Gladstone: A Biography (68 page)

Late on the Sunday evening, 16 March, she requested Gladstone to
resume his office. He was staying with a large party at Cliveden, where he had not been since the death of
his old friend the Duchess of Sutherland in 1868 and the consequent change of generation in the house. It was another remarkable example of his reluctance ever to put off a visit and his liking for
country-house gatherings, the pleasures of which, however, hardly diminished the flow of his writing and reading. Already during that day he had compiled a memorandum on the whole course of the
crisis before sitting down at 10.45 p.m. to write a substantial response to the Queen’s request. The note was one of resigned acquiescence. He would ‘repair to London’ the
following morning, would see ‘some of the most experienced members of the late Government’, and would endeavour to prevail upon them to join with him in picking up the unwanted burden.
But the position had been sufficiently ‘unhinged’ that he doubted whether the government or the Parliament ‘can again be what they were’.
¹⁷

These commitments he faithfully discharged, but with no great sense of urgency and still less of zest. It was 10.15 the next morning before his ‘adieu to our
most
kind hosts’
(Gladstone’s hosts were almost invariably given a high accolade) and it must therefore have been nearly noon before he started on his consultations, beginning with Granville. The reluctance
to do any effective business in the morning was a persistent feature of mid-Victorian political life. However, the results of the consultations were unenthusiastically positive and at a Cabinet on
the following day the formal decision to resume office and to try to keep the Parliament going into 1874 was taken. Gladstone did not get the rest which he and Dr Clark thought he needed, and while
the new and unexhilarating goal of keeping the Parliament alive into the next year was narrowly achieved, these ten months in which borrowed time was thrust upon the government brought little
advantage to the Liberal party or the country. Gladstone, his judgement maybe impaired by exhaustion, made a whole series of mistakes, most in themselves small but leading to a cumulative
impression of a government in decay. And one of those mistakes, which was himself to take over the Exchequer in August 1873, was both crassly foolish for a Prime Minister at the limit of his
reserves and singularly unfortunate for the direction in which it set the government’s programme for the 1874 general election.

G
LADSTONE
’
S SMALL BUT DAMAGING MISTAKES
began in the year before the defeat of March 1873. In the late winter of 1872 he
had been arraigned before the House of Commons for two displays of arrogant corner-cutting. In the first case he wished to appoint Sir Robert Collier to a vacancy on the Judicial Committee of the
Privy Council. Collier, who later became Lord Monkswell and founded an interesting dynasty, was a fine lawyer, whose personal qualifications were never challenged. Nor was there anything unusual
about propelling the Law Officers into high judicial office. Indeed, when a few years later the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas was transformed into the Lord Chief Justice of England the office
became known as the ‘Attorney-General’s pillow’, so frequently did political Law Officers go direct to that position. But there was a specific provision that a judicial
appointment to the Privy Council had to have served as a High Court judge in either England or India. Scotland or Ireland would not do.

Gladstone solved the problem by appointing Collier to the puisne bench for a two-day spell. It was efficacious but arrogant, and was resented by the judicial bench, whose members protested
strongly through Chief Justice Cockburn. Motions of criticism were pressed in both Houses. In the Commons Gladstone had a majority of twenty-seven, not glorious for a government with a nominal
majority of nearly a hundred, and in the Lords, which mattered less, one of two. Collier was embarrassed and Gladstone had used up credit. It was a maladroit affair.

The second imbroglio was even less necessary. The village of Ewelme, near Wallingford, had and has a peculiar connection with the University of Oxford. Today it provides a grace-and-favour
residence for the Regius Professor of Medicine. Until 1871 the rectorship of the parish had been a subsidiary benefice for one of the University’s professors of divinity. As a compensation
for the severance of that link, which followed from the semi-secularization of the University, it was provided that the rector of Ewelme, while no longer a professor of divinity, must continue
to be an Oxford MA. This could hardly be regarded as an onerous restriction upon Gladstone. In general he was loath to accept the appropriateness of anyone who was not a
graduate of one of the two old universities as suitable for Anglican orders, and within this category he often had difficulty in keeping to the unwritten rule that an Oxonian bishop should next
time be balanced by a Cantabrigian one.

This made his handling of the Ewelme issue bizarre to the point of inexplicability. First he offered the living to W. E. Jelf of Christ Church, a Tory and an Evangelical, which meant that it was
doubly broad-minded on Gladstone’s part. Unfortunately Jelf declined and Gladstone then became fixed on W. W. Harvey, another Tory, a scholar of moderate note and a fellow of King’s
College, Cambridge. The only thing that he and Gladstone had in common was that they had been Eton contemporaries in the 1820s. It was perverse, to say the least, to choose a Cambridge man for this
not particularly rewarding but Oxford-restricted appointment. And it was at once provocative and disdainful to believe that, having done so, he could obviate the problem by the method which he
chose. He prevailed upon Oriel College to accept Harvey as a member and, after the statutory forty-two days, to get him admitted to ‘M. A. status’ and hence to Convocation. It was a
curiously similar device to that which he had used with Collier, and it produced a not dissimilar reaction. There was no vote on this occasion, but he had a very rough debate only two and a half
weeks after the Collier one.

