Gladstone: A Biography (45 page)

Russell indeed covered up for Gladstone with as much loyalty as could possibly have been expected, but he did write to him saying that ‘I think you went beyond the latitude which all
speakers must be allowed.’ Palmerston probably minded less. He was somewhat more pro-South, would like to have organized a mediation between Union and Confederacy and was never averse to
Gladstone getting himself into trouble and thus weakening his Cabinet influence.

Why did Gladstone do it? He was not in fact particularly pro-South. He was much more akin to a man of Massachusetts than to one of South Carolina. And it was not demagogy either, although many
of his fellow politicians who were free from temptation in this respect thought that he was making himself drunk with crowds. But the Tyneside crowds would mostly have preferred a more resolute
anti-slavery message.

Gladstone at this stage had some anti-American prejudices of a type prevalent in England for the hundred years between the United States beginning to do things on a big scale and the results of
this bigness turning the balance in the Second World War. He regarded them as a crude and braggart people. It never occurred to him to visit them at home. Yet he had become a surprisingly close
friend of Charles Sumner, the senator–orator from Massachusetts, who had first visited Hawarden in 1857, and who became for Gladstone something of the equivalent of Plantagenet
Palliser’s Ezekiel Boncassen in
The Duke’s Children
. And at the end of his life when he looked back on the Newcastle speech, he was as warm towards the United States as he was
critical of himself. ‘Strange to say’, he wrote in 1896,

He added: ‘And strange to say,
post hoc
though perhaps not
propter hoc
, the United States have been that country in the world in which the most signal marks
of public honour have been paid me, and in which my name has been the most popular, the only parallels being Italy, Greece, and the Balkan Peninsula.’
¹³

This was a handsome apology, but written thirty-four years after the event. The comment of John Bright, already in general a considerable admirer of Gladstone, was fully to the point and more
contemporary. Three days after the speech he wrote: ‘He [Gladstone] is as unstable as water in some things; he is for union and freedom in Italy and for dissension and bondage in
America.’
¹⁴

One thing that Gladstone’s blunder did not damage was the success of the remainder of his progress through the North-east. On the following day, the Wednesday, there was a celebratory
river expedition, but it was hardly a rural picnic. It proceeded for twenty-two miles past the most industrialized river banks in England, and its purpose was to give an opportunity for public
acclaim:

There were even said to be men providing a swimming guard of honour in front of the Gladstone boat, a scene recalling Betjeman’s poem about ‘Captain Webb the
swimming man’, who made his way endlessly through the murky industrial canals of the West Midlands. ‘The expedition ended at six, I had as many speeches as hours,’ Gladstone
continued. ‘Such a pomp I probably shall never again witness: circumstances have brought upon me what I do not in any way deserve. . . . ‘The spectacle was really one for Turner and for
no one else.’
¹⁵

On the Thursday they moved from Tyne to Tees, and repeated the steamboat cavalcade from Middlesbrough. It had been prefaced by a public tour of Newcastle, by an address to the Naval Reserve
there and
by a speech to a large meeting in the Town Hall and another at Sunderland, where he was seized by giddiness and ‘had to take hold of the table’ before
continuing his speech. That day amounted to fifteen hours of continuous activity, concluding with another public banquet. That night he wrote: ‘I ought to be thankful: still more ought I to
be ashamed. It was vain to think of reading, writing or much reflecting on such a day.’
¹⁶
Saturday, with only a luncheon speech in York, must
have seemed like a holiday after his exertions.

What did the crowds signify? Most of all the simple undiscriminating fact that Gladstone had become a name which tripped off people’s lips, that he had an identifiable appearance which did
not betray his fame and his authority, and that when they went home and said they had seen Gladstone that bestowed prestige rather than caused mystification. There was also some feeling that he was
on their side, not in the sense of an economic class struggle, for he was never strong on the social condition of the people, but in the sense that he was for seriousness against cynicism, for
moral purpose against frivolity, for the achievements of industrial and industrious Britain at a time when it was supreme in these respects, and also in some sense for the solid striving of the
northern provincial centres as against the glitter of London and the soft landscape and more traditional society of the South of England.

There was no other ministerial politician who could fill this role. Of the others who could claim to be household names, Russell and Palmerston were very much metropolitan and South of England
Whigs, in spite of their both having been (briefly) at Edinburgh University a half-century or more before. Disraeli was too brittle, and Derby, even though he lived in ‘a stink of
chemicals’ on the edge of Liverpool, was essentially a parliamentary politician. The view of Gladstone as an elevated but nonetheless popular politician was neatly captured by the jingle
locally composed for the occasion:

His wife, who had been through all the strenuous Tyne and Tees days without complaint, thought it was the first time he had ever been properly honoured.

For Gladstone’s democratic progress William Hutt and the several other local MPs and aldermen who organized visits and attended him on them were important agents. The steamers and the Town
Hall
banquets had to be provided, and the populace informed where they might see and cheer the great man. For these owners of large and comfortable houses conveniently adjacent
to the big provincial cities, and often themselves substantial manufacturers or engineers as well as civic dignitaries, there was a lot to be said for tying the big gun of the Chancellor as firmly
as possible into the Liberal party (of which, by no stretch of the imagination, could he be regarded as having been a supporter for more than three years), and in particular to their non-Whiggish
and provincial tendency within it.

For Gladstone things were never quite the same again after Newcastle. He may have made a nonsense of his American Civil War speech, but this was more than balanced by the rapture of his
reception. He became, to put it vulgarly, hooked on crowds. His diary remark about thankfulness and shame showed a good deal of insight. His quarter-envious, three-quarters disapproving colleagues
might have been mildly assuaged by his self-criticism, but not more.

Six months after Newcastle, in the budget of 1863, Gladstone launched his Don Quixote attack on charities. The attack was made the more quixotic by the fact that he had absolutely no need to do
it. Despite the adverse trade effects of the American Civil War and severe distress in Lancashire, to the relief of which the Gladstones were forthcoming in their personal capacities although
William was cautious in his Exchequer role,
⁵⁷
he ended the financial year 1862–3 with a surplus, massive for those days, of £3¾ million.
Some concessions were obviously called for and he reduced the rate of income tax from ninepence to sevenpence in the pound, as well as bringing down the tea duty. But he sought to make one move the
other way. He proposed to bring in £¾ million by removing the tax exemption which the income of registered charities had hitherto enjoyed. How his rather querulous Cabinet colleagues
let him do it is difficult to imagine. There is no record of any stiff Cabinet struggles, such as those he had experienced with his paper-duties concessions in 1860 and 1861. The whole budget was
approved in a two-hour sitting on the day before he presented it to the House of Commons. It is impossible to avoid the thought that there must have been some colleagues who were quite willing to
see him take a tumble.

Gladstone’s approach to the issue was based on a tramlines logic which could sometimes take over his mind, and was buttressed by what Palmerston saw as his ability to
persuade himself of the rightness of any view which he chose to hold. Here he persuaded himself that tax on the income of charities was not just a fiscal convenience but a moral imperative. If ever
a man deliberately poked a stick into a wasps’ nest it was he. He supported his action with the following arguments. Most money at the disposal of charities came from legacies. But deathbed
bequests were not nearly as laudable as giving away money during a man’s lifetime, when he genuinely deprived himself of spending power. In a legacy he merely deprived someone else. (To this
precept Gladstone gave considerable practical effect. Throughout his adult lifetime he gave to charity £114,000, the equivalent of £5½ million today, spread surprisingly evenly
over the decades.)
¹⁷
Lifetime gifts were, however, made out of taxed income and, assuming they went to the revenue accounts of charities, enjoyed no
concession. This was perverse, and meant that not only did the existing law on the taxation of charities offend the principle that all money, ‘a trust from God’, should be taxed alike,
but also favoured the less worthy over the more worthy form of giving. To make sure that no wasps in the nest were left undisturbed he added, for good measure, the argument that most charities were
inefficiently and even corruptly run.

The furore was considerable. The ‘wasps’ assembled a most formidable deputation which waited upon Gladstone at 3.30 p.m. on 4 May. It was headed by the Duke of Cambridge
(Commander-in-Chief and the Queen’s cousin) and made up,
inter alia
, of both Archbishops
⁵⁸
and of that Earl of Shaftesbury who epitomized
philanthropy. Gladstone
received them for forty-five minutes, and then, less than an hour later, got up in the House of Commons and spoke for three hours and ten minutes in
defence of his proposals. It was widely thought to have been one of the two or three outstanding parliamentary performances of his life. It was cogent and trenchant and defiant, but it was
inevitably defensive, and its artistry and muscular skill lay in the triumph of technique over circumstances. It was the equivalent of a captain’s 80 on a bad wicket in a Test match which was
in the course of being lost. He put everything he had into it: ‘Worked hard on my papers all the morning. Spoke 5.10–8.20 with all my might, such as it was; after such prayer as
I
can make.’ But it was a dying fall: ‘The feeling grew more favourable to the act of justice we recommended: but we could not fairly ask our friends to divide, and withdrew the
Clauses.’
¹⁸

The retreat was complete, redeemed only by the brilliance of the bugle call by which it was ordered. Yet Gladstone took it very much in his stride. Eighteen-sixty-three was altogether a good
year for him, much better than 1860 and 1861 when he had experienced heavy strains in living with Palmerston. His position in the government had become secure and powerful. He was in full command
of the Treasury, and could run it without undue effort. That summer he spent the whole of August at Hawarden, an almost equally complete September at Penmaenmawr, and then two weeks ‘in
attendance’ at Balmoral. The last does not sound much like a holiday but Gladstone was surprisingly successful in making it so, with long walking expeditions (one of nineteen miles) on his
own. The fortnight appeared to involve only two dinners and three audiences with the Queen, who when she had tried to have a fourth had found Gladstone missing in the hills. These limited contacts
he found perfectly agreeable, and it was only after a similar tour of duty in the following year that he recorded a little maliciously: ‘she weighs I am told 11 stone eight pounds – a
secret! Rather much for her height.’ And again: ‘Mrs Bruce says the Queen was not well: and it seems she drinks her claret strengthened, I should have thought spoiled, with
whisky.’
¹⁹

His pleasure in Penmaenmawr was at its peak in those years of the early 1860s. In 1862 he had there enjoyed twenty-seven sea-bathes, the presence of two bishops (Oxford and Gloucester who must
have treated each other warily in view of the impending York choice), as well as having two deans within driving distance, and a twenty-four-hour visit from the Dowager Duchess of Sutherland, whose
husband, the second Duke, had died in 1861. They had both often entertained Gladstone
when the Duke was alive, notably during his enforced twenty-six days at Dunrobin in 1857,
but it was with Harriet Sutherland, an intelligent and forceful woman, four years older than himself, that Gladstone’s particular friendship lay. During the parliamentary sessions of 1862 and
1863 he spent respectively six and seven weekends at Cliveden, the Sutherland palace on the middle Thames which Barry had built only a decade or so before and which was to pass through the
Grosvenors before finding its way to the Astors in 1893. The Dowager Duchess died in 1868 but not before she had played a notable part, at Gladstone’s instigation, in entertaining Garibaldi
on his somewhat swaggering visit to England in 1864. The hero of the Risorgimento was said to be the only man who had ever smoked a cigar in her private sitting room, as well as requiring carefully
placed spittoons.
⁵⁹
Duchess Harriet was a considerable source of political solace and advice to Gladstone, and it was a pity that her son, the third
duke, became so virulently partisan as to call him a Russian agent in 1878.