Gladstone: A Biography (58 page)

The Irish Church Bill settled the issue to which it was directed, and its passage united the Cabinet and the Liberal party. The Irish Land Bill signally failed to settle the Irish agrarian
issue. Such a settlement was indeed almost impossible within a United Kingdom in which any attempt to deal with the largely different problems of Irish rural society was vitiated by the fear of the
English (and Scottish) governing class that making life tolerable for the Irish tenantry would feed back across St George’s Channel and undermine the much less oppressive landlord system in
Great Britain.
⁷³
Furthermore, the Land Bill of 1870, so far from solidifying the majority, came near to breaking up the Cabinet and was always at risk from
Liberal defections. It did however pave the way to the more effective Irish land legislation of Gladstone’s second government.

The paradoxes surrounding Gladstone in his first years as Prime Minister were manifold. The force of his personality, both public and private, and the authority of his parliamentary command were
essential to the holding together of the government and the carrying through of the many and disparate measures of reform which it initiated. His position as first minister was therefore
unassailable, partly for this reason and partly because, exceptionally, there was no one who wished to assail it. Although it was a strong government (Morley thought, possibly with
a touch of exaggeration, that it was the strongest Cabinet that was ever assembled), it contained no future Prime Ministers. This was unusual. To take three quick historical cuts,
Peel’s main government contained Derby, Aberdeen and Gladstone himself. Gladstone’s last government, in contrast with his first, contained Rosebery, Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith. And
Asquith’s government contained Lloyd George and Churchill. Perhaps more important from the point of view of Gladstone’s impregnability, it contained no one who urgently
wanted
to
be Prime Minister.

This was as well, for Gladstone, although personally pre-eminent, held views which in a spread of ways were at variance with those of both his colleagues and his followers. Whereas in the last
years of Palmerston he had appeared, although a recent convert to Liberalism, to be embracing advanced Radical positions, some aspects of his old Conservatism perversely reasserted themselves when
he was himself in the supreme position and had no Prime Minister above him to needle. He was cool on the Elementary Education Bill of 1870, on the University Tests Bill of 1871 (which removed the
Anglican monopoly from the governing of the two universities; that on their admissions policy had already gone) and on the Ballot Bill, which finally became law in 1872.

Even on the issues where Gladstone was at one with his party he was mostly so for subtly different reasons. On Ireland, which he made his central purpose, he was unusual both in being willing to
admit that Fenian outrages were what concentrated the otherwise complacent English mind upon the problem, and in regarding its damage to Britain’s reputation in Europe as a determining
factor. And on continental problems, epitomized by the Franco-Prussian War, his attitude was neither that of the old Whigs, who believed in a mixture of Palmerston’s bluster and
Russell’s pragmatic diplomacy, nor that of the Cobden–Bright tradition of keeping out of foreign quarrels at almost any cost. Gladstone believed in the Concert of Europe, the settling
of disputes by the consensual authority of the great powers, and was as willing to bear burdens and risks on its behalf as he was unwilling to pursue chauvinist aims.

His Cabinet may or may not have been the strongest which was ever assembled but it was not one which was easily led. His closest colleague ought in theory to have been Edward Cardwell, who was
the only old Peelite Commons minister left. (There was also Argyll in the Lords.) But Cardwell, an able, self-confident, opinionated departmental minister, as strong on intellectual certainty as he
was weak on oratory and
easy-going charm, was more consistently in disagreement with the Prime Minister in Cabinet than was almost anyone else. At the War Office Cardwell
carried through major army reforms, but also inevitably found himself at odds with the Prime Minister’s instinctive military parsimony. It was not only departmentally, however, that he and
Gladstone were on opposite sides. They were so on Irish land, on English school education, on the final abolition of university tests and on the ballot.

Lowe, who had been generously made Chancellor of the Exchequer in spite of his wrecking Gladstone’s leadership of the Commons in 1866, was expected to be awkward, and was. He did, however,
have the advantage of being determinedly in favour of ending patronage in the civil service, and from his Treasury vantage point was able to bring to completion for all departments except the
Foreign Office the reforms which Gladstone had initiated in 1853–5. Eventually and accidentally he was to do Gladstone a second grave disservice. In 1873, when the government was staggering
and the Prime Minister was already exhausted to a point which impaired his judgement, Lowe was thought to have disqualified himself from continuing to hold the Exchequer by some irregularity in
telegraph accounting for which the Postmaster-General and the First Commissioner of Works were more to blame. Gladstone dispensed with the two lesser ministers and transferred Lowe to the Home
Office. Then, reverting to old fascinations, he could not resist adding the Exchequer to his own already excessive burdens. The outcome was not good for the final phase of the government.

In addition to these two difficult colleagues, Gladstone, particularly on Irish land, was always vulnerable to the nervousness of the Whig magnates about any threat to landlords’ rights.
Granville wrote to him on 25 September 1869, at the beginning of the preparation for the Land Bill, of ‘those who will take a purely landlord view’ and naming in this category
‘Lowe, Argyll, Clarendon, Cardwell, and very moderately so Hartington’.
¹
Granville himself was central to the Whig cousinage, but he had
the advantage from this point of view of not being a magnate. For a nineteenth-century earl he had very little property. Indeed when he died in 1891 his estate was found to be
bankrupt.
⁷⁴
Furthermore he gave every sign of having reached a conscious and sensible decision to exploit his greatest political asset, which was a unique
ability to ease his and others’ relations with Gladstone. He could lead the Prime Minister
on a light rein, always accepting his basic positions but getting him to see
men and events in a calmer perspective than he might otherwise have done. This role owed more to Granville’s personality than to his office, but it was nonetheless somewhat enhanced when
Clarendon died in June 1870 and Granville moved from the Colonial Office to the more central position of Foreign Secretary. He was a vital ball-bearing of the government, performing an important
emollient role, particularly between Gladstone and the old Whigs but to some extent between the Prime Minister and all his colleagues.

John Bright ought to have performed the same function between Gladstone and the Nonconformist Radicals, although they unlike the Whigs were on the back benches and prominent in the provincial
cities rather than in the Cabinet. But Bright was both unwell and opinionated, so that he was often absent and when he was there generally had some pet scheme of his own, which he was more
interested in pushing than in giving support to Gladstone’s contiguous but not identical positions. Gladstone was more pre-eminent than predominant in his first Cabinet, and on no issue were
the hazards for him sharper than on the Irish Land Bill, which was intended to be for the 1870 session the great follow-up to the Irish Church Bill of 1869. But the issue was more tangled and, in
addition, Gladstone for the 1870 session ignored Graham’s 1853 maxim about the avoidance of ‘overlapping business’, that is the danger of trying to run two major bills through
Parliament at the same time. The second reading of the Elementary Education Bill came only a week after that of the Irish Land Bill.

As has been touched on in the context of Mrs Thistlethwayte, Gladstone pursued a policy of intensive consultation in preparation for the session of 1870 and the Irish Land Bill in particular.
There were ten Cabinets between 26 October and Christmas and another eight between 21 January and the Queen’s Speech (once again delivered by Commission and not in person) on 8 February. They
were not exclusively concerned with the Land Bill, but most of the time of most of them was so directed. The issue was how far between the minimum and the maximum approach should the government go.
The minimum approach was that the Irish tenant should, if evicted, be entitled to compensation for his own improvements to the property. This was not seriously contested. The maximum approach was
what came to be called the ‘Three Fs’ – fixity of tenure, fair rent and freedom of sale (of the accrued rights of the tenant). This maximum, which was to be enacted eleven years
later in the second Gladstone government, and which like all
delayed concessions would have been much better done earlier, was regarded as beyond the bounds of practicality in
1870. As Gladstone wrote on 12 March 1870 to Manning, who had passed on the critical although constructive reactions of the Irish Catholic bishops to the bill: ‘. . . I am bound in frankness
to say that the paper enclosed in your former letter proposes changes in the Bill, which neither the nation, nor the Parliament, nor the Cabinet, could adopt. We might as well propose the repeal of
the Union. . . . Not one man has ventured to argue in the House of Commons for these changes.’
²

What Gladstone endeavoured to do was to build on the minimum to the greatest extent that was compatible with holding his Cabinet together. He avoided its disruption only by a narrow margin, and
J. L. Hammond was probably correct in writing that ‘although he gained the consent of his colleagues, he did not gain their conviction’.
³
When on 25 January he finally got the bill through the Cabinet his diary entry ran: ‘The
great
difficulties of I.L. Bill
there
are now over, Thank God.’
⁴

Gladstone’s original instrument for building on the minimum was to take an ancient convention known as Ulster Tenant Right, to extend it to the other three provinces of Ireland and to turn
it from a convention into a law. This right enabled the tenant to bestow or sell the title to occupancy. This concept of creating a form of property in the right of occupancy made it essential that
the tenant should be protected from eviction, or at least compensated for it if it took place. There could be no property in a ‘right’ which could be terminated at the whim of the
landlord. What the Irish tenants wanted was statutory protection from eviction, but the most that Gladstone could persuade his weak but stubborn Chief Secretary for Ireland, let alone the rest of
the Cabinet, to give them was the right to compensation when it had taken place. To make even this right effective there had to be some public intervention in the rent-fixing process. If a tenant
simply did not pay a manifestly fair rent his landlord could hardly be made to pay compensation for evicting him without making a mockery of the whole concept of land ownership. And that was about
as likely to be accepted by a Whig Cabinet as was Church disestablishment by a Tory one. On the other hand if the landlord could fix any rent he liked and then freely get rid of those who did not
pay it that would make compensation for disturbance meaningless.

So some provision for resort to the courts on what was and what was not a fair rent was inevitable. Gladstone was inclined to make it as elaborate as possible because he liked complicated
schemes. The Cabinet
accepted any regulation with reluctance. The Tories, who did not divide against the second reading of the bill, fought hard against the relevant clause.
The Lords amended it by substituting an ‘exorbitant rent’ for an ‘excessive rent’ as the trigger which set off the process. Gladstone, under pressure from Granville as the
leader of the Lords, accepted with reluctance the apparently minor change. Although the only dictionary difference between the two words is that ‘excessive’ means to exceed the proper
amount and that ‘exorbitant’ means to do so grossly, the difference nonetheless enabled the courts to interpret the protection narrowly enough to render it almost a dead letter.

For the rest the bill contained an obeisance to a scheme of tenant land purchase with some Treasury assistance, which was Bright’s favoured solution but which was a very pale forerunner of
the effective Conservative measures for peasant proprietorship which were taken around the turn of the century thirty years later. Altogether the Land Bill of 1870 assaulted some shibboleths and
pointed a way for the future much more effectively than it changed the reality of agrarian life in Ireland. Unlike the Church Bill it did not settle the issue to which it was directed. It raised
questions rather than disposed of them. To the end of his first government, however, but not much longer, Gladstone persisted in the over-sanguine belief that he had dealt with Irish land as
effectively as he had with the Irish Church. He thought that if he could add the third achievement of a bill dealing with Irish university education (as he tried to do in 1873) he would have
achieved a triple crown and gone far towards fulfilling his proclaimed mission ‘to pacify Ireland’. And beyond that, as he genuinely believed, lay the hope of an honourable retirement
from politics as soon as his government (he thought of it not as his first but as his only one) was over. He could then devote ‘an interval between parliament and the
grave’,
⁵
not exactly to repose but to God and Homer and his other religious and intellectual interests. As he wrote to the Queen in March 1873
(using the habitual third person), ‘he has the strongest opinion against spending his old age under the strain of that perpetual contention which is inseparable from his present
position’.
⁶