Gladstone: A Biography (73 page)

In the autumn of that year he made his sole sojourn in Ireland. He was there nearly a month, but he did not venture beyond counties Wicklow, Dublin and Kildare. He stayed at
the great houses of Kilruderry, Coolattin, Powerscourt, Calton, Abbeyleix and Woodlands. But it was Glendalough, the ancient and pastoral Christian site in the Glenealo valley, which made the
deepest impression upon him. ‘The harmony of the scenery with the remains is perfect,’ he wrote.
¹²

Wherever Gladstone was, England or Ireland, Hawarden or London, touring Europe or visiting a country house, and whatever he was doing, unless absorbed in reading or writing, whether he was
felling a tree
⁹²
or walking through an urban street or across a tract of countryside, he was intensely alert, not always to human atmosphere, but to
whatever caught his eye, to light, to buildings, to scenery. And he could come out with most unexpected observations. Just as, on the Obersee in September 1874, he noticed ‘the singularly
beautiful waitress’, so in July 1876: ‘I was greatly struck, returning Holborn way, with the now really great beauty of the City [of London] as well as its astounding
stir.’
¹³
It was not a commonplace reaction to the great wen at the peak of its coal-smut-filled sky and its horse manure-covered streets. But
Gladstone, whatever else he was, was not a commonplace man. In the next phase of his career, which began eight weeks to the day after his Holborn
aperçu
, he was seen by some as an
increasingly demented and irresponsible old man (he was nearly sixty-seven at the time), by others as the most inspirational of Victorian statesmen. What is indisputable, however, is that 1876
began the reforging and reinforcement of his position as the uniquely powerful oratorical communicator of the century.

P
ART
F
OUR

THE REBOUND INTO THE SECOND PREMIERSHIP

1876–1885

F
OR
28 A
UGUST
1876 at Hawarden Gladstone’s diary entry comprised: ‘Worked on a beginning for a possible pamphlet on
the Turkish question: I stupidly brought on again my lumbago by physical exertion.’
¹
The next four days he spent mostly in bed. His entry for
Thursday the 31st captured the flavour of the week: ‘Kept my bed till four & made tolerable play in writing on Bulgarian Horrors: my back is less strained in bed, where I write against
the legs.’
²
On the Friday he ‘sent off more than half to the printer’. On the Sunday he rose in time for church at 11.00 (and again
at 6.30), and then left at 10.15 p.m. to catch the ‘Limited Mail’ train to London, where he descended upon Granville’s house at 18 Carlton House Terrace at 5.00 a.m. His homing
instinct for Carlton House Terrace was as strong as that of any pigeon. What was wrong with 73 Harley Street? What made him think that he would be a welcome guest in someone else’s house at
five in the morning (where he immediately went to bed until nine), or indeed at Granville’s at any time of the night or day in view of the mission on which he had come, which was to disturb
the peace of the Granville–Hartington-led Liberal party?

Yet, such was the strength of his personality and the quality of Granville’s affection, that he almost certainly was, even in these circumstances, wholly welcome. And his employment of the
fourteen or fifteen hours after his second awakening was remarkable even by his own standards. He wrote two letters and conducted five interviews, his visitors including the editor of
The
Times
(Delane), Panizzi of the British Museum and the American minister (Pierrepont). Then: ‘In six or seven hours, principally at the B. Museum I completed my MS making all the needful
searches of Papers and Journals: also worked on proof sheets. Granville had a small very pleasant dinner party,’
³
he graciously concluded.

The next day he ‘Finished the correction of the revises before one: discussing the text with Ld G. & making various alterations of phrase
which he recommended. At
seven I received complete copies.’ Then occurred one of the most remarkable minor incidents in Victorian politics. Gladstone, Hartington and Granville went together to the Haymarket Theatre
to see a farce entitled
The Heir at Law
. The rest of the audience was, not surprisingly, somewhat stunned.

Later that night Gladstone sent a complimentary copy of his hurriedly conceived, written and printed effusion to, among others, the new Earl of Beaconsfield. Disraeli, with typical dramatic
effort, had spoken for the last time in the House of Commons, of which he had been a member for thirty-nine years, on 11 August, had walked to the bar of the House, gazed upon it, regained the
normal ministerial exit behind the Speaker’s chair, and walked out upon the arm of his faithful secretary Monty Corry (later Lord Rowton), pulling on his gloves and encompassed in a long
white overcoat (which might have been thought over-wintry, not merely in colour but in weight, for even a London August). The next day it was announced that he had become Earl of Beaconsfield,
which he pronounced
Bee
consfield, and which followed the elevation of his wife (five years dead at this time) to the viscountcy of the same name at the end of his first premiership.

The complimentary copy did not assuage the new earl. Writing to his Foreign Secretary on 8 September, Disraeli described the pamphlet as ‘vindictive and ill-written – that of course.
Indeed in that respect of all the Bulgarian horrors perhaps the greatest.’
⁴
And he took enough pleasure in the typically derisory phrase with
which he endeavoured to puncture Gladstone’s indignation that he repeated it with a slight variation in a speech at Aylesbury on the eve of the poll in the Buckinghamshire by-election which
followed from his elevation. Gladstone meanwhile, having seen the original 2000 print of his pamphlet supplemented within two days by a second instalment of 22,000 and then grow to a total sale of
200,000, was so swept away by the cause as to take the extreme step of visiting his Greenwich constituency, where on the afternoon of Saturday, 9 September, he addressed an audience of 10,000 who
assembled on Blackheath in spite of the heavy rain. This clash between him and Disraeli, in the words of Robert Blake, ‘injected a bitterness into British politics which had not been seen
since the Corn Law debates’.
⁵
With their utterly conflicting styles, Gladstone’s pulsating moral indignation and Disraeli’s sardonic
cynicism, they each infuriated the other, and increased the mutual hostility. They were both somewhat out of touch with their colleagues on the issue, for Derby and Salisbury on the Conservative
side and Hartington and Granville on the
Liberal one were all clustered on some fairly moderate ground in the middle.

