Gladstone: A Biography (80 page)

Hartington’s gentlemanliness (for which he may not have felt the need for Disraeli’s imprimatur) is widely thought to have embraced an indifference to being Prime Minister. That is
modified by a letter which he wrote to his father on 13 April. In this, after saying that he thought Gladstone would need to be pressed to be Prime Minister and that he did not think such pressure
likely, he added that in consequence ‘it does look a very hopeful prospect for me’.
²
This was already quite unrealistic. Wolverton, after
his two-day visit to Hawarden, had reported the central truth to both Hartington and Granville on the 12th: Gladstone was available to be Prime Minister, but would not contemplate serving in any
subordinate capacity. Once that was starkly clear neither the Queen’s semi-hysterical repugnance nor Hartington’s mild ambitions had more hope of survival than small sailing boats in
the path of a hurricane.

More so than in 1868, the 1880 Liberal majority appeared to the nation and the world as being a Gladstone-created one. He was summoned, as Morley put it, ‘by more direct and personal
acclaim’ than any predecessor. The Queen had no choice. And by fulminating she struck a blow, not at Gladstone’s premiership, but at the Sovereign’s role in the choice of chief
minister, at least in post-election circumstances. Disraeli, had he been a wiser and less sycophantic friend, would have seen this and advised her accordingly during the several days after his
resignation when he remained her crucial confidant.

Instead there occurred the following sequence of events. Hartington was summoned to Windsor on 22 April and asked to form a government. He said that a government could not be formed without
Gladstone and that he understood that Gladstone would not take a subordinate position. The Queen, according to her own account, said that ‘there was one great difficulty, which was that I
could not give Mr Gladstone my confidence’.
³
She then adduced some reasons for this sweeping statement, against which Hartington attempted a
qualified defence of Gladstone. The upshot was that he was charged to convey the Queen’s views to Gladstone, and to ascertain whether he was adamant that he would not serve under Hartington.
Hartington saw Gladstone four hours later in Wolverton’s house. Wisely, having consulted Granville, Hartington ignored his instructions and did not repeat the Queen’s expression of her
inability to give Gladstone her confidence. But he did pose the
direct question whether Gladstone would serve under him or anyone else. ‘This’, he said, according
to Gladstone’s account, ‘is a question which I should not have put to you, except when desired by the Queen.’ Gladstone’s reply sounds fairly chilling. He affected to
approve of the Queen, and therefore of Hartington as for the moment her agent, requiring ‘positive information’, he noted that he was not asked to give reasons but only to say yes or
no, and accordingly reiterated his negative: ‘I have only to say I adhere to my reply as you have already conveyed it to the Queen.’

He then added one of the most conditional offers of support ever made. And to add insult to injury he prefaced it by saying that he could not understand why it was to Hartington rather than to
Granville that the Queen had applied, since it was to Granville that he had ‘resigned his trust’ in 1875. Nevertheless, if a government were formed by either, his duty would be to give
them all the support in his power. But, alas: ‘Promises of this kind . . . stood on slippery ground, and must always be understood with the limits which might be prescribed by
conviction.’
⁴
If Hartington needed any further convincing that Gladstone was inevitable, that sentence alone must have been sufficient to do it.
At the end of the following morning he again went to Windsor, this time accompanied by Granville, who, as the Queen herself rather oddly put it, ‘came down on the chance of seeing the
Queen’. The chance worked, but she saw them separately, and reluctantly accepted from Hartington his refusal of the commission. He admitted that he had not been generously used, but loyally
stressed Gladstone’s ‘great amount of popularity at the present moment amongst the people’ (the Queen’s words) and also urged her strongly not to begin by saying she had no
confidence in him.

She next saw Granville, by whom she was clearly unimpressed on this as on some other occasions. He ‘seemed very nervous’ and ‘much distressed at the painful position I was
in’. He ‘kissed my hand twice and said he feared he had lost some of my confidence, but hoped to be able to regain it’. The Queen in response was about as unaccommodating as
Gladstone had been when he told Hartington that if any other Prime Minister was to be tried it ought to have been Granville and not him. The Queen replied to Granville that ‘he certainly had
done so [probably by opposing the bill creating her Empress of India], but that I should be very glad if he could regain it’.
⁵
The gruffness was
not wise on her part (no more had it been on Gladstone’s) for she was soon endeavouring to deal with the new government as much as possible through Granville
because
Gladstone was ‘not a man of the world’, an unattractive catchphrase which she had picked up from Disraeli. Hartington and Granville both endeavoured to console the Queen (and perhaps
themselves) with the thought that at his age Gladstone was unlikely to stay long in office. (This was Gladstone’s own view at the time; he saw himself as giving the country a quick purge of
the evils of ‘Beaconsfieldism’ and retiring by the end of 1881.) All four – the Queen, Gladstone himself, Hartington and Granville would, in varying degrees and for various
reasons, have been horrified to know that there were another fourteen years to go.

Hartington and Granville then returned to London, went immediately to call on Gladstone in Harley Street, and gave him the message that he was summoned to Windsor for 6.30. (There was a lot of
shuttling up and down the Great Western line, for it does not seem to have occurred to the Queen that she might save the time of others by going to Buckingham Palace; no doubt they were lucky that
she was not at Osborne, or even Balmoral.) Gladstone first sought the assurance of Hartington and Granville that they had unitedly advised the Sovereign that he should be sent for and, having
received that assurance, made a half-apology for putting them to the inconvenience of first withdrawing in 1875 and then re-emerging. He had genuinely but mistakenly believed that ‘quiet
times’ lay ahead. He then asked them whether they would both serve under him, and, when they assented, settled immediately that Granville (‘but modestly and not as of right’)
would take the Foreign Office. For Hartington he suggested the India Office, which he claimed, without much convincing reason, was likely to be at that stage the next most important department in
the government. Hartington asked for time to consider.

That evening at Windsor Gladstone recorded the Queen as receiving him ‘with [the] perfect courtesy from which she never deviates’.
⁶
That was a familiar Gladstone euphemism, trying to intermingle his strong loyalty to the monarchy with some respect for the truth, for saying that she was fairly chilly. An alternative phrase of
his to convey the same meaning was to pay tribute to her ‘great frankness’. On this occasion this latter quality showed itself in her desire to know whether he could
undertake
to
form a government or merely
endeavour
to form one. She presumably and justifiably thought that the interregnum had gone on long enough, although she put the question in the odd form of
saying that she wished to know in order to inform Lord Beaconsfield. Could she still have been playing with the idea of keeping Beaconsfield as
Prime Minister if the Liberals
became locked in a Hartington–Gladstone impasse?

Gladstone swept aside any such uncertainty. He
would
form a government. He already had Granville and Hartington on board (the latter was reflecting only on his office, not on his
participation), and he told her of some other projected Cabinet dispositions before disclosing that he intended to be his own Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Queen, who informed Disraeli that
evening that Gladstone had looked ‘very ill and haggard, and his voice feeble’, sensibly said that she was amazed by this decision to combine the premiership with the heaviest
departmental office. She did not however attempt to resist him. Monarchs have never been much interested in the Treasury. She was much more concerned with who was to be Secretary of State for War,
wanting Hartington, but having to be fobbed off with Childers.

She then further illustrated her gift for frankness by telling him that she did not like many of the things he had said during his campaigns. It was the sort of issue with which
Gladstone’s sophistical convolution made him good at dealing. He said that he had ‘used a mode of speech and language different in some degree from what I should have employed had I
been the leader of a party or a candidate for office’.
⁷
She also recorded him as saying that ‘he considered all violence and bitterness to
belong to the
past
’.
⁸
What is remarkable is the coincidence of their two accounts, both sharing the advantage of having been written
within hours of the interchange, Gladstone’s on Windsor paper, implying that it was done either while waiting in the castle for the train or with prudently collected supplies during the
journey. This Windsor audience might have been a propitious start in the adverse circumstances had not Disraeli been so immanently there, resigned but always available to poison the mind of
‘Madam and Most Beloved Sovereign’, as he was writing to her that summer.

That day was a Friday, and between then and the following Wednesday, although not without difficulty, Gladstone assembled a complete Cabinet list. The result struck the Queen as being
‘very radical’. It struck almost everybody else as being very Whig. Gladstone took the view that, having got him as Prime Minister, the Radicals ought to be more than satisfied, and be
quite happy to see the top half of the Cabinet filled up with the old Whig cousinage. Quite why he expected to be accepted as a paid-up member of the Radical faction is not clear. He was never a
Whig, and he had long ceased to be a Conservative, at any rate
in the party-label sense of the word. But he was at least equally far from being a Radical in the collectivist,
semi-socialist sense which Chamberlain and Dilke had given to the word in the 1870s.

In a Cabinet of only fourteen, Gladstone had six peers plus Hartington, whose membership of the House of Commons until his father died in 1891 hardly made him a commoner rather than a nobleman.
Together with Granville and with Kimberley,
¹⁰²
who took the Colonial Office after refusing the Indian viceroyalty, Hartington as Secretary of State for
India ensured that the three external departments were in the hands of two earls and a marquess. Selborne, soon to be an earl, was Lord Chancellor, Earl Spencer was Lord President, the Duke of
Argyll was Lord Privy Seal; and yet another earl, Northbrook, was First Lord of the Admiralty. Of the commoners, Harcourt had Radical friends as well as high Whig connections, but, although a
partisan parliamentary bruiser, he was more irascible than ideologically predictable as a Home Secretary. Childers, Secretary of State for War, had spent ten years as a young man in the
untraditional atmosphere of Melbourne, Australia, but was said to have grown less radical since his second marriage to the daughter of the Bishop of Chichester. Dodson, of Gladstone’s own
Eton and Christ Church provenance, was a not very exciting President of the Local Government Board who became a Liberal Unionist in 1886.

John Bright was regarded by Gladstone as a great man as well as a great orator, and exactly what a Radical ought to be, cloudy and moralizing rather than demanding and practical. But precisely
for these reasons he had by then come to be seen as a great windbag by his fellow member for Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain, and by those who thought like Chamberlain. As Chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster Bright was not however required to deal in actions as opposed to words. W. E. Forster, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, found himself, almost by accident, in charge for the two years
before his resignation of the most exposed sector of the government’s responsibilities. Forster did not shrink from these for he was a man of force and stubbornness. He was of Radical rather
than Whig origins. He was brought up as a Quaker, he had married a sister of Matthew Arnold, and sat for Bradford, which
was a town of advanced politics. But both his habits
and his views had moved to the right. His favourite pastime had become card-playing and his favourite companion in this pursuit the Duchess of Manchester, later (1892) Duchess of Devonshire. And
his conduct of the Education Bill during the previous Gladstone government had brought him into sharp conflict (leaving continuing animosity) with Chamberlain.

Chamberlain was the fourteenth member of the Cabinet and the only representative there of the new-wave Radicalism which had contributed almost as much to the Liberal victory as had
Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign. Although, ironically, he himself had been elected for Birmingham only in the number-three place, after Bright and Muntz (which should have won him
Gladstone’s sympathy after his own Lancashire and Greenwich experiences), it was nonetheless the case that the Chamberlain-created National Liberal Federation had been successful in sixty of
the sixty-seven seats in which it had engaged. Chamberlain was described by
The Times
as ‘the Carnot of the moment’, the organizer of victory. Carnot or not, Gladstone thought an
under-secretaryship was good enough for him. He attempted to fall back upon what he called ‘Peel’s rule’ of allowing no one into the Cabinet who had not previously served in
subordinate office, although it was a rule which was breached by Peel himself in the case of Buccleuch and by Gladstone in his first government in that of Bright. The truth was that Gladstone, in
spite of that 1877 night under his Birmingham roof, always wrinkled up his nose at the thought of Chamberlain.