Gladstone: A Biography (32 page)

Between them they produced for Gladstone by late November 1853 what became known as one of the great state papers of the nineteenth century. Gladstone read it, interlaced with a report on
decimal coinage, some of Horace Walpole’s letters and a few chapters of Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
, at Hawarden on 30 November. The two central recommendations were
competitive examinations and a central board for recruitment to all the home departments. He reacted with enthusiasm to both, although later he became somewhat impatient with signs of tactical
backsliding on the part of the authors. They thought it wiser to exclude (for the moment at any rate) the Treasury satraps of Customs and Excise and the Inland Revenue, although as Gladstone
correctly pointed out it was in precisely these two departments that the largest number of posts lay. And they also suggested that, between those who had passed the examination, the First Lord of
the Treasury should be allowed to choose after giving ‘due weight to the recommendations of his colleagues and also of his Parliamentary supporters’. As Gladstone again pointed out,
this would be to pretend that patronage had been slain while allowing it to wriggle back. ‘Pray let this disappear,’ he magisterially wrote to Trevelyan on 3 December.

Yet Trevelyan and Northcote had a more lively sense of political
realities than did the famous politician at the head of their department. The Queen grumbled and, unusually
in this phase, was not brought into line on Gladstone’s side by Prince Albert. ‘Where is the application of the principle of public competitions to stop?’
⁴
she asked apprehensively, perhaps influenced by Lord John Russell’s view that the ‘harshly republican scheme was as hostile to the monarchy as it was to the
aristocracy’. Russell’s extreme Whiggery made him fairly indifferent, except for purposes of argument, to the former aspect, but he certainly cared about the latter, and proved a jagged
rock of opposition which Gladstone could not bulldoze out of the way. On 20 January 1854 he wrote Russell a powerfully argued, but not wholly tactful, letter which concluded with a 115-word
sentence. In it he claimed that the Glorious Revolution had marked the change from prerogative to patronage, that since then there had been a movement from bribery to influence, and that this was a
process which must continue. This was peculiarly rash ground, for Russell regarded himself as the keeper of the bones of the Glorious Revolution and also believed that, occasional limited
extensions of the franchise apart, it had settled constitutional issues for all time. It did not require upsetting by the moralizing son of a Liverpool merchant, with dangerous religious
enthusiasms and no adequate respect for the Whig cousinage. His reply to Gladstone’s ten pages was dismissively brief: ‘I hope no change will be made, and I certainly must protest
against it.’
⁵

Gladstone’s error was that he did not make an obvious deal with Russell, who was currently engaged in promoting one of his Reform Bills. It found little favour within the government, let
alone on the other side of the House of Commons. Palmerston was opposed to the extent of threatening to resign, Aberdeen was lukewarm, and Gladstone wholly unhelpful. He deployed a ‘too
clever by half’ argument, ‘This is
my
contribution to parliamentary reform,’ he wrote on 3 January to Graham (First Lord of the Admiralty) about his civil service plans. It
would have been much more sensible for Gladstone to have moved more quickly to the position on the franchise which he was to occupy within less than a decade and to have at least tempted Russell
with a pact of mutual support for each other’s pet reforms.

As it was, Gladstone ran into a wall of Whig hostility at the crucial Cabinet on 26 January. The Peelites were mostly content to go along with what he wanted, although Graham was cool, but with
the exception of Granville the Whig half of the coalition, which provided most of the votes in the House of Commons, was unanimously hostile. As a result
1854 was much less
productive for civil service than for Oxford reform. It was not until after the fall of the Aberdeen government that Gladstone was able to make his trio of notable parliamentary speeches on open
entry to the public services, two in the summer of 1855 and one in the spring of 1856. Nevertheless the seed which he had sown in 1853 was an unsuppressible one which, like so many other burgeoning
mid-Victorian reforms, came to full fruition during his first and most fructuous 1868–74 premiership. This 1854 dispute illustrated the capacity for mutual irritation between Gladstone and
Russell, and the incompatibility of both provenance and instinctive political attitudes which lay behind it. It was within a year to prove fatal to the Aberdeen government.

On 27 March 1854 Russell had written pointedly but with apparent good humour to Gladstone, ‘I fear my mind is exclusively occupied with the war [which Britain and France had that day
declared, an event unnoticed in Gladstone’s diaries] and the Reform Bill, and yours with University reform.’
⁶
On 25 May, however, when
Gladstone had unavailingly wound up a debate on a maladroit second attempt by Russell to resolve the Rothschild difficulty about the parliamentary oath, he petulantly wrote: ‘H of C
4½–7½. Spoke 1h. & voted 247:251 on Lord J R’s Oaths Bill: wh Bill was from the first a great mistake of his and his only.’
⁷
(For a great orator reluctantly to be persuaded to give succour to a disapproved-of colleague and to fail to bring it off is no doubt an almost perfect recipe for
exasperation.) Then the row about the Commissioner of Woods and Forests gathered a momentum of bitterness over the summer, and at church on Christmas morning Gladstone put first among his thoughts
and self-reproaches his worry about his ‘cabinet feud’ with Russell.

The two leading Whigs, Russell and Palmerston, badly though they often got on with each other, were united in finding the Peelite elements in the government inadequately bellicose. And with
Aberdeen Prime Minister, Gladstone Chancellor, Graham First Lord of the Admiralty, Sidney Herbert Secretary at War, and Newcastle Secretary for War and the Colonies (under the curious split system
which prevailed until 1857) the Peelites were very powerfully placed to obstruct a war. Palmerston resigned in December 1853 against the dilatory approach to support for Turkey, and was persuaded
by Aberdeen to remain as Home Secretary only on terms which pushed the Prime Minister in a more warlike direction than he would have wished.

After the war began, however, it was Russell who made the more
trouble. The Whigs in 1852, like the Tories in the Asquith coalition of 1915, had accepted an unsatisfactory
set of portfolios and retaliated for their own bad bargaining by complaining about the lack of adequate war direction. Russell, with a presumption much exceeding that of Bonar Law just over sixty
years later, thought that he ought to be Prime Minister, and indeed believed that he had some sort of assurance from Aberdeen that he would soon make way for him. (‘Soon’, however, as
Eden found with Churchill and Erhard with Adenauer, is not a precise contractual term.) Russell also thought that Palmerston should replace Newcastle.

These beliefs led to growing acrimony. Already by 15 February 1854, a Cabinet dinner lasted from 7.45 p.m. to 2.15 in the morning, and it was not conviviality which accounted for the lateness of
the break-up. By December of that year relations were in a permanent state of bitterness, with Russell threatening to resign on the 4th, another dreadful Cabinet dinner on the 6th, and ‘a
childish scene’ at a Saturday Cabinet on the 9th. Russell’s resignation remained in a state of suspended animation over the brief Christmas holidays. When Parliament met on 23 January
1855 Newcastle had decided to resign out of honourable guilt.

Roebuck, Radical MP for Sheffield, had put down a motion for a parliamentary committee of enquiry into the war, and Russell announced that he could not conscientiously oppose the motion and must
therefore reactivate his suspended resignation. Palmerston incongruously took Russell’s place as leader of the House of Commons, but made a very weak reply to Roebuck. He was no better as an
‘air-raid shelter’ for Aberdeen than Churchill was accused of being for Chamberlain in May 1940. Gladstone tried harder three days later, and denounced the presumptions of the
legislature in trying by means of the committee of enquiry to invade the functions of the executive. But denouncing the jury is rarely a wise way of winning a verdict, and the House voted by the
massive majority of 304 to 148 for Roebuck. That was the end of the Aberdeen government. The Cabinet met only for ‘friendly adieus’ on the following day, 30 January.

This collapse did not necessarily mean even the temporary end of office for Gladstone. The uncertainty which resulted from the fall of the Aberdeen coalition was extreme even by the standards of
instability which marked the whole period between the end of the Peel government in 1846 and the accession of Gladstone himself to the premiership in 1868. There were at least three possible Prime
Ministers, all of whom
were prepared, perhaps even eager, to keep Gladstone as Chancellor. Gladstone, however, with an uncanny stubbornness, attached himself to the one
manifestly impossible solution, which was the return of Aberdeen to 10 Downing Street, and did so with a sophistical ingenuity which must have infuriated nearly every other player in the game, and
ended up by generally damaging his own reputation and ensuring an ignominious end for the Peelites as a collective and influential group.

During the four weeks between the farewell meeting of the Aberdeen Cabinet and Gladstone’s surrendering the seals of the Exchequer to George Cornewall Lewis on 28 February, almost every
combination was mooted or tried, and Gladstone (and some others as well) displayed a skill in thinking up difficulties which was a fine tribute to his resourcefulness. It was perhaps less of a
tribute to his constructive statesmanship in the middle of a war which, while not threatening Britain’s survival, was nonetheless taking a severe toll of men and reputations.

First Palmerston came to Gladstone with a proposition that they should both serve under Derby, for whom the Queen had sent. Palmerston was to lead in the Commons and Gladstone was to remain at
the Exchequer. This meant Disraeli giving up both the posts which he had occupied in the 1852 government. He was however willing to make the sacrifice. Sidney Herbert for the Peelites was also to
be included, but not Graham. Gladstone made Graham’s exclusion a sticking point, and as Palmerston was not very keen, really wanting the foreign secretaryship or indeed the premiership for
himself, and Derby, who never had much thrust to office, was not enthusiastic either, the combination collapsed. Disraeli thought at the time that this was a major missed opportunity, and Gladstone
came to think so later. Certainly it was the last real chance of Conservative reunion (although that might have been more coherently achieved without Palmerston), and as Gladstone subsequently told
the Queen that ‘she would have little peace or comfort in these matters [stable ministries] until parliament should have returned to its old organisation in two political
parties’,
⁸
he might have done more to bring it about.

Next, Gladstone went to see Lord Lansdowne at the latter’s request. Lansdowne, then aged seventy-four, was a trusted and moderate Whig who had served in Cabinets since that of Grenville in
1806. He might have made an acceptable although hardly dynamic Prime Minister, and had been sounded out at Windsor that morning. Gladstone and he then made a leisurely
tour d’horizon
in which Gladstone poured cold water on the possibilities first of Russell, then of Palmerston and finally of
Clarendon as Prime Minister, and said that of the Whigs Lansdowne
himself would be the best. Lansdowne then asked him if he would continue as Chancellor under him. If so, he would persevere. If not, not. Gladstone in effect said no. He was disillusioned with the
previous coalition, and was not prepared to try it again under anyone other than Aberdeen. He thought it would be better if Lansdowne tried to form an homogeneous Whig government. As Lansdowne had
already excluded this course it was not a constructive suggestion. Forty-two years later Gladstone more than endorsed this view. It was his second error in two days. ‘This I think was one of
the greatest, perhaps the greatest, errors I ever committed.’
⁹

On the following day Russell came to see Gladstone. He too had been asked if he could form a government. Would Gladstone continue in his office under him? Gladstone recorded Russell’s tone
as ‘low and doubtful’. It cannot have been made any less so by Gladstone’s refusal, rejecting the suggestion that he might take time to think. So, in three days’ short work,
Gladstone had in effect achieved by default the solution he least wanted, which was to make Palmerston Prime Minister, an outcome for which public opinion appeared to be clamouring. Palmerston
received the commission on 4 February and came to see Gladstone that afternoon, once again offering the Exchequer. Once again Gladstone declined, but not perhaps as definitely as he had done with
Russell. The following day was spent in a scurry of consultation among the Peelites, the process made more complicated by Graham being ill in bed. But they were in a greater difficulty than that.
They tried to hold the line that they would not serve in a Cabinet which did not include Aberdeen, preferably as Prime Minister, but if not at least as a member and as a guarantor of a sensible
attitude (that is, not too bellicose) to ‘war and peace’.

Aberdeen himself did not agree with them. He knew that his return to the premiership was out of the question, and he had no intention of serving in a subordinate capacity under Palmerston. But
he believed that the others ought to accept office. The matter then came to turn on the extent to which Aberdeen would endorse the government, although not a member of it, in the House of Lords. On
the Monday (5 February) he would commit himself only to expressing the hope that ‘it might do right’. Gladstone gasped with relief. He had a new excuse for standing out, and that day
closed with the Peelites still refusing. On the Tuesday, however, Aberdeen said that he would endorse, and the little band publicly changed their mind and agreed to join. Gladstone wrote of
their submission in almost biblical terms: ‘I had a message from P[almerston] that he would answer me but at night I went up to him.’
¹⁰
He spoke in equally emotional terms to Aberdeen – ‘. . . I hoped our conduct and reliance on him would tend to his eminence and honour’ – and said,
‘you are not to be of the Cabinet, but you are to be its tutelary deity’.
¹¹
Gladstone remained as Chancellor, Graham as First Lord, and
Herbert as Colonial Secretary.