Gladstone: A Biography (75 page)

Gladstone’s social life embraced a wider dimension than these royalties, Lady Derby or even Lord Beaconsfield. On 10–12 March 1877, he spent a remarkable Saturday to Monday at the
house of Sir John Lubbock near Farnborough, Kent. Lubbock, later the first Lord Avebury, was at that time Liberal MP for Maidstone, a fellow of the Royal Society and formidable as a promoter of
reforming and philanthropic causes as he was successful as a banker. Among his other guests he had Sir Lyon Playfair, another FRS who was also MP for St Andrews and Edinburgh universities, T. H.
Huxley and John Morley. It was the first time that Gladstone had met Morley, then aged thirty-nine and editor of the
Fortnightly Review
. Morley was to be not only his official
biographer, but also the most devoted colleague of his last decade. After this initial encounter Gladstone wrote: ‘I cannot help liking Mr J. Morley.’
¹⁷
(The touch of surprised reluctance presumably arose from Morley’s well-known agnosticism.) To add to this intellectual feast they walked on the Sunday
afternoon to call on Charles Darwin in a neighbouring village. Darwin, according to Morley, was dazzled that ‘such a gentleman’ should have visited him. Huxley, using with Morley their
mutual saving of time while Gladstone was at church, said of him: ‘why, put him in the middle of a moor, with nothing in the world but his shirt, and you could not prevent him from being
anything he liked.’
¹⁸

Over the turn of the year 1876–7 there had been a European conference at Constantinople. This was much in accordance with Gladstone’s desires, for he believed above all in the
Concert of Europe asserting itself. Such a view potentially separated him from his Radical allies, for they rightly saw the Concert as an essentially conservative concept, owing more to Castlereagh
than to Cobden. However, the conference failed. The Turks rejected its demands, and there was no united will to impose them. Not only Britain, although Derby as British Foreign Secretary was a main
instigator of the conference, but Austria and France were weak in their support, while Germany was mainly concerned to try to avoid too rough a rupture between Austria and Russia, which would
destroy the
Dreikaiserbund
, united in favour of emperors but not of much else.

As the hope of a concerted solution receded, so the two sharp swords of the Balkan Christian communities reacted in different but typical ways. Gladstone devoted himself to writing another
pamphlet, this time on the sufferings of Montenegro. On 19 April he ‘finished, corrected and sent off my article on Montenegro which from the intense interest of the subject has kept me warm,
even hot, all the time I have been writing it’.
¹⁹
But it did not heat the British public. It sold only 8000 copies and was something of an
anti-climax after the
Bulgarian Horrors
. Meanwhile the Tsar moved towards war, which he declared against Turkey on 24 April, five days after Gladstone had completed his Montenegrin pamphlet
and three days before he took his next important step, which was to put down five resolutions (on the Eastern Question) for debate and division in the House of Commons.

Typically Gladstone made up his mind during a day which he spent entirely in bed, with one of his sudden bouts of stomach upset and two visits from his physician: ‘This day I took my
decision: a severe one, in face of my not having a single approval in the
Upper
official circle. But
had I in the first days of September asked the same body whether I
ought to write my [Bulgarian] pamphlet I believe the unanimous verdict would have been no.’
^20
94

The resolutions declared that the Porte (that is, the seat and entity of Turkish government) had offended against humanity; that, in the absence of adequate guarantees for the future, the Porte
had accordingly lost all claim to moral or material support from the other powers; that British influences should be deployed in favour of local liberty and devolved government in the desecrated
provinces; that the European Concert should reassert itself and exact all necessary changes from the government of the Sultan; and (in a wrapping-up procedural address to the Crown) that British
policy should henceforth be based on these principles. Gladstone announced the exact form of the resolutions to the House of Commons three days later, saying: ‘I make this motion on my own
responsibility, and not as the organ of any party or section of a party.’

