Gladstone: A Biography (69 page)

There was a hidden hazard in Gladstone’s taking over the Treasury which, had he apprehended it, might have made him hesitate more than did his mercurial attitude to his own health. This
was the clear rule that MPs accepting ministerial office were held to have vacated their seats and had to seek re-election by their constituencies. The position about those adding one office to
another was more complicated, although there were precedents associated with Lord North, Spencer Perceval and Canning which suggested that in these circumstances no re-election was necessary. But
these were not strictly relevant, for the 1867 Representation of the People Act had redefined the rules. The intention was to make them less strict. But the outcome was an unsatisfactory ambiguity
of language which had not since been tested, and which left plenty of room for argument about whether Gladstone, once he had taken the seals of the Exchequer, was entitled to sit as member for
Greenwich. The point was not academic, for in the event of the seat being vacated the Conservatives would contest it, and the expectation was that Gladstone would lose.

Gladstone became aware of the problem on the day he took office, and a week later wrote to his old Whip Brand, who had succeeded as Speaker and in whose hands the matter would ultimately lie,
saying that he was taking no resignation initiative but was seeking the best legal advice. Speaker Brand wrote back reserving his judgement but saying that he was sure Gladstone was right to take
such advice. This might
have been helpful had the best legal advice not been hopelessly divided. Coleridge and Jessel, two of the most eminent lawyers ever to hold the posts,
were respectively Attorney and Solicitor, and took the view that Gladstone was safe. But within a month Jessel became Master of the Rolls and two months after that Coleridge became Chief Justice
(Gladstone not being in the least put off his preferment by the Collier case). In the meantime there had been an unhelpful intervention from Selborne, the Lord Chancellor, who took a contrary view
and was supported in it by the Lord Advocate (whose
locus
in the matter was far from clear).

This kept the issue open so that the incoming English Law Officers had to be asked to endorse or contradict the opinion of their predecessors. They were Henry James and William Harcourt, whose
jurisprudential distinction did not match that of Coleridge and Jessel, but who were both (particularly Harcourt) to achieve high political importance. On this early test, however, they showed
little of either political acumen or legal decisiveness. After consulting Charles Bowen, then Junior Counsel to the Treasury,
⁸⁴
and widely regarded as the
most subtle and acute of nineteenth-century legal minds, they reported on 1 December that there were very strong arguments both for and against the view that the seat had been vacated. It might
have been better had they had more of the spirit of Jessel, who is reputed to have said of himself: ‘I may be wrong, and sometimes I am; but I have never any doubts.’

The issue hung over Gladstone throughout the autumn of 1873. It was not currently critical, for with Parliament in recess there was no question of his incurring penalties by sitting illegally.
With the opening of the new session in February 1874 it would, however, become so. On 18 January Gladstone wrote: ‘On this day I thought of dissolution. Told Bright of it. In evening at
dinner told Granville and Wolverton [formerly Chief Whip Glyn]. All seemed to approve. My first thought of it was as an escape from a difficulty. I soon saw on reflection that it was the best thing
in itself.’
⁴
Then, ironically, he received on the 20th, when he was once again bed-bound, a memorandum from Sir Erskine May, the most famous of
all clerks of the House of Commons, which would no doubt have been decisive with the Speaker, opining firmly that the Greenwich seat was not vacant.

The problem had been a running sore over the last five months of the Parliament’s life, increasing the sense of a government whose time was exhausted, and it was an
important factor in determining the date of a disastrous general election. But there is no evidence that the Liberals would have done better at any other practicable date. A bigger influence on the
shape and result of the campaign was the unfortunate budgetary strategy which Gladstone formulated.

J. L. Hammond, as we have seen, was the foremost proponent of the view that the Treasury spirit was Gladstone’s poison. Set him free from it and he became an imaginative statesman,
upholding the Concert of Europe and international arbitration, sensitive to the agrarian as well as to the political wrongs of Ireland, even capable of measures of constructive reform at home.
Imprison him in its toils, and he became a penny-pinching miser, elevating the reduction or abolition of particular taxes to the status of an ultimate achievement, and willing to trample on all
sorts of other desiderata on the way.

