Gladstone: A Biography (55 page)

Given that there was no formal agenda and no secretariat to record the results, Gladstone seems to have handled the meetings in a taut and orderly way. While it is difficult to believe that he
emulated Attlee’s laconicism there was no suggestion of Churchillian orotundity either. Before each meeting he made out a neat little agenda card for his own use, and ticked each numbered
item as he disposed of it. He was indeed in most ways instinctively neat. After he reached middle age this did not apply to his clothes, despite a ludicrous 1870 attempt by the
Tailor and
Cutter
to portray him (in a joint representation with his son Willy) as being almost glossy. Photographs show him as carelessly and semishabbily dressed in his habitual formal London clothes,
worn even for striding over the hills of Wales from Penmaenmawr. Sometimes he allowed the variant of lighter-coloured trousers with an 1840s-style brown stripe down the side.

He had a passion for sorting papers and arranging books. It was one reason why he liked departures and arrivals. On the day before he returned from Hawarden to London for his first testing
parliamentary session as Prime Minister he wrote: ‘Attempted to re-establish order with a view to departure’. On his second, third and fourth days back in Carlton House Terrace, he
wrote variants of ‘Arranged books & papers a little.’
⁸
Still more revealingly, when he arrived back at Hawarden for an autumn three
weeks in the following November he recorded:
‘Worked 6 hours on my books arranging and re-arranging: the best brain rest I have had (I think) since Decr
last.’
⁹

As well as giving his Cabinet full rein, if not to disagree on the major thrust, at least to feel that they had been fully consulted on the details, Gladstone in the run-up to the bill also kept
in touch with others whom he thought might be useful. He could not expect much help from the bishops, although he maintained an open line to Tait of Canterbury which led to the Primate not voting
against the second reading in the Lords (although certainly not voting for it) and reluctantly seeking a settlement rather than preparing for an impasse. Thirlwall of St Davids was the only prelate
who went into the lobby for the bill, but Magee of Peterborough, later Archbishop of York, and the perennial Wilberforce of Oxford (who might have been expected to do better in view both of old
friendship and of his impending promotion to Winchester) were scouts scurrying between the lines and incurring both the limited gratitude and the dangers of such a role.

Gladstone also kept in close touch with Delane, the editor of
The Times
, and with Manning, already archbishop but not yet cardinal. Hitherto the
Daily Telegraph
, then firmly
Liberal, had been Gladstone’s principal ally in the press, while Delane had been a little too Palmerstonian for his taste. But Palmerston was dead and Delane was very much a man of the
moment. The Prime Minister saw him several times during the spring and summer of 1869, sometimes writing him notes of conspiratorial invitation: ‘If you can again find yourself in my little
room at the H. of Commons this afternoon at 5, I shall be glad again to exchange a few words with you on the present aspect of the situation.’
¹⁰

Manning was an obvious ally of Gladstone’s on the issue, almost too much so to be an interesting one. However, he did have the advantage of fully agreeing with Gladstone, not only on the
need for Anglican disestablishment but also on the unacceptability of ‘concurrent endowment’. Gladstone was against it for reasons of cost to the British Exchequer, Manning for reasons
of threat to Roman authority if Irish prelates and priests became pensioners of the London government. The confluence of these views was powerful and satisfactory. Gladstone also found Manning a
useful channel for dealing with Archbishop Cullen of Dublin and the Irish hierarchy, perhaps too convenient if he wished to avoid a colonial approach to Ireland.

This led to a temporary renewal of warmth between Roman Catholic Archbishop and Anglican Prime Minister which would have seemed
unimaginable at the time of their chilly 1861
resumption of contact after a ten-year gap. Manning wrote to Gladstone on 24 July 1869: ‘But at this time I will only add that I may wish you joy on personal reasons. I could hardly have
hoped that you would have so framed, mastered, and carried through the bill from first to last so complete, so unchanged in identity of principle and detail, and let me add with such unwearying and
sustained self-control and forbearance.’
¹¹
The momentum of Manning–Gladstone reunion was, however, heavily circumscribed by Manning
being about to become the animator and agent of Vatican ultramontanism, which sent Gladstone into his greatest bout of anti-Romanism since Wiseman had ensnared (as he thought) his sister Helen in
1842.

