Gladstone: A Biography (79 page)

Most of the last twenty days of January were taken up with the death and burial of Gladstone’s sister Helen. She was reported as dangerously ill on the 10th, and less
than thirty-six hours later he and Sir Thomas and Lady Gladstone were on the night boat to Ostend for Cologne. She died four days after they arrived, and they then stayed nearly another week,
clearing up and assembling the doubtful evidence for her having reverted to the Anglican faith, or at least rejected post-Vatican Council Roman Catholicism.

There followed a four-day visit to Fasque and Helen’s physically safe if doctrinally doubtful funeral and burial in the Episcopalian chapel there. On the Perth train from Euston Gladstone
‘made a stage of the journey with Ld Hartington, alone, & conversed on the situation’. It was much the longest of his only three encounters with Hartington between the two phases of
his Midlothian campaign, and was another indication (compare the journey with H. A. Bruce in 1871) of the chance intimacies which, much more than today, were a feature of Victorian railway
travel.
¹⁰⁰

Disraeli, encouraged by the false dawn of two favourable by-election results, announced the dissolution of Parliament on 8 March and Gladstone returned to Edinburgh a week later. This time he
went from London and was greeted by thousands at all the major stations of the east-coast route. At Grantham the Mayor headed 2000. At York the Lord Mayor brought 6000, and at Newcastle there were
too many to count. In Edinburgh ‘the wonderful scene of November there was exactly renewed’. Such repetition, which broadly persisted throughout the two subsequent weeks, had the
advantage of avoiding any sense of let-down for Gladstone and the disadvantage of leaving little fresh now to describe. Again he stayed for most of the nights at Dalmeny, although Lord Rosebery,
who did not believe in promoting a campaign by halves, had also taken a house for Gladstone’s use in George Street in the heart of the New Town,
¹⁰¹
and
Gladstone spent five nights there (and,
typically, three days mostly in bed) as well as using it for the day and evening of the poll and count. He also spent one night at Lord
Reay’s house near Galashiels.

The speeches were once again splendid on-the-spot successes. But it was a second gallop around the course, as far as both subjects and venues were concerned. The most memorable was his
winding-up speech at West Calder, which modest town always seemed to pull out his oratorical stops, on the Friday before the Monday poll. By then, owing to the spread-out nature of the polling days
in different constituencies, he knew that the national result would be a Liberal victory. Furthermore he had already been elected for Leeds and was almost certainly going to win Midlothian. So
there was no question of his being in a
contra mundum
mood, forced to fall back on the defiant faithful. Yet he chose to sound his most explicit ‘masses against the classes’, the
‘nation against selfish interests’ note:

So were the burghers of West Calder asked to rise above any narrow material interests and so were they sent away with the impression that they were morally superior to the plutocracy and had
laid upon them a more serious judgemental duty than even the most elevated of bewigged dignitaries. And so ended too the Midlothian campaign.

The result was declared in the early evening of 7 April. Gladstone did not go to the count but remained in the George Street house until Reid, the principal agent and one of the brilliantly
accurate conductors of the canvass of January 1879, brought him the figures. Reid could have said ‘Here is the result, Mr Gladstone, from which you will see that your two great series of
speeches may have changed six votes since the estimate that I gave you before you set foot in the constituency.’ But I doubt if Reid did. He was more likely to have been caught up in the
enthusiasm of the assembled crowd of 15,000 whom Gladstone, followed by Rosebery, addressed briefly (for him) from a window of the house before returning in a torchlight procession to Dalmeny.
Gladstone’s mood was not triumphalist. ‘Quite satisfactory’ was his restrained comment on the result and he distributed some of the credit to others, noting that Rosebery spoke
‘excellently well’ and that ‘wonderful, & nothing less, has been the disposing guiding hand of God in all this matter’.
³⁵

That night, with his extraordinary capacity for concentration under excitement, he wrote his address of thanks to the electors. The next evening he left Edinburgh by train and with three hours
of sleep despite
‘frightful unearthly noises at Warrington’ reached Hawarden the following morning. He stayed there for twelve days in what can only be described as
a mood of elation. His sole complaint was against the volume of incoming mail. And even here there was a mixture of satisfaction and dismay: ‘Postal arrivals 140! Horrible!’ For the
rest his enthusiasm and beneficence was unexampled. He was reading Scott’s
Guy Mannering
, ‘
dear
Guy Mannering’, he wrote, and ‘that most heavenly man George
Herbert’. There were two Lyttelton nephews staying. Neville, later a general, was ‘a real fine fellow’. Edward, later headmaster of Eton, was a ‘capital fellow’, who
helped with the mail. The return, first of Herbert and then of Willy Gladstone from their electoral contests, were triumphant occasions of estate loyalty. Samuel Plimsoll (MP for Derby and famous
for his ‘line’), who was in reality making a good-natured nuisance of himself by his determination to organize a victory parade for Gladstone’s entry into London, which could
hardly have been less helpful in relation to the Queen, Hartington or Granville, was nonetheless summoned to Hawarden for a night and, although ‘overflowing with his own subject of the
Mercantile Marine’, was found ‘an original and childlike man, full of reality and enthusiasm’.
³⁶
John Bright ‘came over from
Llandudno’ and was ‘most kind and satisfactory’.
³⁷
There never was a time when Gladstone wrote with such benignity about everybody
and everything.

The key visitor was his former Whip, George Glyn, now Lord Wolverton, who could not resist continuing to perform the more interesting half of his old functions. He came for two nights. On the
first ‘he [threatened] a request from Granville and Hartington’ and left Gladstone ‘stunned’. On the second night he so persuasively argued ‘on the great matter of
all’ (that is, another Gladstone premiership) that on the third (after his departure) Gladstone wrote out his Cabinet list. On the day after that Gladstone pursued Wolverton to London with a
letter of spectacular obscurity of form, even though its substance was almost brutally clear. Everything should be decided ‘on the ground of public policy’.
³⁸
That apart, Granville or Hartington should head the government. That apart, Gladstone should seek repose. There was no question of honour or delicacy demanding that the
established leaders should give way to him. There was no question of his seeking office for his own sake. It was all a matter of what ‘public policy’ demanded. Armed with this deadly if
(or because) unprecise weapon, buoyed up by his post-Midlothian euphoria, and at seventy, ‘not consent[ing] to be old’, he set out for London on the afternoon of Monday, 19 April
1880.

V
ICTORY
, W
HERE
A
RE
T
HY
F
RUITS
?

D
ISRAELI RECEIVED THE NEWS
of his final defeat – for at seventy-five and in his state of health there was no possibility of revenge –
brooding in solitary state at Hatfield, where he was surprisingly installed in Salisbury’s absence abroad. From John Morley to Robert Blake there is agreement that he took the crushing result
well. ‘Dignified imperturbability’ was Blake’s felicitous phrase for his demeanour. The results were more or less a reverse image of those of 1874, just as those of that year had
been of those of 1868. There were party majorities of about a hundred in each of the three cases. This left Gladstone a clear two-to-one victor in the series, and, even though his campaign may not
have shifted many votes in Midlothian, it had a considerable ‘lighthouse’ effect. Conservative representation in Scotland fell from nineteen to seven, a position as weak as that in the
late twentieth century. In Wales there were only two surviving Conservatives, and even England produced a non-Conservative majority, which has been a rare phenomenon since the death of Palmerston.
Only in Ireland were there more Tories than Liberals (twenty-five against thirteen) but that was balanced by there being sixty-five ‘Home Rulers’, of whom thirty-five were firmly
affiliated to Charles Stewart Parnell, who replaced Isaac Butt as Nationalist leader immediately after the 1880 elections, and thirty wore the label more loosely.

Disraeli, despite his stoicism, did not hasten to resign, or to hurry the Queen back from her Easter holiday in Baden-Baden. Nor did he use his decisive influence to reconcile her to the
prospect of a Gladstone government. There was much need for someone, and most of all him, to perform this last role. On 4 April she had written of Gladstone to her private secretary (Ponsonby):
‘She will sooner
abdicate
than send for or have any
communication
with
that half mad firebrand
who wd soon ruin everything & be a
Dictator
. Others but herself
may submit
to his democratic rule but
not the Queen
.’
¹
On the 7th Disraeli told her that she need not leave Baden for another
week. On the 21st he resigned, having advised her to send for Hartington, which may have been
constitutionally correct, for the latter was still nominally the leader of the
victorious party in the Commons, although it was gratuitous to add the recommendation that he was ‘a Conservative at heart [and] a gentleman’.