Gladstone: A Biography (109 page)

Although less inherently difficult, the financial provisions proved even more of a quagmire. This was partly because of the anti-Irish ill will of Harcourt (tempered only by his equally
rumbustious anti-Toryism), who was of course in a key position to cause financial trouble, and partly by a malevolent voodoo which seemed to sit on British official calculations in relation to
Irish finance. In 1886 Welby (permanent secretary to the Treasury) and Hamilton (more directly to blame) had made an embarrassing error. In 1893 an at least equally serious mistake was
made, with the major blame resting on that normally impeccable prodigy Alfred Milner, then aged only thirty-eight but already West’s successor as chairman of the Board of Inland
Revenue. In 1892 Welby again and the Dublin Castle administration were also involved. The result was to muddy the financial issues to an extent which now makes it difficult and doubtfully
worthwhile to disentangle them. It is perhaps sufficient to say that the financial clauses had to be largely recast after the second reading of the bill, and that Gladstone was always dealing with
them heavily on the defensive.

The circumstances surrounding the presentation of the second Home Rule Bill to Parliament were therefore remarkably unfavourable. The majority was thin, although, such as it was, more cohesive
than those of 1880 or 1886. The Prime Minister was infirm and backed by a far from enthusiastic or unanimous Cabinet. And the bill itself was by no means a perfect piece of draft legislation. In
addition there was Gladstone’s strong suspicion that it would not make the statute book. It therefore had a good deal of gesture politics in it. All this makes the more heroic his last
parliamentary
tour de force
. Essentially it was he who took the bill through the House of Commons in the most strenuous parliamentary session on record. The Chancellor of the Exchequer gave
some rather grudging help on the financial clauses, and the Irish Secretary was constantly at the GOM’s side. But Morley was not long on parliamentary experience, and was in any event a
scratchy violin compared with the resonant organ notes which the Prime Minister was still able to produce. It was an organ which did not just produce great volumes of solemn sound. There was
widespread agreement that he was supple, subtle, erudite, good-humoured and sometimes very amusing. His committee-stage speeches were almost entirely spontaneous. They almost had to be, for as he
wrote to a correspondent on 4 March he could not see to read any notes which he might have made. On 11 May when Chamberlain had delivered one of his most vicious attacks at the end of a
‘clause stand part’ (that is, fairly general) debate, Gladstone after hesitating until the last moment about whether to speak, rose at the dinner-hungry time of just after 8.00 p.m. but
nonetheless delighted the House, according to Morley, with ‘one of the most remarkable performances that ever was known’. ‘I have never seen Mr. Gladstone so dramatic, so prolific
of all the resources of the actor’s art,’ wrote another observer. ‘The courage the audacity and the melodrama of it were irresistible.’
⁵
Gladstone himself wrote of the occasion: ‘I seemed to be held up by a strength not my own. Much fatigued.’
⁶

That incident also illustrates what was the one criticism of his parliamentary handling of the bill. The reply to Chamberlain was not strictly necessary. The division might
have taken place immediately after Chamberlain; instead the debate was stimulated to such an extent that the vote was postponed until two hours into the following day’s sitting. Gladstone
exposed a lot of surface, which meant that with an opposition trying to spin things out he was a helpful minister to have on the other side. Morley referring back sixty years from 1893 thought that
an Althorp might have expedited matters more. Looking forward almost the same length of time it is probable that an Attlee might have done so too.

On the other hand Gladstone’s resilience and expansive good humour could sometimes unravel parliamentary knots. Morley describes another afternoon of obstruction when no progress at all
had been made until the dinner adjournment. Gladstone had gone off ‘haggard and depressed’ briefly to fulfil a dining engagement. When Morley returned to the chamber around 10.00 p.m.
he found Gladstone on his feet making ‘a most lively and amusing speech on procedure’ which ungummed the works. He sat down a different man, and turned compliments from his colleagues
by saying: ‘To make a speech of that sort, a man does best to dine out; ‘tis no use to lie on a sofa and think about it.’
⁷

Yet overall it was his courage and his endurance, the latter triumphing over frequent complaints of exhaustion, even more than his debating skill, which made his conduct of the marathon so
memorable. In different parts of the House, even among his bitterest opponents, there was a sense of witnessing a magnificent last performance by a unique creature, the like of whom would never be
seen again. One evening during the bill’s passage Lord Randolph Churchill, admittedly then on the edge of his decline into incoherence, accosted Albert (later fourth Earl) Grey, a prominent
Liberal Unionist: ‘And that is the man you deserted,’ he said of Gladstone. ‘How could you do it?’
⁸
There were at least two
ironies to this exchange. The first was that Churchill’s last successful speech in the House, delivered on 23 February on Welsh Church disestablishment, had been a most violent attack on
Gladstone. The second was that the accused deserter Grey was the son not only of Queen Victoria’s former private secretary who had travelled to Hawarden twenty-five years before to give to
Gladstone his first opportunity to form a government, but also of the former Miss Caroline Farquhar, who had so sharply rejected his amorous overtures at Polesden Lacey another thirty-five years
before that.

A marathon the progress of the bill most certainly was. Gladstone moved the second reading on 6 April and carried it, after nine nights of debate, on the 21st, by a majority
of forty-three. He wound up from 11.05 p.m. to 1.00 a.m. before an overflowing House. Of a total membership of 670, 651 voted, 4 were tellers, 14 were paired and one was the Speaker. The committee
stage started on 8 May and continued until 27 July, consuming, together with guillotine and procedural motions, parts of fifty-three parliamentary days. During this stage of the proceedings
Gladstone made over eighty speeches, sometimes as many as four in a single day. Between 7 and 25 August another ten days were devoted to the report stage. Third reading was secured after three
parliamentary days, late at night on Friday, 1 September.

By then the greater part of eighty-two sittings had been devoted to the bill. Even this rate of progress had been achieved only by the use at both committee and report stages of the still
relatively unfamiliar ‘guillotine’ (although there was a good precedent in the Conservative use of it for the Irish Crimes Bill of 1887). When the blade fell on the night of Thursday,
27 July, there were nine divisions in a row, a form of parliamentary torture, particularly on a foetid July night, of which more cruel regimes might have been proud.

But there was also, in Gladstone’s words, ‘the sad scene never to be forgotten’.
⁹
Chamberlain, always one on whichever side he
was for provoking bitterness, launched a fierce attack on Gladstone whom he accused of behaving like an imperious and cruel god (reminiscent of those of Lucretius which Gladstone himself had so
memorably summoned to the attention of the House in a Bradlaugh debate ten years before). As ten o’clock, the terminal time, approached, Chamberlain moved towards his derisory conclusion:
‘The Prime Minister calls “black” and they say it is good: the Prime Minister calls “white” and they say it is better. Never since the time of Herod has there been
such slavish adulation.’
¹⁰
The biblical allusion was typically provocative, but not wise. T. P. O’Connor, who had the distinction of
being the only Nationalist MP elected from outside Ireland (by the Scotland division of Liverpool) started a widely taken up shout of ‘Judas.’ Within seconds this led to an almost
unprecedented outbreak of fighting on the floor in which the ringleaders appear to have been J. W. Logan, Liberal MP for Harborough, and Hayes Fisher, Conservative MP for Fulham. Between them they
got about forty members in a battling mass around the end of the clerks’ table. Speaker Peel, who, the House being in committee, was not in the chair, was sent for and quickly restored order,
but the incident horrified Gladstone, who referred to it on the next day as ‘last night’s catastrophe’ and on the day after that, when some sort of apologies
were exchanged, wrote of getting ‘the wretched incident to a close’.
¹¹
Its only benefit was that it somewhat restored his relations
with Arthur Balfour, who as leader of the opposition dealt with the matter elegantly.

The majority for the third reading was thirty-four, which showed a slight but uncomfortable decline from the forty-three of the second reading. Three Liberals voted against and two abstained, at
least one of them because of the removal of the restriction on the voting rights of Irish MPs. Gladstone greeted the result with ‘This is a great step. Thanks be to God.’
¹²
But his mood was not one of rejoicing or of optimism. Nor should it have been. He had shot his last bolt. On the next day (a Saturday) he wrote: ‘Saw
. . . Lord Stanmore: an uneasy conversation. I was rather upset by that or some other cause: and spent the day mainly on my back.’
¹³
Stanmore, who had been made a peer only that year, was the Arthur Gordon who had been his ADC in the Ionian Isles in 1858, had since held several colonial governorships, and in 1893 had just
completed a (good) life of his Prime Minister father, the fourth Lord Aberdeen. He was, however, showing ingratitude for his Gladstone-bestowed peerage to the extent of making trouble about voting
in the Lords for the Home Rule Bill. (He eventually did so, however.) The near unanimity with which Gladstone’s old connections and associates were reluctant to support him can hardly have
been a solace.

On the Monday he moved a business motion which provided for Parliament after a six-week break from 21 September to be recalled on 2 November and to sit indefinitely until the government’s
business was completed. During this autumn session (on 4 September Parliament was still nominally in its normal summer session) the government would take the whole of the time of the House and
pursue its two other major measures, the Local Government (or Parish Councils) Bill and the Employers’ Liability (or Industrial Accidents) Bill. Gladstone then departed by the night train to
Perthshire, once again the guest of the ever welcoming Armitstead, but this time at his impressively named Black Craig Castle in the Forest of Clunie. There he stayed for three weeks of deserved
rest, leaving Harcourt in charge in the House of Commons. But his holiday enthusiasm was less than usual. On the first day: ‘Drive and walk: 2 miles entirely knocked me up. . . . Early bed,
worked on Odes of Horace: pleasant but how difficult.’ And on the
second: ‘Worked on Odes: so slow. Backgammon with Mr. A. I have fallen back another step or stride
in the power of reading.’
¹⁴

While the Commons was dealing with minor business and the Prime Minister was driving about the Perthshire Highlands and tinkering with his Horatian translations, the House of Lords was indulging
in one of the seismic actions of its history. Yet it was an earthquake almost without noise or excitement, if that is a possible concept. On 8 September, after four short days of debate, it
rejected the bill which was the centre of the government’s programme and on which the Commons had spent eighty-two days by a vote of 419 to 41. It was a division without precedent, both for
the size of the majority and for the strength of the vote. There were only 560 entitled to vote, and 82 per cent of them did so, even though there was no incentive of uncertainty to bring remote
peers to London.

The breakdown of the vote, as well as its overall shape, was at once remarkable and profoundly unsatisfactory to Gladstone. Not a single bishop voted for the Bill, whereas both archbishops, the
senior trio of London, Durham and Winchester, together with no less than seventeen other diocesans, voted against it. Many of these, including both Canterbury (Benson) and York (Maclagan), had of
course been appointed by him. Nor did any duke vote for the Bill, although twenty-two (an almost incredible turn-up) voted against it. So did Gladstone’s nephew Lyttelton, as well as, amongst
those with whose persons or titles Gladstone had been closely associated, Ampthill, Rothschild and Wolverton (newly succeeded, not Gladstone’s old Whip). On the other hand the heirs to
Granville, Russell and Northbourne (James) remained loyal. So did Acton.

It was an enormity, but it was one which had become so widely discounted in advance, with the subject so exhausted by discussion, that the result was received with calm, almost with boredom.
Magnus wrote that ‘not a dog barked from John O’Groat’s to Land’s End’. What was even more surprising was that Gladstone hardly growled. He did not mention the result
in his diary, either for that day or for the next. He received a visit from Sir Henry Ponsonby, who came over from Balmoral. But Ponsonby was more concerned to discuss the burning question of
whether the Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria’s second son who had succeeded as Duke (and princeling) of Coburg could continue to keep the whole or part of his British civil-list allowance,
which subject did indeed occupy not only Gladstone but Harcourt and Rosebery as well for a considerable part of the autumn. Ponsonby also,
Gladstone noted, ‘brought a
message half inviting me to a limited visit [to Balmoral], which I think is well meant’
¹⁵
– but was not taken up. Neither Prime
Minister nor private secretary sought a constitutional discussion. Gladstone’s other occupation that day and the next was to read the official life of W. H. Smith, the
stationer–politician, which should have been reasonably calming.