Gladstone: A Biography (17 page)

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several sources of dismay, Oak Farm, Helen, Newman’s conversion, Gladstone lost his parliamentary seat. When he returned to
England on 18 November 1845 from his two-month Helen-retrieving German trip he found that a combination of factors – the Irish famine, a poor harvest in England, a public announcement (on 22
November) by the Whig leader Lord John Russell of his conversion to Repeal – was leading Peel to take the issue of the Corn Laws
¹³
more quickly than
he had hitherto intended. Previously he had been content to rest on the doctrine of ‘unripe time’, one to which Gladstone, despite his generally impetuous nature, was always inclined to
defer.

The anti-Corn Law position was not an easy one for Gladstone. It divided him from his father, which he disliked not only because of his naturally filial loyalty but because the Oak Farm troubles
increased his paternal dependence. It also separated him from his borough patron, the Duke of Newcastle. Once the issue had become actual, however, he did not doubt that he had to be on
Peel’s side. Nevertheless he rushed into no frenzy of political activity. He spent only one night at Carlton House Terrace before joining Catherine at Hagley for the last two weeks of
November and then only another four days in London before going to Hawarden for ten mid-December days. His correspondence was more religious and Helen-related (with a strong dash of Oak Farm) than
it was politically centred. And his reading was much directed to Newman, probably with a view to a refutation, which he did not, however, complete or publish. He recorded only three serious
political conversations, all of them with Lincoln, who had been in the Cabinet
since 1844 as Commissioner of Woods and Forests: the first on 6 December and the latter two in the
week before Christmas.

The day before the first conversation Peel had resigned, feeling that without the support of a wholly united Cabinet he should leave it to Russell to carry Repeal. The Cabinet was disunited only
to the extent that the Duke of Buccleuch and Stanley (Derby after 1851 and the only man before Gladstone to be Prime Minister more than twice, although his triple occupancy of the office amounted
to a cumulative total of only three years and ten months) could not accept Peel’s lead. It was not a major split but the two peers (Stanley had been called up to the House of Lords in 1844)
paradoxically represented a lot of House of Commons feeling.
¹⁴

After two weeks of hesitation Russell declined to pick up the poisoned chalice which Peel, via the Queen, had handed him. He said that he could act effectively only with both Palmerston and Sir
George Grey in his Cabinet, but Grey would not serve if Palmerston were Foreign Secretary and Palmerston would not serve in any other position. In addition Russell claimed that Peel offered him
inadequate guarantees of support on what they both knew had to be done. So, without great reluctance, Peel took up office again. It was at once a tribute to his public spirit and a criticism of his
party leadership that, having seen that Repeal was essential, he had a positive zest, more than the querulous Russell, for carrying it through himself. This was central to the subsequent count
against him as a party splitter. Had he just leant back and franchised Russell to do the necessary job, he might have been forgiven. The ‘protectionists’ half knew that it was necessary
to abandon protection, which, within six years, they themselves proceeded to do. But they did not want a leader who put country before party. Sixty-four years later the precedent led even so
fastidious a politician as Arthur Balfour to say that he could not become another Robert Peel to his party: ‘Peel twice committed what seems to me the unforgivable sin. . . . He simply
betrayed his party.’
¹
Peel chose the path of activity rather than of lying back, and as a result became both excoriated and the architect of the
calm and prosperous third quarter of the nineteenth century,
relatively the most unchallenged period of material and moral superiority in British history.

In order to do this, however, he had to plug the gaps in his Cabinet. Buccleuch, mysteriously, plugged his own gap. Having helped to precipitate a Cabinet crisis on 5 December he calmly returned
to office on the 21st, and indeed in January 1846 advanced from being Lord Privy Seal to being Lord President of the Council. Stanley was a more resolute resigner and Peel turned to Gladstone to
replace him as Secretary for War and Colonies (as it was still quaintly called until 1854, although Sidney Herbert as Secretary
at
War was already in charge of the War Office). Gladstone was
still only thirty-five, but he was looked to as almost a veteran, temporarily in the reserve, whom it was useful to bring back into the front line. It was a relatively young era. Peel was
fifty-seven and Russell fifty-three, but Buccleuch only thirty-nine and the resigning Stanley forty-six.

Gladstone had little hesitation about accepting Peel’s offer. He did so, he wrote to his wife, ‘with a clear conscience but with a heavy heart’,
²
which for Gladstone was almost the equivalent of saying that he leapt at it. This was curious, for it involved a serious risk of the loss of his seat in Parliament. Until after
the First World War the acceptance of Cabinet office necessarily involved vacating a seat and seeking re-election. And a few fell at the hurdle, most notably Winston Churchill in North-west
Manchester in 1908. Gladstone did not take the hurdle. He played with the idea of contesting the seat against the Duke of Newcastle, who was a virulent protectionist, but discovered that he did not
have enough support in the town and that his former ‘principal and best supporters’ produced an alternative candidate with humiliating speed and ease. This was ironical, for it was
discussion with Newcastle’s son Lincoln which had been most mind-clearing for Gladstone in his approach to office.

On 22 December he almost kissed hands with Peel (‘we
held
hands instinctively & I could not but reciprocate with emphasis his “God bless you”’).
³
And over the Christmas holidays (only five days at Hawarden, most exceptionally, followed by a New Year forty-eight hours at Windsor)
¹⁵
and the first weeks of January he gradually reconciled himself to his exclusion from Newark. He then sought another seat with more urgency than discrimination. There was talk
of North Nottinghamshire, Wigan, Liverpool, Dorchester, Chester and South
Lancashire. Later Oxford City, Scarborough, Aberdeen and Montrose Burghs were all subject to feelers.
For a variety of reasons none of them came to anything.

Wigan, in the early spring of 1846, approached the nearest to reality. The Tory (and Peelite) member who had been elected at a bye-election in the previous October was in danger of being
unseated on a petition. As he was a son of the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, who was also Lord Wigan, he had some territorial strength (which Gladstone after Newark, and indeed because of his own
views, was bound to treat with respect) and he was willing to let the Colonial Secretary in only for the bye-election and not for the subsequent general election when his own disqualification would
have ceased. Gladstone was prepared to accept this somewhat stringent condition, for the short lease would at least have solved his immediate governmental problem. He got as far as writing his
election address and preparing to take the night mail to Lancashire. But it was in vain. On 8 April he wrote, ‘My Wigan vision is dissolved.’
⁴
The reason could be regarded as a parliamentary compliment. The Whigs had withdrawn the petition, thinking it well worth while to forgo a bye-election in order to keep Gladstone
out of the House of Commons.

No other seat presented itself, and the main reason for which Peel wanted Gladstone to replace Stanley was thus frustrated. He could make administrative decisions in his Secretary of
State’s office, but he could bring no debating thunder to the government’s aid in the House of Commons. For his six months’ tenure of the Colonial Office, the first and only time
that he was a Secretary of State, he could get no nearer to the despatch box than the distinguished strangers’ gallery. There he often sat, for it was a momentous six months for parliamentary
clashes and for the fashioning of the shape of mid-Victorian politics. On 23 January 1846, Disraeli delivered the first of his insolently devastating attacks on Peel, rallied the protectionist
forces in the Conservative Party and went on to form with Lord George Bentinck (MP for King’s Lynn, a younger son of the Duke of Portland and hitherto more interested in racing than in
politics) his improbable but effective partnership: ‘the Jew and the jockey’, as it was irreverently known.

So effective was it that on the first important division on Repeal, at the end of February and after twelve nights of debate, including another philippic from Disraeli, Peel carried only 112
Tories into the lobby with him; 242 of his ‘supporters’ voted against, and he carried his motion to go into committee (by 97) only with the help of 227 Whigs and Radicals.
From that moment the Tory party in which Gladstone had grown up was irrevocably split and it was to be another twenty-eight years before another Conservative Prime Minister commanded
an independent majority in the House of Commons. Repeal got through (the House of Lords was strangely quiescent), but the moment the bill was safe the Whigs joined with the Radicals, the Irish and
a hard core of only seventy (but enough) Disraeli–Bentinck rebels (‘a blackguard combination’ in the Duke of Wellington’s view) to defeat the government on an Irish coercion
bill.

Peel resigned four days later, ending up with an encomium of Richard Cobden, the Radical leader of the victorious anti-Corn Law campaign, which shocked Gladstone, and of his own performance as
Prime Minister which displeased both sides of the House of Commons. Russell became Prime Minister of a Whig government. The anomaly of Gladstone’s position as a non-parliamentary Secretary of
State was ended, but not his seatlessness which continued for more than a year. Gladstone had suffered two major blows. Having seen Newman in 1843–5 shatter the high hopes of the apostolic
revival within the Church of England he watched Peel producing equally devastating effects upon the Conservative party in 1845–6. There were differences. On the merits of the issue Gladstone
agreed with Peel and disagreed with Newman. Furthermore he was never central to Tractarianism (much though it occupied his mind) in the way that he was to the movement away from protectionism in
the Peel-led Conservative party. On both issues, however, he found himself in the final stages a spectator rather than a participant.

Would it have made any difference had Gladstone been in the House of Commons in the first half of 1846? Certainly his presence would have ensured that the government’s case was presented
with more brio. The more or less simultaneous loss in different directions from the Treasury bench of Stanley and Gladstone was gravely weakening to the government in the House of Commons. It left
Peel effectively alone to face the
banderillas
of Disraeli and the lesser weapons of Bentinck (for Aberdeen was in the Lords, Goulburn, Graham and Sidney Herbert not great debaters, and
Lincoln, not a great one either, was in Ireland). This had the effect of making the Prime Minister unusually sullen and wooden. Gladstone himself, forty-five years later, told John Morley that the
performances against Peel of Disraeli (in whose favour he was hardly biased) were ‘quite as wonderful as report makes them. Peel altogether helpless in reply. Dealt with them with a kind of
“righteous dullness”.’
⁵
With Gladstone at his side he might have been more buoyant and less alienating, but the
lines of the split were unlikely to have been significantly different. What would have been significantly reduced was Gladstone’s sense of frustration.

Nor did his Colonial Office achievements provide any relief. To leave Gladstone as an administrator without providing him with a parliamentary sounding-board was like putting Napoleon in charge
of army supply while forbidding him to fight any campaigns, except that Napoleon would have been better at
intendance
than Gladstone was at exercising calm judgement on delicate colonial
issues. Gladstone was at best an indifferent Colonial Secretary, as Morley, normally admiring although not sycophantic, delicately makes clear. ‘To colonial policy at this stage,’ he
circumspectly wrote, ‘I discern no particular contribution, and the matters that I have named are now well covered by the moss of kindly time.’
⁶
These ‘matters’ were first Gladstone’s unfortunate advocacy of the resumption of convict despatch to Australia, which provoked a sharp reaction there and was
promptly vetoed by his Whig successor (the third Earl Grey); and second his clumsy sacking of the Governor of Tasmania, one Eardley-Wilmot. Wilmot probably deserved recall for general inefficiency,
but Gladstone, like a sermonizing judge, added to the dismissal letter a homily on the retiring Governor’s private character, details of which he had got, typically, from the local bishop,
but by which that dignitary refused to stand when the point became a matter of public and (to Gladstone) damaging controversy.