Gladstone: A Biography (76 page)

Two weeks after that about 3000 came from Salford and Darwen, and Gladstone seemed to be warming to the attention. They were ‘very well managed’, he wrote. Two days after that there
were 2000 from Bacup who were ‘very hearty and enjoyed themselves much’. It seems as though the momentum was growing and no self-respecting Lancashire industrial town would be allowed
to escape sending a contingent. In fact, however, the end of the holiday season and peculiarly dismal weather brought the expeditions to an end. There were 600 from Leigh and Rossendale on 1
September, and that was that. These activities aroused some London cynicism, with other politicians, who would have been appalled but also amazed and flattered to have been pursued to their country
estates by enthusiastic crowds, affecting to believe that there was more contrivance than spontaneity about the excursions and that Gladstone had arranged it all as a massage for his own demagogic
ego. Whether the ‘invasions’ were planned or impulsive, welcome or burdensome, there could be no doubt that they showed how Gladstone’s denunciation of Disraeli’s
pro-Turkish imperialist showmanship had reknit the alliance between himself and provincial democracy.

M
IDLOTHIAN
B
ECKONS

I
N THE EARLY STAGES
of the Russo-Turkish War the campaign favoured the Russians, and Disraeli, egged on by the Queen, came very close in July 1877 to
advocating British intervention on the Turkish side. Fortunately he had a reluctant Cabinet and a more than reluctant Foreign Secretary in the shape of Derby, who pointed out that Britain would
have no allies. Disraeli replied that the British needed none other than the Turks who, soldier for soldier, were worth twenty Spaniards – he was drawing an analogy with Wellington’s
Peninsular campaign. The Turks proceeded to give some force to his argument by their resolute defence of Plevna, which kept the Russians 250 miles or so from Constantinople for five months. As it
was the fear of Tsarist troops on the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus which most excited English bellicosity, this produced an autumn lull. But when on 9 December Plevna at last fell, and the Russian
armies advanced to spend their Christmas almost within sight of the minarets of Stamboul, the most virulent phase of the British political battle began.

In January 1878 a British fleet was despatched to the Dardanelles. Lord Carnarvon, the Colonial Secretary, resigned from Disraeli’s Cabinet, and there was a Russo-Turkish armistice, which
at least removed the imminent threat of the Tsar bestriding the Bosphorus. It also led on to the March Treaty of San Stefano, with the creation of a huge Bulgaria and the effective throwing out of
the Turks from Europe except for a tiny Constantinople hinterland. At the end of January Gladstone used the improbable ambience of a six-hour dinner of the Palmerston Club at Oxford to deliver his
strongest denunciation of ‘Beaconsfieldism’. On 24 February, and again two weeks later, there were London Sunday afternoon demonstrations against Gladstone. On the first Sunday his
Harley Street windows were smashed. On the second he and his wife had to seek refuge in the Cavendish Square house of his doctor, and then escape in a cab escorted by four mounted constables. In
most of the Northern or either of the great Scottish cities he would by contrast have been carried shoulder-high. In the previous November he had
crushingly defeated Stafford
Northcote for the rectorship of Glasgow University
⁹⁶
and in March he both announced publicly that he would not stand again for Greenwich and received a
strong invitation to become a candidate for Leeds, as safe a Liberal seat as it was populous an electorate (49,000). Gladstone gave a stalling answer at that stage. Two months later the first
flicker of a Midlothian possibility came over the horizon.

In the meantime, the Treaty of San Stefano had been signed at the beginning of March and at the end of the month Derby had resigned (after hesitating too long to make his going effective)
against the warlike steps of ordering Indian troops into the Mediterranean and calling up British reserves. On 9 April Gladstone voted in a small minority of sixty-four against the latter step,
which well illustrated the limited parliamentary strength of hard-core anti-‘Beaconsfieldism’ as opposed to those, like Hartington, who thought it wise from time to time to assuage
Gladstone rather than to expose themselves to the blast of his oratory. This combination of Liberal disunity and lukewarmness gave House of Commons protection even to a government front bench as
weak as that which had been left by Disraeli’s departure to the Lords.

The country was a different matter, particularly in the North and Scotland, and it was on this dimension that Gladstone’s attention became increasingly concentrated. In the summer of the
Congress of Berlin he made only one major speech in Parliament, and that, on 30 July, was notable more for its length (his almost statutory two and a half hours for an important debate) than for
its content. His own version of the occasion was realistic. He had been suffering over the weekend from the ‘depressing and sharp pain of a gumboil’.
¹
On the Monday of his speech his face was less distorted, although: ‘I was in body much below par but put on the steam perforce. It ought to have been
far
better.’
²

‘Putting on the steam perforce’ was a vividly truthful rather than a flattering phrase for a great orator to write about himself after an indifferent day and fitted in with some
other almost devastatingly self-critical remarks which he made around this time. When his letters to Samuel Wilberforce were sent to him in 1879 by the Bishop’s biographer with a request for
their free use, Gladstone acceded but added the
private comment: ‘They are curiously illustrative of a peculiar and second-rate nature.’
³

Such surprising shafts, accompanied by a certain inherently comic quality about his persona and his reaction to some events, made Gladstone a much more sympathetic character than his moralizing
and didactic personality might at first sight lead one to suppose. Thus for 14 June 1879 he remarked: ‘6–11. Attended the dinner of the Savage Club. Too long and the clouds of tobacco
were fearful. In other respects most interesting. It was impossible to speak ill of so quick and sympathetic an audience. I returned thanks for Literature & was (like the
ensemble
) too
long; but nothing could exhaust their patience.’
⁴
The audience would have been composed of ‘literary gents’ and some actors.
Gladstone loved any audience with histrionic affiliations. This fitted in with his April 1878 reaction to an address of an hour which he gave to ‘a remarkable meeting’ of Nonconformist
Ministers in the Farringdon Street Memorial Hall, where, twenty-two years later, the Labour party was to be founded. ‘Never did I address a better audience,’
⁵
he wrote. They were, of course, themselves mostly performers and this gave them something of the same quality which, a decade and more later, he attributed to what he described
as the best audience of his whole life – a congress of actors, because they were the ones who best understood what he was trying to do.

On the Sunday morning following the four hours of tobacco-clouded (and no doubt liberally wine-supplied) Savage Club jollification, Gladstone recorded himself as being ‘laid up with
deranged liver & bowels’. Dr Clark came, prescribed castor oil and tactfully laid ‘the blame on eight hours of heat [the length of the celebration seemed to have grown overnight]
& on preserved peas’.
⁶
An alternative if less tactful explanation would have been that Gladstone was suffering from a good old-fashioned
hangover. There is some inconclusive evidence from the pattern of his quite frequent sick headaches, which kept him in bed for half a day or so, that he may have been subject to this form of
retribution after occasional over-indulgence. On the one occasion (in 1885) when he dined alone at Grillion’s, for by accident no one else came, he entered himself in the club book as having
consumed a single bottle of champagne, which was quite moderate, particularly as he might not have finished it. While there is no evidence that his consumption, unlike that of Asquith, ever
rendered him unsteady, he liked wine throughout his life, and, as with most people, probably drank more under stimulus of animated conversation than in solitary state.

Over the summer and then the recess of 1878 Gladstone was politically quiet. Private obligations filled some of the slack. In May at a dinner party of the Frederick
Cavendishes he sat down next to the Duchess of Argyll, who immediately had a stroke and died within a few hours. Whether because of the proximity or for more general reasons of respect for the Duke
and his family, Gladstone went to the funeral near Helensburgh, travelling all night from St Pancras ‘in a Pullman bed with rest but no (continuous) sleep’.
⁷
After the interment he went to Glasgow, and looked at a ‘highly interesting’ exhibition of pictures. Glasgow, with no Kelvingrove Gallery for another twenty years,
let alone a Burrell Collection, was nevertheless foreshadowing its twentieth-century reputation as a centre of both indigenous and imported art.

Then he took an evening train to Sheffield, on his way to Clumber, the Newcastle house where he had first waited on the fourth Duke in 1832, and where he was still laboriously trying, fourteen
years after the death of his friend the fifth Duke, to discharge his thankless duties as a trustee of the embarrassed estate with its degenerate heirs. (A year later the task was made even more
onerous by the house being badly burnt.) On this visit he devoted two and a half days mainly to trying to sort the letters of the fifth Duke, an obligation which it might be thought a once and
future Prime Minister could have delegated.

This Clumber visit, and Gladstone’s continuing efforts to make some sense out of the financial chaos of the Newcastle affairs, prompts a comparison between the way in which he and Disraeli
discharged their earlier-incurred ducal obligations. They both liked a duke, but had different ways of showing it. Disraeli had benefited greatly from his 1840s association with Lord George
Bentinck and had also been assisted by Bentinck family money in the purchase of Hughenden. In 1880, in the last year of his life, Disraeli summoned the head of the Bentinck family, a
twenty-two-year-old Coldstream Guards subaltern who had recently succeeded as sixth Duke of Portland, to visit him there. No one else was present other than Montagu Corry. Nevertheless Disraeli
came down to dinner in the blue riband of the Garter, but regarded this as a substitute for conversational effort. The meal passed in barely broken silence, but all too slowly for the mystified and
uneasy young nobleman. Then Disraeli rose to his feet, said, ‘My Lord Duke, I come from a race which never forgives an injury, nor forgets a benefit,’ and bizarrely announced that he
proposed to make the Duke’s stepmother (his closest relation, for both his parents were dead and he had made a cousinly succession) a peeress in her own right. (She became Lady Bolsover.) He
then closed the evening, sweeping aside the Duke’s attempt to reply and retired to his red boxes.
⁸
Disraeli paid his debts
with theatre, mainly devised for his own amusement, Gladstone with a heavy-footed almost interfering devotion.

It was one of the paradoxes of Gladstone’s life at this time that, as his denunciations of the ‘upper ten thousand’ and ‘the West End of London’ became more shrill,
so his own social life became if anything more elevated. In the autumn of 1878, despite his habit of not giving grand house parties, he had two dukes (Bedford
⁹⁷
and Argyll), as well as another duchess (Westminster) and the marquisal Baths, to stay at Hawarden. His own excursions that autumn included an early October semi-walking,
semi-speechmaking tour of the Isle of Man (eight speeches in six days, which was prodigal particularly as the Manxmen had no United Kingdom votes) with his son Stephen. Then, after two weeks at
home, he progressed via Bedfordshire to Cambridge. He stayed with the Bedfords at Woburn and with the Cowpers (he became Gladstone’s Irish Viceroy in 1880) at Wrest Park. In Cambridge, he
stayed with the Sidgwicks, she Balfour’s sister and founder of Newnham, he the foremost exponent of Millite philosophy in the University and a vigorous educational reformer. Gladstone’s
Sunday there comprised Trinity chapel at 10.30, a sermon from the Bishop of Ely in the University church at 2.00, King’s College Chapel at 3.30, and dinner in Trinity for the first time since
he had stayed in that Master’s Lodge in 1831.