Gladstone: A Biography (42 page)

It was then arranged by Palmerston (as leader of the House of Commons) that the budget statement should be on the following Friday, and be preceded by a Cabinet on the Thursday, which with
apparent consideration was to take place in Gladstone’s house. But Gladstone had had enough of pre-budget Cabinets. A week before he had recorded: ‘Cabinet 1–4¼: very
stiff. I carried my remissions [of customs and excise duties] but the Depts. carried their great Estimates.’
¹¹
And Palmerston, behind his
consideration, was clearly anxious for some reopening. ‘Some of our Colleagues’, he wrote, ‘wish to have more discussion and Explanation about the arrangements, and also to
endeavour to come to an Understanding about the Fortification Question upon which, like me, they have a very strong Feeling.’
¹²
Gladstone was
not so easily caught. His reply, containing the passage rejecting a fortifications loan which has already been cited, made it clear that Friday was as much as he could manage (‘I shall have
no strength either of heart or lungs to spare’), and simply allowed the Cabinet to take place in his house but also in his absence. He remained firmly upstairs, even though he had been out
for a recuperative drive on the previous day.

The ordeal to which he was about to subject himself was indeed a testing one. It was the third-longest speech that even he ever made in Parliament, and the postponement had inevitably (and
perhaps even deliberately) increased the tension.
The Times
, a little mockingly, said that the question of the day had become ‘How is Mr Gladstone’s throat?’ and suggested
it was ‘just a little ridiculous that all Europe should hold its breath because an English gentleman cannot make an oration in his best manner’. Ridiculous maybe, but also flattering to
Gladstone, to the House of Commons and to Britain. It is some time since the chancelleries of Europe hung upon a British budget speech.

Of the fateful day itself Gladstone wrote: ‘Secs. and Dr Fergusson as usual. Had to make changes in figures & finished all up. H of C at 4¼.
Spoke 5–9
without great exhaustion: aided by a great stock of egg and wine. Thank God. Home at 11. . . . This was themost arduous operation I had ever had in Parliament.’
¹³

The speech filled sixty-one columns of Hansard, as against seventy-two for his 1853 triumph. But the impact was at least as strong, although the speech, in cold print and after nearly a century
and a half, is much less impressive. In 1853 he took fiscal themes and beat them into a batter of high oratory, historical continuity and quasi-philosophical coherence. In 1860 he took fiscal
themes and, over four hours, presented them, persuasively but often pedestrianly, as fiscal themes. His argument was not bureaucratic. It is difficult to believe that any significant part of the
vast speech could have been written by anyone but himself. It was too idiosyncratic and also too ingenuous for any hand but his own to have been seriously at work.

His long panegyric in favour of French wine (in support of his reduction in the duty from five shillings and tenpence to three shillings a gallon), for instance, is a strong example of this.
What Treasury official would have written thus for Gladstone?

There came a most affecting passage in which he seemed to be arguing for fine growths as an aid to medicine:

When on some naval visit he had been pressed to sample the wine supplied to a sailor after surgery, ‘it was with great difficulty I succeeded in accomplishing the
operation’.
¹⁴

In spite of this vinous excursion, and of many other
obiter dicta
(‘All those of the labouring classes who are in good circumstances are large consumers of currants,’ he
suddenly announced), the speech, compared with its famous predecessor, remained lacking in high flights of Gladstonian oratory. Over a third of its mammoth length was devoted to a detailed
justification of the commercial treaty with France, and although the general concept of the treaty, ‘a great European operation’, as he wrote of it to his wife, was noble enough, its
individual provisions were not conducive to rhetoric. Nonetheless every point was argued with a mixture of force and simplicity. He loved to prove a point to his own satisfaction with arguments
which were sometimes as naive as they were original. He certainly revealed an extraordinary state of strangulated trade between Britain and its nearest and most populous neighbour. In 1858 total
British exports of manufactured goods were £130 million, of which no more than £688,000, barely a half of 1 per cent, went to France. And of that £688,000 nearly a third was
accounted for by Cashmere shawls – that is, was merely an entrepôt trade from India.

He also laid down a governing principle for his finance which had the advantage that it freed him from a simple ‘tea and sugar’ approach to fairness towards the poor and which he
stated straightforwardly as follows:

The reductions in duty arising from the French treaty amounted to about £1.4 million. On top of these Gladstone proposed a further series of reductions, most of
which, apart from timber, were fairly minor, but which had the combined effect of reducing the number of items on which duty was levied from the thousand or so which prevailed at the beginning of
the main Peel government and the 419 which were still there in early 1859 to 48, of which only 15 produced significant amounts of revenue. These changes cost nearly another £1 million. All
this might, give or take a small amount, have been financed out of a currently occurring fortuitous reduction of debt interest charges, known as the cessation of the long annuities.

