Gladstone: A Biography (39 page)

That division, which took place after three nights of debate on a Liberal amendment moved by the then almost juvenile Marquess of Hartington, put the Conservatives out for another seven years.
It resulted in the defeat of the government by thirteen and immediate resignation. That result was achieved against the vote of the man who was to be both the greatest beneficiary and the greatest
ornament of the new political pattern thus created.

Gladstone’s was a controversial but a quiet vote. Almost all the other big parliamentary guns – Palmerston, Disraeli, Russell, Bright, Sidney Herbert, Graham, Roebuck, Cornewall
Lewis – fired off during the three nights. Gladstone did not, although abstinence from a major debate was unusual on his part. He merely slipped unobtrusively into the lobby and cast his vote
for the Conservative government. The remaining prominent Peelites in the House of Commons, Herbert, Graham, Cardwell, all voted the other way. Gladstone no doubt felt the separation keenly,
particularly from Herbert. It was less than sixteen months since they had jointly expressed ‘the fervent wish that in public life we might never part’. Gladstone was also subject to
some metaphorical jostling. Two days before the vote he recorded that he had seen Mrs Herbert, ‘who threatened me’.
⁶

In the case of anyone but Gladstone such behaviour would have seemed an almost certain indication that he was preparing rather shamefacedly to slip his old moorings, go back into full communion
with the Conservatives, and thereby hope to solve the problem of his need for office. In his case, however, such an interpretation bore no relation at all to either his
motivation or the way in which events turned out. He had rejected all the Derby–Disraeli overtures of 1858, and although he might in the meantime have become more aware of the futility of
politics without office, he had also, in his perpetual struggle to find an equilibrium point which enabled him to be anti-Disraeli without being pro-Palmerston (and vice versa), been moved a few
notches towards Palmerston. His preferred outcome after the election was a Derby–Palmerston coalition with Disraeli moved away from the leadership of the Commons without being given the
Foreign Office as a consolation. But that possibility disappeared at Willis’s Rooms and by the time he voted it must have been obvious to him that his vote was unlikely to help the government
to survive. So far from trimming for office he was indulging in another bout of Maynooth-style perversity, voting against his interest, against his friends, against his evolving beliefs, all out of
some sort of loyalty to the past.

Counterbalancing this was the fortunate fact that Gladstone by this stage in his life did not need to look after his own interests. His force was such that anyone endeavouring to form a stable
government wanted him in it. This was perfectly illustrated by the events of the few days after the Commons vote and by the sense of slightly resented inevitability about the way in which Gladstone
emerged from them.

When Derby resigned the Queen presaged her foolish attempt twenty-one years later to keep Gladstone out in favour of Hartington by trying to get Granville, then young (only forty-four) as well
as benignly unabrasive, instead of either Palmerston or Russell. This attempt to consult her own preference rather than the political realities (it was surprising that the Prince Consort allowed
her to do it) would probably have foundered in any event, but it was most firmly blocked, not so much by Palmerston’s unwillingness to be number two, as by Russell’s determination not
to be number three. Up with the number-two position he was prepared to put, but not, as an ex-Prime Minister, with the number-three one. So, by Monday, 13 June, Palmerston was again Prime Minister,
and by late that night Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer. He would have accepted no other office.

Russell became Foreign Secretary, Cornewall Lewis, who had hoped to be Chancellor, Home Secretary, and Granville, deprived of his undeserved premiership, Lord President. Among the Peelites, who
always did well for office when they could be persuaded to take it, Gladstone was buttressed by Argyll as Lord Privy Seal, Herbert as Secretary of State for War, Newcastle as
Secretary of State for the Colonies and Cardwell as Chief Secretary for Ireland. Clarendon, who had been Foreign Secretary in the previous Palmerston administration and was to be so again under
Russell and then under Gladstone in the second half of the 1860s, was left out, which may have accounted for the bitterness of his wife’s comments on Gladstone’s return to the
Exchequer. Lady Clarendon complained that Gladstone had forced himself into his old job, thereby producing the effect of a ripple demotion among the Whigs (Lewis slipped to the Home Office and her
husband out altogether): ‘Why he who voted in the last division with the Derby ministry should not only be asked to join this one,
but be
allowed to choose his office
, I cannot
conceive or rather, I
can
conceive, for I know that it is his power of speaking. They want his tongue and they dread it in opposition.’
⁷