Nonetheless Gladstone and Disraeli staged between them the greatest setpiece drama of Victorian politics. Protagonist and antagonist exaggerated their styles and roles as though they had been
coached by Henry Irving. The previous contender for the dramatic accolade – the Don Pacifico debate of 1850 – was outpaced not because any single occasion in 1876–80 was more
memorable, but because the Pacifico clash was all over in a few days and was played out almost entirely within the parliamentary dimension. The Eastern Question was on the contrary a full three-act
drama, and it was not primarily parliamentary, let alone exclusively so. It embraced Gladstone’s pamphlets, his denunciatory meetings up and down the country culminating in the Midlothian
campaign, balanced by Disraeli’s mordant and provocative flippancies as well as his sole but spectacular appearance at an international diplomatic conference. Moreover it left a permanent
imprint on the line of the divide in British politics. It separated the North from the South, the classes from the masses, and high moral tone from an appeal to self-interest flavoured with
music-hall patriotism and mocking wit. The Whigs of the age first of Melbourne and then of Palmerston could hardly be regarded as more earnest than the Conservative party of Peel. But there was no
comparison between the earnestness of the Liberal party under Gladstone’s second leadership and that of Disraeli or even Salisbury.

The genesis of Gladstone’s fervour on the issue is difficult to analyse. Was he, perhaps semi-consciously, looking for a cause for which, with a clap of thunder and a whiff of smoke, he
could re-emerge as the dominating central figure of politics after a fairly boring two and a half years during which he had been trying to persuade himself that he wished to concentrate on
theology? Or was he spontaneously seized with a passionate sympathy for the sufferings of the Balkan Christian communities which left him no alternative but to erupt with his full and extraordinary
force? Arguments in favour of both propositions can be effectively deployed, and no doubt the most likely answer is that there were elements of both in his motivation.

In favour of the more cynical explanation is the consideration that he was not much good at theology, or at any abstract or speculative subject, and probably knew it. He was always much more at
ease with the historical and organizational aspects of religion than with its philosophical content. He did not have an absolutely first-class analytical
mind. He had a very
good mind, which he nurtured throughout his long life with an exceptional intake of diversified information. It would never have been appropriate to say of him, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said of
Franklin Roosevelt: ‘a second-class intellect, but a first-rate temperament’. Gladstone had a mind which fully deserved his two Oxford firsts and which then retained the full vigour of
its curiosity for nearly seventy years. He was well in the half dozen cleverest Prime Ministers, although he did not have quite Peel’s orderliness or Asquith’s smooth-purring if
conventional machine of a mind, or Rosebery’s gifts as a delicate stylist, or Churchill’s as a sonorous one. What made him pre-eminent were his physical rather than his intellectual
gifts, formidable by normal standards though the latter were: his energy and the commanding force with which he delivered his not always limpid words.

All this meant that when he inscribed on the docket of his papers on Future Punishment the pregnant phrase, ‘From this I was called away to write on Bulgaria’, he was turning from a
task he did indifferently to one which he did spectacularly well. It did not follow that what he did was contrived for his own convenience. He was driven on Bulgaria by the same sort of elemental
force which had seized him at the time of his Neapolitan pamphlets twenty-five years before. But there were two balancing paradoxes. The first was that he knew incomparably more about Naples in
1851 than he knew about Bulgaria in 1876. In 1851 he had spent a winter on the spot. He had visited the gaols. He had met some of the victims. From the point of view not only of knowledge but also
of reasons for direct sympathy there was no comparison between the two involvements. In 1876 he had never been nearer to the violated provinces than Vienna or his one night in the hills above the
Albanian coast, both in 1858. At the end of July 1876, he had admittedly delivered a two-hour House of Commons oration against the government’s policy towards Turkey, but he had concentrated
very much on the responsibilities which flowed from Britain being a signatory to the Treaty of Paris which had ended the Crimean War, and had deliberately eschewed raising the question of the
alleged atrocities. Furthermore, as there are many examples to demonstrate, such a speech required from Gladstone no concentration of preparation.

During the Hawarden month which intervened between then and his sudden outburst of bedridden pamphlet-writing there was no indication of any special reading on the subject, although he no doubt
closely followed the various reports which indicated that as many as 12,000 Bulgarians may have been massacred by the Turks. The
Daily News
carried reports from J. A.
MacGahan, that newspaper’s special correspondent in Batak as well as its publication of an explosive despatch from the United States consul-general Eugene Schuyler. W. T. Stead also sent to
Hawarden copies of his Darlington
Northern Echo
, in which from early August onwards that crusading editor was whipping up a great campaign. Nonetheless Gladstone’s knowledge of
Bulgaria was far from profound. Yet, when he began to write, the phrases poured out of him, not only with passion, but with at any rate a superficial grasp of local terminology which produced one
of the most famous examples of nineteenth-century polemics: