Gladstone: A Biography (24 page)

His second foray in that summer of 1850 was in the Don Pacifico debate. As long previously as Easter 1847, a Greek mob which included several well-connected youths had pillaged the Athens house
of a merchant by the name of David Pacifico, who liked to call himself Chevalier Pacifico, but who became known to history as Don Pacifico. Pacifico was a Spanish Jew who had been born in Gibraltar
(which entitled him to British citizenship) but had lived much of his life in Portugal, had acquired Portuguese nationality and had indeed been the consul of Portugal in Athens until dismissed for
forgery. He had wisely acquired a British passport before the pillaging took place and as a result Palmerston was willing to add Pacifico’s vast claim for damage to the
house (totalling £31,000, the equivalent to a good £1½ million today) to other claims and grievances against the Greek government. When Pacifico’s claims
(
inter alia
) were not met, Palmerston proclaimed the doctrine of
Civis Romanus sum
(that a British connection, however tenuous, entitled the holder to the full panoply of imperial
protection) and ordered a naval blockade of the Greek coast.

The imperious action of the Foreign Secretary, which set him at odds with both Russia and Austria as well as leading to a sufficiently serious diplomatic quarrel with France for the French
ambassador to be withdrawn from London, was challenged first by a motion of Stanley’s in the Lords, which was carried against the government, and then in the Commons. As a parliamentary
occasion, that Commons debate was the great setpiece of the nineteenth century, just as the Norway debate of 7–8 May 1940 was that of the twentieth century. They were both characterized by
the participation of almost every member of the first rank, and by the continuing resonance of the phrases used by at least some of them. Eighteen-fifty has the edge over 1940 in that the debate
lasted four nights (with no cut-off point) rather than two (with an 11.00 p.m. close-down) and that the speeches, led by Palmerston with an oration of over four and a half hours and buttressed in
this respect by Gladstone with one of nearly three hours, were immensely longer. The 1940 debate has the edge in that much more flowed from it.

Palmerston had spoken from dusk to dawn on the second night of the debate, and Gladstone on the third night was almost as late if not as long. It was nearly two o’clock before he sat down.
His speech was not a
sur place
triumph comparable with that of Palmerston, who not only secured the division but in Gladstone’s description, ‘through the livelong summer’s
night [made] the British House of Commons, crowded as it was, hang upon his words’.
²
There was some straying of attention during Gladstone’s
second hour, to which he responded with pained rebuke. Despite this mixed reception the speech extended Gladstone’s range into foreign affairs, made a considerable outside impact and
contained some remarkable passages which presaged the distaste for chauvinism which was to inform the four Gladstone administrations. He took
Civis Romanus sum
head on:

More surprisingly, Gladstone then contested and mocked the doctrine of Britain as a universal moral arbitrator:

Very near the end Gladstone sustained this argument with a subtle and sensitive piece of national self-criticism:

Gladstone’s speech, as well as these fine excursions on to the high moral ground, also and less characteristically contained some brilliant pieces of raillery against the extravagance of
Pacifico’s claims. It is an interesting comment on mid-nineteenth-century values that Pacifico was thought to be broaching the top end of the market when he specified £170 for a couch,
£53 for a chest of drawers, £60 for a carpet, £150 for a bed, £24 for a card-table, £120 for a pair of mirrors, £170 for a dinner service and £64 for tea
and coffee services. Yes, said Gladstone, you could find such articles at such prices in shops in London, but the only people who bought them were those who, apart from their possessions, had
incomes of £20,000, £50,000 or £100,000 a year. Yet Monsieur Pacifico, ‘who thus surpassed nearly all subjects and equalled almost any prince, according to his own account,
in many articles of luxury, who had £5,000 worth of clothes, jewels and furniture in his house, had not outside of it, except plate pledged to the Bank of Athens for £30, which he had
not been able to redeem, one single farthing! So, Sir, having his house crammed full of fine furniture, fine clothes and fine jewels, Monsieur Pacifico was in all other respects a
pauper.’
³

Gladstone in this speech may not have rivalled Palmerston. But he probably made the next best speech of the great debate, better than Disraeli’s, whom he recorded as ‘being below his
mark though he seemed in earnest’, better than Russell’s, whom he allowed as being ‘about par’, and stronger than what proved to be Peel’s swan-song. It was, however,
the result not the speeches which aroused his anger. ‘The division was disgusting, not on account of the numbers simply but considering where they came from.’
⁴
The ground for this bitter complaint was that with the exception of Cobden, Bright and Joseph Hume, the Radicals as well as the entire Whig party voted for Palmerston, for
jingoism (a word not then invented) and for the big stick, thus giving the Foreign Secretary a Commons majority of forty-six to compensate for the Lords defeat which Stanley had inflicted upon him.
And an equal irony was that the restrained internationalism outlined in Gladstone’s speech was one of the few issues of the day in favour of which the scattered parts of the Conservative
party, protectionists and Peelites alike, united in a single lobby. The debate also fortified Gladstone’s hostility to Palmerston. Hitherto he had mildly disapproved of his character.
Henceforward he deeply distrusted his policy.

Gladstone’s next burst of political (although not parliamentary) activity could be regarded as somewhat incompatible with the high nonassertiveness which he preached
in the Don Pacifico debate. Before he left for Italy he had little intention of political involvement during his Naples winter of 1850–1. The object was an improvement in the health of his
daughter Mary, a rest for his wife after the strains of pregnancy, illness and death in the family, and perhaps some repose too for his own uncalm nervous system. The chief vacation task which he
set himself, that of translating the three Italian volumes of L. C. Farini’s history of
Lo Stato Romano 1815–1850
, was half a help and half a hindrance to this end. In the first
place it involved him in sustained work, sometimes on his own and sometimes with L. J. Barber, the British vice-consul in Naples, as an assistant. When they were working together he recorded that
they had done 303 pages in seventy-one and three-quarter hours, a considerable pace at which to copy let alone probe Italian meanings and search for appropriate English words and phrases. Given his
energy, however, this task probably provided a more steadying influence than sightseeing alone could have given. On the other hand the work he had chosen tempted him towards Italian politics. It
was perhaps for him the equivalent, in another context, of lingering in front of a bookshop window. Farini was a very moderate liberal, but his history of the post-Napoleonic exercise of papal
temporal power was highly critical and could not fail to set the mind of his translator on to the question of whether post-1848 conditions in Naples were not even worse.

Gladstone’s interest in what went on under the regime of King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies,
²⁵
‘King Bomba’ as he was derisively
known in England, had been aroused in London by (Sir) Anthony Panizzi, then deputy keeper of the British Museum and the creator of the Round Reading Room, who although of Lombard origin kept
Neapolitan affairs very much under his eye. As soon as Gladstone arrived in Naples Panizzi’s influence was fortified by that of another and almost equally remarkable Anglo-Italian
knight-to-be (Sir) James Lacaita, later Professor at King’s College London, and secretary to Gladstone on his Ionian Isles mission in 1859. Lacaita was at that time a Neapolitan subject and
legal adviser to the British Legation, which was headed by William Temple, Palmerston’s younger brother.

Through Lacaita, Gladstone became much involved with the case of
Baron Carlo Poerio, who had been briefly a Neapolitan minister in the frightened days of 1848 but who by
1850 was put on trial for subversion and sentenced to twenty-four years in irons. Gladstone attended with deep disapproval some of the court proceedings, and then visited Poerio at the Bagno di
Nisida prison. The conditions in the dungeons where Poerio was habitually confined were of the classic quality of operatic incarceration. Chained prisoners lay in foetid darkness and were
occasionally handed out a portion of filthy food. On the day of Gladstone’s visit a veritable
Fidelio
scene was enacted.

Gladstone recorded in great detail the conditions in which the prisoners were held, and in Poerio’s case had been held for sixteen months before trial. He recorded the length and heaviness
of the chains which were never taken off night and day, observed the ‘stinking soup’ which was taken in as food, ascertained that the dungeons were damp and hardly lit, and noted that
the political prisoners were forced to wear the rough dress of ‘common malefactors’ including ‘the felon’s red cap’. These facts whipped up Gladstone’s
indignation, but the main purpose of his visit was to get assurance from Poerio that public intervention would not do more harm than good. Gladstone had been warned against this a few days before
by the Prince San Giacomo, who had been ambassador to London in the false Neapolitan dawn of 1848 and of whom he thought highly. And Poerio himself was at first somewhat hesitant. He told Gladstone
that he feared ‘his case had been made worse by Mr Temple’s intervention: not in the least blaming Mr T or considering it officious. But he said to speak without reserve the Kings [of
Naples] had a great hatred of the English generally.’
⁵

Gladstone then asked Poerio a question which, as a protesting man of
courage, it would have been very difficult for him to answer other than as he did. ‘Matters
standing thus,’ Gladstone said,