Gladstone: A Biography (54 page)

Robert Rhodes James has written a persuasive thesis that Churchill would have been little more than a footnote to history had he died on the threshold of his premiership, when he was sixty-four.
This would certainly have been so of Salisbury had he gone in 1886 at the age of fifty-six, or of Macmillan had he done so in 1956 when he was sixty-two. But such obscurity would emphatically not
have been the fate of Gladstone had he died instead of becoming Prime Minister in 1868. He would still have been a major nineteenth-century figure. The country would, however, have been deprived of
its most quintessential Prime Minister. He was this because he was the one who most dominated the busy junction where executive power, parliamentary command and democratic validity jostle together.
His executive power, which he exercised with gusto, was modified by respect for and conflict with the whims of the Sovereign. His parliamentary command was accompanied by endemic revolts against
his driving force. His democratic validity also
had elements of paradox in that it was based on his ability to rivet great audiences who were held by his flashing eyes while
hardly understanding the convolutions of his interminable sentences. No one else however has so mingled the three sources of constitutional power. Lloyd George rivalled his spell-binding oratory,
but lacked his personal parliamentary authority. Churchill could not match the spontaneous popular oratory as opposed to the parliamentary setpieces.

In 1868 Gladstone could be held to epitomize the words of Browning’s
Rabbi Ben Ezra
:

But he also had more pre–Prime Ministerial achievement and interest behind him than any except one of his fellow Prime Ministers, and that one, Wellington, did not
achieve much in 10, Downing Street.

A C
OMMANDING
P
RIME
M
INISTER

T
HE EARLY PART OF
Gladstone’s first government was as enjoyable for its participants as office can ever be expected to be. The Prime Minister
afterwards spoke of that administration as ‘one of the best instruments for government that ever was constructed’, and did so in a way which made the statement a nostalgic lament rather
than a boast of his own skill at Cabinet-making. Of the fourteen gentlemen whom he so assembled, six were peers (then a low proportion), only one a duke (although another was a duke’s heir),
and of the twelve who survived until 1886 no more than four supported Gladstone in the great Home Rule split of that year. But for the moment there was harmony. Gladstone’s diaries for the
last weeks of 1868 and the session of 1869 give an impression of contentment, confidence and tolerance, with bursts of almost boyish good humour.

At the two turn-of-the-year milestones, his birthday and New Year’s Eve, he wrote with an enthusiasm which nearly suppressed his usual breast-beating. On 29 December: ‘This birthday
opens my 60th year. I descend the hill of life. It would be a truer figure to say I ascend a steepening path with a burden ever gathering weight. The Almighty seems to sustain and spare me for some
purpose of His own deeply unworthy as I know myself to be. Glory be to his name.’
¹

On 31 December his satisfaction was still more evident:

He then added a perceptive comment on the restricted and often too reactive life of a minister: ‘Swimming for his life, a man does not see much of the
country through which the river winds, and I probably know little of these years through which I busily work and live, beyond this, how sin and frailty deface them, and how mercy crowns
them.’ He ended almost on an exultant note: ‘Farewell great year of opening, not of alarming, change: and welcome new year laden with promise and with care.’
²

Apart from a bizarre expedition to Hatfield in the second week of December, he had exceptionally remained in London over Christmas and until he went to Hagley on 29 December and then to
Hawarden. The Hatfield stay, which no doubt fulfilled a prior commitment to the thirty-eight-year-old and recently succeeded Salisbury extended across four days, interrupted by an excursion to
Windsor. It was bizarre because it was an uncompromising Tory house from which to complete the making of a Liberal government. It also foreshadowed almost exactly similar behaviour by Asquith
thirty-seven years later during the making of the next major reforming government.
⁷⁰

Gladstone spent the first three weeks of 1869 at Hawarden. It was inevitably a working holiday with his attention mainly on preparation for the Irish Church Bill. He had visits from three of his
colleagues: Granville (but more as leader of the House of Lords and an easy companion than as Colonial Secretary), Spencer as Irish Viceroy, and Sullivan as Irish Attorney-General. He also
entertained an Irish ecclesiastical go-between, Archdeacon Stafford of Meath, and Sir John Acton, on the threshold of ennoblement but sufficiently unworried by his famous aphorism about the
corruption of power to be eager to attend upon the new Prime Minister. (Gladstone never gave fashionable general house parties of the sort in which he frequently participated at ducal and other
great houses, but he liked visitors, was always willing to have people from Cobden to Parnell for a specific purpose, and often mingled them with young family friends.)

Despite the press of work on his Hawarden days it was a cool thing
for Gladstone to remain so long away from London at such an early stage of his first premiership. His
diary entry for 8 January 1869 illustrates the pattern. After church at 8.30, he:

The purpose of his operating from 200 miles away rather than in Downing Street or Carlton House Terrace was well captured in a half-sentence of a letter to Clarendon, whom he
showered with very courteously expressed foreign policy advice: ‘in point of hours it is much the same here and there though [here] the free hours feel much more free which is a great
thing’.
⁴

Gladstone came to London on 22 January and began a period of intensive ‘softening up’ on the Irish Church Bill (at Hawarden he had applied himself to its intellectual preparation).
He went first, accompanied by his wife, on a two-day visit to the Queen at Osborne. He could not persuade his sovereign to attend the opening of Parliament, which was fixed for 16 February, even
though it was a new Parliament, elected on a new franchise, with a new Prime Minister, and turned out to be the beginning of a new political epoch. But he may have succeeded in diminishing her
opposition to the Irish Church changes.

However, Gladstone at this stage in their relationship was often over-optimistic about the effect of his explanations and persuasions on the Queen. On the first evening he wrote: ‘Saw the
Queen on the Irish Church especially and gave H.M. my papers with explanations which appeared to be well taken. She was altogether at ease.’
⁵
On
the second day he did not know what to make of her absolute silence on the subject. That evening at dinner she had Mrs Gladstone and not the Prime Minister to sit next to her. The truth was that
she had not made head or tail of Gladstone’s ‘papers’ until Sir Theodore Martin, the Prince Consort’s biographer, had been summoned to write a summary. Then she did not much
like what she saw, and ten days later Gladstone was recording: ‘A letter from H.M. today showed much disturbance: which I tried to soothe.’
⁶
Nonetheless his talks with her, and perhaps even
more with General Grey on the December journey from Chester to Slough, had prepared the ground for her
acquiescence in the inevitable, and when there came a crunch with the House of Lords in July she was helpful to the government.

Gladstone also guarded his flank against a predecessor’s possible sourness. Five days after his return from Osborne he went to Richmond and spent forty-eight hours at Pembroke Lodge with
Russell. ‘Much conversation with Lord R. on the Irish Ch. and other matters,’ he recorded.
⁷
During that first year of the government he
took a lot of trouble with the old Whig, but gradually the rule that nearly all Prime Ministers are dissatisfied with their successors, perhaps even more so if they come from the same party,
asserted itself, and Russell drifted into discontent. Gladstone, when he wished, could be both solicitous and flattering. He was persistently so with John Bright, who was more opinionated than
effective as President of the Board of Trade, but whom Gladstone determinedly treated as a great man as well as a great orator. This was partly because of his natural sympathy with what Professor
Matthew calls ‘the sentimental side of Victorian Radicalism’, and was in marked contrast with his total inability, a decade later, to massage the abler but notably unsentimental Joseph
Chamberlain.

With the Queen, in a different way, Gladstone was just as unskilled as he was to be with Chamberlain, but with most of the members of his Cabinet he was elaborately courteous and nearly as
solicitous as with Bright, certainly so with Clarendon, with Granville, with Argyll (to whom he wrote frequent general political letters while never interfering in his departmental Indian affairs),
with Earl de Grey, the Lord President, whom he made Marquess of Ripon. The one whom he handled least well was Hartington, treating him like his much more amenable brother Frederick Cavendish, who
after he married Lucy Lyttelton in 1864 became almost a Gladstone family satellite. In 1868 he made Hartington Postmaster-General, which bored him, and in 1870 he forced him to go to Ireland as
Chief Secretary. This was a bad preparation for patronizingly handing over the leadership to him in 1875 and then, inevitably but without delicacy, superseding him in 1880. It was not surprising
that Gladstone lost Hartington in 1886.

Despite the complaints of his whips and of Phillimore and Acland, however, Gladstone could mostly cajole when he wanted to. He was psychologically incapable of flattery with some people, most
notably the Queen, with Chamberlain as a runner-up, although in the latter case it
was simple consideration, well short of flattery, which was lacking. Sometimes, with others,
his courtesy failed because it was too elaborate and heavy-footed, but mostly his failures in human management were because he had not tried, hardly knew or noticed the person concerned, or just
failed to understand that a word from him might make all the difference. But, in general, particularly away from politics, his manners were very good, and his charm, especially when he was not
trying to achieve a result, formidable.

In 1869 he was solicitous to keep both his Cabinet and his majority together. Although by the time he left Hawarden he had got his own mind almost completely clear on what he wanted in the Irish
Church Bill, he nonetheless allowed time for five Cabinets before the opening of the session, and a long sixth (mostly on the bill) between the Queen’s Speech on 16 February and his
exposition of the details to the House of Commons on 1 March. All the January and February 1869 Cabinets were early-afternoon occasions, starting at 2.00 or 2.30. As soon as the session began,
while he kept to the same time of day, he reverted to Palmerston’s Saturday habit.