed dramatically. In the 1885 general election (the first on the extended franchise) Gladstone had a
majority of 7879 to 3248. In 1886 he was unopposed. In 1892 he was returned only by 5845 votes to 5155. Gladstone dismissed this as ‘a small matter’, compared that is with the
disappointment of the overall result. He explained it in a letter to Harcourt: ‘Two thousand voters seem to have gone over from me in a mass. It is simply due to the question of Scotch
Disestablishment.’
¹⁸
No doubt that vexed question did play a significant and adverse role. But is is difficult to believe that it could have
been exclusively responsible for a result so sharply at variance with the general trend. There must surely also have been a feeling that Gladstone was both over the hill and obsessed with
Ireland.

He was of course over the hill and in one sense knew this perfectly well himself. The day after his letter to Harcourt he confided to his diary: ‘Frankly from the condition (
now
) of
my senses, I am no longer fit for public life: yet bidden to walk in it. “Lead thou me on.”’
¹⁹
Others took an even harsher view
of Gladstone’s condition. When Harcourt saw him for two hours on 27 July he was reported by his son as ‘much shocked at the physical and mental change for the worse in Mr. G. since he
left the H. of C. in June. He thinks him confused and feeble.’
²⁰
On the other hand, Sir Andrew Clark, though he had not seen Gladstone since
his eye accident, took a more optimistic medical view about his patient’s capacity for office, if not about its likely effect upon his longevity. Clark, from the closest knowledge over nearly
twenty-five years, was a great admirer of Gladstone’s physique and resilience. He had told Granville ten years before that ‘Gladstone was not only sound from head to toes, but built in
the most beautiful proportion he had ever seen of all parts of the human body to each other – head, legs, arms, and trunk, all without a flaw, like some ancient Greek statue of the ideal man.
He added that of all the persons he had treated, Gladstone . . . had the best chance of living to be a hundred.’
²¹

On 12 July 1892 Clark gave to Edward Hamilton, not in casual gossip but in a formal statement, his physician’s judgement:

Apart from his retreat from the view that Gladstone might live to be a hundred this was a favourable prognosis,
¹³²
more sanguine probably than
Gladstone’s view of his own capacity during the period between the election result and the meeting of the new Parliament, for which the Queen’s Speech was on 9 August. Yet, despite his
frailties and his disappointment at the weakness of the victory, he never appeared to waver in his determination to form and preside over a government. The explanation, it is easy to assume, must
have lain in his sense of Irish mission and his fear that no alternative Liberal Prime Minister would give Home Rule an adequate priority and momentum. But the amazing paradox was that, while he
did not contemplate stepping aside, what he most certainly did contemplate was relegating Irish business to a lower order of priority. From the disappointing election result he drew the almost
Chamberlain-like conclusion that not enough attention had been given to ‘British questions’.

Consequently, on 20 July and when staying as Armitstead’s guest at Fisher’s Hotel, Pitlochry (‘capital Inn: lovely place’), he drew up ‘a
first
view of the
possibilities of 1893’. ‘It aims’, he wrote, ‘at obtaining a judgment upon the great Irish question without spending the bulk of the Session upon its particulars (viewing
the unlikelihood as far as can now be seen of their at once passing into law): and obtaining a good or fair Sessional result for the various portions of the country. . . .’
²³
In other words he proposed to carry a resolution in favour of Home Rule, but to let the bill wait and to get on in the first session with a series of
domestic reforms. This memorandum he circulated to a few of his shadow Cabinet colleagues. Spencer, the ex-Viceroy of Ireland, and
John Morley, the putative Chief Irish
Secretary, both thought it a major mistake. Spencer said it would look ‘faint hearted’ and asked what would the Irish say, the answer to which was that they would probably have rendered
the issue of legislative priority academic by declining on such a basis to support a Liberal government. By the time that he saw Spencer and Morley on the 27th, the day of his arrival in London
from Hawarden, Gladstone was moving to second thoughts.

The trouble was that Harcourt, who was to be Chancellor and the effective leader in the Commons, very much liked his first thoughts, and tried hard to bully him into sticking to them. During the
previous ten days Gladstone had written unusually warm letters to Harcourt, who had responded with appropriate friendliness. But as soon as they were both in London, relations deteriorated.
Harcourt, with his usual truculence, was probably concerned to establish his defensible space at the Treasury as well as with the Irish point. After their first meeting (of one and three-quarter
hours) Gladstone wrote: ‘Formidable especially at my age’;
²⁴
and a couple of weeks later: ‘Conclave 3–5. A storm. I am
sorry to record that Harcourt has used me in such a way since my return to town that the addition of another Harcourt would have gone far to make my task impossible.’ But he added: ‘All
however is
well:
it comes
[from above].’
²⁵

By all being well Gladstone meant that Harcourt had reluctantly acquiesced in his second and dramatically different draft which he had written on 1 August and which put a Government of Ireland
Bill at the very top of the list. The logic of the situation pointed irresistibly in this direction. Apart from the government’s dependence upon the Irish, it would have made no sense for a
nearly eighty-three-year-old Prime Minister, kept in politics only by a dedication to the Irish cause, to have postponed dealing with it for the first eighteen months of what showed every sign of
being a short-lived government. The surprise is that Gladstone’s intention flickered in this direction for a couple of weeks of post-election sag. It is also surprising that Spencer, having
been an upright but unimaginative Viceroy in 1882–5, should have become such a resolute supporter of the policy which had driven nearly all his fellow Whigs out of the Liberal party.

Nevertheless the upset with Harcourt occasioned by Gladstone’s temporary wobble gave an unpleasant twist to the business of cabinet-making. This was accentuated by the behaviour of
Rosebery, who was even more tiresome than usual. That spoilt Scottish earl and (through his deceased wife) Home Counties plutocrat, who had spent most of the
first half of the
1880s agitating that he was not in the Cabinet by the age of thirty-six and had struck Dilke (no mean judge) as ‘the most ambitious man he had ever met’, now that he had achieved a
certain indispensability as Foreign Secretary in a weak government, decided that he had a temperamental unsuitability for public office and would play very hard to get. His natural misanthropy had
been increased by the Gladstones’ election stay at Dalmeny having apparently not gone well. Hamilton, whose loyalty to Gladstone was becoming tempered by his dazzlement by Rosebery, recorded
on 11 July: ‘Evidently things have been very unpleasant at Dalmeny. R. says he has had a terrible week of it. It is evident that Mr. and Mrs. G. have got on his nerves, which are not in the
best of conditions, and they have been apparently more than usually tactless.’
²⁶

On 31 July Rosebery wrote to Gladstone declining office. ‘I am the best judge of my unfitness for public life,’ he started with a combination of sententiousness and mock modesty. He
then disappeared to Dalmeny, followed by a flurry of appealing letters culminating in a visit of supplication from John Morley, who had come by the overnight train, on the morning of 5 August.
Together they travelled back to London, but Rosebery then found it necessary to retreat for a weekend in Paris to ‘clear the cobwebs out of his brain’. After his return, with or without
cobwebs, he withdrew to his house near Epsom for further communion with his conscience and then contradicted Morley’s view that he had come round, and told Gladstone in a ‘very trying
and rather sad’ (Gladstone’s words) interview on 11 August that he could not join. Then he went to Mentmore, his great Rothschild pile near Leighton Buzzard,
¹³³
which was conveniently placed for receiving further representations. These were abundantly forthcoming, most influentially, it appeared, from the Prince of Wales, Buckle (the
vehemently anti-Gladstone editor of
The Times
), and Henry Primrose (Rosebery’s cousin).

Gladstone wisely abstained from further appeals until 15 August, the day he went to Osborne to accept office. Then, under pressure from his private secretaries, he wrote Rosebery a rather cool
note saying that the Queen wished him to be Foreign Secretary and that the office was still open. Gladstone, unlike the courtiers and the private secretaries, and even the Harcourts and the
Morleys, who had persuaded themselves
that Rosebery was essential, sensibly thought that Spencer as leader of the House of Lords and Kimberley as Foreign Secretary would do
more or less as well as Rosebery filling both posts.

Rosebery’s response to that final cool offer was an insufferably self-regarding telegram. ‘So be it. Mentmore’ was the message he sent to Gladstone at Osborne. The substance
was redolent with the conferring of a benefit rather than a commitment to co-operation. And the signature was at once arch and arrogant. Rosebery was an
allumeur
(if the word can be used in
the masculine) on a scale which Gladstone had hardly encountered since Arthur Hallam died over sixty years before. And he was not even a very good Foreign Secretary. By September he had got the
government in its first but considerable mess with his unilateral and jingoist handling of Uganda, which Rosebery, against the views of Gladstone, Harcourt and most of the rest of the Cabinet, was
determined to turn into a permanent British possession.

The Queen, for once, caused relatively little trouble over Gladstone’s return to office. Admittedly she wrote of her contemplation of it ‘with utter disgust’.
²⁷
She publicly accepted Salisbury’s resignation ‘with much regret’, which was unusual and improper but insignificant. She momentarily
flirted with the idea of trying to get Rosebery instead, but made no serious diversionary attempt in this or any other direction. On 11 August the Salisbury government was defeated on an amendment
to the address by 350 votes to 310, and by the 15th Gladstone had kissed hands (in fact omitting to do so) and the new government was in being.

The rest of his Cabinet-making went somewhat more easily, although Gladstone claimed that it was the most difficult of his four experiences in this field, and Labouchère made a public
fuss about being left out. For this Gladstone gallantly took the blame, rather than allowing Labouchère to put it on the Queen. In reality both factors were at work. Labouchère was
distasteful to the Queen and somewhat brash for the Prime Minister’s taste, although Gladstone would have been content for him to achieve his second major ambition, which was the Washington
Legation (raised to an embassy only in 1893), had this not been vetoed by Rosebery.

The Cabinet contained only two members whom Gladstone did not know well. They were Herbert Henry Asquith and Henry Hartley Fowler. Asquith became the youngest member of the Cabinet, appointed at
thirty-nine to the senior secretaryship of state. He had been chosen by Gladstone as the most appropriate backbencher to move the amendment which brought down the Salisbury government, and did so
with a
most accomplished debating speech. Subsequently he proved the outstanding success of the government, ‘the best Home Secretary of the [nineteenth] century’,
was Magnus’s somewhat sweeping judgement, and by so being laid the foundation of his brilliant career. He was also, despite being a ‘new man’ from a Yorkshire Nonconformist
background who had been in the House of Commons for only six years, highly congenial to Gladstone. Here again, as with Morley, the essential link was Asquith’s classical erudition. Balliol
had comfortably overcome Batley and put Asquith, in Gladstone’s eyes, in a quite different category from Chamberlain. His position was further (although later) buttressed by Gladstone’s
fondness for his second wife, Margot Tennant. She was exactly the sort of pert young woman, flattering and unintimidated, whom he liked. She was several times bidden to Hawarden, and on the
occasion of her first visit in 1889 he had written her a four-stanzaed piece of verse, of which the first ran: