Gladstone: A Biography (107 page)

In December 1890 Gladstone went for a five-day visit to the Tennant Scottish house near Peebles, and when the Asquith marriage took place in May 1894 (even though it was one of his last
engagements before a doubtfully successful cataract operation which effectively closed down seventy years of diary-keeping) he attended and signed the register together with Rosebery and
Balfour.

Fowler, the solicitor from Wolverhampton, and twenty-two years’ Asquith’s senior, could not compete in these fashionable stakes. In 1892, however, he was also a successful minister
and effective debater, who carried the Parish Councils Bill, the major legislative achievement of that government. For the rest the ministry was a familiar Gladstonian one, with Herschell again
Lord Chancellor, the secretaryships of state apart from the already mentioned Home and Foreign ones filled by Kimberley, Ripon and Campbell-Bannerman, with Spencer at the Admiralty, Mundella at the
Board of Trade, and G. O. Trevelyan at the
Scottish Office. A. H. D. Acland, the son of Gladstone’s Christ Church contemporary, Shaw-Lefevre and Arnold Morley brought up
the rear of the Cabinet. There was also James Bryce, in ministerial office for the first time as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster with that office’s scarcity of administrative duties
enabling him to act as a general constitutional adviser.

Although Gladstone could still gear himself up for formidable feats of endurance, particularly if they involved declaiming on his legs before an audience, the normal conduct of a Prime
Minister’s business had become just beyond his capacity. Rightly if he was to retain adequate authority, he had cursorily dismissed a scheme canvassed by Hamilton and others that he might ask
someone else (perhaps Spencer) to become Prime Minister while himself accepting one of the grand honorific offices with the specific role of drawing up and conducting the Irish Bill. (The only
vestige of this which survived was the perverse one that he took the office of Lord Privy Seal as well as that of First Lord of the Treasury, which he had done in his 1886 administration but not in
his two previous and major ones.) Nor did he act upon an alternative Hamilton suggestion that at ‘conclaves’, the informal precursors of modern Cabinet committees, he should nominate on
an
ad hoc
basis a presiding colleague who could actually hear what was being said.

What he did do as a recognition of his deafness was to take the more iconoclastic step of changing the locale and physical shape of Cabinet meetings. He rationalized this by pretending that the
new arrangement was inherently better. Hamilton wrote on 19 August:

Then, on 27 October, he continued: ‘Mr. G. held his first autumnal Cabinet today. They met in his own room – the corner room on first floor (over the old Cabinet
room) – in No. 10 Downing Street.’
²⁹

Amazingly, however, and once again illustrating Gladstone’s unique capacity to be larger than life, but not wholly rationally so, he responded to the challenge of taking on for the fourth
time a burden which was
just beyond the perimeter of his capacity by an absolute refusal to concentrate all his energies upon it. He continued with four other tasks, all of
which any normal man would have abandoned, postponed or at least neglected when struggling on the frontiers of his strength to be Prime Minister at an older age than any other man before or since.
The first was to complete a long article for the
North American Review
designed to refute an attack in the same periodical by his old but separated friend the Duke of Argyll on the principle
of Home Rule. On his first three days in London after the election he worked hard on this abstract argument for a recondite journal.

Second, he was intent on doing a new translation of the Odes of Horace. He conceived the idea in the Fife Arms Hotel at Braemar in the immediate aftermath of the election and made a start within
a week. On his journey to London from Hawarden on 27 July for his immediately pending ‘formidable’ interview with Harcourt he worked the whole way on the Odes. No doubt the searching
for appropriate English renderings was easier on his eyes than continuous reading. He was at them again as soon as he had sent off his anti-Argyll article to the
North American Review
, and
then, a good deal more intermittently, during the autumn. He returned to more serious Horatian work during his Biarritz Christmas holiday. The translations were eventually published by John Murray
in 1894.

One reason why his application to Horace became spasmodic during the early autumn was that he had agreed to deliver on 24 October the first Romanes lecture in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford,
and proceeded to devote the most disproportionate amount of time to its preparation. He started on 31 August, which was two days after the third and the most dangerous but also the most farcical of
his three accidents of that summer. After an afternoon drive with his wife he ‘walked & came unawares in the quietest corner of the park on a dangerous cow which knocked me down and might
have done serious damage’.
³⁰
There are slightly more dramatic versions, including Magnus’s statement that he had to lie down, feigning
to be dead, until the cow’s attention was distracted and he could escape first behind a tree and then back to the Castle. The malfeasant beast was apparently not part of a dairy herd but a
wild heifer which had intruded into the park and was subsequently shot. It was compensated by the tributes of having its head permanently displayed at the Glynne Arms in Hawarden village, and of
evoking an elaborate wreath despatched with a card inscribed ‘to the memory of the patriotic cow which sacrificed its life in an attempt
to save Ireland from Home
Rule’.
³¹
Gladstone, although he had walked home and sat down calmly at dinner, suffered a few weeks of mild ill effect, which was not
surprising at nearly eighty-three.

The incident did not much distract him from the preparation of his Oxford lecture. Between the end of August and mid-October he spent substantial portions of fifteen separate days working upon
it. During this period he surprisingly pleaded this preoccupation in a letter to the poet’s son, as a reason for not agreeing to act as a pall-bearer at Tennyson’s Westminster Abbey
funeral. Then he recorded on 17 October: ‘Finished at last writing my interminable lecture.’
³²
But he still devoted parts of another
three days to touching it up, including an occasion when he assembled an audience of half a dozen or so at Hawarden (not all family, for one, James Stuart, MP for Hoxton, was a former fellow of
Trinity College, Cambridge) and read it to them for an hour and twenty minutes. His approach to the actual performance was equally respectful. He engaged in correspondence with the eponymous
Professor Romanes (not a venerable Oxford don but a forty-four-year-old Canadian-born, Cambridge-educated scientist, who had held a chair of physiology at the Royal Institution) on the question
whether he should wear a red or a black gown, and he arrived in Oxford and was installed in the Christ Church Deanery two days in advance.

Altogether it was a remarkably disproportionate elaboration, particularly from the man who with no indication of more than half a morning’s preparation had delivered some of the greatest
(and longest) of nineteenth-century parliamentary orations. It can only be interpreted as an old man’s act of Oxford pietism, a gesture of thanksgiving for sixty-three years of connection
with the University, which has at least had the lasting effect of giving the Romanes series a unique prestige among all Oxford lectures. Fortunately, in the circumstances, the occasion was a
success. Gladstone pronounced the ‘audience excellent’.
The Times
, not then his most enthusiastic supporter, reported: ‘He was in excellent voice, and each word and
intonation was fully appreciated by every person in the crowded theatre.’
³³
This was despite the fact that the lecture’s title,
‘An Academic Sketch’, hardly lived up to the preparations. It was in fact an erudite survey of the history and spirit of the University, with some sidelong glances at Cambridge which
made him anxious to be assured by the former fellow of Trinity that these were fair. The crowning irony was that, having devoted all this attention to a private excursion to Oxford, he stubbornly
declined to deliver the obligatory Prime Minister’s speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet which took place
two weeks later. Andrew Clark was encouraged to provide a
medical prohibition. Two Cabinet meetings had to consider who should be the substitute, until it was devolved through Ripon to Kimberley.

Gladstone’s fourth preoccupation was with the affairs of the Granville estate. Granville, as we have seen,
¹³⁵
had never been a broad-acred as
opposed to a many-cousined earl, but it was not realized until after his death in April 1891 that he was effectively bankrupt. This may have been the principal reason why he had refused the
marquessate which Gladstone offered him at the end of the 1886 government.
¹³⁶
When it became clear that there was a substantial deficit on the estate
Gladstone occupied himself in the matter with all the relentless dedication which he had shown in dealing with the Oak Farm débâcle or the embarrassed affairs of the fifth Duke of
Newcastle. Following a sombre report from Waterhouse, the great accountant, he set himself to raise gifts of £10,000 each (£500,000 today) from magnates who had been Granville’s
associates. It was a club with a stiff entrance fee and for membership of which social and political cachet was also required. The prospective list makes interesting reading. Ten appear at first to
have been approached: Westminster, Devonshire, Spencer, Lansdowne, Rothschild, Brassey, Northbrook, Sefton (Derby’s rival as an owner of Liverpool ground rents), Derby himself and Burton
(originally Bass, the brewer). Later Gladstone added Currie the shipowner, Aberdeen, Rosebery and Northbourne. They responded with varying degrees of generosity. Westminster declined absolutely.
Devonshire on the other hand, despite the political separation, ‘behaved right ducally’. The others dribbled out differing (in fact rather substantial) amounts so that £18,000
(£900,000) had been subscribed by the end of 1892 and Gladstone was able with a final modest subvention from himself and the skilled services of Mr Waterhouse to avoid any technical state of
bankruptcy.

With these preoccupations, as well as semi-blindness and semi-deafness, it is amazing that Gladstone had any time at all to spare for the premiership. Yet, although he managed to avoid London
between 16 August and 28 September, and again for most of October, he nonetheless showed almost surplus energy in his pouring out of memoranda to his Foreign Secretary (of whose forward policy in
Uganda he was deeply critical), his India Secretary (on bimetallism), his Chancellor
of the Exchequer and his Home Secretary, his Lord Chancellor and his Irish Secretary on a
variety of topics, but above all, in one great effusion, to the Queen. For the middle ten days of September he went from Hawarden for a North Wales holiday, partly at the Beddgelert
‘chalet’ of Sir Edward William Watkin MP, who had become a Liberal Unionist in 1886 but who was nonetheless interesting to Gladstone as the leading advocate of the Channel Tunnel, and
partly at the Marine Hotel, Barmouth. Watkin believed in elevated as well as subterranean routes and had just made a road to the summit of Snowdon, which he persuaded Gladstone to open before a
crowd of 2000 and from a platform on a boulder which has since been known as Gladstone’s Rock. He also provided David Lloyd George, then aged twenty-nine and an MP of just over a year’s
standing, as a guest at dinner in the chalet. On the last day of that holiday Gladstone began to write a major memorandum for the Queen and continued to play around with it (although giving
priority to his Romanes lecture) until it was eventually submitted five weeks later.

It was a strange document to have sent to an unsympathetic and not very subtle sovereign. The premisses were a lament for what Gladstone regarded as recent deteriorations in the politico-social
structure. This part was written with a stark force and honesty, but, so far from being likely to move the Queen’s mind, was almost perfectly crafted to elicit from her a murmured
‘Whose fault do you think that is?’ or ‘I told you so’ at the end of each paragraph. His central theme was the dangerous degree of class confrontation introduced into
politics by the alienation of property from the Liberal party: