Gladstone: A Biography (60 page)

Matters were made worse by the insertion in the bill of a provision which became the much denounced and therefore famous Section 25 and enabled school boards to pay to denominational schools the
fees of poor children. This led to an excited Nonconformist conference of opposition at Manchester in 1872, and to an agitation in which Joseph Chamberlain first came to national prominence.
Chamberlain did not win his battle – the ground for which he chose to fight was in fact ludicrously narrow, for very few school boards contemplated doing any such thing – but he made
life very uncomfortable for a High Anglican leader of the Liberal party, and also set a depressing pattern, which persisted until terminated by the Butler Act of 1944, of making British education
policy more a battleground for denominational and social dispute than a basis for improving the instruction of children.

Gladstone did not therefore set the schools issue to rest by his reluctant swallowing of Cowper-Temple. And no sooner had he imbibed this disagreeable medicine than he was confronted with a
second nauseous potion in the form of the University Tests Bill. More than fifteen years previously Gladstone had been converted to the admission of non-Anglicans to the University and to its
bachelors’ degrees. (There were of course two universities involved, but he found it very difficult not to believe that the intellectual life of the universe centred on Carfax, or that even
the greater Trinity in the Fens could hold a candle to Christ Church.) But he was still loath to allow non-Anglicans any place in Oxford’s controlling institutions, including the membership
of Convocation which would follow from their being allowed to take masters’ degrees. Admission to headships of houses, professorships and membership of the governing bodies of colleges
through fellowships he recoiled from still more strongly. In 1865, when Goschen, then a backbench Liberal MP for the City of London, had brought this matter to the fore by an (unsuccessful) private
member’s bill, Gladstone had somewhat
extremely written to a Nonconformist correspondent: ‘I would rather see Oxford level with the ground, than its religion
regulated in the manner which would please Bishop Colenso.’
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By 1870 the matter had advanced to
the stage of Coleridge, later Chief Justice and at the time Gladstone’s Solicitor-General, being allowed to make another attempt to end the tests, provided he brought forward the bill in his
private capacity and not as a law officer of the Crown.

This halfway house closely matched Gladstone’s own evolving attitude. He was coming to accept the inevitable but his reluctance persisted. ‘. . . I am almost tempted to say,’
he wrote to Coleridge with a characteristically fine if convoluted shade of meaning, ‘it would be impossible, after my long connection with Oxford, to go into a new controversy on the basis
of what will be taken and alleged to be an absolute secularisation of the colleges. . . . I incline to think that this work is for others not for me.’
¹³
This bill got much further than Goschen’s had done, but foundered between the two Houses in July. Gladstone, further evolving, then agreed to its being made a
government measure for the following session. And then, with his curious capacity once he had decided to bite a bullet to bite it hard, himself introduced the measure on 10 February 1871. In April
and May he resisted with considerable indignation attempts by Salisbury substantially to amend it in the Lords. Eventually, on a second consideration, the Lords voted Salisbury down by 129 to 89,
and all academic appointments at Oxford and at Cambridge (which had already been a little more liberal), with the exception of those with a specific religious function such as the deanship of
Christ Church and the theological professorships, became open to those of all beliefs or none.

The immediate effects should not be exaggerated. Roman Catholics by their own abstention remained for some decades almost entirely absent from Oxford, despite Newman’s first fleeting
return visit in 1878. Those of non-Christian faiths, except for a few home-grown eccentrics and (later) maharajahs, nawabs or their equivalent, were hardly envisaged, and even the Nonconformists
remained peripheral to the University. They made their own Oxford encampments (Mansfield College, founded in 1886, and Manchester College, founded in 1889), as well as gradually becoming strong in
colleges such as Queen’s with a large
northern intake. Jews, epitomized by Herbert Samuel and L. B. Namier at Oxford and Edwin Montagu at Cambridge, were probably the
greatest early beneficiaries. But until well into the twentieth century the majority of Heads of Houses were in Anglican orders, college chapels were regarded as obligatory until a new wave of
post-1945 colleges dispensed with them, the University church of St Mary’s continued to be both Anglican and geographically central to Oxford, if not as doctrinally so as in the days of
Keble’s Assize Sermon and Newman’s incumbency, and Christ Church remained the only college in Christendom which contained the cathedral church of a diocese within its purlieus.
Gladstone could claim without remotely straining his well-known capacity for sophistical argument that he had avoided ‘an absolute secularisation of the colleges’.