Gladstone, however, decided to make two further changes, one in one direction and one in the other. He raised the rate of income tax by another penny, which brought in about £½
million. And he again did it in an admonitory way. Public expenditure at the time of his 1853 budget was approximately £52 million. In the seven years between this and his second budget it
had risen to around £70 million, a rate of increase totally disproportionate to the growth in national wealth, rapid although that had been. If this disproportionate growth had been avoided
it would have been possible to have dispensed entirely with the income tax, the hope of which Gladstone had indeed held out in 1853. The fact that this had not happened he regarded as in some sense
the collective responsibility of the prosperous classes, and he was right to the extent that they enjoyed the still relatively rare privilege of the vote and were the main formulators of a climate
of opinion which had permitted the increase. It was therefore just, even desirable, that they should pay for the laxity which they had encouraged. Income tax went up from ninepence to tenpence in
the pound.

The second change, although it was a remission and not an increased imposition, proved much more controversial. This was the repeal of the paper duties, at a cost of about £1 million.
Gladstone produced a list of sixty-nine trades, from the manufacture of artificial limbs to shipbuilding, which he claimed would benefit marginally from the change. It would also help rural life,
for ‘where there are streams, where there are villages, where there is pure and good air and tolerable access, there are the places in which paper manufacture tends to establish
itself’. But overwhelmingly the impact of the change would be on the ability to produce cheap newspapers and cheap books. It would amount to the removal of a tax on popular knowledge. And
events were unmistakably to show that the change (which was not in fact implemented for another
year) had a most powerful effect on the shape of the newspaper market.
The
Times
never again held the position of the largest-selling English newspaper. Furthermore there was a substantial (although not permanent) shift from London to the provincial cities as centres
of newspaper production. Hitherto there had been little of substance published in England (Scotland had an indigenous press) outside the capital. By 1864 the circulation of the provincials was
nearly twice that of the London dailies.

Neither the force of Gladstone’s arguments nor the attraction of these likely developments was sufficient to generate anything approaching unanimous Cabinet enthusiasm for the repeal of
the paper duties. Gladstone thought that he had with him Russell, Argyll, Milner Gibson (with whom more than anyone else he agreed at this time, although – or because – Gibson was
commonly considered the most Radical member), Newcastle, Granville and, maybe, the Lord Chancellor (Campbell). Of a Cabinet total of fifteen, that was hardly a commanding majority. And among the
others were not only Gladstone’s closest friend Herbert and his other Peelite ‘ally’ Cardwell, but the Prime Minister as well. Palmerston was a strong minister on his own subjects
and a strong personality, but he was not exactly a strong Prime Minister. He went his own way, and allowed others, notably Russell and Gladstone, to go theirs, rather than attempting to co-ordinate
the whole work of the government. Gladstone contrasted him with Peel in this respect. In Peel’s government a minister always opened an issue with the Prime Minister before he took it to
Cabinet. In Palmerston’s this was not the habit. Ministers went straight to Cabinet, and, if the Prime Minister did not agree with them, hoped to outflank him there. Nevertheless, not to have
the Prime Minister on his side was for a Chancellor making an important and controversial taxation change a grave source of weakness. And, although it was a matter of remission and not of
imposition, the change was controversial both because the encouragement of a popular press was regarded by many as dangerously subversive and because many of his colleagues would much rather have
spent the £1 million on fortifications and ironclads.

The changes, although announced in a single unified budget, still had to be implemented in separate individual bills. Therefore, despite Gladstone riding temporarily high immediately after the
budget, and securing its approval on 24 February after a successful winding-up speech and with a majority of 116, far bigger than the government’s normal strength, that was far from being the
end of the matter. Palmerston had
plenty of opportunities for reopening. At the end of March he began an epistolary bombardment which continued intermittently for several
months, and on 5 May Gladstone recorded: ‘Cabinet 1¼–4¼. Lord P spoke ¾ hour agt. Paper Duties Bill! I had to reply: Cabinet agt. him except a
few.’
¹⁶
This last comment of Gladstone’s was probably over-sanguine, and the opposition in the Cabinet communicated itself to
Parliament. When this bill was taken in the Commons three days later he found himself speaking ‘to a very adverse House’, and even worse he found that his great majority of 116 had
shrunk to one of 9.

This obviously left him and the bill very exposed before the Lords, who were far from enthusiastic about cheap newspapers. The position was made worse by Palmerston writing to the Queen one of
the most disloyal letters which can ever have been sent to the Sovereign by a Prime Minister about a proposal of his Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Lords, he informed her, ‘would perform a
good public service’ if they threw out the bill. She, in turn, described such an event to her uncle Leopold of the Belgians as ‘
as a very good thing
’. These letters were
not made public at the time, but the feeling which led to their being written of course communicated itself to the political classes, helped to embolden the Lords to a rejection by 193 to 104, and
was confirmed by the unconcealed public joy with which Lady Palmerston, witnessing the Lords’ debate, received the news of a defeat for her husband’s government. Gladstone then tried
ineffectively to secure some strong government reaction to what he described as this
coup d’état
by the Lords. The strength of the phrase stemmed from his belief that the Lords
by throwing out a financial measure on second reading had upset a constitutional understanding that had prevailed since the seventeenth century. But the strength of his phrase was not matched by
any general strength of Cabinet reaction. Only Russell and Gibson backed him at all fully. Eventually, in early July, some mild resolutions of protest were introduced and carried. Palmerston
introduced them and Gladstone spoke later in the debate. As they spoke in almost directly opposite senses this added a considerable element of farce to the proceedings.