Gladstone: A Biography (81 page)

It was Dilke, at least equally well qualified for high office, who made him unwrinkle it. Chamberlain before the election had proposed to Dilke an offensive–defensive alliance by which
they would refuse any office unless they were both in the Cabinet. Dilke thought this was over their market price and moderated the compact to demanding that provided one was in the Cabinet the
other could accept junior office. Chamberlain accepted this reluctantly, no doubt thinking that it was not merely Dilke pouring water into his wine but also preparing for his own entry into the
Cabinet, while leaving Chamberlain to accept lesser office. Exactly the reverse was the outcome. Dilke was sent for first and offered the under-secretaryship at the Foreign Office. He stuck
absolutely to the limited compact and said that if this were the offer to him and Chamberlain was not to be in the Cabinet he would refuse. This produced a considerable reaction, both hostile and
productive. Gladstone was amazed and affronted. The unctuous side of Granville, who was present as Dilke’s putative chief at the Foreign Office, was perfectly
captured by
Dilke when he later wrote: ‘Lord Granville made a disagreeable little speech in his most agreeable way. . . .’
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Gladstone, however, could
not afford to do without both of the Radicals, and he judged that the Queen would probably accept Chamberlain for the Cabinet more easily than Dilke. He conseqently illustrated his remarkable
capacity for cloaking in fluent orotundity his recognition of political reality and wrote to Chamberlain on the next morning in the following terms:

Thus did a combination of Dilke’s loyalty, the Queen’s prejudices and Gladstone’s flexibility under duress make Chamberlain the junior and much the most Radical member of the
largely Whig new Cabinet, and thus too was Gladstone’s second government somewhat laboriously assembled. He never referred to it by any phrase approximating to that which he applied to his
first Cabinet: ‘one of the best instruments for government that ever was constructed’. Nor did it replicate its 1868 predecessor’s attribute of containing no one who pressingly
wanted to be Prime Minister. With varying degrees of urgency, Chamberlain did (although he later became more interested in power than place); Dilke did; Harrington in a rather sleepy way did, and
was understandably mildly resentful about having been passed over; Harcourt was boisterously ambitious; Granville and Spencer, both men who at various times had been or were to be mooted for the
premiership, could not be depended upon to say no; and Rosebery (not in the Cabinet until later in the government but the only one who actually got to 10 Downing Street) was always both ambitious
and discontented. Nor was that government internally cohesive, as events soon began to show. In the 1886 split no less than seven of the original fourteen of 1880 were to desert Gladstone, and
most, but not all, of these defections cast a shadow before them.

The Cabinet of 1880 compared with that of 1868 was therefore a poor vessel for the weathering of storms. The fault for this was almost entirely Gladstone’s own. Admittedly the Queen was
tiresome in her reaction to his suggested appointments. She objected to Selborne as
Lord Chancellor, Childers as Secretary of State for War, Northbrook as First Lord of the
Admiralty (because she would have preferred him in the War Office), and Chamberlain in any senior position. All these objections related to Cabinet appointments. Beyond these she complained about
Ripon being made Viceroy of India, about Lord Fife (who subsequently married the Prince of Wales’s daughter) becoming Lord Chamberlain (too young), about Dilke (too republican) becoming an
under-secretary, about a viscountcy (as opposed to a barony) for Robert Lowe, the excluded former Chancellor, and about Lord Derby (who had deserted Disraeli) being offered a Garter. But these were
time-consuming and temper-trying diversions rather than effective ukases. Of the ten points listed she got her way only on the peripheral ones of Fife and Derby. For the rest Gladstone
prevailed.

He may have designed the Whig bias partly to reassure the Queen. But it also fitted in well enough with Gladstone’s own instincts even if not with his interests. The Queen may as a result
of knowing less about him have helped the promotion of Chamberlain over Dilke, but this did not affect the balance of the Cabinet, and where she expressed an individual judgement, even such a
sensible one as that Gladstone should not burden himself with the Exchequer, it made no difference.

The real distinction between the government of 1868 and that of 1880 went beyond the relative cohesion of the two Cabinets. The 1868 government, because it had a legislative programme relevant
to the dominant issues, was able to make the political weather. The 1880 government not only lacked a structured programme but it also had little idea in advance of the main issues with which it
would have to deal. As a result it was always the creature rather than the creator of the circumstances in which it operated. The Prime Minister who had grandly proclaimed in 1868 that ‘My
mission is to pacify Ireland’ had hardly mentioned that unhappy island during the Midlothian campaigns. Yet Irish issues were still more dominant in the Parliament elected in 1880 than they
had been in that of 1868. The difference was that the first Gladstone government thrust them before Parliament, whereas the second had them thrust down its own throat by deteriorating circumstances
on the ground.

Gladstone’s lack of foresight in this respect stemmed largely from his indifference to economic trends beyond purely fiscal and budgetary matters. Governments should not be expected to do
anything about fluctuations in the state of trade. Gladstone therefore closed his mind to such issues and set up a rigid ‘Chinese wall’ between politics and
economics. In reality the defeat of the Disraeli government owed at least as much to the economic recession which had set in strongly in 1876–7 as to any political issue; but
this could never have been guessed from Gladstone’s orations. Equally the swing to budgetary deficit under the Conservatives was due just as much to the consequences of this recession as to
imperialist extravagance or a weak hand at the Exchequer; but Gladstone preferred a moralist to a materialist analysis.

The industrial downswing was accompanied by the onset of an agricultural depression which lasted much longer and had more profound causes and consequences. The combination of post-Civil War
rebound in America, the completion of the transcontinental railways and the beginning of refrigerated ships gave a great fillip to New World food supplies. In England this produced falling
rent-rolls and the first touches of austerity for those rural magnates who were not able to make up by the importation of rich American wives for the adverse effects of wheat and beef from the same
source. In Ireland, with its much greater agrarian vulnerability, it meant near catastrophe. Particularly in the congested districts of the western provinces of Connaught and Munster, conditions
became worse than at any time since the famine. The majority of Irish landlords made their normal unconstructive contribution, and evictions increased fivefold between 1877 and 1880. In parts of
Ireland the degradation of peasant life became unparalleled in Europe west of the Balkans, and the disintegration of civil society a present danger.

Yet such was Gladstone’s capacity for concentrating on one train of thought at the expense of all others that he did not particularly notice this. The statesman who in 1868 had given
priority to Ireland and who in 1885–94 was to cause the Irish issue to pre-empt his old age, to split the Liberal party and to distort the pattern of British politics for a generation, was in
1879–80 so diverted on to other issues that he even accused Disraeli of raising the side issue of Ireland in order to cloak his iniquities in other parts of the world. Ireland was not the
only issue to catch the second Gladstone government unawares. The affair of the oath or affirmation of Bradlaugh, the militantly atheistic new member for Northampton, drained away much of the
momentum of the first year. This could not however reasonably have been foreseen.

Again in contrast with 1868, this government had no planned legislative programme to put before Parliament, and it was only after four years that its major non-Irish measure of reform, the
extension of household franchise to the counties and hence to the agricultural labourer, got to the statute book. Improvisation was the keynote of
the government’s
performance. Gladstone was fortunately a great improviser as well as a great performer, and many brilliant displays of the qualities which made him both and of his extraordinary parliamentary
patience and stamina were needed to keep the government upright in the House of Commons. All of this, particularly during the first two and a half years, when he ludicrously held the Exchequer as
well, took a heavy toll of his energies. These, as he himself recognized, were showing some signs of flagging. He wrote to Spencer, whom he had recently made Irish Viceroy, in October 1882,
referring to his ‘increase of disinclination to work, and disposition (in homely phrase) to scamp it, which I think and know to be a sign of diminished powers. . . . It would be no good to
anyone’, he continued, ‘that I should remain on the stage like a half-exhausted singer, whose notes are flat and everyone perceives it except himself.’
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He had over eleven years on the stage after that and his notes were rarely flat, except perhaps during the last six months of his fourth premiership. His health was if
anything better in his short third and fourth governments than in this long and testing second one. During this 1880 government it was probably worse than that of any subsequent Prime Minister in
office, except for Campbell-Bannerman and Bonar Law during their relatively rapid declines to death, until Churchill’s second Downing Street spell in 1951–5.

Yet, illness intermissions apart, Gladstone retained his ability to dominate the House of Commons. With Disraeli declining in the House of Lords, Stafford Northcote the Tory leader in the
Commons a sheep in sheep’s clothing, and Salisbury segregated in the Lords and in any event not a thundering orator, although with a caustic tongue, there was no one in Gladstone’s
league. Bright was fading. Chamberlain, whose mixture of courage and rancour was to turn him into a master of the whiplash school of oratory, was still a parliamentary tyro, and at this stage never
appeared in juxtaposition to Gladstone. Randolph Churchill, in this Parliament at the height of his short-lived powers, deliberately set himself up as an irreverent and irritating mocker of
Gladstone. But this role made him more of a mosquito than a fellow eagle able to confront Gladstone beak to beak. Parnell, whose cold, sometimes forceful oratory, with words viscously struggling to
get through, diverted the course of this Parliament even more than did Bradlaugh, but he had too small a following before the trebling of the Irish franchise in 1886 and too narrow a beam to be
comparable with Gladstone on the floor of the House of Commons.

So Gladstone was unique. He could dominate the House of
Commons, not merely on a few setpiece grand occasions, but through night after night of the committee stages of the
Irish Land Bill of 1881, the Coercion and Arrears Bill of 1882 and the Franchise Bill of 1884. He did so with a combination of sweep, patience and attention to detail which it is impossible to
imagine a Prime Minister exercising today. He could also defend the government against the disasters which befell it with almost too great a power and facility.

From one point of view Gladstone was an ailing Prime Minister presiding over a ramshackle government, within which relations between Whigs and Radicals became increasingly hostile, and
staggering reactively from one crisis and one improvisation to another. At the same time he became the only person who could possibly hold the government and the Liberal party together. In the
spring of 1880, within the inner circle, his premiership was regarded as more inevitable than welcome. Hartington, as we have seen, was a little miffed. Granville was more loyal than enthusiastic.
Chamberlain and Dilke thought they might have done better under a Whig Prime Minister who needed to elevate them to compensate for his own right-of-centre position. Harcourt, always willing to
lambast his colleagues in private, would have preferred Hartington, and a lot of the old Whig aristocracy – Bedford and Lansdowne for example – were becoming increasingly unhappy with
the social and economic direction of the Liberal party well before Home Rule seriously reared its head.

Yet, as that unproductive and often scourging Parliament ground on, so the desire for Gladstone’s early retirement paradoxically evaporated. There was still a general expectation that
Hartington would some day come into his political as well as his ducal inheritance, but his own mind was becoming increasingly sceptical about the possibility of his leading a party containing
Dilke and Chamberlain, with whom he disagreed on almost every issue which came before the Cabinet. Equally the two Radicals looked forward to a day when they would not need Gladstone, but they did
not think they were yet strong enough to confront the Whigs without him. For both wings, therefore, in 1880 to 1885, the alternatives appeared to be Gladstone or split. The prospect of a split grew
in the minds of both sides, but the idea that when it came, in 1886, it would be because of rather than in spite of Gladstone, and that it would find Hartington and Chamberlain uniting with each
other against him, would have seemed preposterous at any stage in the life of the 1880 government.

Gladstone’s position was thus doubly paradoxical. He was oratorically
towering in Parliament, yet for a Prime Minister with a majority of a hundred his frequent
weakness in the division lobbies was surprising. His Cabinet was increasingly anxious for his continuance in office, yet unwilling to pay the price of submission to his judgement. Not only on a
host of minor matters but on several crucial issues, on Ireland, on Egypt, he allowed himself to be overruled. The Queen’s picture of him as ‘a Dictator’, whether or not
‘half-mad’, was far wide of the mark, and sadly so, for subsequent developments, particularly in Ireland, suggested that he had wiser judgement than his colleagues. Granville’s
typically jaunty 1886 comment was more to the point. ‘I think you too often counted noses in your last Cabinet,’ he told Gladstone.
¹²
The result was a disappointing government, and one which brought more frustration than satisfaction for its ageing but still often high-spirited Prime Minister.