Gladstone: A Biography (119 page)

52.
Gladstone in fact used the one Greek word
in place of the last five
English words.

53.
The issue was largely procedural. Russell wished to change a despatch, relating to whether an international conference should be
proposed, which the Cabinet had approved and the form of which the Queen had accepted. The matter was resolved at a ‘holiday’ Cabinet on 29 August.

54.
Gladstone in reply to this put up a sensible argument against the concept of the vast battleship, though it required about another
hundred years to become acceptable to professional naval opinion. ‘Is it really wise’, he wrote to Palmerston, ‘to continue the present outlay on so great a scale for the building
of these maritime castles which we call line of battle ships and which seem to be constructed on the principle precisely opposite to that of all land fortifications, and to aim at presenting as
large a surface as possible to the destroying fire of an enemy?’ (Guedalla,
Gladstone and Palmerston
, p. 113.)

55.
It was in this conversation that Palmerston made to Gladstone the surprisingly particular statement that he ‘had had two great
objects always before him in life: one the suppression of the Slave Trade, and the other to put England in a state of defence’. (
Diaries
, V, p. 495.)

56.
Eventually she had to be paid off with the very considerable sum of £5000, which led to Gladstone, who was the intermediary in
making the payment, being quite falsely accused in an Irish newspaper of making it to cover up his own immoral activities.

57.
A party of distressed mill operators was provided with shelter and some agricultural work at Hawarden, and Catherine Gladstone
actively organized relief schemes in Blackburn and other Lancashire towns.

58.
Longley had recently been translated from York to Canterbury, with Gladstone’s strong approval. Thomson, after only a year at
Gloucester, had replaced him at York, but against Gladstone’s wishes. Gladstone had written a long but good letter to Palmerston urging the claims of Wilberforce. It was vintage Gladstone,
urging Wilberforce’s appointment on the highest grounds of principle: he was a fine bishop, a great preacher, a unifying influence within the Church, maybe a bit social but how desirable it
was to have a prelate who could ‘maintain the hold and influence of religion upon the higher circles of civil life’. And then Gladstone’s jesuitical side came to the surface, and
he slipped in a good fall-back defence: ‘But those who think he meddles too much in London would gladly see him removed to a spot where he would no longer be within an hour of the
Metropolis.’

It was unavailing. Wilberforce, who had been at Oxford for seventeen years, did not go to York, and Thomson, once his curate and a diocesan for only a year, did. Gladstone might be the most
dominating Chancellor of the century, but Palmerston was still Prime Minister, and liked so to remind Gladstone.

59.
This led to a current anti-Gladstone joke which the
Economist
, at that time very pro- Gladstone, recalled and printed when
it turned away from him at the time of the Home Rule split. In response to a not very serious suggestion that there would be much to be said for a marriage between General Garibaldi and the
Duchess, it was pointed out that the General already had a wife at home. ‘Oh, there is no problem,’ it was countered, ‘Gladstone is here, and we could get him to explain her
away.’ (Ruth Dudley Edwards,
The Pursuit of Reason: A History of the Economist
, p. 378.)

60.
On the other hand this clear evidence not only of Helen’s commitment to the Roman Church, but also of her strong position in
it, did nothing to counter his fanatical conviction twenty years later that she must have reverted to her Anglican faith, and to arrange for her burial accordingly.

61.
Although in the following session Baines pressed a similar bill to a vote and was defeated by 248 to 214, with Gladstone voting in
the minority.

62.
Not then strictly ducal, for the Marquess of Westminster did not get his ‘step’ until 1874.

63.
As Monckton Milnes (for this was he after his 1863 ennoblement) was regarded as one of the great nineteenth-century wits, he might
not have been too pleased by this qualified accolade.

64.
See pp. 179–80, above.

65.
When the Speaker (Denison) dined with Palmerston in his (Palmerston’s) eighty-first year he was much struck by the Prime
Minister consuming two plates of turtle soup, a dish of cod with oyster sauce, a paté, two entrées, a plate of mutton, a slice of ham, and a portion of pheasant. (Guedalla,
Gladstone and Palmerston
, p. 453.)

66.
See pp. 23–4, above.

67.
Odo Russell, later ambassador in Berlin at the time of the 1878 Congress, who became first Lord Odo Russell when his father became
Duke of Bedford and then Lord Ampthill, was in 1866 unofficial British representative at the Vatican.

68.
A rash prophecy: Disraeli was dead after fourteen years and Gladstone was Prime Minister for nearly twelve of the twenty.

69.
Disraeli’s House of Commons words of 16 February 1844 were:

70.
In December 1905, Asquith, who had just become Chancellor of the Exchequer and was already the obvious future Liberal leader, stayed
four nights at Hatfield, travelling up to London by train each day and trying to unravel the foolish ‘Relugas Compact’ under which he and Edward Grey and Haldane had agreed that they
would not serve unless Campbell-Bannerman retreated to a nominal premiership in the House of Lords. From this distraction he returned each night to various Hatfield festivities including a
fancy-dress ball.

71.
Wilberforce to Winchester; Mackerness (a staunch Liberal) to Oxford in his place; Lord Arthur Hervey (a younger son of the first
Marquess of Bristol – the Herveys were then a more devout family than subsequently) to Bath and Wells; and Temple to Exeter (an appointment which proved very controversial because of a
combination of the high apostolic and anti-Erastian tradition of the diocese and of Temple’s having contributed to the 1860
Essays and Reviews
, which some regarded as
semi-heretical).

