Gladstone: A Biography (47 page)

Gladstone complained in his diary that the arrival of this ‘pamphlet letter from Lord P. about Defence Estimates holds out a dark prospect’. While it may be thought that Gladstone
had somewhat deliberately walked into the dark prospect, there can be no doubt that the exchange marked the beginning of a new phase of greater tension between Prime Minister and Chancellor which
persisted, although correspondence continued to flow freely from both sides, until Palmerston’s death almost exactly a year later. It also made membership of the Cabinet and of the government
much less of a pleasure for Gladstone. On 19 January 1865 he wrote: ‘Cabinet 3¾–6½ very stiff indeed, on Estimates. Sky dark.’ And on 28 January: ‘Last night I
could have done almost anything to shut out the thought of the coming battle. This is very weak: but it is the result of the constant recurrence of such things: estimates always settled at
dagger’s point.’ Yet again, on 7 February, the day Parliament reassembled: ‘I flinch from the Session.’
³⁰

The inherent trouble was that he was the aggressor without possessing sufficient forces to sustain the assault. Palmerston was sitting comfortably on interior lines of communication. The
national finances were healthy (thanks largely to Gladstone), the Prime Minister and the service ministers were no longer asking for any great new expenditure on armaments, merely for a maintenance
of the existing, hardly monstrous level (about £1.6 billion at present-day prices), there was no question of additional taxation, only a moderation of the rate at which reductions could take
place, and the Cabinet was perfectly content to sustain this balance. On 19 January Gladstone had been forced to admit: ‘In regard to the Navy Estimates I have had no effective or broad
support: platoon firing more or less in my sense from Argyll and Gibson.’ Such haphazard small-arms fire from only two members was clearly insufficient, and the stark and obvious fact was
that Gladstone had only the unappealing choice of defeat or resignation. As he did not want to resign he would have done better to have called off the battles before he had lost them. But that was
not his nature, and as a result he inflicted unnecessary humiliations upon himself and pointless strife upon the Cabinet.

It might also have left him freer to make his own taxation dispositions. As it was, Palmerston was courteously teasing him only a day or so
before his ninth budget on 27
April 1865. ‘If you will allow me to say so,’ he wrote, ‘some of your best financial arrangements lost much of their deserved popularity by the ingenious Complications with which
they were accompanied. It will be as well on this occasion not to fall into the similar mistake. . . .’
³¹
had wanted to levy a tax of
fourpence in the pound upon all rateable buildings, and it was this which Palmerston was determined to get him off. Gladstone was nonetheless able to bring income tax down from sixpence to
fourpence, tea duty from one shilling to sixpence and further to diminish the fire insurance duty (a curiously pervasive issue of the time).

In June Palmerston graciously tossed an episcopal nomination to Gladstone, and the Regius Professor of Divinity went from Christ Church to Chester. The Prime Minister hoped the choice might help
Gladstone with his ‘oncoming election’. It did not, or not sufficiently so at any rate. The government gained twenty-six seats throughout the country, but on 17 July 1865 Gladstone was
out at Oxford. The size of the University poll was considerably increased by the introduction for the first time of postal voting (thereby improving the relative influence of country clergy as
against resident dons). Gladstone’s sitting colleague Heathcote polled 3236, the new challenger Gathorne Hardy 1904, and Gladstone himself 1724. ‘A dear dream is dispelled,’ he
wrote. ‘God’s will be done.’
³²

The quietism lay more in words than in deeds. He had already been nominated for South Lancashire (in those days multiple nomination was common practice), and the next morning he was off to the
north, and in the afternoon addressed 6000 people in Manchester and in the evening 5000 in Liverpool. He was indeed ‘unmuzzled’ by Oxford, as Palmerston had feared that he would be, and
by 20 July had succeeded in being elected for South Lancashire. The meetings were, however, more of a triumph than the result. In a three-member constituency he ran only third to two Tories,
although a good thousand ahead of the other two Liberals.

The election made little difference to the balance or direction of the government. Lord Westbury had been forced out by nepotistic scandal at the beginning of July and was replaced by the
seventy-five-year-old Cranworth as Lord Chancellor. Otherwise there was no change of personnel. Palmerston’s main desire had become that of preventing changes. The Cabinet met once on 24
July. (‘All in good humour,’ Gladstone recorded, although others reported him as being in a subdued mood), and then shuffled off on holiday. The new Parliament did not
meet, even to choose a Speaker, until nearly seven months after its election, which must surely be a record for dilatoriness. Gladstone went to Hawarden on 27 July and did not return
to London until 20 October. For the first time for six years he did not go to Penmaenmawr and applied himself heavily to family and estate affairs. In late September he made a ten-day Scottish
ducal excursion (Buccleuch and Argyll), but was recalled to Liverpool on account of the death of Robertson Gladstone’s wife, the lady against whom he had become so excited in 1839. Over the
intervening twenty-six years he had come to value her more, and in middle life he had moved closer to Robertson than to either of his other brothers, and indeed depended substantially on his
sponsorship and support for the South Lancashire seat. Once again, as with John Neilson Gladstone’s death less than two years before, he devoted more than a week to a Liverpool visit of
mourning, support and comfort. From there he went to Clumber, where he had first waited on the old fourth Duke of Newcastle thirty-three years before and where he was currently engaged in the vast
and unrewarding task of clearing up as an executor the chaotic family and financial legacy of the fifth Duke.

It was against this sombre and wearing background that Gladstone, on the evening of 18 October, received news of the sudden death of Palmerston. His last letter to Gladstone, courteous in intent
and jaunty in tone, had contained no hint of an impending end. ‘I do not foresee any reason for calling the Cabinet together till the 10th of November,’ he had written on 7
October.
³³
Alas, this easeful prospect could not be maintained. The Cabinet next met on 28 October, but under a different Prime Minister. There was
no trouble about Russell’s succession. There were only two people who could have put in doubt the return of the old Whig to 10 Downing Street – after thirteen years away, the second
longest interval ever between two premierships of the same man. The first was the Queen, and she, perhaps because of the looming shadow of Gladstone appeared to have learnt her lesson from her
Granville experience in 1859, and made no difficulty. The second was of course Gladstone himself, who had been urged by some, including notably that worldly prelate Wilberforce, to make a
pre-emptive strike for the top place. He showed no desire to do so. The flame of ambition was burning relatively low in him at the time. He even betrayed some signs of dismay at the general
election victory of the previous July, feeling after more than six years in office that there were attractions in the freedom of opposition. He accepted with at least a show of reluctance the
leadership of the Commons which a change from a Lower House to an Upper
House Prime Minister made vacant (‘The charge of leading fastened on me’). Also, he
positively believed that Russell was entitled to another term and wrote to tell him so within a few hours of getting the Palmerston news. Russell received the commission on the following day.

There was consequently no sense of upheaval. The premiership merely passed from a man who would have been eighty-one to one who was seventy-three. They were the two oldest of those who had ever
then held that office. This was indeed perhaps one of Russell’s attractions for Gladstone. The only fault with him that Gladstone could immediately find was his inactivity in organizing a
proper state funeral for Palmerston. Gladstone stepped in as soon as he got back to London and ‘a solemn and touching scene’ (taking three and a quarter hours) was arranged in
Westminster Abbey for the following Friday. It was an appropriate final act of courtesy in the relationship of Gladstone and Palmerston, who, agreeing on little, behaved with considerable propriety
towards each other.

Nonetheless Palmerston’s death, in relation to both the achievements and the pyrotechnics of his career, passed surprisingly quietly. The House of Commons, despite his fifty-eight years of
membership, was not recalled for tributes. Yet his death did mark the effective end of mid-century politics, even though Russell, like a juggler performing at the end of a play, as was fashionable
in Paris theatres of the time, kept the season open for another eight months.

D
ISRAELI
’
S
F
OIL

A
T THE TURN OF THE YEAR
1865–6, Gladstone was fifty-six, no longer young but with not a hint of an old man about him either, his hair still black,
his face hard and lined, that and his lithe movements giving an

(accurate) impression of great power. There was none of the fuzziness of line which became a characteristic of his appearance from the age of about seventy onwards.

Disraeli was sixty-one, old and stiff for his years, but in some ways welcoming this, for, as with Harold Macmillan a hundred years later, an affectation of age became part of his style. The
Queen, prematurely dumpy, was still only forty-six, although already the grandmother of both Kaiser Wilhelm II and King George V, as well as of a few others who had less
Kaiserliche und
Königliche
futures. Russell, as we have seen, was seventy-three (although with twelve more years ahead of him), and Palmerston was dead. Most of the other mid-century politicians were also
dead, and the stars of the end of the century, Salisbury, Joseph Chamberlain, Rosebery, William Harcourt, Randolph Churchill, had not emerged.

Britain was still pre-eminent. Her manufacturing strength was not to be seriously challenged until the American north-east had bounded forward after the Civil War, and the new German Empire had
digested its gains of 1866 and 1870. Although on Gladstone’s fifth-sixth birthday the horrors of the Prussian siege of Paris and still more the Commune could not be foreseen, the glitter of
the Second Empire was already wearing thin, and the French challenge to Britain was finally ceasing to be military, and was moving into a ninety- or hundred-year period when it was cultural and
social rather than industrial or commercial. At home the ‘respectable’ working class was continuing to rise above the abyss and to form itself into mechanics’ institutes and
friendly societies and craft unions with an ethos which attracted Gladstone’s approbation. And Ireland, at once the running sore of the Britannic Isles and the most conveniently placed of all
areas of colonial exploitation, was quiet. But quiet in a temporary and deadened way, in the aftermath of the famine
and the mass emigration. Gladstone more than almost anyone,
although Disraeli once made a brilliantly prescient speech, had the foresight to see this and to see also that Ireland was capable, with a population a quarter of the British total (it had been a
third before the famine) as opposed to the 3 per cent in Northern Ireland today, of gravely weakening the whole United Kingdom polity.

However, at the beginning of 1866 the Irish threat was largely either in the past or in the future. Although in fact the threshold of a period of great change, political, industrial and social,
the 1860s seemed a time of unusual stability. There were only a few who would have emulated Edmund (later Lord) Hammond, permanent under-secretary of the Foreign Office, who told a new Foreign
Secretary (Granville) within days of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870 that rarely had he seen such a lull in Europe. But Hammond was in tune with a generally confident mood in
British political society.