This disclaimer was hardly enough to prevent the motion being a deeply embarrassing one for the hesitant Liberal leadership. They were nervous of getting into a russophil position, but they were
even more nervous of being assailed by the force of Gladstone’s oratory. And they would, of course, have to decide whether or not to vote with him, either course presenting grave
disadvantages. As was usual, Gladstone and Hartington moved stiffly at arm’s length from each other while the more supple Granville attempted a compromise. ‘Puss’ Granville was
lucky (although probably also cunning) in his timing, and caught Gladstone for a meeting with himself, Hartington and Wolverton (the former Whip) immediately after the Royal Academy dinner on
Saturday, 5 May. About this dinner Gladstone struck an almost exultant note: ‘spoke for “Literature!” My
reception
surprised me, it was so good.’
²¹
In this euphoric mood, post-applause as well as post-prandial, he was remarkably conciliatory. ‘What they ask of me is really, from my point of view,
little more than nominal.’ He was wrong. His agreement to modify the second resolution and move only that and the first, although ranging over all five in his speech, produced a sense of
let-down among both the hardline parliamentary Radicals such as Dilke and Chamberlain and the more utopian outside enthusiasts. It did however produce a
more or less united
Liberal division lobby, although a weak one for the key vote resulted in defeat by 354 to 223, a majority far in excess of the nominal Conservative preponderance.

It also led to a memorable, even if not notably vote-winning, oration from Gladstone. He had to make it in unfavourable circumstances, for his deal with Granville exposed him to a multitude of
points of order and procedural wrangles, which occupied the House almost until dinner time. When he eventually came to his main speech the House was emptying and those who remained were an
impatient audience. He addressed them for his habitual two and a half hours. ‘The House gradually came round . . .,’ he recorded. His performance escaped by an even wider margin than
usual any danger of being woodenly text-bound for he forgot his ‘eyeglass’, and could not read such limited notes as he had prepared.
⁹⁵
It was
in this speech that he launched his denunciation of the false values of the West End of London. Arthur Balfour, who as leader of the House at the time of Gladstone’s death, twenty-one years
later, had to pronounce the first panegyric, reverted to this 1877 occasion: ‘I shall never forget the effect which this speech left on my mind. As a mere feat of physical endurance it was
almost unsurpassed; as a feat of parliamentary courage, parliamentary skill, parliamentary endurance and parliamentary eloquence, I believe it will always be unequalled.’
²²

After the disposal of Gladstone’s resolutions there was a lull in the British debate while the Russians moved into position and then successfully fought the Turks. The next act of the
British political drama had to await the Russo-Turkish armistice, the Treaty of San Stefano and the height of London war fever, all in the early months of 1878. Then the music-halls (or at least
one of them) rang to the chorus of:

This could be regarded as an anti-Gladstone hymn, for it neatly encapsulated everything he was most against, fighting an unjust war,
‘jingoism’, a term which it
put into the language, maintaining an overlarge fleet of vulnerable ironclads, sending troops unnecessarily to die, and, perhaps even worse, wasting public money and upsetting the probity of the
budget. He had become a keen, almost obsessive theatregoer, with the music-hall by no means excluded from his patronage. Stage histrionics and pulpit thunderings almost equally engaged his
interest, and the former if anything had the edge at this stage in his life. Nevertheless these controversies marked a certain extrusion of his influence from the metropolis and its Home Counties.
He chose to attack the West End. The West End of ‘stage-door johnnies’ and even of more modestly pleasure-seeking members of the middle class chose to mock him. Immediately his great
clash with Beaconsfield was the prelude to the strong (but somewhat sterile) Liberal victory of 1880, but it also sowed the first seeds of the Liberal retreat to the bastions of the West Country,
the Pennines and the Celtic fringes.

The conurbation on which Gladstone advanced within three weeks of his ‘resolutions’ debate was, however, the least remote, mountainous or Celtic in the whole of Britain, that of
Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham. On 31 May 1877 he went from Hawarden, where he had spent a Whitsun fortnight, to speak at the inaugural meeting of the National Liberal Federation. He stayed
with Chamberlain, then an MP of not quite a year’s standing. Radical Joe was not then in the full splendour of his gabled Italian gothic Highbury mansion, which was built only in 1880, but in
a more modest but still substantial villa on the fringe of Edgbaston. It was nonetheless an exuberant day. Gladstone was hauled in triumph the couple of miles from the station to
Chamberlain’s house for an early dinner with many guests.

The meeting, in Bingley Hall, was from 7.00 to 9.30. The venue was itself a challenge. Bingley Hall was a big hangar-like exhibition hall with no seats for the multitude but an elastic standing
capacity. Gladstone, when told there were likely to be more than 10,000 present, was uncharacteristically doubtful about his ability to command the cavernous space, but was persuaded that if Bright
could do it so could he. In fact the audience far exceeded the estimate. Gladstone put it at 25,000 and Chamberlain at 30,000. There was speculation about whether so many had ever before assembled
under one roof. Gladstone’s one-and-a-quarter-hour speech contained no memorable passages, but did not disappoint. He always gave good value.

There was a number of quirks surrounding the visit. In bringing together the National Liberal Federation, which was made up of a
hundred or more lesser caucuses clustered
around the Birmingham core, Chamberlain was seeking a broader-based successor to the National Education League. In the early 1870s he had tried to use this as a vehicle to rally provincial
Nonconformists against Gladstone’s education policy and to launch himself into national politics, but had found it narrow for the latter purpose. It was thus odd that he should want Gladstone
at the Federation’s inaugural meeting and perhaps even odder that Gladstone should have made it his major engagement of the spring. The explanation on Chamberlain’s side was that,
although equivocal about Gladstone’s anti-Turkish crusade, he wished to draw him back, for a short time at least, into the Liberal leadership to counteract the baleful Whiggery of Hartington
and Granville. The irony was that the sixty-seven-year-old former Premier, once drawn back, stayed more than long enough to drive Chamberlain not only out of Liberal communion but out of his own
caucus as well.

Gladstone for his part had an equally compelling reason for going to Birmingham. He wanted the support of the National Liberal Federation for his Eastern policy. And once in Birmingham he of
course swept the faithful along with his eloquence. He also temporarily embraced his host in the compass of his enthusiasm. On the next day too he did Chamberlain proud. He performed at a breakfast
party, visited a factory of the Birmingham Small Arms Company, lunched at a Birmingham board school, received a municipal address at the Town Hall and spoke at a final dinner before retreating to
Hagley for the night. He also arranged one of the most maladroit visits of his sometimes maladroit life. In the late afternoon he took Chamberlain with him to see Newman at the Birmingham Oratory.
A Gladstone–Newman rendezvous, particularly with Gladstone anxious to push Newman into supporting his Bulgarian agitation, would in itself have been an uneasy occasion. It was made positively
absurd by adding to the mix Chamberlain, whose whole cast of mind and religion, such as the latter was, was as different as it is possible to imagine from that of Newman, and indeed of Gladstone.
It is not surprising that the result was a tense twenty minutes of stilted conversation.

There was indeed an undercurrent of tenseness to the whole Birmingham visit. Gladstone had been gracious but reserved. Chamberlain had been welcoming but undazzled. Perhaps the most spontaneous
warmth was in Gladstone recording that he ‘saw Mr. Chamberlain’s very pleasing children’.
²³
As these would certainly have included
Neville (then aged eight) and maybe Austen (then thirteen) this presence of two future
leaders of the Conservative party introduced a final twist of irony to the proceedings.
Although the visit served the different purposes of both Gladstone and Chamberlain, it left no residue of affection or mutual understanding.

It was Gladstone’s only political excursion for some months except for some almost accidental July speeches. These were to spontaneous crowds in Plymouth and Exeter, where he went ashore
from a four-day English Channel cruise in the yacht of Donald Currie, the founder of the Castle (later Union Castle) shipping line. Gladstone went infrequently to the House of Commons, and left
London for Hawarden on 28 July, an early retreat by the standards of Victorian parliamentary sessions. He stayed at Hawarden almost uninterruptedly from then until the beginning of his only Irish
tour in mid-October. During that long static period he developed, again almost by accident, a novel form of semi-passive political campaigning, one which has never since been repeated except
perhaps by one or two American presidential candidates who fought from their ‘front porches’. On 4 August he wrote: ‘A party of 1400 came from Bolton! We were nearly killed with
kindness. I began with W[illy] the cutting of a tree; and had to speak to them, but not on politics.’
²⁴
Two days later
The Times
reported that ‘the very splinters which flew from his axe were picked up and treasured as relics’.