72.
This recommendation, which was for Sir Lionel de Rothschild, who had eventually won his battle over the parliamentary oath which
had kept him, although a several times elected member, out of the House of Common, was however blocked by the Queen; and her objection, despite a long and powerfully argued letter from Gladstone,
was persisted in. In the course of resisting the arguments of the government (Granville was also involved, although in a more light-footed way than Gladstone) she permitted herself several
animadversions. ‘But she
cannot
consent to a Jew being made a Peer – tho’ she will not object to a
Jew
baronet – and she is quite certain that it wld do the
Govt. harm rather than good,’ she wrote on 24 August. And on 1 November, for the argument was long drawn out: ‘she cannot think one who owes his great wealth to contracts with Foreign
Govts for Loans, or to successful speculations on the Stock Exchange can fairly claim a British Peerage. However high Sr L. Rothschild may stand personally in Public Estimation, this seems to her
not the less a species of gambling, because it is on a gigantic scale – & far removed from that legitimate trading wh she
delights
to
honour
. . . .’ (Guedalla,
The
Queen and Mr Gladstone
, pp. 249 and 254.) Lionel de Rothschild died without his peerage. His son Nathan Meyer Rothschild became the first Lord Rothschild (and the first Jewish peer) in 1885,
again on the recommendation of Gladstone.

73.
The essential difference was that in Britain it was in general the landowner who made capital improvements, whereas in Ireland, with
its multiplicity of holdings, it was mostly the tenants who had effected such drainage, fencing, making of farm-roads and construction of farm buildings as had taken place.

74.
See p. 594, below.

75.
He took the view, much at variance with more recent practice, that incoming governments should accept the legislation of their
predecessor.

76.
Bishop Colenso of Natal (although of Cambridge provenance) then occupied a position in the Church roughly equivalent to that of
Bishop Jenkins of Durham in his high days.

77.
These emotions did not however weigh with the Prince of Wales, who preferred the glitter of
la ville lumière
to German
hearths and homes, and was regarded by his mother as dangerously pro-French.

78.
Surprisingly, Gladstone himself bestowed this description upon his very definitely unmarried sister Helen. He so described her in a
22 July 1870 letter to the Prussian minister in London requesting on the outbreak of the war a
laissez-passer
from Cologne, and did so again at the time of her death.

79.
The future Archbishop of Canterbury, whom Gladstone had just nominated to Exeter (see p. 305n, above).

80.
See pp. 356–60, below.

81.
Eight and a half years later Edward Hamilton, one of his most devoted private secretaries and later joint permanent secretary of the
Treasury, after listening to him before the Leeds Chamber of Commerce, wrote in admiration of ‘the unrivalled style in which he manipulates figures and dresses them up in a wholly new
light’. (Bahlmann (ed.),
The Diary of Sir Edward Walter Hamilton 1880–1885
, I, p. 174.)

82.
See p. 315, above.

83.
These had embraced not only the purge of the government but the tragic and dramatic death of Bishop Wilberforce, with whom
Gladstone’s life had been closely intertwined for forty-five years. After a Cabinet on Saturday, 19 July, Gladstone had gone to Holmbury, near Dorking, to stay with Lord Edward Leveson-Gower.
Granville and the ‘great diocesan’ (to give him at the end his more favourable sobriquet), were due to join them there. ‘We were enjoying that beautiful spot,’ Gladstone
wrote, ‘when the Groom arrived with a message that the Bp. had had a bad fall.’ He had been riding up to the house from Leatherhead station with the Foreign Secretary. One and a half
hours later Granville arrived to say that Wilberforce was dead. After his notable quartercentury as Bishop of Oxford he had enjoyed the lusher pastures of Winchester, Gladstone’s compensation
to him for having missed York and Canterbury, for only three years. Both the loss and its circumstances were a heavy blow to the Prime Minister and a bad preparation for the next testing three
weeks. But what an extraordinary vignette of Victorian life is provided by this confluence of events. The country’s most eminent bishop (and episcopal eminence then counted for much more) had
been killed on a Saturday evening riding up a country lane from a railway station with the Foreign Secretary to dine with the Prime Minister. Even late-twentieth-century Sunday newspapers might
have felt compelled to give the tragedy priority over their pet scandal of the week.

84.
Two years later Bowen became Asquith’s pupil master. It is perhaps worth noting that when in the spring of 1914, following the
Curragh ‘mutiny’, Asquith as Prime Minister took over the War Office, he assumed his exclusion from the House of Commons until he had been to East Fife for re-election.

85.
Boord, then a thirty-five-year-old Tory gin-maker got first place with 6193 votes. Gladstone came next with 5968. The second Tory was
400 votes behind that, and the second Liberal another 300 votes short. It was easy to see why Gladstone did not feel triumphant.

86.
The new government’s life of over six years was as long a span as that achieved by any Prime Minister between the death of
Liverpool and 1895. But it did not win a second general election, which feat was not to be performed by a Conservative until Salisbury (Disraeli’s successor in the leadership of the
Conservative party) was greatly aided by the disruptive effect on the Liberal party of Gladstone’s final years. In a sense therefore Gladstone was formally correct, although wrong in spirit,
in his dismissive 1874 judgement.