Gladstone: A Biography (63 page)

This more than outweighed the summer dispute about peerages, of which Sir Lionel de Rothschild was the only casualty. The Queen, although grumbling about the substance, had been helpful to the
government in the crisis of the late summer with the Lords about the Irish Church Bill. She decided that she would prefer the sacrifice of a few Leinster bishops and deans to a major clash between
the Lords and the Commons in the first year of a strongly supported government. So on balance the first year of the government did not pass at all badly between them, and a pre-Christmas letter
which the Queen wrote as soon as she got to Osborne on 18 December was more of a budget of chat than a letter of business to her Prime Minister:

Moreover she displayed during that Christmas recess two of her rare shafts of liberalism, both on ecclesiastical matters. In December she wrote that ‘the exhibition of illiberality in the
Church towards Dr Temple
⁷⁹
is a disgrace and shows how ignorance & bigotry blind people and destroy all real spiritual religion wh is quite lost sight
of’.
⁸
And in January 1869, when a new bishop for St Asaph was under consideration, she laid down the simple principle that ‘The Queen
believes that a
Welshman is almost necessary for a Welsh see on acct of the language.’
⁹
As Gladstone was moving towards
appointing Dr Joshua Hughes, who was an indisputably Welsh Welshman who did a good deal for the promotion of Welsh language and education, this was welcome if original doctrine. From Llandaff to
Bangor and from St Asaph to St David’s most recent prelates had been ignorant of the language of eisteddfods.

The Queen’s next touch of liberalism, and as it turned out of sound political sense, came before the budget of 1871. Lowe introduced a tax on matches. The Queen wrote expressing great
doubt about its fairness between rich and poor.

Three days later the Queen’s remonstrances, aided by those of East End match girls, induced the Cabinet to make the Chancellor give way and substitute twopence on the
income tax for the match duty.

The Queen also showed signs in May 1872 of being a moderate on the
Alabama
arbitration issue
⁸⁰
and loath to see any chauvinistic break with the
United States on this vexed question. These fairly isolated manifestations apart, she was, whether agreeing or disagreeing with Gladstone, replete with nearly all the conventional English
prejudices. She hardly ever had a good word to say for the Irish. The French were a ‘nation wh, with but few exceptions seems to be entirely devoid of
truth
, & to live upon vanity,
deception, amusement and self-glorification’.
¹¹
John Stuart Mill’s 1870 revival of a female franchise bill led her ‘to call Mr
Gladstone’s attention to the mad and utterly demoralizing movement of the present day to place women in the same position as to professions – as
men
’. She was particularly
horrified with the thought that they should be medical students. ‘But to tear away all the barriers wh surround a woman, & to propose that they shld study with
men
– things
wh cld not be named before them – certainly not in a
mixed
audience – wd be to introduce a total disregard of what must be considered as belonging to the
rules and principles of morality.’
¹²

Predictably she was wholly opposed to the release of Fenian political prisoners, which Gladstone was anxious to push through in 1870–1, and, less predictably and not very attractively, she
was almost obsessively vindictive towards a half-demented youth called Arthur O’Connor who made a mock assassination attempt against her in February 1872. He had no weapon more offensive than
an unloaded imitation pistol, and John Brown was able to cover himself with glory and earn a £25 annuity for life by seizing it from him. It was about as serious as the 1982 invasion of
Buckingham Palace by an amiable lunatic which discomfited Home Secretary Whitelaw but did not greatly excite Queen Elizabeth II. Queen Victoria, on the other hand, besieged Gladstone with letters
complaining about her special exposure, the state of the law, the leniency of the sentence and the general weakness of the judge who, finding O’Connor an inadequate, gave him only a
year’s imprisonment just as, according to the Queen, he had recently given only three months to a man ‘who [had] pushed his wife under a Dray Cart’. She demanded that
O’Connor be deported, and eventually he agreed to go abroad voluntarily, provided, as he shrewdly negotiated, thereby raising doubt about his degree of mental deficiency, that it should be to
a healthy climate.

There had also been a depressing little incident in February 1870 when the Gladstones had the Waleses (the Prince then aged twenty-eight, but already looking immensely self-indulgent, although
benignly so) dining with them at 11 Carlton House Terrace, and the Prime Minister very circumspectly wrote to the Queen to ask whether they might be permitted also to ask Princess Louise, her
fourth and eldest unmarried daughter, then aged twenty-one. The Queen’s reply, maybe occasioned by slight resistance to the thought of a direct relationship between the heir to the throne and
the Prime Minister, was at best unequivocal and at worst slightly snubbing: ‘It is very kind of Mr and Mrs Gladstone to ask Pnss Louise – but she never dines out except at Marlborough
House.’
¹³
It is impossible not to append the comment that if the poor girl had been allowed to range a little more widely she might not have
made such a disastrously unhappy marriage as that which she contracted in the following year with Argyll’s heir, the Marquess of Lorne.

On balance, however, relations jogged along tolerably if exhaustingly until the summer of 1871. Then what might have been expected to remain a minor dispute suddenly sent out ripples of
resentment and left
lasting grievances on both sides. The contentious political issue towards the end of that session was an Army Regulation Bill, which Gladstone would have
liked to be a more far-reaching measure of reorganization and reform but which was largely confined to the abolition of the purchase of commissions (and also of promotions), with provision for the
compensation of officers who lost presumed property rights. (The militia was also brought by the bill under more effective War Office control.)