Gladstone believed that the bold fiscal scheme which he had outlined to Cardwell, particularly as he had resolved to supplement it by a considerable remission of local property taxation, would
have at least three advantages. First, as a dashing and outflanking manoeuvre, it would enable the government to seize the political initiative, which it had manifestly lost, at least since the
defeat of the Irish University Bill, and dictate the agenda on which the general election, whether it came before or after the budget, would be fought. Here he ought to have remembered that such
manoeuvres, as in 1867, were more in Disraeli’s style than in his own. Second, he hoped that it would reconcile to the government the non-political men of moderate property, the ordinary run
of the middle classes who cared more about the solid comfort of their domestic lives than about political or social or even religious ideology. But this again was not Gladstonian. His natural
appeal was moralizing rather than materialistic, and he had fulminated too often against the politics of the pork barrel for it to be sensible to rest on a short-term financial enticement to defeat
a growing longer-term affinity of these groups with the suburban respectability flavoured by imperial excitement of the new Conservative party.

Third, Gladstone believed that the reproclamation of fiscal austerity and the minimalist state, which the abolition of the income tax would symbolize, was the best available formula for uniting
the Liberal party. While there is room for argument about his judgement on the first two propositions there can be no doubt that on this third one he was
profoundly mistaken.
Joseph Chamberlain, for example, then only the Mayor of Birmingham, but soon to be one of that city’s MPs and by the time of Gladstone’s next government the leader of the Radical wing
of the party, described (admittedly after the election had been lost) the election address in which Gladstone presented his proposals as ‘the meanest public document that had ever, in like
circumstances, proceeded from a statesman of the first rank. His manifesto was simply an appeal to the selfishness of the middle classes.’
⁵
Chamberlain was by no means alone. The Economist under Bagehot, and the
Bee Hive
, an important Radical journal in spite of its teashop-like title, were both vehemently opposed. An article in
the latter complained that ‘Mr Gladstone has sacrificed the lower classes, who worshipped him, to the richer classes, who disliked him.’
⁶

Beyond the affront to the constructive Radicals, Gladstone’s budgetary plans were also potentially disruptive within the Cabinet. Whatever else he was, Gladstone was not an irresponsible
financier. He would not sacrifice a balanced budget even to get rid of the income tax. This meant that despite the £5 million surplus with which he started the year and the £2 million
of new revenue which he proposed to raise from spirits and death duties, he needed at least another £600,000 to cover the abolition of the income tax, the remission of the sugar duties and
some relief of local taxation. This money he saw as coming from a reduction in the service estimates, with the emphasis on the naval ones. This was strongly resisted by Goschen, the First Lord of
the Admiralty, and also by Cardwell, the War Secretary. Neither of them had been extravagant ministers and they had been steadily if marginally squeezed throughout the life of the government. They
felt they could do no more and an unresolved Cabinet crisis was the background to Gladstone’s 18 January decision to dissolve. The dissolution was as much against the Admiralty and the War
Office as it was against the Tories.

The other objection to Gladstone’s 1874 fiscal programme was that it was manifestly against the tide of history. When eight years before he had concluded his electoral reform oration with
the ringing message (at least to those who understood it) of: ‘
Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor
. You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side. The great social
forces which move onwards in their might and majesty . . . are against you,’ there was not only force but validity in what he said. But in 1874 he was in the reverse position. His fiscal
programme failed to deflect the Conservative tide at the election. It was also manifestly the last shot of an old war rather than a harbinger of the future. From its
reintroduction in 1842 to 1874 the abolition of the income tax had been a flickering flame of hope, never achieved and mainly kept alive by Gladstone himself fanning it away from
extinction. After 1874 it ceased either to flicker or to be even a contingent hope. At that election it was a desperate ploy by a beleaguered government, and did not work. At no subsequent general
election could it even have been thrown into the arena by any serious party.

