Gladstone: A Biography (52 page)

It is, however, strange that curiosity had not led him to Ireland earlier. He had so often taken the Irish Mail from Euston as far as Chester, from where after the Britannia bridge was completed
in 1850 the next stop was Holyhead. He would have been almost there in the time he frequently devoted to walking from Chester station to Hawarden. Had he never been tempted to remain on the train
for this further two hours, to make the short two-and-a-half-hour crossing (admittedly he was a bad sailor), and then to step ashore in a country which was so different from and yet so crucial to
the predominant island? Indefatigable a traveller and relentless a sightseer, up and down the Italian peninsula and from Dresden to Athens, though he had proved himself to be, there is no evidence
that either the Georgian urbanity of Dublin (not much admired at the time) or the mountains and lakes of the west ever exercised a comparable pull upon him.

Until the late 1860s Gladstone’s views on Ireland were largely conditioned by two contrary strands of thought. First, his respect for a judgemental Concert of Europe made him ashamed that
the condition of Ireland exposed a flank so damaging to England’s reputation. Whenever continental rulers wished to deliver a
tu quoque
against England they had Ireland readily to
hand. Schwarzenberg, for instance, had not failed to raise it in his dismissive reply to the remonstrance against Neapolitan gaols which Gladstone had persuaded Aberdeen to send him in 1851. Even
more significant was the letter which Gladstone wrote to Guizot, the statesman–savant of France, in 1872. Gladstone was then Prime Minister and Guizot, aged eighty-five, in the last eighteen
months of his life and out of office for the past twenty-four years. It was remarkable and typical of Gladstone that he should have taken the trouble to write such a letter ‘out of the
blue’. Its content, written in the
aftermath of Irish Church disestablishment and of the first Land Act was even more revealing.

The saving of Britain’s Irish reputation in Europe (and indeed America, although there it was more difficult to redeem and the jury was further away from his mind) was
for Gladstone as important a motive. as the relief of distress in the congested districts of the west of Ireland.

Second, and somewhat contradictorily, there was what J. L. Hammond in his great book on
Gladstone and the Irish Nation
regarded as the wretched parsimoniousness which sprang from his too
many years as a cheese-paring Chancellor of the Exchequer. This made him suspicious of Ireland as a potentially dangerous source of demands upon the Treasury. One of Gladstone’s deepest
political beliefs, which he inherited from Peel, was his view that the miseries of the English poor (which were manifestly acute between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and his first budgets)
stemmed largely from the unnecessary burdens of indirect taxation which the eighteenth-century tradition of rich sinecures for the governing class and other lavish pay-outs imposed upon them. He
saw loose public expenditure not as a means of redistribution in favour of the poor but as a discrimination in favour of the undeserving rich. A large part of the moral fervour of his Treasury
policies came from this conviction. And it took him a long time to see that Ireland in this respect, as in so many others, was different from the rest of the United Kingdom. Ireland was not going
to achieve a stable agrarianism, towards which Gladstone’s policies eventually made a major contribution, without new forms of public expenditure. Yet Gladstone’s earlier and
instinctive attitude is well illustrated in a letter which he wrote to his wife on 9 April 1859, when he was not even in office, but had the previous night attacked Disraeli’s handling of the
Galway Packet Contract, an issue which assumed temporary prominence. ‘The scene [in the House of Commons] was sickening,’ he wrote, ‘and all the Irish were
there most of them vying with each other in eagerness to plunder the public purse.’
²

One way of reconciling the conflict between guilt and parsimony which raged in his mind was to give priority to the issue of the Anglican Church in Ireland. This, unless it was dealt with by
what was called concurrent endowment (that is, maintaining the establishment but giving levelling-up money to the Roman Catholics), to which Gladstone was implacably opposed, did not involve public
expenditure. Furthermore, any issue touching on religion, even if in some ways an awkward one for him, as was certainly the case here, also carried an inherent fascination.