This bill ran into obstructive tactics in the House of Commons, which made Gladstone, who then had no idea what he was going to experience from the Irish in his next government, as angry as he
was surprised. He wrote to the Queen on 14 June: ‘at the morning sitting today the House went into Committee for the tenth time on the Army Bill. Much of the same obstruction, which it is
difficult to characterize by the epithets it deserves, but of which there is little doubt that it is without precedent in the present generation, was continued.’
¹⁴
And on another occasion he complained to her that while he had:

It was something that in June he was still hopeful of her sympathy against these tactics. In July they had a slight altercation about the behaviour of the Duke of Cambridge on the issue. The
Queen was ‘sure that Mr Gladstone & the Govt must feel very grateful to [him] for the support he has given to the Army Bill’. Gladstone in fact thought Cambridge was distinctly
equivocal. The best he could do in the House of Lords, after speaking, was to abstain. The Queen herself was never at direct loggerheads with the government over the Army Bill and the abolition of
purchase. At first she was in favour of the government’s proposals, but probably lost her enthusiasm when she discovered how deep-seated was the latent opposition of the old officer class,
from the Commander-in-Chief downwards. She was even more impatient when she realized that the delay would keep Parliament sitting into late August, and her irritation was then about equally
directed towards the government for raising the tiresome issue and the opposition for opposing.

She did not however resist the government’s tough tactic for circumnavigating
the obstruction. When, on top of the Commons delay, the bill foundered in the Lords, the
Cabinet simply decided to proceed by prerogative. The purchase of commissions had been made illegal by an Act in 1809, except where it was regulated and the price kept under control by royal
warrant. The warrant had merely to be cancelled, and the deed was done. It was a tactic at once daring and clever. It was open to a strong charge of constitutional arrogance because it cocked a
snook at the parliamentary process. Legislation being in danger of failing, the government coolly declared it unnecessary, which raised the considerable question why they had started on the process
in the first place. On the other hand it was a brilliant manoeuvre for it left the enemy forces not merely frustrated but dangerously outflanked. The abolition could be achieved without the bill,
but not the compensation, which was the last result which the officers and their supporters wanted. The Lords were humiliated as well as outraged, for they had no alternative but to turn round like
squirrels in a cage and pass the bill.

This masterful display of executive power was a fine sample of Gladstone’s ruthlessness when, as was frequently the case, he was convinced of his own rightness. The Queen’s
acquiescence was perhaps surprising and it may have left her with a certain residue of resentment which contributed to the bitterness of the consequential dispute on the apparently trivial issue of
the date of her departure for her 1871 Balmoral autumn. Parliament that year dragged on to 21 August. There had the day before to be a meeting of the Privy Council to approve of the speech which
was read on her behalf by the Lord Chancellor to bring the session’s proceedings to an end. She was prepared, under great protest, to stay in the south until the 18th, but not a moment
longer. If that did not suffice, as it did not, a quorum including at least one Cabinet minister had to be assembled on Deeside, which was what eventually happened.

The Queen and the Prime Minister became locked in mutual misunderstanding. He did not appreciate that she was for once genuinely unwell. He had a good deal of excuse for not doing so. She had
cried ‘wolf’ so often, even at the beginning of 1870 putting forward for not opening Parliament the wonderfully blanket reason that ‘It is a very unwholesome year.’ In 1871,
however, she arrived at Balmoral in a genuinely poor state and suffered two weeks of severe illness, of which the symptoms appeared to be a constriction of the throat, an abscess on the arm and a
general state of debility. Jenner took it seriously enough to send for Lister, the founder of antiseptic surgery. Ponsonby, partly
because he disagreed with Jenner on almost
everything, took a more optimistic view and recorded the hope that she would soon be better, accompanied by the odd thought that ‘Here away . . . from all her children she feels
comfortable.’
¹⁶
There seems no doubt, however, that she was seriously ill for two to three weeks after her arrival at Balmoral, and low for
the whole of September.

She, for her part, was even more impervious to the difficulties which Gladstone had to face on
her
behalf. Eighteen-seventy-one was the peak year of mid-Victorian republicanism. Dilke
mounted a considerable campaign, and his friend G. O. Trevelyan (by no means as chastened ‘for life’ as Gladstone had assured the Queen that he was in 1869) had written an anonymous
pamphlet entitled
What Does She Do With It
? which was an attack on the Queen’s parsimony and hoarding of money. In these unpropitious circumstances Gladstone had in the early summer to
defend a marriage dowry of £30,000 (approximately £1.5 million at today’s prices) for Princess Louise and an annual allowance of £15,000 (£750,000) for Prince Arthur,
later Duke of Connaught, in August. There was widespread impatience with the demands of the brood, exacerbated by the invisibility of the Queen. Had Gladstone been able to point to the
Queen’s remaining for prorogation it would have eased his task, and it rankled that he could not. But what rankled still more was the way in which the Queen reacted to his well-intentioned
and sensible advice.

First she let off on 10 August a dithyramb of complaint and did it to Hatherley, the Lord Chancellor, rather than to the Prime Minister, which was in itself almost a manifesto of no confidence.
The burden of her complaint was that ministers, and in particular Gladstone and Granville, apologized for her not performing more public duties instead of saying that it was a miracle that she
managed as much as she did: