Gladstone: A Biography (30 page)

Such a touch of chloroform was indeed necessary, for the next stage of the argument was breathtaking enough to inflict a considerable trauma upon any non-prepared mind. He announced a seven-year
prolongation of the tax, more than twice what Pitt or Peel had ever ventured, seven times the hesitant fumbling of 1851 and 1852. He also extended the tax to Ireland and reduced the exemption limit
from £150 of annual income to £100. But he did it in a way which, while fiscally responsible, made it extraordinarily difficult for the opponents of the income tax to engage with him.
The tax was to be at sevenpence in the pound from 1853 to 1855, at sixpence from 1855 to 1857, and at
fivepence for three years from then. ‘Under this proposal,’ he
concluded the passage, ‘on the 5th of April, 1860 the income tax will by law expire.’

He had pre-empted the decade, harnessed the income tax to his immediate need for room to reduce indirect imposts while enticing its opponents by what appeared to be a realistic programme for its
abolition, and also put them on good behaviour to support the Chancellor in his rigorous control of public expenditure in order that his and their objective might be achieved. He appeared to have
reconciled imagination with rigour. (He did not of course foresee the Crimean War, but in this he was no more and no less prescient than his listeners.) And in the slipstream he was able to carry
much further the central Peelite policy of getting rid of protective, discriminating and labyrinthine customs duties: 123 articles were entirely removed from the tariff in the 1853 budget, and the
duties on another 135 were significantly reduced. The excise duty on soap also went completely. Lansdowne, Graham and Wood had tried to retain half of it, but Gladstone resisted this, and brought
cleanliness twice as near to godliness as their compromise would have done.

From the moment that he sat down (after a final sentence of 344 words) Gladstone’s triumph began to reverberate throughout the political world. Russell, as leader of the House, wrote to
the Queen that the budget statement was ‘one of the most powerful financial speeches ever made. Mr Pitt, in the days of his glory, might have been more imposing, but he could not have been
more persuasive.’
¹⁶
Aberdeen both passed on the Queen’s expression of delight ‘at the great success of Mr Gladstone’s speech
last night’ and added his own congratulations, which were made much more than formal by his concluding ‘if the existence of my government shall be prolonged, it will be your
work’.
¹⁷
Clarendon, the Foreign Secretary (who had changed jobs with Russell a few weeks earlier), wrote that it was ‘the most perfect
financial statement ever heard within the walls of Parlt. for such it is allowed to be by friend and foe’.
¹⁸
Charles Greville, clerk to the
Privy Council and most sensitive appraiser of the market value of political reputations, recorded that the budget ‘had raised Gladstone to a great political elevation, and what is of far
greater consequence than the measure itself, has given the country assurance of a
man
equal to great political necessities and fit to lead parties and direct governments’.
¹⁹
Prince Albert said that he would ‘certainly have cheered had [he] a seat in the House’; and at the French imperial court they appeared to discuss
little else except ‘the boldness and comprehensiveness’ of the British budget.

This acclaim was more than sufficient to carry Gladstone over a misjudgement which might in other circumstances have been damaging. He attempted a major conversion operation
designed to reduce the rate of interest on a portion of the national debt to 2½ per cent, but got a take-up at the reduced rate of only a couple of million pounds, whereas he had hoped for
twenty or thirty million. He attributed the failure partly to Disraeli’s ‘malignant opposition’, which crucially (and improperly, he alleged) delayed the date of the offer past a
major turning-point in the sentiment of the market. But in a long-distance (1897) retrospect he also blamed himself for ‘an incessant course of sailing near the wind’, which habit
of ‘daring navigation’ he attributed to his Oak Farm and Hawarden estate experience, where he had learnt to choose this course because ‘there was really no other
hope’.
²⁰

Despite the setback, the wave of success on which he emerged from the budget and its aftermath was such as to make hubris a more likely danger than dismay. There was however remarkably little
indication of even the most extravagant praise going to his head. Gladstone, like de Gaulle, was conceited rather than vain. He had great certainty about his intellectual positions, frequently
although they could change (but not under pressure from others), and this meant that he was both undismayed in adversity and unflattered in success. He did not greatly need the approval of his
peers, although in later life, again like de Gaulle, he became addicted to
bains de foule
(immersions in enthusiastic crowds). He could castigate himself for moral weakness, but that was a
matter between himself and his God. On matters of intellectual and oratorical performance he knew his strength and did not much need others to tell him of it. Like all human beings he did not
reject praise, but he did not wallow in it. In his diaries he took it all in his stride, and in his summing up of the year, eight months later, he did not mention his spring triumph. ‘The
singular blessing of this year’, he wrote, ‘has been
health
. Without this among them I do not know how I could have gone through its labours. It has not I grieve to say been a
year of advance towards purity, taken as a whole.’
²¹

The 1853 budget marked not only an enhancement of the office of Chancellor and of the importance of his spring festival, but also a major strengthening of Gladstone’s personal position
among his colleagues. After 18 April he would have had much less difficulty in getting his proposals through the Cabinet than he experienced in the ten days before it. The truth of the adage about
success having a thousand (or, in the
case of this Cabinet, fifteen) parents, while failure was an orphan, has rarely been better illustrated.

A short time later Gladstone drew attention to the composition of the fifteen and to his position among them. ‘No Cabinet could have been more aristocratically composed than that over
which Lord Aberdeen presided,’ he said. ‘I myself was the only one of fifteen noblemen and gentlemen who composed it, who could not fairly be said to belong to that
class.’
²²
While it may be doubted whether Gladstone’s social origin was markedly different from that of Molesworth, there was nonetheless
general validity in the point, which he no doubt made with as much pride as humbleness, even though he always had a certain deference for rank. There could be no question, after April 1853, of his
being employed as a professional to roll the pitch as well as to score the runs. Aberdeen was right. Gladstone had given the government such hold on life as it possessed, and he was more pivotal to
it than the Foreign Secretary (Clarendon), the leader of the House of Commons (Russell), perhaps even than the Prime Minister (Aberdeen).

His only political equal was Palmerston, temporarily languishing in the Home Office, and contention between them (and indeed almost total difference of political outlook) ran through the next
twelve years of Gladstone’s career. It was more an incompatibility than a rivalry – the twenty-five-year difference in age was too wide for the latter, and Disraeli was already
ensconced as the rival
en titre
. But Palmerston and Gladstone were to spend eight years of the next twelve within the same Cabinets, whereas Disraeli and Gladstone were never colleagues,
although the margin by which they missed being so was at times narrow. And, as is well known, personal tensions within parties are mostly greater than those across parties. However that may be,
there was no doubt after the spring of 1853 that Gladstone, with Palmerston and Disraeli, was one of the trio of stars of British politics, although one who could shoot down as well as up. It took
him a couple of decades more to outshine both the others, but that he eventually and assuredly did.

T
HE
D
ECLINE AND
F
ALL OF THE
A
BERDEEN
C
OALITION

D
ESPITE THE PERSONAL TRIUMPH
Gladstone had achieved with the budget of 1853, he at that stage was essentially an isolated figure, even though one of
great individual power. He wished to work neither with Palmerston nor with Disraeli. In addition, although he did not exactly disapprove of him as he did of the other two, he and Russell were
instinctively quarrelsome with each other. This three-directional repugnance on Gladstone’s part meant that he was out of office (even though no one else was very stably in) for
three-quarters of the 1850s.

The Peelites gradually subsided around him. The five most prominent other than himself, Aberdeen, Sidney Herbert, Goulburn, Graham and Newcastle (Lincoln), all died between 1857 and 1864, and
only Herbert and Newcastle held office after 1855. Gladstone’s passage into the full embrace of Liberalism was solitary and hazardous. At times his political prospects looked at least as
bleak as after his perverse resignation from the Board of Trade in 1845. In 1856 Aberdeen wrote to him with avuncular concern: ‘With an admitted superiority of character and intellectual
power above any other member, I fear that you do not really possess the sympathy of the House at large. . . .’
¹
And two years later, when his
acceptance of a bizarre mission to the Ionian Isles took him out of British politics for a whole winter, he looked like a man who was marginalizing himself before he was fifty. Yet within three
months of the not very successful conclusion of that mission, Gladstone boxed all compasses by first voting to keep Disraeli (and Derby) in office and then, when that vote had proved ineffective,
accepting a return to the Treasury under Palmerston and remaining Chancellor, in contentious but continuing partnership with him, for longer than anyone had done since the unmemorable Vansittart in
the first decade of the Liverpool government. This 1859 return was the beginning of the second and much more governmental phase of his political life. The first phase, from his election for Newark,
had
covered twenty-seven years, of which he had been in office for only six and a half. The second was to extend over thirty-five years, with nineteen of them in office. This
nevertheless meant that, during the sixty-two and a half years between his first entry into the House of Commons and his leaving it for the last time in 1895, he was for thirty-seven of them a
private member. His ration of office was substantial, but by no means such as to make him essentially a Treasury-bench politician, one who was out of his natural element when he could not put his
feet upon the Commons table from the government side, as had been the case with Pitt and Palmerston and was to be so with Asquith and Baldwin.

In the spring of 1853, however, and on his ‘great political elevation’, Gladstone had nearly another two years of his first term as Chancellor to go until the collapse of the
Aberdeen government, and his unwillingness to continue in the Palmerston one which followed it, sent him on his second excursion into the political wilderness. Broadly speaking the first of these
two years was highly productive and the second vexatious. Essentially the Crimean War was the cause of the degression. It was a war with which Gladstone was always ill at ease. He did not oppose it
at the outset. Indeed in one notable and maybe decisive conversation with his Prime Minister he took a markedly more pro-war line than did Aberdeen.
⁴²
But
he never had his heart in it, brought no urgency to its winning, financed it only reluctantly and became an early advocate of peace without victory. As a result, rather like R. A. Butler at the
time of Suez, he got the worst of both worlds and offended all parties, including himself, becoming guilt-ridden for his initial attitude. He liked issues on which he could fulminate with moral
certainty. The Crimean War was the reverse of that, and he accordingly tried to circumnavigate it. The war was not fatal to him, as it was to 18,000 British soldiers and to the premiership of
Aberdeen, but it was damaging, and was a substantial cause of his quinquennium of political setback which began in the mid-1850s. Contemplating these years, it is difficult not to be struck by
Gladstone’s luck in being able to fit his whole career into the long years of mostly unbroken peace which followed Waterloo and without having to engage with the Boer War, let alone
1914–18 and the slaughter on the Somme. He was not made for war, not from want of courage or of
patriotism, but because the martial arts stirred in him a sense more of
waste than of excitement or admiration.