On the maintenance of the Anglican establishment in Ireland Gladstone had started from the most intransigent position. In his 1838
The State in its Relations with the Church
he had wished
not merely to maintain the full panoply of the state-supported episcopacy in the thirty-two counties but to exclude from a public service job in Ireland anyone who was not a communicating Anglican.
And in the same year he both fulminated and voted against the flicker towards concurrent endowment which was represented by the small Maynooth grant. By 1845, however, when he perversely and on
purely historical grounds resigned from the Peel Cabinet on the Maynooth issue, he had considerably shifted his position. Indeed, once he had lost his faith that Church and state could be run by a
joint clerisy, he began to move into a somewhat ambivalent position even on the merits of establishment in England. An independent Church might be better than a purely Erastian one owing more to
Prime Ministers than to the apostolic succession and the early Christian fathers. These doubts were strengthened by the Gorham judgement of 1850. They were inhibited, however, by his eighteen years
as member for ‘the God-fearing and God-sustaining University of Oxford’ (in his own slightly hyperbolic deathbed phrase). The University, with some famous exceptions who attached more
importance to doctrine than to mitres, was devoted to the powers and perquisites of an established Church and to its own special position as both its ornament and its seminary.

Gladstone’s ‘unmuzzling’ as a result of his transference from Oxford to South Lancashire in July 1865 was therefore important to the evolution of his public (perhaps more than
his private) position on Irish Church disestablishment. It must however be said that he made his first resonant pronouncement on the issue three months before he ceased to be member for Oxford. He
insisted on speaking (although it could hardly be regarded as a responsibility of a Chancellor of the Exchequer
who was not then leader of the House of Commons) on a motion
from James Dillwyn, Radical MP for Swansea, drawing attention to the deleterious anomaly of an Anglican established Church in Ireland, and calling upon the government to take action. Gladstone once
again demonstrated his mixture of naivety and wilfulness by first thinking that he could speak (from the Treasury bench) in a private member’s capacity, and then, when Palmerston remonstrated
against this course, believing that he had met the objection by assenting to the first part of the motion but not promising any specific government action. The speech not unnaturally attracted a
lot of attention, particularly in Oxford, and suggests that Gladstone’s mind was already writing off the dreaming spires.

The retreat to South Lancashire in that summer of 1865 and the death of Palmerston in the autumn removed two of the obstacles to action as opposed to abstract condemnation. Nevertheless
Gladstone did not attempt to drive the Russell government to legislation. Its energies were concentrated on its unsuccessful Reform Bill. In May 1867, however, when he had no responsibility for the
government’s programme, he showed his resilience to the buffetings he was receiving from Disraeli, as well as a shrewd sense that if one front was going badly there was much to be said for
opening up a different one. He threw into a debate on Irish universities a statement of firm notice that Parliament could not long delay dealing with the Irish Church. This, unlike suffrage reform,
had a unifying rather than a divisive affect upon the Liberal party.

The views which he expressed in his December 1867 speech at Southport were therefore not the result of a sudden lurch, but rather the end of a gradual but predictable curve which had started
nearly thirty years before and had taken him through almost 180 degrees. What was new and surprising was the prominence which he chose to give to them. Southport placed Irish Church reform and
Irish land reform in the centre of the English political battle. The speech was made the more courageous by coming immediately after a wave of Fenian attacks. In the previous year, in an almost
Ruritanian act, the Fenians of New York had mounted an invasion of Canada. In September 1867 an armed gang had rescued two Irish prisoners from a police van in Manchester and shot one guard dead.
And in December, only a few days before the Southport speech, part of the wall of Clerkenwell Prison was blown up and twelve people killed. Gladstone of course condemned these outrages, and indeed
was particularly vehement against the
irrationality and injustice of the attack on Canada: ‘Canada has inflicted no wrongs on Ireland; Ireland has wrongs; Canada has no
power to remedy them.’
³
But he also urged looking behind the outrages to the grievances of the Irish people out of which, even if
illegitimately, they sprang. The first of the desirable consequences which he predicted from remedying these grievances was impressively idiosyncratic. When this has been done, ‘instead of
hearing in every corner of Europe the most painful commentaries on the policy of England towards Ireland we may be able to look our fellow Europeans in the face’.
⁴

Just as the speech was made more courageous by the terrorism which immediately preceded it, so it was made more significant by a statement which immediately followed it. Russell announced his
intention not again to take office. The titular leadership of the Liberal party thus became vacant, and the succession was wide open to Gladstone, even apart from the dominance of his personality,
by virtue of his leadership in the Commons without a senior rival in the Lords. In December 1867, therefore, the majority party, for such it had loosely been in every election since 1847, achieved
both a new leader and a new first item for its programme. Gladstone and Irish reform became the new device on the banner. It was not the most obvious combination with which to rally the freshly
enlarged but still restricted (to about two and a half million) electorate of England, Scotland and Wales. However, the moral and oratorical force of the one transcended, for a time at any rate,
the limited appeal of the other.

The first manifestation of Gladstone’s leadership and of his choice of issue on which to exercise it came at the end of March 1868, when he initiated a four-day debate (such time could the
leader of the opposition then command) on his intention to bring in three resolutions on the Irish Church. A Conservative amendment to delay their consideration until the next Parliament was
handsomely defeated, the old Palmerstonian majority thus reasserting itself after the vicissitudes of the suffrage issue. It was yet another example of Gladstone being ‘terrible in the
rebound’. Disraeli’s triumphs of the previous year did not repeat themselves in his first real test as Prime Minister. Even the curt and cryptic sentences of Gladstone’s diary
managed to convey a full sense of triumph:

A month later, the substantive resolutions were put to the vote. The majority on the first was still bigger than the ‘wonderful’ sixty, and the other two were not opposed. This made
the position of the government untenable. As with Russell two years earlier, Disraeli’s choice appeared to lie only between resignation and dissolution. However, after so many years of
waiting, he had been Prime Minister for only two months. So he hit upon an ingenious compromise. He would dissolve, but not until the autumn. For this course he had both a good excuse and a good
ally. The excuse was that the election ought to be fought on a new register based upon the provisions of the 1867 Reform Act. The ally was the Queen, who was already loath to see Disraeli go. He
needed her, for there was an important element in his Cabinet, including Gathorne Hardy, his Home Secretary and strongest debating colleague, and his two ducal substitutes, Richmond and
Marlborough, who were strongly in favour of immediate resignation. Both his cynical skill at man-management and his jaunty relations with the Queen (so different from those of Gladstone) were well
illustrated by the letter which he wrote to her on 8 May indicating how he had circumnavigated the problem with Marlborough (which took the steam out of the other two would-be resigners):
‘The Duke of Marlborough seemed a little bilious when Mr Disraeli returned from Osborne so ultimately, acting on Yr Majesty’s sanction, Mr Disraeli announced to his Grace that Yr
Majesty had been pleased to confer on him the blue ribbon [of the Garter].’
⁶

Gladstone followed up his Irish Church resolutions by introducing a bill to suspend any new beneficial appointments in the Church of Ireland and, with a majority of fifty-four on second reading,
carried it through the House of Commons at the end of May. The Lords threw it out by the larger majority of ninety-five later in the summer, but it was nonetheless a rumbling warning of what was to
come, as well as a display of Gladstone’s renewed parliamentary power. Disraeli might be temporarily Prime Minister, but he could extend his term for eight months after the night of
Gladstone’s triumph over his ‘tipsiness’ only at the price of sharing parliamentary power with him. During the remainder of that session of 1868, which expired on 28 July,
Gladstone spoke with great frequency and on almost every subject under the sun. He spoke on the new Law Courts, on the Navy estimates, on Glasgow electoral arrangements. As his days were full with
many other engagements and
occupations his diaries give the impression of his blowing in to the House of Commons, sounding off on whatever subject was under discussion, and
generally exercising his remarkable facility for being as economical with his own preparation time as he was profligate with House of Commons listening time. What was indisputable was that he had
completely regained his parliamentary confidence and authority after the trough of 1867. Gladstone was very much a Prime Minister in waiting during the session of 1868.