Both these incidents were widely regarded as showing that exhaustion combined with an imperious nature were leading Gladstone away from judgement and proportion towards a petulant
authoritarianism. They damaged him both inside and outside the government. The next incident was hardly Gladstone’s fault, except insofar as it conveyed an impression, half justified, of
remoteness from those aspects of the business of his own government with which he was not obsessively absorbed. He was very much an ‘all or nothing’ man. In the instance of the
‘scandals’, as he came himself rather damningly to call them, he reacted with a determined heavy-handedness, but allowed an unforeseen consequence of his solution of the problem to lead
him into what was almost a new version of Collier or Ewelme.

The ‘scandals’ were the misallocation (but not misappropriation) of public money to the telegraph service
⁸²
which touched the Chancellor of
the Exchequer (Lowe), two other ministers, the Postmaster-General
and the First Commissioner of Works, who were not at the time in the Cabinet but whose predecessors and
successors quite often were so included, and two others in the Treasury, one political and one official. The matter began to break in early July 1873. As the facts emerged, Gladstone took the view
that all concerned must cease to hold their current posts. He did not, however, feel that they should incur the full penalty of exclusion from office. In the case of Lowe this was right, for his
responsibility was remote and Gladstone admired him as a notable if difficult man, while having reservations about his performance as Chancellor.

In the case of Monsell, the Postmaster-General, the fault was more direct, and he did leave the government, although compensated with a peerage in the following year’s honours. Ayrton, the
First Commissioner of Works, appeared to be the most to blame and compounded his fault on 30 July by attempting such an exculpatory and limited definition of ministerial responsibility in the House
of Commons that Gladstone felt it necessary to get up after him and disavow what he had said. It must have been one of the most devastating of public Prime Ministerial rebukes. Nonetheless
Gladstone thought that Ayrton ought to be given a compensating office. It was another example of his addiction to some private scale which mingled hierarchy and justice and often caused him
considerable inconvenience. This was certainly so here, for the post which Gladstone was determined to offer Ayrton was that of Judge Advocate-General, which normally involved presenting the result
of courts martial personally to the Queen; and the Queen, while in general sympathetic to Gladstone over these troubles, was determined never to have to see Ayrton. After several letters and
telegrams it was agreed that Ayrton should have the job with the humiliating condition that all his communications must be made in writing.

There were wider ministerial repercussions. A new senior office had to be found for Lowe and a new Chancellor as his replacement. Furthermore Ripon was anxious to resign as Lord President,
partly because he was on the brink of a sharp transition from being Grand Master of the Freemasons of England to admission into the Roman Catholic Church. This half eased and half complicated the
position. Eventually Gladstone settled Lowe by ennobling Bruce as Lord Aberdare, transferring him to the Lord Presidency of the Council, and thus vacating the Home Office. For Chancellor there were
several possible candidates, but Gladstone felt under heavy pressure to take the job himself, and the conventional wisdom is that he was forced into it by his
Cabinet
colleagues. But by which of them? There is a singular lack of documentary support and the impression persists that he was more tempted than coerced. In any event he received for the fifth time the
Chancellor’s seals of office on 9 August, and within forty-eight hours descended on the probably disappointed Cardwell – for he was one of the candidates – at the War Office and
disclosed to him a fiscal strategy which must have been germinating in the Prime Minister’s mind well before he was ‘drafted’ to the Exchequer: ‘I told [him] in deep secrecy
my ideas on the
possible
finance of next year, based upon abolition of Income Tax & Sugar Duties with partial compensation from Spirits and Death duties. This only might give us a
chance.’
¹

The last sentence presumably referred to electoral prospects, although the dominating impression conveyed is not that of political opportunism but of eagerness to put his hands back upon the
fiscal levers. The state of overstrain in which he approached the end of the session (prorogation took place on 5 August) should have made him more cautious. On 23, 26 and 27 July he was in bed for
most of the time. On 6 August he wrote to the Queen: ‘The labours of the last few days have been incessant and the peculiarly invidious character of those labours has not unnaturally
increased the strain; but Mr Gladstone has been well-tended, and hopes to come through without breaking down. . . .’
²
It was not exactly the
best foundation on which to add the heaviest department to a Prime Minister’s normal burdens of co-ordination and leadership.

Gladstone’s metabolism enabled him to move with bewildering rapidity from disturbingly frequent bouts of prostration to displays of almost manic energy. Within five days of his
apprehensive letter to the Queen he was outlining his fiscal programme to Cardwell before leaving in the late evening for a 3.30 a.m. arrival at Hawarden. ‘Off at 8.50,’ he wrote,
‘with a more buoyant spirit and greater sense of relief than I have experienced for many years on this which is the only pleasant act of moving to me in the circuit of the year. This gush is
in proportion to the measure of the late troubles and anxieties.’
^3
83
A still more extreme
example of his alternations was provided a couple of weeks later. As soon as he arrived at Balmoral he excused himself from dining with the Queen and took to his bed with a gastric
attack. Within a week he did a day’s walk of thirty-three miles over very rough Highland ground, which took him to what he kindly described as ‘a good hotel at Kingussie’, where,
however, he was ‘sorely disturbed with rats’.