Gladstone’s decision to play this card, and to do so in the cause of Liberal unity, points both to his very imperfect knowledge of the party of which he had become the leader after only
eight years of adherence, and to the extent to which ‘the People’s William’ had gone into retreat during his first prime ministership. In contrast with his building up of his
position against Palmerston by the force of his popular appearances and appeal, Gladstone effectively abandoned public meetings and speeches between 1868 and 1873. In a period of a little over five
years he addressed only three popular audiences, and all these occasions were concentrated within eight weeks in the autumn of 1871. The first was in the small North Yorkshire fishing town of
Whitby, where his eldest son was member. The second was at Aberdeen, when he received the freedom of the city on his way to Balmoral. And the third was to an enormous open-air assembly on
Blackheath in his own constituency. It was effectively his only visit to Greenwich in the course of that Parliament. When the election came, however, he spoke there three times, once in Greenwich
itself, once in Woolwich and once at New Cross. They were all open-air afternoon occasions, the Greenwich one in pouring rain, with audiences of between 5000 and 15,000. But he spoke nowhere else.
There was no nationwide campaign, and the government went down to heavy defeat without deployment of its greatest battering-ram. That was in accordance with the habit of the time, and Disraeli
spoke no more frequently or widely.

Gladstone’s very different pattern in the run-up to 1880 was therefore to be the bigger shock. But it cast no shadow before it in 1874, and accompanied by his demagogic abstinence in
1868–73 meant that he had reverted to being a politician very much confined (as were most others) to Westminster, Whitehall, the Court and his favoured country houses. Greenwich was a
thoroughly unfortunate constituency for him. It aroused neither his affection nor his interest. On the widely separated occasions when he went there it was only for an afternoon, and it gave him no
additional angle of sight outside the metropolis. South Lancashire, even Oxford, which provided a special dimension to his life, had
been better. Midlothian, when it came, was
the best of the lot, although even there he was distinctly sparing in his visits.

His attitude to Greenwich, and still more his retreat from provincial speaking, made the end of his first government a period when he was more cut off from his natural reservoirs of support than
at any time since 1859, maybe even since he first became Chancellor in 1853. And this, combined with his too enthusiastic embrace of Treasury negativism, helped to set him off on his chase for a
Britain without income tax which proved as electorally ineffective as it was programmatically sterile for the Liberal party. Hammond may have exaggerated, but he got hold of a piece of essential
truth when he saw that Gladstone, once he had become party leader, was much better away from the Exchequer.

The most interesting letter which Gladstone wrote during the campaign was to Lord Fermoy on 28 January. Fermoy, who appeared to have written one of those tiresomely tentative letters which
combine a general inclination to support with a need for reassurance on a particular issue, was told: ‘With respect to Home Rule I have not yet heard an authoritative or binding definition of
the phrase, which appears to be used by different persons in different senses. Until the phrase comes to have a definite and certain meaning, I have not thought myself justified in referring to it.
. . .’
⁷
The reply was a remarkable paving exercise for his 1886 conversion: nothing he wrote to Fermoy was inconsistent with the attitude he
took twelve years later.

Whether Gladstone believed the election would be won is not certain. He wrote to Bright on 27 January that ‘the feeling of our friends is excellent’, which could be regarded as
cheerfulness in the bunker. Michael Foot might have said it during the 1983 campaign. On the next day, however, after his first Greenwich expedition, he wrote: ‘An enthusiastic meeting. But
the general prospects are far from clear.’ And a week later, when the results, with his own coming early, were beginning to trickle out, he was more disenchanted than usual with Greenwich and
recognized the certainty of national defeat: ‘The general prospect was first indifferent, then bad. My own election for Greenwich, after Boord the distiller, is more like a defeat than a
victory, though it places me in Parliament again.’
⁸⁵
Two days after that he concluded the
tale of declining hopes with:
‘The issue of the Elections is now irrevocably bad.’
⁸
It was by far the worst Whig–Liberal result since 1841.