The conduct of the Irish Church Bill through the House of Commons and the command of tactics in the dispute with the Lords which developed in late June and July was almost exclusively handled by
the Prime Minister himself. Chichester Fortescue, Lady Waldegrave’s fourth husband and
cavaliere servente
at her Strawberry Hill festivities, for whom she did not bother to change her
name on marriage, was not a strong Chief Secretary for Ireland. He was allowed more of a role in the following session’s Land Bill, although even then provoking more exasperation than
admiration from Gladstone. But in 1869 he was kept firmly on the sidelines. It was only in the very last stages of the summer dispute with the Lords that Gladstone, struck down by a severe gastric
attack, the intermittent effects of which lasted for four or five weeks, was forced to delegate, and then he did so to Granville and not to Fortescue.

For the main engagements Gladstone was in full and direct command, and discharged his commission with a combination of authority, persuasiveness and sustained energy which produced admiration
from the most disparate sources. Of his three-and-a-quarter-hour speech introducing the bill, Disraeli, frequently so scornful of Gladstone’s verbosity, said: ‘There was not a word
wasted.’ The future Archbishop (Frederick) Temple (admittedly just about to be given his first bishopric by Gladstone but not normally of his ecclesiastical tendency) wrote that ‘The
Irish Church bill is the greatest monument of genius that I have yet known from Gladstone; even his marvellous budgets are not so marvellous.’
¹²
Morley, who was a partisan but not a blind one, and who had a fine eye for discriminating between the relative quality of Gladstone’s different performances, wrote
that, ‘since Pitt, the author of the Act of Union, the author of the Church Act was the only statesman
in the roll of the century capable at once of framing such a
statute and expounding it with the same lofty and commanding power’.
¹³

This power enabled him to carry the second reading after four nights of debate by the striking majority of 118. It was the first time since the beginning of the Peel government, twenty-eight
years before, that a major party clash had been resolved so decisively. In the 1850s and most of the 1860s governments had fallen or survived and controversial bills had been carried or defeated by
majorities of between five and nineteen. Few things could have more symbolized the change from mid-century political confusion to the relatively clear late-century alternatives of Gladstone and
Disraeli or Salisbury than that 118. And Gladstone himself treated it as having an almost mystical significance. ‘A notable and historic Division,’ he described it in his
diary.
¹⁴
In a letter to Manning on 3 June, when the bill had gone through its committee stage like a tank brushing aside bushes which stood in its
path and when the third reading had been secured by an almost equally impressive majority of 114, he commented with a mixture of pride and ambiguity that ‘The House has moved like an army, an
army where every private is his own general.’
¹⁵
was right in attaching importance to the earlier steadiness of the majority which had acted
(to continue and maybe to confuse the military simile) like an artillery barrage upon Queen, peers and bishops. If it had not made them surrender it had made them see the advantage of a negotiated
peace.

He would also have been right, had he taken satisfaction in his own contribution to that result, which he did not do, for self-congratulation as opposed to a conviction of the rightness of his
own case was never part of his conceit. His introductory speech may have been a masterly example of lucid exposition, but it was his one-and-a-quarter-hour winding-up speech on 23 March, a nutshell
of succinctness by his standards, which was the debating triumph and was rightly chosen for inclusion in the treasury of Gladstone’s orations. This speech had an easy confidence which made
comprehensible his otherwise paradoxical (late-life) remark that he was only nervous when opening a debate (presumably with a prepared text) and never when replying and therefore depending upon the
inspiration of the moment to turn a pudding into a soufflé. This concluding speech, largely unprepared, is a brilliant example of his best flowing debating style, and is a standing
contradiction to any view that he was a pompous, humourless and viscous speaker. His sentences in this speech were, as always, long and elaborate, but perfectly constructed and easy to read. He had
some good jokes. He
engaged with Gathorne Hardy, who had spoken immediately before him; with Disraeli, who had opened the debate for the opposition; with Lord George Hamilton,
who had made a successful maiden speech which presaged a parliamentary career lasting into the Balfour–Asquith epoch; and with Spencer Walpole, the tearful Home Secretary of 1867; and he
annihilated Stafford Northcote, his former private secretary who had become Conservative MP for North Devon. The whole speech conveys an exceptional force and mastery over both subject and
audience.

It was not only in the setpiece debate that Gladstone demonstrated by his stamina and unflagging patience a Prime Minister’s strategic command combined with a detailed knowledge of the
intricacies of a bill which few departmental ministers would have been able to rival with a measure of their own. There were thirteen committee days, all concentrated within three weeks, and then,
after a short interval, a couple more days for report and third reading. For around seven or eight hours on all of these days Gladstone was continuously on the government bench, always listening,
always in charge, intervening on all the most difficult points, invariably with knowledge and conviction, mostly with judgement. The fact that the bill got through the Commons so compactly, the
majorities always above a hundred, the debates intensive but never running out of control, the government never having to seek a pause because of some new point which it could not answer or some
setback from which it needed a few days to recover, owed much to the Prime Minister’s hands-on generalship.

Over the Lords he could obviously exercise no such control, both because of the absence of a Liberal majority and because he could not there participate, even though he sat listening upon the
steps of the throne for some significant part of the proceedings. Second reading was carried by 179 to 146, a very large vote in the then under 500-strong House. Canterbury and York (as well as the
already mentioned Winchester and Peterborough and most other bishops) abstained, and thirty-six Conservative peers headed by the Marquess of Salisbury (the Hatfield visit perhaps justifying itself)
voted for the bill. It was only the second time in a generation that the Conservative leadership in the Lords had been defeated in a division.

This promising start did not prevent the Lords mauling the bill at committee stage. They concerned themselves very much with the temporalities rather than the spiritualities. As Morley
succinctly put it: ‘The general result of the operations of the Lords was to leave
disestablishment complete, and the legal framework of the bill undisturbed.
Disendowment on the other hand was reduced to a shadow.’
¹⁶
This at least had the advantage of reducing the dispute between the two Houses to a
haggle about money, which was perhaps more manageable, even if less elevating, than a clash of religious principles. However, Church money, and in particular Church stipends, were more than capable
of raising passions. The controversy was further fuelled by the Lords twice insisting on an alteration to the preamble of the bill. This alteration, while it did not have direct practical effect,
predicated the whole exercise on a ‘concurrent endowment’ approach which was as repugnant to Gladstone as he believed (probably rightly) it was to almost all Irish opinion.

The loss between the two Houses of the only major bill of the first session of a government commanding the biggest majority for more than a generation would have been a grave constitutional
affront, and an appropriate atmosphere of crisis lay on official London throughout the two middle weeks of July. Despite the result of the second reading division, the opponents of the bill had a
secure Lords majority for amendments which were unacceptable to the government, and in a game of shuttlecock between the two Houses twice voted for them. On the other hand there was nervousness as
well as defiance among the opponents of the government and the bill. Disraeli’s general strategy was to let the government run into exhaustion and unpopularity rather than to engage it in
mortal combat during its youthful vigour. Cairns, the once and future Lord Chancellor and the new Conservative leader in the Lords, had nothing like Derby’s confidence and was more concerned
to balance on his recently acquired bicycle than to ride it towards a constitutional revolution.

Nor were many of the bishops enthusiastic for a quarrel
à outrance
with, on any showing, the first committed churchman to be Prime Minister since Peel and by some criteria the only
dedicated Anglican ever to occupy 10 Downing Street. Nor did they wish to risk their position in the House of Lords in a defence of their somewhat shadowy brethren from Offaly or Meath. Their
interest was to avoid the weakness of the Irish Church damaging the establishment in England, and it was by no means clear whether discretion or valour best served that end. The ambiguity of the
two Primates had already shown itself in their abstention on second reading.