This was no doubt the principal reason why Palmerston wanted Gladstone. If he was not in, he devastated ministries from the outside. There was also a feeling that if the finances of the country
were to be decently run Gladstone had to be at the Treasury. He had made himself, despite having held the office only for one great budget, a second indifferent one and a third response to the
emergency of war, the indispensable benchmark for all nineteenth-century Chancellors of the Exchequer. At one level the last thing which Palmerston wanted was a moralizing, powerful and
cheese-paring Chancellor. He liked to spend money, particularly on extravagant fortifications of the south coast against the French, and he was bored with the economical approach to government. Yet
he knew that if he wanted his government to last (which it did for six and a half years and was brought to an end only by his own sudden but not premature death on the threshold of eighty-one) he
needed an economic discipline which was as firm as it was tiresome, and that if he was safely to pursue his own foreign and defence policy adventures he needed to be tethered to a post by a cord
which, while generous and even flexible, would not break under pressure. The only person capable of providing that post and cord was Gladstone, and the reason why Palmerston was a statesman and not
just a mountebank with dyed whiskers was that he had the underlying wisdom to see the need for this irksome discipline.

Palmerston therefore had more than adequate motive for wishing, slightly gloomily, to have Gladstone join him. Why did Gladstone, after
all his denunciations of
Palmerston’s deficiencies and his wholly unsatisfactory brief experience of office under him in the early months of 1855, wish to join the new Prime Minister? He recorded remarkably little in
the way of explanation.
⁵¹
When he declined or renounced office, in 1855, in 1857, in 1858, he wrote reams of explanation of his negative behaviour. When he
accepted it and had something positive to explain, he kept much more silent. ‘Italy’, his one-word explanation, was perhaps more aphoristic than comprehensively convincing. If this was
his dominating concern it was not clear why he had insisted on being Chancellor or nothing. Foreign Secretary or a less departmentally exhausting portfolio might have better served that interest.
His niece by marriage, Lucy Lyttelton, then only seventeen and later as Lady Frederick Cavendish the widow of the Phoenix Park tragedy and later still the eponym of the Cambridge college for mature
women students, provided in her diary a fine example of the mixture of loyalty and mystification with which Gladstone fans received the news of his acceptance of office under Palmerston:

His Oxford constituents were at least as mystified as was his niece and less inclined to balance their surprise with loyalty. A candidate, in the
shape of the Marquess of
Chandos, heir (if that was the right word) to the near-bankrupt second Duke of Buckingham and himself chairman of the London and North Western Railway, was immediately nominated against him, and
ran him fairly but not desperately close in the short contest which followed. On 1 July Gladstone was declared re-elected by 1050 votes to 859.

His resentment that the contest took place at all was however very considerable. It reduced him, in his diary, to almost total incomprehensibility. ‘I am sore about the Oxford Election;
but I try to keep myself in order: it disorganises and demoralises me, while such are the riddles of
my
“human nature” it also quickens mere devotional sensibility. O that I had
wings.
⁹
More important was the permanent disenchantment with the University as a constituency which followed from this contest. Before 1859, whatever
disputes or upheavals were involved, Gladstone was proud to be member for Oxford. After 1859, he wished that he had another, less presumptuous constituency. Palmerston, as in so many matters and
despite Gladstone’s expression of harmony in his letter to Heathcote, felt the reverse. ‘He is a dangerous man,’ he said in 1864. ‘Keep him in Oxford and he is partially
muzzled, but send him elsewhere, and he will run wild.’
¹⁰
As with a number of more important matters, Palmerston kept the undesirable at bay
for what was effectively his lifetime, but Gladstone’s parliamentary divorce from the University seat began in 1859. He visited Oxford only three times in his remaining six years of his
tenure as a burgess.

