Gladstone: A Biography (108 page)

After 1886, however, this division ‘widened and hardened’:

From here he proceeded to argue that the effect of this was to make the Liberal party more radical and democratic (a development which he implicitly regretted), and that the history of at any
rate the past sixty years showed that in the direction in which the Liberal party moved so sooner or later did the country. His remedy was to dispose (favourably) of the Home Rule question as
quickly as possible. This he referred to as ‘eminently Conservative [deliberately using a capital and not a small c] in the highest sense of the term’. Such a quick cut offered the best
hope of halting the two processes of property deserting the Liberals and that party consequently being pushed to the left. But he was not very sanguine of achieving the remedy, and perhaps not of
the desired result following if he did. ‘. . . Mr. Gladstone therefore, well aware that his own time is short, does not confidently count upon success in bringing the great controversy to an
early issue at a definite time.’
³⁴

The Queen caused Ponsonby to send only a brief acknowledgement, which was courteous to the extent of saying that she ‘fully appreciates the motives which have led to his laying his views
before her’. In her own journal she wrote on the fourth day after it had been despatched to Balmoral: ‘Reading a long memorandum from Mr. Gladstone about the political situation, which
is very curious.’
³⁵
And that was that.

Much of the work of the Cabinet (which met seven times between 27 October and 21 November) was concerned with the preparation of the Irish Bill, which it had been painfully agreed should be the
priority for the session of 1893. It was difficult work. The old unanswerable questions of whether there should be Irish members at Westminster (this time the inclination was to say yes), and if
so, how many, and what
should they vote on, quickly reared their ugly heads. And their ugliness was fully matched by that of the moods of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. On 11
November Gladstone wrote that ‘Harcourt came early and poured out antiIrish opinions, declaring himself pledged to them’; and later that day: ‘Cabinet 2½–5. One
person outrageous.’
³⁶
And again, on 23 November: ‘Cabinet 2½–4. Something of a scene with Harcourt at the
close.’
³⁷
It was a relief when the Prime Minister got further consideration of the Irish Bill delegated to a Cabinet committee composed, as
he wrote, of ‘WEG; Spencer; Chancellor; Morley; Bryce; and Bannerman’; and an even greater relief that ‘Chancellor’ in this shorthand meant Lord Chancellor Herschell and not
Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer Harcourt.

Gladstone then retreated to Hawarden for three weeks, where he had acrimonious correspondence with Rosebery and worked with Morley on the bill, the committee apparently having been conveniently
forgotten. Morley he found ‘so genial and effective’, as well as ‘a great stay in Rosebery troubles’.
³⁸
Morley
unfortunately was less complimentary about Gladstone’s working habits at this stage, and also about some of his other attributes. His diary painted a much less noble picture of the Grand Old
Man in decline than that which he chose to give, nearly ten years later, in the last chapters of his resonant biography. Altogether the government of 1892, even by the somewhat low standards of
collegiality which are more the rule than the exception in British Cabinets of at least the last hundred years, cannot have been a happy one in which to serve or over which to preside.

Nor was the interlocking support by a combination of Gladstone’s family and his private office as much of an assuagement as it had been in the government of 1880. Hamilton was no longer
available, having been promoted too high to be a secretary, even to the Prime Minister. He was effectively the second man in the Treasury, and although he maintained close contact with Gladstone
and was a ubiquitous figure on the Whitehall and social scene, it was not the same as being full-time in his service. Furthermore he owed departmental loyalty to Harcourt, and his old and close
friendship with Rosebery became more difficult to combine with devotion to Gladstone as Rosebery became an independent political power and Gladstone’s likely (but by no means chosen)
successor.

As a substitute for Hamilton Gladstone paradoxically moved to a still more senior official. Sir Algernon West, who had been Gladstone’s private secretary in 1868–72, was due to
retire as chairman of the Board
of Inland Revenue, and in the run-up to the change of government Gladstone had persuaded him to do special post-retirement service as head of
his private office. (Spencer Lyttelton came back to assist West.) But West was sixty in 1892, whereas Hamilton had been thirty-three, much nearer to the optimum private secretary age, in 1880.
Moreover, and partly no doubt as a result, West was less skilled at melding official life with the idiosyncrasies of Gladstone’s household pattern. Maybe the family, Mrs Gladstone and the
daughters, had become more difficult to deal with in the meantime. On 2 August Hamilton, possibly by this time a slightly malicious source, enjoying while sympathizing with the difficulties of his
successor, had written:

And on 9 December, when that year’s Biarritz expedition was under discussion: ‘Algy West is much put out about the whole thing. The family decline to listen to anything he has to
say.’
⁴⁰
Wherever the fault lay, that happily ‘interlocking protective cocoon’ of family and secretaries of the 1880s was not in
equal harmony in the 1890s or able to provide an adequate compensation for the truculence of Harcourt, the self-centredness of Rosebery and the occasional behind-the-arras vinegar of Morley.

The truth probably was that Gladstone by this stage was not much good at working on the intricacies of legislation. (He was still brilliant at sustaining a bill in the House of Commons once its
details had been determined, but that was a matter for 1893 and not for 1892.) What he did however do well in that autumn of waiting for the final joust was to set a good shape for the general
legislative programme of the government. Despite his age, his small majority and his preoccupation with Ireland, this was incomparably better planned than that for the 1880 government, when the
circumstances were more propitious. As a result the last Gladstone government had a very respectable record, creating district and parish councils, raising the school-leaving age, limiting the
hours of railwaymen, accompanied by important administrative advances, Mundella creating the labour department of the Board of Trade, and Asquith putting new strength into the factory inspectorate.
Even Rosebery, arbitrating more successfully at home than abroad, earned trade union gratitude by settling the coal dispute of 1893.

But in early December 1892 all of this was in the future and the intricate problems of drafting the second Home Rule Bill, as well as the intractable behaviour of some of his colleagues, were
weighing heavily on Gladstone. He had a few nights of sleeping badly, encouraged Clark to say that another Biarritz sojourn would do him good, mobilized the ever available Armitstead to perform the
functions of a Thomas Cook’s man who presented no bills, and on 20 December he was off, getting to Folkestone in time to attend an afternoon service in the ‘beautiful church’ and
to Biarritz thirty-six hours later. He was away until 10 January. He returned to face his final parliamentary lap – ‘one fight more, the best and the last’. It was certainly the
last, and in the quality of his own performance, although not in the results achieved, almost the best.

T
WO DAYS AFTER HIS RETURN
, on 12 January 1893, Gladstone reported to his physician: ‘Biarritz has been very kind to me and the sleep has been
completely restored.’
¹
He celebrated this happy result and marked his general gratitude to Clark by sending him a copy of a Gladstone bust
made in Rome in 1868, which was very close to the time when Clark began to treat his illustrious patient. Nevertheless Gladstone approached his final circuit around the hazardous course of the
Great Home Rule Handicap with an unusual and almost pathological nervousness. On the eve of the session he wrote: ‘Official dinner & evening party. 8–11. I feel, what? much troubled
& tossed about; in marked contrast with the inner attitude on former like occasions.’
²
The next day he spoke for fifty minutes in sharp
reply to Balfour in the debate on the Address, and pronounced himself ‘much tired’. And on the day after that: ‘Did not rise until 10.30. Now that I have taken the plunge I feel
slightly more at home’
³
– which was an understandable but nonetheless odd expression to use for someone who had experienced nearer sixty
to fifty debates on the Address, and dominatingly participated in most of them.

Nor did his neurosis remain permanently at bay once his plunge had taken him into the water. On 5 February, returning from a Sunday-morning service at the Chapel Royal he felt ‘both
depression & worry’. On the 13th before he made his last marathon oration on the motion for leave to bring in (or first reading) of the Government of Ireland Bill, he ‘felt very
weak having heard every hour (or all but one) strike in the night.
¹³⁷
I seemed to lie at the foot of the Cross, and to get my arm around it. The House was
most kind, and I was borne through. The later evening I spent on the sofa.’
⁴
Seven weeks later when the bill came to its second reading,
however, he seemed to have got back to normal to
the extent of merely recording that he worked on papers for the debate in the morning and spoke for one and a half hours in the
afternoon.

Despite this hesitant approach to the early fences, Gladstone’s conduct of the Government of Ireland Bill throughout that punishing session became a feat of sustained parliamentary
resource which has rarely if ever been equalled before or since by any Prime Minister, let alone one aged eighty-three. It was made the more remarkable by the high likelihood that he throughout
appreciated that his skills and his energy would be in vain. Nor was he much assisted by a sustaining Cabinet, apart from Morley and Spencer. Rosebery’s commitment to Home Rule was always
skin-deep, and he quickly peeled it off as soon as Gladstone was out of the way. Within eight years it had become the foremost of the ‘fly-blown phylacteries’, a phrase of which the
resonance exceeded the meaning, which he urged the Liberal party to discard. Harcourt was always unpleasantly hostile.

The two difficult issues which remained to be decided after Gladstone’s return from Biarritz were first the old basically unanswerable question of Irish representation at Westminster, and
secondly the financial settlement, particularly in relation to customs and excise. The first was temporarily resolved on the basis that there should be an Irish representation reduced from 103 to
80 to bring it in line with population, and that these numbers should ‘in general terms’ (that is, if a satisfactory dividing line could be devised, which was not so far the case) be
excluded from voting on purely British questions. This was agreed on 13 January, with an overruled minority of Harcourt, Asquith, Fowler and Acland, who, in differing ways and activated by
different reasons, were a disturbing quadrilateral of dissent, and one which proved itself to be right, at least to the extent that their scepticism about a satisfactory dividing line proved
incontrovertible. In July the government gave up the attempt to find one and amended the crucial Clause 9 of the bill so as to give Irish representatives unrestricted rights of participation in all
business.