Gladstone: A Biography (40 page)

The conclusion of the article was even more glowing: ‘Of it [the
Idylls
as a whole] we will say without fear, what we would not dare to say of any other recent work: that of itself
it raises the character and the hopes of the age and the country which have produced it, and that its author, by his own single strength, has made a sensible addition to the permanent wealth of
mankind.’ Even so it is doubtful whether Tennyson, who never forgot and rarely forgave a bad review and was riding very high at the time, Laureate (appointed by Russell) since 1850 and
earning much fame and money, regarded the praise for
In Memoriam
and
Idylls
as balancing the attack on
Maud
. It is always the criticism rather than the praise which writers
best remember. It was to be another twenty-four years before enough grass had grown for the joint Scandinavian cruise of Prime Minister and Poet Laureate to take place and to lead to Tennyson (who
had previously refused a baronetcy from both Gladstone and Disraeli) accepting a peerage from his sailing companion.

The third of Gladstone’s non-governmental pursuits of the first summer of his return to office began on 30 July 1859 when he met Marion Summerhayes. His first diary entry described her as
‘full in the highest degree both of interest and of beauty’.
¹⁴
He then saw her on twelve out of the next nineteen days, having been away
from London for three of the blank seven. She was his greatest infatuation since Elizabeth Collins in 1851. It was probably less physically urgent but more romantic than that previous obsession.
She became intermingled with his current fascination with Tennyson and the Arthurian legend. He read
The Princess
to her, and began to see her in a heavily charged pre-Raphaelite light. She
was an artists’ model, as well as a courtesan (not a unique combination), and his suggestion on their eighth day of acquaintance that he would commission a portrait of her by William Dyce was
therefore perhaps not as far-fetched as it at first sounds. Both she and Dyce seem to have responded with at least adequate enthusiasm, and the calmly madonna-like result now reposes in the
Aberdeen Art
Gallery under the title, at once demure and romantic, of
Lady with the
Coronet of Jasmine
.

Gladstone was then away for a month but during a brief return in mid-September there was a fresh burst of Miss Summerhayes, mostly with a richly romantic undertone. On the 16th he read Tennyson
with her for no less than four and a half hours, and was ‘much and variously moved’. On the 17th there was ‘a scene of rebuke [of and by whom?] not to be easily forgotten’,
and in the evening of the 19th after seeing her from 6.30 to 7.30 he brought her to Downing Street at 11.00 ‘for 1 hour, espy. to see the pictures’.
¹⁵
She remained a frequent subject of encounter throughout the autumn and winter, and continued (having in the meantime become Mrs Duke) to cross his path in varying
circumstances until 1867. In July 1861 he wrote: ‘Altogether she is no common specimen of womanhood,’
¹⁶
a remark well justified both by
her appearance in the Aberdeen Art Gallery and by her impact upon him.

Gladstone’s summer, his first in office for five years, was obviously not occupied entirely with Tennyson, Watts and Summerhayes. There is nonetheless a strong impression that he treated
his return to both Cabinet and Treasury more as though he were conferring a favour upon his colleagues than panting thankfully back to office under a Whig Prime Minister. It may be that the ease
with which he had stepped from the support of one government to a key job in its successful adversary (as pointedly expressed by Lady Clarendon) had gone temporarily to his head. The strict Whigs
were always an alien group to him. The superficial explanation was that he was not aristocratic enough, either in origin or in manner. But this is contradicted by the fact that, of the three dukes
in the government (Somerset at the Admiralty was the third), one (Newcastle) was his oldest political friend and another (Argyll) became his closest Cabinet ally. It was more that he was too
serious, too God-fearing and too resolutely nineteenth century to suit the general run of the Whig cousinage who liked to believe that they kept alive the easier-going spirit of the eighteenth
century. It is certainly almost impossible to imagine Gladstone in the coloured coats which went out with or before the accession of the Queen. However, in that Cabinet the only members to have
been born before 1800 were Campbell, the Lord Chancellor, who balanced it by having also been born the son of the Presbyterian minister in Cupar, Fife, and Russell, who while of impeccable lineage
was not exactly a ball of rakish fun. No doubt the spirit of the eighteenth century did not just depend upon date of birth, and was probably epitomized after Palmerston by Granville
(born in the year of Waterloo). But here again there is the confusion that, of all the ministers who came to serve under Gladstone, Granville was the one whom he most liked, who could
talk to him most persuasively, and who even managed to get Gladstone to write him letters which were almost jaunty rather than architectonic in style.

What is less open to dispute is that the heritage into which Gladstone was entering was a potentially glorious one. He became one of a triumvirate of power, with the first of the other members
twenty-five years and the second seventeen years his senior. Palmerston had many reservations about Gladstone, and was in (1864) to say: ‘Gladstone will soon have it all his own way; and
whenever he gets my place, we shall have strange doings.’
¹⁷
Yet by persuading him to accept office in 1859 Palmerston not only gave Gladstone
the opportunity to become both the longest continuously serving and most dominant Chancellor of the Exchequer of the century but also threw to him the future leadership of the newly founded Liberal
party. There was one unspoken proviso, which Gladstone just, but only just, managed to meet. This was that he should not resign. And although he claimed (as a joke) that he never attended a meeting
of the Palmerston Cabinet without the precaution of having a letter of resignation in his wallet, and although Palmerston claimed (as a joke) that he kept the fires of his Broadlands house burning
with the fuel of such letters from Gladstone, there is no record of them in the Palmerston archives (perhaps naturally if this was the use which was made of them), and, still more to the point,
Gladstone stayed put.

This was in spite of a good deal of provocation from Palmerston. The Prime Minister did not really want Gladstone to go, but he much enjoyed teasing him, and was determined that he should not
think himself either indispensable or omnipotent. ‘However great the loss to the Government by the retirement of Mr Gladstone,’ he wrote during the great fortifications dispute to the
Queen, to whom he was consistently disloyal about his Chancellor of the Exchequer, ‘it would be better to lose Mr Gladstone than to run the risk of losing Plymouth or Portsmouth.’ (To
the French rather than to the Tories, although the latter risk may also have been in Palmerston’s mind.)

This was good for Gladstone, who under a more nervous Prime Minister might have been inclined to overplay his hand and not to last the course. Their correspondence is interesting not so much for
the issues discussed as for the light that it sheds on the balance and interplay of their personalities. Palmerston was much neater in phrase than Gladstone. This applied as much when he wanted to
compliment his
Chancellor as when he wanted to controvert him. Thus, after Gladstone’s budget of February 1860, he wrote: ‘I hope you are none the worse for that
triumph on Friday for which the Government is much the better.’
¹⁸
It would have taken Gladstone three paragraphs to say this. The
seventy-five-year-old Prime Minister was much faster over the ground than was his forty-nine-year-old Chancellor. His jauntiness, which sometimes so irritated Gladstone, expressed itself in an
admirable pithiness. Gladstone, however, was a powerful if not a darting correspondent. He was courteous, firm, fearless, and formidable in argument. They were a remarkably dissimilar yet balanced
pair, each providing enough weight on the rope to ensure that neither fell into the mud and that the contest, never out of control, lasted long enough to see Palmerston out and to prepare Gladstone
for coming to full power.

Gladstone had been right to jump the way that he did in 1859. It was better to have Disraeli as an opponent across the floor of the House than as an enemy on his own side. And it was better to
have Palmerston as a chief with whom he could live, partly because he was so old and partly because he and Gladstone were so different that they could not be jealous of each other. It was a hostile
partnership, but it worked, or at least it creaked along for six and a half years.

G
OD’S
V
ICAR IN THE
T
REASURY

J
UST AS IT WAS
the budget of 1853 which made Gladstone’s first chancellorship, so it was that of 1860, and the negotiations for a commercial treaty with
France which led up to and determined much of the shape of it, which made his second one. For his first two or three months, as we have seen, he treated Exchequer matters with a curious casualness.
His July 1859 budget, which he presented four weeks after taking office, was ostensibly a holding operation, but in reality it was even more an almost insolent reassertion of financial
discipline.

Cornewall Lewis, like almost every previous Whig Chancellor of the century, had left the public finances in a fair state of laxity. Expenditure, mainly military, was 25 per cent up on the
pre-Crimean War level, but was not covered by a corresponding increase in revenue. Gladstone took over a £5 million deficit. He also inherited an excited military climate. There was a
colonial war with China. There was also war in the heart of Europe for the first time since 1815. That latter conflict on the plains of Lombardy was a war which, particularly as Britain was not
involved, Gladstone might have had his heart much more than in the Crimea. The battle of Magenta took place on 4 June and the battle of Solférino on the 24th. They were both victories for
the French (and the Italians) over the Austrians, as is demonstrated by the presence of these names on the street-maps of Paris and not of Vienna. What was more relevant to Gladstone, however, was
that these events provided a smokescreen of excitement behind which his budget passed with surprising ease and scant attention. It invites comparison with Neville Chamberlain’s
‘hidden’ 20 per cent devaluation of sterling in September 1939. There was so much else happening that it was neither widely noticed at the time nor much subsequently remembered.

Equally Gladstone’s 1859 budget contained a swingeing rise in taxation by the standards of those days. He put income tax up from fivepence to ninepence in the pound, the highest peacetime
rate that had then been experienced. And to compound the impact he stipulated that all the increase should be collected in the first half of the financial
year. He did it while
protesting that he disliked the tax, which should in general be reserved as an instrument of war. However, its greater use had been made necessary by the laxity with which expenditure had been
allowed to grow since he was last at the Exchequer.

This budget went through on what Asquith would have called ‘oiled castors’. For Saturday, 16 July, Gladstone recorded: ‘Cabinet 2–5½: two hours took my Budget
through,
pur et simple
.’
¹
The only grumbling appears to have come from Lewis, but as he had as Chancellor in 1855–8 been largely
responsible for the build-up of the deficit, and was also manifestly sour at not himself being again in that office, he did not cut much ice. Nor was the House of Commons difficult. There was no
great clash with Disraeli, and not even a division.