Gladstone: A Biography (41 page)

Whether this easy passage helped Gladstone to settle in to a Cabinet headed by two Whigs is not clear. On Saturday, 6 August, such was the contrast between bursts of strenuousness and long
periods of leisure which then made up the pattern of the parliamentary time-table, after attending and speaking in the House of Commons from noon to 1.30 p.m., he spent the afternoon in a Cabinet
and wrote, a little dismissively: ‘but the Cabinet is now . . . just a place for conversation’.
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Four days later, however, at the traditional ministerial Fish Dinner in the Trafalgar Tavern at Greenwich he much moved the audience and even Palmerston himself with the felicity
of his sudden toast to the Prime Minister. But by 31 August he was writing a bitter letter of complaint to Argyll (who had missed the last two Cabinets) about the behaviour on the Italian question
of Palmerston and even more so of Russell,
⁵³
ironically in view of his own future handling of this relationship, calling in aid the Foreign
Secretary’s brusqueness to the Queen ‘as a sovereign and a woman’:

Nevertheless he had been much occupied before his departure from London on 18 August with moving into 11 Downing Street, and did not therefore seem afflicted with the uncomfortable restlessness
which had led him after only a few weeks to resign (in 1855) from the previous Palmerston government. The removal was far from complete. He kept his other No. 11 in Carlton House Terrace, left his
London books there, continued to use it as a base for his seven children, and quite often for himself and/or his wife as well. His letters over the next six years were just as likely to be
addressed from one as from the other. This was hardly economical. Mid-Victorian prosperity, which as a leading member of the Peel and Aberdeen governments he had done as much as anyone to bring
about, was obviously and justly benefiting him. This was in contrast with the years of Oak Farm worry and austerity on the one side and of old-age apprehensiveness and even a combination of
stinginess and willingness to sponge which beset him in his years of greatest fame.

His 1859 autumn was marked by two non-Oxford academic honours. On All Saints Day, together with his Cabinet colleague Sir George Grey, his brother-in-law Lyttelton and the ubiquitous Bishop
Wilberforce, he received a Cambridge honorary degree. In December he paid a five-day visit to Edinburgh which resulted in his being pre-elected as Rector by the University Court there, although he
was not installed or called upon to deliver his rectorial address until the following April. He then spoke on ‘The Work of Universities’ and survived ‘a crowded and kind
Assembly’ (in the Music Room in George Street) without riot or egg-pelting.

By far his most pregnant encounter of that autumn, however, was Richard Cobden’s visit to Hawarden on 12–13 September. Cobden, then aged fifty-five, had been returned, unopposed and
in his absence in America, for Rochdale at the spring general election, having been out of the House since he lost his West Riding of Yorkshire seat in the Palmerston triumph of 1857. He was still
away for the Willis’s Rooms meeting, but he was greeted at Liverpool on 29 June by letters from both Palmerston and Lord John Russell (for whom he had a much higher regard) pressing him to
join the new government as President of the Board of Trade. He declined, on the ground that his opposition to Palmerston’s policies had been so complete that suddenly to accept
office under him would be ridiculous. But his long and good-humoured interview of refusal with Palmerston a day or two later left no bitterness and indeed substantially improved their
relations. It also left Cobden with a slight sense of guilt towards the government and of futility about his future purpose in Parliament. Palmerston had shrewdly asked him how he expected to
influence foreign policy in particular if he could never join a government.

Cobden had decided to spend the winter of 1859–60 in Paris, partly for reasons of economy, a course few Englishmen would today contemplate for that reason. While there he sought to occupy
himself by engaging in commercial discussions with the French. In this way he might assuage his own sense of frustration, give some help to the government from the outside, and promote not only
free trade but the relaxation of military tension. To fulfil this role, however, he needed a strong patron within the British government, and Gladstone offered the best prospect. As Chancellor he
obviously held a key office. He had a proven record on free trade. Already coming under pressure for heavy armament expenditure against the French, not only from the Prime Minister, but also from
his old friend Herbert as Secretary of State for War and from the Duke of Somerset as First Lord of the Admiralty, he had a strong motive for wishing to improve London–Paris relations. And he
was also developing an affinity with Radicals. Once he had made his Conservative break, Gladstone was in many ways more at home with the pacifism, the anti-protectionism and the moral-force
politics of the left of the Liberal party than he was with the more casual and less ideological outlook of the Whigs. This paradox was of much importance for British politics in the last forty
years of the nineteenth century.

Of more immediate impact, however, was the consequence that when Cobden wrote to Gladstone from Manchester on 5 September suggesting that he might ‘run over’ to Hawarden in the
following week and have ‘a little talk’ about trade with France,
⁴
Gladstone responded with alacrity. Although he was only four days into
his Penmaenmawr holiday he arranged to return to Hawarden and receive Cobden on the following Monday and Tuesday. His diary entries expressed satisfaction with the expenditure of time and the
sacrifice of holiday. For the Monday: ‘Mr Cobden arrived. Several hours walk and talk with him.’ Then later that evening: ‘Conv. . . . with Mr C. on Currency.’ And on the
Tuesday morning, with more commitment: ‘Further conv. with Mr Cobden on Tariffs and relations with France. We are closely and warmly agreed.’
⁵
Gladstone saw him off at 11.00 and returned that afternoon to Penmaenmawr and a new burst of sea-bathing and work on Tennyson.

Cobden’s skill lay in presenting the matter to Gladstone in terms which were by no means exclusively commercial. Obviously the freeing of trade with Britain’s most important
neighbour was in itself a highly desirable objective. But Cobden also argued for it as a corrective to the mounting fear of war with France (soon to be fortified by Napoleon III’s annexation
of Savoy and Nice) which was a feature of that autumn, and hence offered some protection for the Chancellor against the clamour from his colleagues for increased expenditure on armaments. The
difficult point for both of them was that a bilateral commercial treaty was not wholly compatible with the strict doctrine of generalized free trade. Yet such bilateralism was the only hope of
making progress with the
étatiste
French government, even more true to the spirit of Colbert in 1859 than it is today. Gladstone and Cobden agreed that this difficulty could be got
round by allowing an asymmetry in the treaty. The British would make their concessions apply to other countries as well as to France, while the French could refrain from benefiting the Eskimos or
even the Austrians in order to match a concession to the British. Thus was a British doctrine of non-discrimination maintained in theory, although in practice the concessions were directed towards
French needs: it would have been difficult to argue that the heavy cut in wine duties was likely to be of much benefit to Swedes or Canadians, or that fine gloves, on which there was another
important reduction, were at that time likely to flood in from Brazil. When the negotiations were complete Cobden felt it necessary to write defensively to Bright on this point: ‘I will
undertake that there is not a syllable on our side of the treaty which is inconsistent with the soundest principles of free trade.’
⁶

In his anti-armament struggle Gladstone needed every help that he could get that autumn. Not only was there an expensive little war going on with China. His greatest friend in the government,
Sidney Herbert, who however in the two years before his premature death in 1861 was too much of a victim of the widespread ministerial disease of departmentalitis to be much of a Cabinet ally,
wanted to raise battalions of volunteers, fortify Portsmouth and Plymouth, and scatter Martello towers over much of the south of England. Somerset, as First Lord, wanted new ‘line of
battle’ ships as well as the iron-plating of as many existing ones as possible.
⁵⁴
And they both of them had the enthusiastic
and
even hectoring support of the Prime Minister, while Gladstone before his 1860 budget did not have quite the prestige that he was to enjoy immediately after it.

On 15 December Gladstone received a formidable letter from Palmerston. ‘Sidney Herbert has asked me to summon a Cabinet for tomorrow that we may come to a decision on the Fortification
Question,’ it menacingly began, ‘and I am most anxious that the arrangements which he has proposed should be adopted.’ He then proceeded to paint a nightmare scenario.

£10 or £11 million, he concluded, needed to be spent on fortifications, but there was no need for this to be a direct burden on the budget. It could be financed by
a loan, payable over twenty or thirty years.

‘The objection to borrowing for Expenditure is Stronger for Individuals than for a Nation,’ he cheerfully continued. But his conclusion was less benign:

Not only did this missive show Palmerston as addicted to the emotive use of capital letters as was his Sovereign; it also amounted to as great a
mixture of
siren song and intimidating barrage as has ever been deployed by a Prime Minister against his Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Gladstone, however, was proof against even such a bombardment. The French Emperor might or might not have been able to take Portsmouth or Plymouth but he would have found it much more difficult
to overwhelm Gladstone. The Chancellor had the paradoxical advantage that, having been at Hawarden until specially summoned, he had read neither the Prime Minister’s letter nor Sidney
Herbert’s paper on fortifications until he arrived at 10 Downing Street as the Cabinet began. He therefore had a good stalling position. His order of proceedings for the day was to travel up
from Chester, to attend the Cabinet from 3.30 to 6.00 p.m., to seek sustenance of various sorts from Lord Aberdeen, the Duke of Newcastle and Marion Summerhayes, to dine with Sidney Herbert, whose
paper together with the history of Pitt’s aborted plan of 1785–6 for fortifying the dockyards he had belatedly read, and then to go to bed complaining of being ‘much oppressed
with cough and cold’. The next day he consequently rose late and wrote only fourteen letters, including ones to the Prime Minister, Herbert and Russell, as well as conducting three interviews
before departing for Hawarden and arriving there late at night and ‘in bitter frost’ for two weeks of Christmas holiday.

The delaying tactics were effective. Palmerston in January 1860 never managed again to bring matters to the boil, and on 7 February, three days before his great budget, Gladstone, choosing his
time well, wrote a dismissal of Palmerston’s December proposal which was as intransigent as Palmerston had been thrusting, and, for once, a good deal more succinct. ‘My mind is made up
and to propose any loan for Fortifications would be on my part, with the view I entertain, a betrayal of my public duty.’
⁸
Palmerston was left
to cleave for the shore: ‘I have received your letter of this Morning. We will let the Question about the Fortifications rest for the present as there will be Room left for them in your
Budget.’
⁹

This budget had been due on 6 February, the date having been wisely chosen to get through the French treaty, which Cobden had succeeded in negotiating to the point of signature on 23 January,
before the rats could get at it. A four-day postponement had, however, been made necessary by Gladstone’s ill health. He had been intermittently bronchial since his 16 December complaint of
‘cough and cold’, thereby once again disproving the view that vast energy (plus, as it turned out, exceptional longevity) is necessarily connected with robust health. He had spent most
of New Year’s Day in bed, and although he functioned
more or less normally during January he was severely stricken down on 3 February. That day was taken up with an
almost endless series of special-interest deputations, which were in favour of the French treaty in general and cumulatively against it in almost every particular, and by the next morning
(Saturday) he was worse and had to submit to strenuous remedies. ‘Sent for Dr Fergusson early who found the right lung somewhat congested: he gave me antimonial wine, James’s powder in
pills, more mustard plasters, and at night a hot sponge coating round the chest wh proved very powerful.’
¹⁰
Even so Gladstone accepted on the
Sunday that the budget on the Monday was ‘physically impossible’.