Gladstone: A Biography (65 page)

Gladstone might have done well to recognize defeat, but this was not his way. Five days after her reply she got another 2000 words. She discouragingly acknowledged ‘Mr Gladstone’s
long letter’, again doubted the feasibility but promised to consult the Prince of Wales when he came to Osborne in a few days’ time. Two weeks later she reported that his reaction was
as adverse as her own and added: ‘The Queen therefore trusts that this plan may now be considered as
definitely
abandoned.’
³¹
Three weeks later Gladstone redeployed the argument in another 2000 words. The Queen replied that she ‘thinks it useless to prolong the discussion on this proposal’. Gladstone, in
return, ‘need hardly say with how much grief he finds his views to be so unequivocally disapproved by Your Majesty on a matter of so much importance, either way, to the interests of the
Monarchy. But, having been permitted to explain himself at so much length, and with such freedom, he refrains from further trespass on Your Majesty’s patience.’
³²

He ended, a little huffily, by saying that ‘as matters now stand’ he would assume that he need not that year go to Balmoral (although he had been invited). A
week later she renewed her invitation for him to go ‘for 2 days . . . but if there is nothing very special to communicate the Queen hardly likes to urge Mr Gladstone to put himself to the
inconvenience & fatigue of coming over’. Gladstone did not go, although he circled Balmoral, at three houses and an inn, for three weeks.

In November there was an anti-climactic little exchange in which the Queen may have had her tongue more firmly in her cheek than did Gladstone. Clinging to a very puny raft in place of the proud
ship which he had endeavoured to launch, Gladstone wrote from Hawarden: ‘It would without doubt be a great object gained if, without reference to any other means, the Prince of Wales could,
through your Majesty’s influence or otherwise be induced to adopt the habit of reading. The regular application of but a small portion of time would enable him to master many of the able and
valuable works which bear upon Royal and Public duty.’
³³
The Queen replied after two weeks: ‘With respect to an observation in one of Mr
Gladstone’s letters respecting the Prince of Wales – she has only to say that the P. of Wales has never been fond of reading & that from his earliest years it was
impossible
to get him to do so. Newspapers &
very rarely
, a novel, are all that he ever reads. . . .’
³⁴

The government lasted just over a year after this depressing ending to an enterprise which Gladstone undoubtedly thought he had started in order to underpin the monarchy, while the Queen and
some of her Court no doubt thought it was in order to underpin his Irish policy. The enterprise had by any standards been conducted with determination, powerful arguments and a marked lack of
persuasive tact. It was a significant notch in the downward progress of their relations. Gladstone’s first and strongest government, while it produced no open rupture, ended with their
relations substantially worse than they had been at its beginning.

‘E
VER AND
A
NON THE
D
ARK
R
UMBLING OF THE
S
EA
’

I
N
A
PRIL
1872, D
ISRAELI
went to Manchester and delivered one of the most memorable polemics of the
nineteenth century. The Free Trade Hall ought to have been Gladstone territory just as a great provincial meeting was almost a Gladstone patent. But Disraeli was capable of emulating as well as
mocking his
vis-à-vis
, although he did it in a very different style, sardonic rather than uplifting, but at least equally generous in amplitude. Disraeli’s Manchester speech,
almost unbelievably, lasted three and a quarter hours, throughout which he sustained himself with two bottles of very weak brandy and water. Its claim to near immortality, however, was all
concentrated in barely two minutes of brilliant imagery. The government, he said, was losing its destructive energy:

That speech, if it did not cause, at least coincided with a political turning-point. Hitherto Disraeli had been a hesitant leader of the opposition, with only nine months of interim premiership
behind him. From 1868 it had been very much Gladstone’s Parliament, and there had been strong Conservative party murmurings that they might do better under a different leader. Suddenly the
situation appeared transformed. Disraeli came to look a future as well as a past Prime Minister, and even ministers began to feel that they should prepare for a
nunc dimittis
. In sharp
contrast with the careerist political culture of today
when Prime Ministers find it difficult to get rid of their colleagues, nineteenth-century Prime Ministers often had a
problem keeping men in their governments. And no one was riveted to the results of the next general election, regarding it as much nearer to an unpredictable act of God than a subject for obsessive
political manipulation.

This was as true of Gladstone himself as it was of his subordinates. He was by no means above political manoeuvring, but his eye was also always half-fixed on that desirable interval
‘between parliament and the grave’, and his morbidity made him doubtful in his sixty-third year of his actuarial chances. Of his fourteen Cabinet colleagues of 1868, Clarendon had died,
Bright and Childers had retired because of ill health, and Hatherley was about to do so for the same reason. The survivors and the four (Halifax, W. E. Forster, Stansfield and Selborne) who had
joined or were about to join them were beginning to feel the imminence for the government of ‘twilight and evening bell’. There remained two of the most notable achievements of the
government – the Ballot Bill and the conclusion of the
Alabama
arbitration and settlement with the United States – to be brought to a safe lodging (which was accomplished in July
1872 in the former case and two months later in the latter), and one great failure – the Irish University Bill – to be endured before the government in March 1873 made its first attempt
at escape from office. After defeat on the Irish Bill the Cabinet decided on resignation, which Gladstone accordingly tendered to the Queen on 13 March. Disraeli coolly and ruthlessly refused to
take office. He would have been in a minority in the House of Commons, but a dissolution would have been open to him as it had been in roughly similar circumstances to Russell in 1846 or to Derby
and himself in 1852, and was to be to Campbell-Bannerman in 1905. But he had had enough of minority office and decided that he wanted to see the government get still deeper into the mire. After a
week’s interregnum he forced them back into office.

The Ballot Bill was not much more welcome to Gladstone than had been the Elementary Education and the University Tests Bills. It was nearly forty years since he had informed the readers of the
Liverpool Standard
that the fall of the Roman Republic was to be attributed to the corruptions of secret voting, and while there were few subjects, except perhaps for the importance of
religion in politics and the quality of Dante’s poetry, on which his views of the 1830s were within hailing distance of those of the 1870s, he had retained a certain resistance towards the
idea that those who deserved the vote also needed the
protection of being able to exercise it secretly. His ideal polity was a mass of contradictions. He liked small boroughs
with restricted electorates which could nurture statesmen without distracting them from higher things with the squalor of local log-rolling. He also liked the idea of voters as independent
gentlemen who strode to the poll with their heads high and the courage to declare their choice without fear or favour. (It must be said that this caricature of Athenian democracy did not bear much
relation to his own early experience of Newark.) Yet he had also come to believe in the good moral sense of the masses against the classes. The great democracy of Northern England and Scotland,
acting like a vast jury, was the best hope of saving Britain from the brittle values of the metropolitan ‘upper ten thousand’ and their Home Counties hangers-on, of whom Disraeli had
made himself the unesteemed mouthpiece.

Gladstone put these incompatibilities through the mincing machine of his mind and came out at first with a rather bland pâté. In his first speech as Prime Minister, when he went to
Greenwich (a very rare experience during the eleven years he was member for that borough) to secure his re-election after taking an office of profit under the Crown, he produced the somewhat
delphic statement that ‘I have at all times given my vote in favour of open voting, but I have done so before, and I do so now, with an important reservation, namely, that whether by open
voting or by whatsoever means, free voting must be secured.’ In the 1870 session Hartington, acting not very departmentally as Postmaster-General, brought forward an anti-corrupt-practices
bill which would,
inter alia
, have introduced ballot voting. It was a government measure but a low-pressure one. It was not given much priority compared with Elementary Education and Irish
Land, the favoured measures of the session. This bill foundered, but another, concentrating on the ballot, was introduced by a private member late in the session. This was a ‘gesture’
bill rather than a serious attempt at legislation, but it nonetheless marked a decisive stage in the argument. This was partly because the Prime Minister spoke, and for the first time committed
himself favourably on the issue, and partly because it secured a favourable vote in a full House of Commons. Gladstone said that many whose occupations made them vulnerable to pressure now had the
vote and that these new social circumstances made the protection of their freedom necessary. Necessary more than desirable was the implication, and this was confirmed by his diary entry for 29 June
in the following year, when the Ballot Bill was having its third canter round the parliamentary course:
‘Spoke on ballot, and voted in 324–230 with mind satisfied
& as to feeling a lingering reluctance.’
¹

In this 1871 session broadly the same bill had progressed to being a major government measure. W. E. Forster, nominally only Vice-President of the Council but a seasoned ministerial performer in
the House of Commons, who had piloted the Education Bill in the previous session, was in charge. He drove it through an obstructing chamber. Then, after the amazing amplitude for such an apparently
simple measure of eighteen days of Commons Committee and forty years of public discussion the Lords threw it out (and did so by the insultingly small vote of 97 to 48) on the ground that it had not
been adequately considered. Gladstone reacted with more passion against the Lords than he had hitherto mustered in favour of the ballot. This could be regarded as a typical sign of his
imperiousness: once his own mind, however reluctantly, had embraced the need for a change, he was impatient of the obscurantism of those who had not moved with him. In his holiday-interrupting
speech in his son’s Whitby constituency on 2 September, he denounced the Lords for frustrating the will of the people’s House, and said that the next time round the bill would be
presented with ‘an authoritative knock’ on the door of their Lordship’s House. In 1872 he threatened first a special autumn session, a rare event, and then, if the Lords still did
not give way, a dissolution. Disraeli was not at all keen to risk his future prospects on this issue, and so, as a result of one of those processes of osmosis between the Conservative leader in the
Commons and allegedly independent-minded Tory peers, the Lords gave way in early July and the crisis was averted. The first secret-ballot by-election took place as early as 15 August 1872. The last
major legislative reform of Gladstone’s first government was in place.