Gladstone: A Biography (59 page)

Hammond believed there were two central reasons why Gladstone did not get Irish land as right as he got the Irish Church. The first was that he had not adequately prepared influential opinion or
provided himself and others with a background of more or less incontrovertible facts. In an age of ‘blue books’, which had proved particularly effective on factory reform and public
health, he ought to have fortified himself
and indoctrinated others by setting up a quickly reporting Royal Commission or other enquiring body as soon as the government came
into power. This enquiry could have investigated and deliberated during 1869 and greatly strengthened the Prime Minister’s hand in 1870.

Second, Hammond thought that while Gladstone had immersed himself in Irish history, he was not well informed about the realities of mid-Victorian life in ‘John Bull’s other
island’. He had never been there, and he was curiously inhibited about talking to those who knew well the situation on the ground. Unionist sentiment, which at that time was not challenged in
the Liberal party, was dedicated to maintaining the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, even though at that stage its sixty-nine-year-old history was both brief and dismal and its future
fifty-two years were to contain little but searing trouble. The union was sacrosanct to establishment opinion in Britain, but the instinctive reaction of such opinion was to treat talking to and
being influenced by the indigenous Irish as almost the equivalent of ‘nigger loving’.

Gladstone was on the threshold of devoting the last third of his life to Ireland, yet he was not immune from this approach. The fifth Earl of Bessborough tried hard to persuade Gladstone to
consult Sir John Gray about the Bill. Gray was the proprietor and editor of the
Freeman’s Journal
, which was pre-eminently the paper of Irish tenant farmers. He was also MP for
Kilkenny and had been knighted by the Palmerston government. Furthermore, Gladstone had been warned by O’Hagan, his Irish Lord Chancellor, that ‘the success of the Land Bill depends on
the
Freeman’s Journal
; if it says, We accept this as a fixity of tenure, every priest will say the same, and
vice versa
.’
⁷
Yet Gladstone would not see Gray. Instinctively he approached the problem of Irish government almost in a Colonial or Indian spirit. He became prepared to sacrifice the unity and future of the
Liberal party to trying to right the wrongs of Ireland, but he made it, in Morley’s phrase, ‘almost a point of honour . . . for British cabinets to make Irish laws out of their own
heads’.
⁸

In the same way he used Manning as effectively his sole channel of communication with the Catholic Church in Ireland. This was odder in 1870 than it had been in 1869 with the Irish
Disestablishment Bill. Manning knew something about both the Anglican and the Roman Churches in Ireland, but he knew next to nothing about Irish land tenure. And an ill-informed conduit is always a
potentially misleading one. Further more any renewal of relations of trust and friendship with Manning, which had seemed possible the previous year, had been shattered by Gladstone’s deep
disapproval of the Archbishop’s role in urging Pope
Pius IX forward to what for Gladstone were the excesses of ultramontanism and the pernicious, divisive and
unhistorical doctrine of papal infallibility. Manning’s activities in this direction were at their height in the spring and summer of 1870, and Gladstone’s anti-Roman feeling became
incandescent. It was a minor and lucky miracle that he waited five years to compose and publish his pamphlet entitled
The Vatican Decrees and their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political
Expostulation
rather than dashing it off immediately and publishing it, maybe under an easily pierced veil of anonymity, while he was still Prime Minister.

Such partial knowledge and imperfect channels meant that Gladstone’s bill strained the loyalty of the Whigs without achieving much of a response in Ireland. This double-barrelled coolness
was perhaps inevitable, but it was nonetheless marked. Gray himself voted against the second reading, the bishops said that it could not be regarded as a settlement of the question, and the Dublin
Municipal Council passed a resolution of inadequacy. Nor was the passage through Parliament nearly as solidly assured as had been that of the Church Bill. Then the Tories could be depended upon to
oppose, and the Liberal majority to support. With the Land Bill the Tory opposition was more sporadic and therefore more dangerous, because it helped to make unanimous Liberal support less
reliable. Indeed the most damaging enemy of the bill in the Commons was Roundell Palmer, who had been Attorney-General in the Palmerston and Russell governments and Gladstone’s adjutant in
several past parliamentary struggles. However, Gladstone, with that mixture of simple generosity and willingness to stoop to conquer which were equally persistent parts of his character (and which
he had previously shown to Lowe) made him Lord Chancellor when Hatherley resigned in 1872 and employed him in the same capacity (as well as advancing him to the earldom of Selborne) in
1880–5.

Despite these hazards the Land Bill got through the Commons by Whitsun. Gladstone celebrated by allowing himself to be taken by Granville to Epsom for the Derby. His reaction again illustrated
his mixture of naivety and enthusiasm (’no one of such great simplicity had ever before been found in so exalted a station’, Jowett, the Master who made the Balliol of good jobs for the
well-qualified boys, said of him when he became Prime Minister). Gladstone’s diary entry read:

The measure then survived the Lords and a little shuttle between the two Houses, including the acceptance by the Commons of the unfortunate ‘exorbitant’ for ‘excessive’,
to become law by the end of July. Gladstone had two associated disappointments. First he was forced to accompany the Land Bill with a Coercion Bill (the curiously brutal name commonly used in the
late nineteenth century for Irish bills giving special powers to courts and police against politically motivated crime). He was very loath to do this, but a combination of Fenian activities on the
ground and the pressure of his colleagues forced him into it. This combination also postponed for a year the implementation of his desire, as an assuaging measure, to release another batch of
Fenian prisoners beyond the forty whom the government had freed (with beneficial results according to the Viceroy) in early 1869. When this second batch were eventually let out it was with the
short-sighted provision that they should be banished from both Britain and Ireland itself; so they went to the United States and acted as dedicated agents of terrorist recruitment and
fund-raising.

The other disappointment was that his desire, embraced even more strongly by Hartington as Irish Chief Secretary, to improve the infrastructure of the Irish economy by nationalizing and
extending its railway system, ran into the sand of Cabinet opposition and postponement. Gladstone did not push this as hard as he ought to have done, but he was nonetheless always somewhat
predisposed towards railway nationalization for England, both when he was President of the Board of Trade in the 1840s and in the Palmerston government in the early 1860s, and for Ireland a decade
later.

By the spring of 1870 Gladstone’s attention was increasingly engrossed by English education, both lower and higher. The middle or secondary range was, unfortunately for national purposes,
left to look after itself, that is confined to the public schools and to a few haphazardly placed ancient grammar schools. This persisted until Balfour grasped the nettle in 1902 and thereby, such
can be the perversity of political rewards, helped to produce the Conservative electoral débâcle of 1906. In 1870, however, it was the need for an
elementary
education bill
which was regarded as urgent, as was that for removing the remaining Oxford and Cambridge religious tests. Legislation on elementary education was
eagerly sought within the
government by de Grey (Ripon) and W. E. Forster. As Lord President and Vice-President of the Council, these two carried the ministerial responsibility for education, such as it then was. This
eagerness was shared by many of the Liberal party’s most prominent provincial supporters, as well as by several other Cabinet members (notably Bruce, the Home Secretary), but not by the Prime
Minister.

Gladstone was never very interested in popular education. He was half willing to go along with a fashionable view that the crushing of France by Germany in 1870 owed a great deal to the Prussian
system of state education. However, he was far from giving the highest priority to military victories and his mind was set much more on Eton than on the Technischen Hochschulen of Bismarck’s
Berlin. He was an unashamed elitist. To him education meant the rigours of traditional classical scholarship. Although it was of course manifestly impractical to provide this sort of instruction
for more than a tiny minority, he did not easily embrace the utility of more humble forms of teaching. He could not, however, contest the inevitability of a major measure of reform.

The existing position, in which of 4.3 million children of school age (in England and Wales), only 1.3 million were in state-aided schools, 1.0 million in purely voluntary (and often very
inefficient) schools, and 2.0 million outside any educational provision, was not defensible. Confronted with this reality Gladstone’s own preference was for increasing the grant to the
existing Anglican (and Roman Catholic) schools, and filling the gap with new state schools – Board Schools as, because they were administered by local education boards, they came to be called
– which would provide only secular education on the rates, while allowing the priests or ministers of the various denominations to come in at their own expense and provide full doctrinal
instruction for the children of their own adherents. This, he wrote to Bright, provided the only prospect of ‘solid and stable ground’.

His approach to the education of the ‘uneducated’ classes was at least as much that of a churchman as of a reformer. He no longer believed that Anglicanism should be imposed upon
everybody, but he was most unwilling to see the existing Church of England schools absorbed into a secular national system. To illustrate the matter with particularity, he would have been horrified
if at Hawarden his brother-in-law Henry Glynne, or his son Stephen Gladstone when he succeeded Glynne as rector in 1872, had been inhibited from religious instruction, and instruction which
embraced the Anglican ‘formularies’, in the Church school there. Simple education should be for piety as much as for
knowledge, and piety (for Anglicans at any
rate) involved some understanding of the dogma and structure of the apostolic Church. A religion based solely on Bible teaching intermingled with some vague ethical principles would always be for
Gladstone a poor and sterile thing.

His only solid ground was not however ground which he was able to hold. Hardly anyone except himself was in favour of the position. It did not satisfy the Anglican lobby, which was less tolerant
of ‘lesser breeds without the law’ than Gladstone had become; it did not satisfy the Dissenters, who wanted simple Bible teaching on the rates; and it did not satisfy the mostly
Erastian members of the Cabinet who wanted a more politically attractive solution. This was provided nearly three months after the introduction of the bill into the House of Commons by the
Cabinet’s decision on 14 June to accept what became the famous Cowper-Temple amendment. Cowper-Temple was the Whig member for South Hampshire who had been intermittently a junior minister for
the quarter-century from 1841 to 1866 but whom Gladstone had not included in 1868, although with another touch of magnanimity he was to make him a peer in 1880. Cowper-Temple’s amendment
provided for basic or Nonconformist religion, that is the Bible and a few hymns, on the rates. It went through the House of Commons on 16 June, for which day Gladstone’s diary entry included
the stoical entry: ‘Explained the plans of the Govt in modification of the Bill to an eager and agitated House. . . . Exhausting Siroccolike heat.’
¹⁰

Gladstone was half self-willed ideologue and half parliamentary old trouper who would expound with vehemence to the House of Commons a decision of his government even when he had accepted it
with the utmost reluctance. His reluctance on this occasion was so great that it probably contributed to the exhaustion at least as much as did the humidity of the weather. Matthew describes the
Cabinet decision as ‘a major personal blow for Gladstone’ and his acceptance of it as ‘a concession which rankled more deeply’ than any other obeisance he made to hold his
government together.
¹¹

The concession made, the Education Bill ground on through the Commons until it completed its course amid the opening distractions of the Franco-Prussian War. It was not seriously contested by
the Conservative opposition (although they modified it as soon as they came to power in 1874 in a way that Gladstone regarded as constitutionally improper),
⁷⁵
and as a result it was not seriously interfered with by the House of Lords. In several of the many divisions Tory votes were an essential contribution to the
government majority. Thus on 30 June an amendment moved by Jacob Bright, John Bright’s younger brother, which proclaimed the doctrine that religious teaching in state schools should not be in
favour of, or opposed to, the tenets of any denomination, was defeated by 251 votes to 130. The 130 were all Liberals. The majority was effectively provided by over a hundred Conservatives. It was
not a happy dependence or one which was good for the cohesion of the government party.