Nevertheless the passages of the Elementary Education Act of 1870 and of the University Tests Act of 1871 were far from exhilarating experiences for him. They exemplified the burdens rather than
the pleasures of office, and they also demonstrated the difficulties which flowed from the contradictions between his past and his present, his beliefs and his followers, his emotions and his
intellect. There was, however, an important difference between the two issues: the University Tests boil, once lanced, subsided satisfactorily; the Elementary Education issue, once raised,
reverberated on to weaken the government and to exacerbate Gladstone’s relations with his party.

Compared with these lacerating if parochial issues (but at a time when the British parish was the most famous and observed one in the world), the problems of the Franco-Prussian War must have
been almost a relief for Gladstone. It started on 19 July 1870 within a fortnight of the appointment of Granville as Foreign Secretary following the death of Clarendon, and therefore involved the
Prime Minister more than might otherwise have been the case in those days of departmental devolution and the prerogatives of secretaries of state. It came, even more than 1914 and incomparably more
than 1939, out of a clear blue sky. It was not only Edmund Hammond, permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office, who totally misjudged the prospect in his initial report to Granville. Bismarck,
five months before, was equally unprescient. ‘The political horizon as seen from Berlin’, he had informed the King of Roumania in the February of 1870, ‘appears at present so
unclouded that there is nothing of interest to report. . . .’ Hammond, however, was merely a weather forecaster, whereas Bismarck was a rain king. If he found ‘nothing of interest to
report’ he had
the power to fill the gap and according to popular retrospective judgement he proceeded so to do.

At the time, however, British opinion started strongly pro-Prussian, and regarded the French Emperor as having behaved like one of his imperial bees and killed himself as a result of delivering
an unprovoked sting. Queen Victoria, for instance, who admittedly had strong family reasons for partisanship, wrote to Gladstone on 19 July: ‘It is not a question of
Prussia
agst
France but of
United Germany
most
unjustifiably attacked
, fighting for hearth & Home – so no one can help feeling warmly for them.’
⁷⁷
Again on 3 August she assured him that ‘Germany as a real & natural ally would always be safe – never aggressive.’ And on 2 October, with the French army
crushed, Napoleon III a prisoner, his Empress a refugee in England and Paris invaded by Prussian troops, she was still animadverting: ‘What a dreadful exhibition of falsehood and boastfulness
the French continue to make! It shows a corruption wh is the cause of the Country’s downfall – & one of the most disgraceful exhibitions is the way in wh all turn agst the Emperor
and Empress &
all
about them!’
¹⁴
Meanwhile, from the other end of the political spectrum, the young Sir Charles Dilke, who was just
about to mount his British republican campaign but before doing so was rushing around the battlefields as well as witnessing the proclamation of the Third Republic in Paris, was also full of vague
feelings of nordic solidarity with the Germans.
¹⁵
It was one of the few issues on which he agreed with the Queen.

Gladstone took a more restrained position. ‘On the face of the facts France is wrong,’ he informed Brand, his former Chief Whip, ‘but as to personal trustworthiness the two
moving spirits on the respective sides, Napoleon and Bismarck, are nearly on a par.’
¹⁶
Gladstone, with this view, had three objectives in
relation to the war. First, he wished to keep Britain out. In retrospect this does not sound too difficult. It is indeed not easy to see on which side Britain might have intervened. To have
supported Prussia could have been a work of supererogation, and to have supported France would in the decisive days between July and September have been so unpopular as to be impossible. But at the
time there was great concern that Britain would in some way or other be drawn in, accompanied by calls, mainly from those who were so
predisposed, for a substantial increase in
British military capacity. Gladstone was equally concerned to resist this.

The danger point was Belgium. Both on grounds of strategic interest and of sentiment an invasion of that somewhat ramshackle kingdom by either belligerent would have transfixed any British
government. The matter was dramatized by
The Times
on 25 July (six days after the French declaration of war) publishing the text of a secret Franco-Prussian treaty of 1867 or 1869 (there was
some dispute about the date) which included a provision that Prussia would not object to France swallowing Belgium and Luxembourg. The Prussians admitted to Granville that there had at any rate
been such a draft, done they said in the hand of Benedetti, the somewhat over-active French ambassador to Berlin. The matter was complicated by the fact that the text as published by
The
Times
was in less than the perfect French which it was difficult to believe that Benedetti, in spite of his Italian name and his German immersion, would have produced. This pointed to Prussian
origin (Bismarck’s Chancery while respecting the language of diplomacy was less immaculately francophone than the court of Frederick the Great a hundred years earlier).

With France at war with Prussia, however, it was difficult to see that the treaty, whether of draft or stronger status, of French or Prussian origin, had any continuing relevance. The more
present danger was that the Prussian generals, as were their descendants forty-four and seventy years later, would be attracted by an axis of advance up the Meuse valley and past the forbidding
fortresses of Namur and Dinant. This sufficiently worried Gladstone that he modified his anti-militarism and urgently encouraged the War Office to study means of sending 20,000 troops to Antwerp.
Also, on 30 July, he persuaded the Cabinet to propose to France and Prussia a treaty by which, if either of them violated the neutrality of Belgium, Britain would co-operate with the other for its
defence. This might have been regarded as a classic example of an initiative taken too late, but oddly it worked. Prussia accepted immediately. Moltke’s war plans, unlike those of Schlieffen
and Rundstedt in the two world wars, did not involve Belgium. And France hesitated only until the battle of Wörth had been lost, and then signed on 9 August. Gladstone thus achieved the second
of his objectives.

The third was more elusive, partly because it was another issue on which he failed to carry his Cabinet. When the French had lost the war (and when public sympathy in England had substantially
swung back to their side) Gladstone wanted to rally the neutral powers of Europe
against the German annexation of Alsace and half of Lorraine on the ground that no such change
should be made without the consent of the population. This differed from the basis on which the French government was objecting. It took its stand on the inviolability of established frontiers,
particularly if they involved French soil. This was a hazardous position in view of the French annexation, little more than a decade before, of both Nice and Savoy. But it was also a position
preferred by some members of the British Cabinet, while others dissented from Gladstone on the ground of traditional Whig realism. Protests were not going to make Bismarck give up the opportunity
to annex two of the richest provinces of Europe. Why, therefore, invite failure by ineffective intervention? As a result Gladstone had an unusually humiliating Cabinet on Friday, 30 September:
‘Cabinet 2¼–6. I failed in my two objects 1. an effort to speak with the other neutral powers against the transfer of A. & L. without reference to the populations. 2.
(Immediate) release of the Fenian prisoners.’
¹⁷

Gladstone was far from all-powerful as Prime Minister. He had, nonetheless, attained two of his three objects in relation to the war. He had also done a couple of very odd things, which between
them illustrate some of the contradictions of his bewildering character. When war became virtually certain on 14–15 July, British government stocks including Consols fell heavily. At a long
Cabinet on Saturday the 16th reports were received and dispositions made which caused Gladstone, as he informed the Queen by letter, to be more confident that France would respect the neutrality of
Belgium and that Britain, partly in consequence, would be able to keep out of the conflict. These of course were both bull points for Consols, and on the Monday Gladstone calmly bought for his own
account £2500 of them at the temporarily depressed price of 90. It was a shrewd speculation, and it is unlikely that it ever occurred to him, through his carapace of innocence and faith in
his own motives, that he was doing anything remotely improper. He made no effort at concealment.