This was not because of an excessive preoccupation with Treasury and Cabinet business. Indeed his summer was much occupied with three distinctly non-governmental pursuits. In June and again in
August he gave generous bursts of sittings to G. F. Watts, already at forty-two an eminent and fashionable portrait painter. The result was two pictures, one of which is now in the National
Portrait Gallery and the other at Hawarden.

In July Gladstone read Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King
, which had just been published, and became fascinated for a time with the works of that great contemporary, one of the few
Victorians whose eminence equalled his own. For 18 July, the day on which in a speech lasting one hour and forty minutes he presented a provisional budget, he noted also that he had read Tennyson,
‘who has grasped me with a strong hand’.
¹¹
It was a remarkable tribute both to Tennyson’s fascination and to Gladstone’s
eclecticism. There must be few Chancellors of the Exchequer who have been grasped by the hand of a poet on budget day.

Gladstone then read or re-read Tennyson’s previous published collections,
Poems
from 1842,
The Princess
from 1842,
In Memoriam
from 1850 (it had
taken Tennyson seventeen years after Hallam’s death to produce this threnody) and
Maud
from 1855. In mid-August Gladstone wrote to Whitwell Elwin, the editor of the
Quarterly
Review
, suggesting that he might do a substantial critical article. ‘Will you let me try my hand on a review of Tennyson. . . . I have never been fanatical about him: but his late work
has laid hold of me with a power that I have not felt, I ought to say not suffered, for many years.’
¹²
Elwin having agreed, this became his
main holiday task. Penmaenmawr that year became as devoted to Tennyson as to sea-bathing.

The result was a highly readable 15,000-word essay.
¹³
The style is measured and orotund, with his praise couched in a schoolmasterly mode. But it
was less obscure and convoluted than many of his speeches and it bounded along with interest and verve. Tennyson was rebuked for the ‘somewhat heavy dreaminess’ of
Maud
,
‘the least popular, and probably the least worthy of popularity, amongst his more considerable works’. But it was essentially
Maud
’s militarism which offended Gladstone.
‘No more shall commerce be all in all, and Peace / Pipe on her pastoral hillock a languid note’ was a couplet which struck an unacceptable note for Gladstone, and he set about refuting
Tennyson’s apparent belief that war was an antidote to mammon-worship with a statistical intensity which would have been more appropriate to a Cobden speech against the Corn Laws than to a
piece of literary criticism. Nearly twenty years later Gladstone himself came to see this, and added a footnote apologizing that the ‘war-spirit in the outer world’ at the time of the
article had ‘dislocated my frame of mind, and disabled me from dealing even tolerably with the work as a work of imagination’.

In Memoriam
got much more approval, for not only was it ‘perhaps the richest oblation ever offered by the affection of friendship at the tomb of the departed’, but it also
contained an advance antidote to
Maud
in the lines ‘Ring out the thousand wars of old, / Ring in the thousand years of peace.’
Idylls of the King
, which had provoked the
article, did even better. The romance of the Arthurian legend and the character of the King himself, a sort of mixture of Hope-Scott and the Prince Consort (or ‘crowned curate’ as
George Meredith called him), made an instinctive appeal to Gladstone. ‘Wherever he [Arthur] appears,’ he wrote, ‘it is as the great pillar of the moral order, and the resplendent
top of human excellence.’ Towards Lancelot he was predictably more ambivalent, but the temptation and guilt of Guinevere fascinated him,
although also bringing out his
schoolmasterly mode. The following passage might almost have been written by one of Gladstone’s appointments as Warden of Glenalmond College: