Gladstone: A Biography (111 page)

Four days later he retreated to Biarritz accompanied by Armitstead,
Mrs Gladstone, his daughter Mary with her child Dorothy Drew, and Lord Acton. He left everyone in
considerable doubt about what he would do next. Was he going to return to resign, or, as many thought likely, to come back rejuvenated and announce that he was swallowing the naval estimates and
staying on? And, if he resigned, was he to go quietly on grounds of increasing infirmity, or was he to make an issue of the naval quarrel, stay in Parliament and fulminate against his colleagues?
It was a striking fact that the long-running Cabinet naval row never got into the newspapers. It justified Hamilton’s comment: ‘Mr G’s Cabinets have been able to keep their own
counsel ever since Chamberlain and Dilke ceased to be colleagues.’
²⁶
It also set an example which modern Cabinets would find hard to
follow.

There was the additional lurking fear that Gladstone might indulge in one last exercise in the prerogatives of a Prime Minister and try to force a dissolution of Parliament. This would have been
in the tradition (not a happy one) of 1874, when his dissolution was just as much against Cardwell’s army estimates as it was against the Tories. Fortunately, perhaps, that precedent was not
much noticed, although one or two of his Cabinet colleagues – Harcourt in particular – had a naive faith that they were going to catch him out, and even force a change in his position,
on the basis that in 1860 when Chancellor under Palmerston he had accepted, and even defended, a bigger increase in naval spending than anything which Spencer was currently putting forward.

Towards the end of his month at Biarritz Gladstone increased the tension, probably deliberately, by sending to Welby (the permanent secretary of the Treasury) a request to know immediately the
minimum number of days between (i) dissolution and the assembly of the new Parliament, and (ii) that assembly and the taking of votes on the various estimates, including the naval ones. It was a
good gamesmanship ploy. He also sent back, via his own chief of staff, Algernon West, who had come out for a few days, a definite proposition for an immediate dissolution on the accumulated sins of
the Lords. It was turned down unanimously, and Gladstone made no attempt to act unilaterally. Harcourt nevertheless described Gladstone’s proposal as ‘the act of a selfish
lunatic’.
²⁷

There was ambiguity about Gladstone’s mood during that last visit to Biarritz. The weather was mostly wet, although ‘wild but soft’ in his rather good oxymoron for one aspect
of the Basque climate. He made numerous expeditions, which did not point to low spirits, to St Jean de Luz, to San Sebastián, to Bayonne, to Cambo-les-Bains, to St Jean Pied-de-Port,
and when one of these drives was not on the agenda he got pleasure out of going with his wife to the Rocher or the Phare (two Biarritz promontories) to look at the fierce seas.

On the other hand when Algernon West came out (instigated by Harcourt) to try to persuade Gladstone to give way, or at least to compromise, he got short shrift. Hamilton, who saw West after he
got back wrote: ‘[He] was in the depths of despair. Nobody knew, he said, what he had been through at Biarritz; he never got a civil word out of Mr. G., who either fulminated against
everybody as if they were all criminals or treated everything with the greatest levity.’
²⁸
Gladstone provided some confirmation by writing
(20 January): ‘I had with W[est] my tenth [?] long conversation on the coming events. . . . He is most kind and loyal: but weary talk casts no light whatever on the matter.’ And even
with his son Herbert (by now Asquith’s under-secretary at the Home Office), who also came out, there was some trouble. ‘Polemical talk with Herbert. He argued as well as any. I hope I
have now nearly done.’
²⁹

Also at Biarritz he engaged spiritedly but not generously in a final honours joust with the Queen. The Marquess of Lansdowne was about to return after five years as Viceroy of India. Before that
he had been Governor-General of Canada, so that his public service (although he was still under fifty) was great. On the other hand he had led the flight of the Whigs from Liberalism by his 1880
resignation from a junior position in Gladstone’s second government. He obviously had to receive some high honour. The Queen was in favour of a dukedom or a Garter, or maybe both. But there
was no Garter vacancy. He would therefore have had to be given an ‘extra’ one for which there was no precedent since the Duke of Wellington. Gladstone thought there was no question of
his deserving this. He saw his record as Viceroy as ‘very chequered’. Nor did he want to make him a duke (about which Lansdowne himself was also reticent). On both issues Gladstone
entered into an elaborate defence in depth. A step from a marquessate to a dukedom, he argued with more pedantry than persuasiveness, was qualitatively different from any other elevation in the
peerage. He thought a Grand Cross of the Bath would do perfectly well. The Indian Secretary, Kimberley, was doubtfully on his side. It was in a way the encapsulation of Gladstone’s relations
with the Queen. He was probably by a narrow margin right on the merits, although he would have been very hard put to it to explain why his own Westminster dukedom was more appropriate than a
Lansdowne one would have been. But Disraeli, had he been alive, in
office and aware of what the Queen wanted, would have happily given Lansdowne the dukedom, the
‘extra’ Garter, and the GCB as well. In this little final skirmish Gladstone, while convincing himself that he was discharging his duty to maintain the value of honours, exhibited many
of the traits which, in combination with her prejudices, ruined his relations with Victoria.

When he got back to London on 10 February (‘Luxurious journey: but bad [Channel] passage’),
³⁰
Gladstone continued to keep his
colleagues on tenterhooks. Except for Asquith as a minister, Morley as a companion and Spencer as a
grand seigneur
he did not have much of a view of them, and was at least half happy that
they should swing in the wind. He held a brief Cabinet on the 12th, to which he gave no hint of his intentions. There was a sense of anti-climax when he adjourned it after merely an hour’s
discussion on the Lords’ amendments to the Parish Councils Bill. On Saturday the 17th he held a Cabinet dinner. Every member came. They were eager more for the news than for the food. But
again nothing happened, even when Rosebery, with perhaps less than his vaunted subtlety, suggested that they ought to make sure that the doors were closed and that there were no waiters or others
behind the screens. Gladstone wrote: ‘I believe it was expected that I should say something. But from my point of view there is nothing to be said.’
³¹

Algernon West thought that he was waiting to see what the Lords did with the Parish Councils Bill: ‘and they may alter things, for in the case of a dissolution I should go to the country
with them’ – ‘them’ referring not back to ‘they’ but to his Liberal colleagues. As, however, the one thing his Liberal colleagues were determined not to do was
to ‘go to the country’ this was not a meaningful promise or threat. And it has to be set against the view of Hamilton, who for all his occasional Roseberyite disloyalty both knew and
understood Gladstone better than did West. Hamilton recorded on 17 February that he was ‘convinced that Mr. G. has never really vacillated since the Admiralty decision was taken by Cabinet
before he went to Biarritz’.
³²
He was going, but he nonetheless felt at least enough resentment against his colleagues to enjoy playing a
game with them on the way.

There was no further Cabinet until Friday, 23 February. On this occasion, after the attitude of the government to the Lords’ amendments to the Local Government Bill (hostile acquiescence)
had been fixed and the Prorogation speech (end of the session) agreed, Gladstone announced that its delivery would be the moment of his resignation, but
did so only as the
Cabinet was breaking up, so that no one else had a chance to say anything. However, there was another Cabinet on the Monday, and nobody seems to have said much on that occasion either, although
Gladstone had seen both Harcourt and Rosebery (together; it cannot have been an easy triangle) to tell them of an interview which he had had with Ponsonby, the Queen’s secretary. The purport
of this interview was for Gladstone to authorize Ponsonby to tell the Queen he was about to resign, provided that the Queen would agree to pass the information on to no one else. The Queen refused
to give the assurance. It was a preposterous refusal to a farcical request. The idea that the Sovereign would not agree to accept a confidence from her Prime Minister was disgraceful. Equally it
was not very fruitful to make an issue of secrecy about an event which was the gossip of London. Like the issue of Lansdowne’s honours it showed that they never could fail to rub each other
the wrong way.

