Gladstone: A Biography (62 page)

When Gladstone became Prime Minister Queen Victoria was forty-nine and a half years old (a little under ten years his junior), with nine children of her own, the oldest twenty-eight and the
youngest eleven, was already eight times a grandmother, and was just completing her seventh year of widowhood. During these seven years she had hardly been seen in public, although she had once
opened Parliament, at the beginning of the session of 1866, but had done so with waxen visage, responding to neither the populace outside nor the peers inside. London and Windsor had become almost
equally distasteful to her. Only Osborne on the Isle of Wight and Balmoral in Aberdeenshire, neither convenient for the transaction of official business, were congenial or, she insisted, good for
her delicate health. Nevertheless she worked quite hard at papers and correspondence, although complaining to far busier ministers that her burdens were unique. She had in General Grey an
unobsequious private secretary with a Whig background who firmly believed that she ought to pull herself together and undertake more public engagements, and a doctor in William Jenner
(not to be confused with his more eminent but unrelated namesake who had invented vaccination) who was professionally reputable but who encouraged her valetudinarianism. When Grey died in 1870 he
was succeeded by Henry Ponsonby, who was at first referred to as Colonel Ponsonby, but when he settled into the job became General Ponsonby, rather like a housekeeper receiving the honorary title
of ‘Mrs’.
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Ponsonby, whatever his rank, was a man of firm Liberal views (indeed his son became a Labour MP and his grandson Labour Whip in the
House of Lords, although that of course was not necessarily proof of his own radicalism).

The Queen was not therefore surrounded by reactionary influences, although Jenner encouraged her resistance to greater visibility, which would also in a sense have made her more democratic.
There was in addition John Brown, ‘the Queen’s highland servant’ as he had become officially designated in 1865, although ceasing at the same time to be confined to Balmoral and
allowed to operate at Osborne as well. His political views are not known. He came from a Liberal part of the country, but was probably not naturally of a reforming turn of mind. Then there was
Disraeli, who had had a nine-month run with the Queen for most of 1868. He had made the most of it, referring to ‘we authors, Ma’am’ when her
Highland Journal
was
published, and had received his first offering of royal primroses. But he had not captivated or prejudiced her mind in the way that he was so effectively to do during his second and long
government.

At the November 1868 general election she would almost certainly, had she possessed a vote, have used it for the Conservatives rather than for the Liberals. But it is also true to say that in
all the previous six general elections of her reign she would have voted for the incumbent government, whether it was Tory or Whig. She had hitherto been loyal rather than partisan. Eighteen
sixty-eight was the break-point. At all the subsequent six she would undoubtedly have voted Conservative. In 1868, however, her preference was clear (although she had just had a strong argument
with Disraeli about whether Bishop Tait of London should become the new Archbishop of Canterbury; at the end of it, however, Disraeli
deferred to her, which on a matter he
would have regarded as of such importance Gladstone would not have done), but her preference was not obsessive. She was disappointed but not dismayed by the election result.

It never occurred to her for instance that she might have played with trying to get a Whig peer to accept the premiership and have confined Gladstone to his old stamping ground of the Exchequer
combined with the leadership of the House of Commons. She despatched General Grey to Hawarden with perfect propriety, and the initial attitude of both Queen to new Prime Minister and of Prime
Minister to Queen was probably well expressed, allowing a little for the natural flattery of persuasive correspondence, in an exchange of letters between Gladstone and his old Eton and Christ
Church contemporary Dean Wellesley of Windsor. Wellesley was as close to the Queen as any Anglican dignitary ever was (she preferred Scots Presbyterians, without ever being overkeen on ‘men
of God’, north or south of the border). He wrote to Gladstone on 27 November 1868:

The advice was precise and perceptive, and the opening encouragement was the more convincing for being realistically qualified by assuring Gladstone only that the Queen would
not be
initially
hostile to him. After that it was up to him. He took Wellesley’s letter well and replied on 29 November:

In other words Gladstone saw and was grateful for the force of Wellesley’s advice but, much though he desired to serve and be appreciated by his Sovereign, was very doubtful whether his
temperament would enable him to live up to it. The recipes which Wellesley laid down were those which Gladstone was quite incapable of following. He had an immense respect for the Queen, both as an
institution and as an individual – probably more than Disraeli did – but the chances of his being able to turn this into gentleness, tenderness and restraint in pursuing his point when
he was convinced that he was right, and that his views were in accordance with the best interests of the monarchy and the country, were quite negligible. Thus, even before he kissed hands as Prime
Minister, this exchange of letters illuminated with a harsh clarity (insofar as that word could ever be applied to Gladstone’s opaque phrases) the bleakness of the future landscape.

Such full bleakness took some time to be attained, and for the earlier half of the life of his first government relations were, in diplomatic terms, ‘normal’ or even a little warmer.
It was in 1871–2 that the real freeze-up began, although even after that there could be intervals of hesitant thaw. What was, however, always the case, in the bad periods and the better ones
alike, was the huge amount of Prime Ministerial time that was devoted to relations with the Sovereign. It was qualitatively different from any recent practice. Not only were there the frequent
extended autumn visits to Balmoral (two weeks in 1869, good-tempered release in 1870, a week in 1871, rather huffy release in 1872, and ten days in 1873), the often inconvenient journeys to
Osborne, the full letter after each meeting of the Cabinet, and the daily letter of description of proceedings in Parliament (a task now long since delegated to a whip). All this was in a sense
routine, and was to be matched by at least an equal effort (although more skilfully conducted and more copiously rewarded) by Disraeli in 1874–80. What were special to Gladstone were the long
and often argumentative audiences (conducted standing, for it was only in the subsequent government that she accorded Disraeli the
surreptitious privilege of sitting –
surreptitious because he removed the chair before leaving in order that no Court servant should be aware of how familiar he had been) and the long and equally argumentative letters which Gladstone
chose to address to her on specific matters of policy or appointments. These exchanges, both oral and written, were of doubtful utility. Neither fitted in with Wellesley’s advice. The former
led to her complaining that Gladstone addressed her like a public meeting (she might have done better to get him, too, to sit down), and the latter, encouraged it must be said by almost equally
long royal replies, led more often to an impasse rather than to a resolution. She could not effectively answer Gladstone’s over-meticulous arguments, which made her irritable, and she found
it easier to say no on paper than face to face.

Of Gladstone’s near contemporaries as Prime Minister, Disraeli as we have seen was equally Queen-obsessed, although in a totally different and much more productive way. Palmerston, Russell
and later Salisbury remained more detached. Even they necessarily had more Court duties than is the almost minimal practice today, but they did not get emotionally involved. Palmerston sailed
jauntily through all disagreements. Russell had the true Whig’s approach to the monarchy as a convenience rather than an institution for reverence. And Salisbury, while in the Golden and
Diamond Jubilees of 1887 and 1897 he built on the Disraeli practice of exalting and even exploiting the Queen–Emperor as a symbol of Empire, patriotism and unionism, wisely got on with his
own business and left the Queen to get on with hers.

Examples of Gladstone’s less relaxed and more interventionist style abounded from the beginning of the government. On a day in his first week of office on which he wrote a total of thirty
letters, five of them were to the Queen and two to her private secretary. The first small storm blew up before he had even begun to hold regular Cabinets and concerned an election indiscretion of
G. O. Trevelyan, the father of both the historian G. M Trevelyan and the Labour Minister of Education Sir Charles Trevelyan. G. O. Trevelyan was then a young junior minister at the Admiralty and
had been rash enough to say that the Court and the Duke of Cambridge (the Queen’s first cousin) as Commander-in-Chief were obstacles to army reform. Gladstone responded with horror and with
two letters, each of which must have taken him half an hour to write, in hand of course. The indiscretions were ‘extraordinary and unaccountable’. ‘Mr Gladstone cannot but humbly
subscribe to Your Majesty’s judgement that an error of this
nature even raises the question whether, if it was in Mr Trevelyan’s mind to point to Your Majesty in
the expressions he used, he can be allowed to continue in the office which he holds.’
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Then, three days later, after a thunderbolt to Trevelyan
and a propitiatory reply, Gladstone wrote again with continued contrition but also a glint of optimism: ‘Mr Gladstone has a very strong sense of the offence committed, but it appears to him
that the confession is frank and manly, and he feels confident that the gentleman, who is really a gentleman of high character, ability, and promise, has received a lesson for life. With this
preface, Mr Gladstone desires to take Your Majesty’s pleasure.’
⁴

The Queen’s pleasure was that the apology should be accepted, although with an additional one to the Duke of Cambridge, and Trevelyan remained a member of successive Gladstone
administrations until in 1886 he temporarily broke with his chief on Home Rule, thereby incurring the Queen’s equally temporary approval, for he changed his mind on the issue in 1887. The
main impression left by the incident and the correspondence is that Gladstone took it a great deal too portentously. The wise equivalent of Disraeli’s ‘We authors, Ma’am’
would have been to say ‘These inexperienced junior ministers, Ma’am. . . . I’ll see he doesn’t do it again,’ and leave it there. But that was not his way.

The next issue which gave rise to reams of correspondence was the Queen’s recoiling from a public suggestion that she might open the parliamentary session on 16 February. She did so on the
just acceptable grounds of health and the unacceptable and unconstitutional one of her dislike of the Irish Church Bill. She had come to treat a state opening of Parliament as a health hazard
comparable with a visit to a fever camp. It was too cold outside and too hot inside. Moreover riding backwards in a carriage upset her. Gladstone accepted the decision with obsequious
resignation:

Then in May 1869 there was a most laborious but amicable exchange on the question what should be done about an uninvited visit from the Viceroy of Egypt, and in June another on the question
whether the
Queen should open the new Blackfriars Bridge and also take in an inspection of the equally new (Victoria) Embankment, the Farringdon Viaduct and the Metropolitan
Railway (‘of which the construction is most curious’, Gladstone wrote, presumably intending to be enticing). This produced an outburst of horror from the Queen: ‘The fatigue and
the excitement would be
far too
great,’ quite apart from the well-known intolerable heat of London in June. Eventually, after heavy pressure from Gladstone and the City of London
authorities and with General Grey, as always, in favour of less neurasthenia and more activity, she did it in November, and was delighted with the occasion: ‘Nothing cld go better or more
satisfactorily in
every possible way
than the ceremony and long progress thro’, the Queen must think – nearly a million of people today.’
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