On Wednesday, 28 February, he eventually saw her, most exceptionally and conveniently at Buckingham Palace (where she had not come, needless to say, to effect an easy changeover but to hold
a drawing room). By the time of the formal replacement of Gladstone by Rosebery she had retreated to Windsor. Of this first resignation interview, however, Gladstone provided a very good throw-away
account on the borderline of irony, which was not normally his strongest weapon:

The next event was the so-called ‘blubbering Cabinet’ of the following day, Thursday, 1 March. The sobriquet was the dismissive title which Gladstone himself subsequently gave it,
although at the time he wrote of it as ‘a really moving scene’. However, I prefer the account of the occasion given by Asquith, a man of cool judgement who had been given a great
opportunity by Gladstone, who admired his historical resonance, but was at that time a friend and ally of Rosebery’s, and with his brilliant career ahead of him naturally looked more to the
future than to the past. Thirty years later Asquith wrote:

That afternoon Gladstone also made his last appearance in the House of Commons. He was there for one and three-quarter hours. He answered questions and then spoke on the Lords’ amendments
to the Local Government Bill. He withdrew the government’s opposition to them ‘under protest’, and warned that if, as seemed likely, the Lords had abandoned their traditional
‘reserve and circumspection’ then the conflict between them and the elected House ‘when once raised, must [in due course] go forward to an issue. . . . Having said this, and
thanking the House for the attention they have given me,’ he concluded, ‘I have only to signify that it is the intention of the Government to acquiesce in the amendments which have been
made by the House of Lords.’
³⁵
These were the last words that he spoke in the chamber, where in its different guise before the great fire of
1834, he had first spoken sixty-one years earlier. Indeed he never again entered the Palace of Westminster, although he retained his nominal membership until the general election fifteen months
later. It appeared to suit his Edinburgh constituents better that way.
¹³⁹

Twenty-four hours later he went to Windsor to ‘dine and sleep’. His conversation with the Queen, as part of the general company, was, he wrote ‘long and courteous, but of
little meaning’. The next morning he was waylaid by Ponsonby on his way to the St George’s Chapel service. Ponsonby trailed the disadvantages of having a peer as Prime Minister.
Gladstone refused to be drawn, either then or at a resumed conversation an hour later. If the Queen asked his views direct or if Ponsonby did it at her express command, he would of course give
them; ‘but . . . otherwise my lips must be sealed’.
³⁶
Ponsonby could not say he had been
so commanded and so
nothing more was said. Nor was there the slightest mention of the succession when Gladstone later saw the Queen and formally handed over his letter of resignation. She thanked him profusely –
but only for what he had done in the matter of the Duke of Edinburgh (become Coburg) retaining his British annuity. She also opined that German oculists were better than English ones. And so, after
fifty-three years as a Privy Councillor, twenty-seven of them in the service of the Crown, and twelve of them in the highest office, it was all over. Ponsonby informed him that the Queen had sent
for Rosebery, to whom he could not object on the ground that he was a peer, for as we know he would, if asked, have advised Spencer. Nor was the news of the beginning of Rosebery’s
unfortunate premiership in any way a surprise to Gladstone, although he obviously felt deeply the complete absence of any consultation or even direct prior information on the point.

He then went back to London on what he described as ‘the Council train’ (there had been a Privy Council at Windsor that morning), finished off his translation of the Odes of Horace
(‘But
what
is it worth?’) and dined with Lord Kimberley.
³⁷
He still had to receive the Queen’s jejune reply to his letter
of resignation,
¹⁴⁰
which perhaps hurt the most of the lot, and then to begin a very leisurely move out of 10 Downing Street. Rosebery at least had the
advantage of not being in a hurry for that perquisite of office; he did not occupy it for nearly a year.