Gladstone: A Biography (82 page)

The first summer was particularly wearing, and ended with Gladstone more severely ill than at any time since his erysipelas in the north of Scotland twenty-seven years before. Gladstone first
met the new Parliament on 20 May. He noticed ‘a great and fervent crowd in Palace Yard; and much feeling in the House’.
¹³
It was his
last exultant note of the summer. First there was a sense of let-down on the Liberal benches at the news that neither Bartle Frere in South Africa nor Henry Layard in Constantinople, both regarded
as symbols of Disraeli’s imperialism (despite Layard having previously been a Liberal minister), was to be ostentatiously recalled. In fact Layard was quickly sent on a leave from which he
never returned and was replaced by Goschen, while Frere was recalled within a few months. So it was only gesture politics which was lacking. But it was enough to create a bad atmosphere and to pave
the way to a series of government defeats on peripheral issues. In June the House carried by 229 to 203 a motion from Sir Wilfred Lawson, the dedicated temperance reformer, in favour of local
option, against which the Prime Minister had not only voted but had spoken as well. In mid-July there was an even more ignominious rejection of a government-supported proposal to install in
Westminster Abbey a monument to the Prince Imperial, Napoleon III’s heir, who had been killed fighting with British troops in the Zulu War. The Cabinet had acquiesced out of deference to the
Queen, but few of them carried their deference to the extent of attending and voting in the House of Commons. The Prime Minister (and Hartington) voted in a largely Tory lobby with only eight other
Liberals. Gladstone not unnaturally described it as a ‘weary day’, but blithely added: ‘Our defeat however on the Monument was on the
whole a public
good.’
¹⁴
And then at the end of that month there was even trouble on a Hares and Rabbits Bill.

None of these issues was of inherent importance (the local-option motion was an expression of parliamentary opinion not an enactment), but they imprinted the image of a government whose
authority did not match its majority. As tests of Gladstone’s patience, moreover, they did not begin to rival his other two trials of that summer, the Bradlaugh issue and the (Irish)
Compensation for Disturbance Bill. They were interspersed around one highly successful event, which, however, was a further addition to the burdens of those few months. On 10 June Gladstone
introduced what was at once his twelfth budget and also his first for fourteen years. He did it very much like a veteran stylist coming back to give an apparently effortless performance at the
crease or on the tennis court. He did it in two hours, which was a miracle of compression by his standards. It was a largely alcoholic budget. He replaced the malt tax by an agriculturally much
more acceptable beer duty, reduced the excise on table wines, tidied up the duties on alcoholic sales, and balanced off the picture by putting a penny on income tax, a tax towards which Gladstone
was highly flexible, frequently denouncing it but no less frequently raising it when he wanted to combine sound finance with other fiscal remissions.

The easy demise of the malt tax, over which Stafford Northcote had stumbled throughout the whole of the 1874 government, aroused feelings of envy, irritation and admiration in about equal
proportions among Conservatives. Why could Gladstone achieve in two months the great benefit for
their
rural supporters which had eluded Northcote for six years? There could be no question
of their opposing the change, and indeed the whole budget went easily through and considerably raised the spirits of the ministerial party. Nevertheless the plain fact was that Gladstone ought not
to have been performing such a departmental task at all, but ought to have been concentrating on the overall direction of the government and endeavouring to anticipate events, particularly in
Ireland, rather than merely reacting to them.

The discreditable Bradlaugh saga blew up even before the beginning of the session. Bradlaugh had written to the Speaker in advance of the meeting of Parliament, claiming the right to affirm
rather than take the oath of allegiance on the ground that the latter would have no meaning for him. Speaker Brand’s legal advisers were against allowing such a claim, and he accepted their
view, suggesting to Gladstone (and to Northcote) that a select committee should be appointed to deliberate
quickly upon the matter. A strong committee resulted. From the
government side there were Henry James and Farrer Herschell, the former a most urbane politician, the latter to be twice Lord Chancellor, as well as John Bright. They all supported
Bradlaugh’s claim to affirm, as from outside the Committee did Selborne, the current Lord Chancellor and a churchman who was as devout as Gladstone himself, although a good deal more
conservative. The forces of intolerance on the Committee had a most formidable champion in Hardinge Giffard, Disraeli’s Solicitor-General, who went on to become the first Earl of Halsbury, to
be Salisbury’s (and Balfour’s) Lord Chancellor for fourteen years, to lead the ‘diehards’ against the 1911 Parliament Bill at the age of eighty-eight, and to survive for
another ten years after that. The chairman was Spencer Walpole, the lachrymose Home Secretary of the 1866 Hyde Park riot, and Giffard, aided by one or two Liberal defections, gave him both the
opportunity and the nerve to exercise his casting vote against Bradlaugh.

This was the situation which confronted Gladstone when the new Parliament met. On 19 May he attended a conclave in the Speaker’s library, with a panoply of advisers on both sides. By this
time Bradlaugh had announced that if he could not affirm he was prepared to swear. The Speaker claimed that if Bradlaugh had said this in the first instance he would have allowed no interference.
But Bradlaugh’s public declaration that the oath could mean nothing to him made the matter more difficult. The Speaker then urged that, when an attempt was made to prevent Bradlaugh swearing,
Gladstone should move the previous question. The Liberal Whip then said there was no chance of this being carried. It was therefore decided that the least bad course was to go for another select
committee, this time to consider not whether Bradlaugh was entitled to affirm, but whether he was entitled to swear. That was accepted by the House without hazard although not without a bitter
debate.

That second Select Committee advanced matters little. When the issue came back before the House at midsummer all the old battle lines were reoccupied. Henry Labouchère, Bradlaugh’s
colleague in the representation of Northampton (or at least in their intention to be so represented) moved that he be allowed to affirm. Giffard, never one to hedge his intransigence, moved a
counter-motion that he be permitted neither to affirm nor to swear. This raised in most brutal form the direct issue of whether the acceptability of a member lay with his constituents or with the
House of Commons.

Gladstone saw clearly that this was dangerous ground, and said so forthrightly in an hour’s speech on the second night. He was also beginning, typically, to develop a
more theological, idiosyncratic and probably less persuasive line of argument which, in the various debates on the issue, he came with increasing passion to deploy. This was the rejection of the
view that an indiscriminate theism rendered a man acceptable, while its absence put him outside the pale. This crudity he regarded as a negation of nearly 1900 years of Christian thought and
doctrine. ‘You know, Mr Speaker,’ Charles Newdegate MP called out with what might now be regarded as a jaunty saloon-bar camaraderie, ‘we all of us believe in a God of some sort
or another.’ This to Gladstone was the worst sort of apostasy. Better an honest if benighted atheist than a man who believed that he had answered the spiritual needs of mankind by such a
threadbare doctrine.

Gladstone’s speech was not persuasive. A House with a nominal Liberal majority of over a hundred voted by 275 to 230 against allowing Bradlaugh either to affirm or to attest, and thus
forbade him to represent his constituents. Worse still, as Gladstone wrote to the Queen, who was a doubtfully sympathetic audience in view of Bradlaugh’s republicanism and advocacy of birth
control, both of which she minded more than his atheism, that the House received the result in ‘an ecstatic transport, [which] exceeded anything which Mr Gladstone remembers to have
witnessed’.
¹⁵

On the next day Bradlaugh presented himself at the bar of the House and claimed to take the oath. The Speaker read to him the resolution of the House which forbade this. Thereupon he asked to be
heard and this was allowed. Gladstone described his performance from the bar – a nightmare position from which to address the House – as ‘that of a consummate speaker’.
Bradlaugh was then requested to withdraw, and putting up some resistance to this got involved in a semi-scuffle with the deputy serjeant-at-arms. This was Gladstone’s moment of weakness. As
leader of the House he failed to lead, one way or the other, and, sympathizing with Bradlaugh, left it to Northcote to move the two disciplinary motions, the second, after the scuffle, committing
Bradlaugh to custody. But, believing also in upholding the collective authority of the House, Gladstone somewhat sheepishly voted for both the motions.

However, Gladstone soon rallied and on 1 July proposed and carried (by 303 votes to 249) a resolution permitting Bradlaugh to affirm. But there was a catch in the tail. He was permitted to do so
only on his own responsibility and ‘subject to any liability by statute’, which meant that
he was at risk in the courts. The next day he affirmed, took his place on
the Liberal benches and voted in a division. The legality of his action was immediately contested at law, with Hardinge Giffard purporting to represent the outraged conscience of England. Bradlaugh
lost and was unseated. He was re-elected in April 1881, but was persuaded to stay away while the government tried to get an Affirmation Bill on the statute book. The session came to an end before
they had succeeded. When the next session opened in February 1882, Bradlaugh decided that he had exercised enough patience. He reappeared, advanced up the floor to the table, pulling a piece of
paper out of his pocket, and proceeded to administer the oath himself. The next day he was expelled. Ten days after that he was elected for the second time at Northampton.

The unsavoury farce then moved for a year from the Commons to the law courts. At one stage there were four legal actions pending. Bradlaugh’s opponents were endeavouring to impose
bankrupting penalties upon him for his allegedly illegal vote; he was suing the deputy serjeant-at-arms for assault; his supporters were challenging (at law) the right of the House to exclude him;
and he was being prosecuted for blasphemy. In April 1883 the government made a second and more determined attempt to carry an Affirmation Bill and cut through this legal jungle.

This produced another memorable Gladstone speech in which he developed his subtle 1880 thought that there were worse things than atheism into an argument at once sublime and remote. The House,
he said with more hope than truth, would be familiar with ‘the majestic and noble lines of Lucretius’. There then followed a six-line quotation (in Latin of course) in which pagan gods
were described as ‘far withdrawn from all concerns of ours: free from our pains, free from our perils, strong in resources of their own, needing nought from us, no favour wins them, no anger
moves them’. This, he said, was the real evil of the age, far worse than blank atheism, the proclamation of the total detachment of man from God, of God from man.

Morley, then in his very first days as an MP and sharing Gladstone’s classicism although not his faith, was twenty years later to write of the House sitting:

In other words, Gladstone lost his bill, although by a majority of only three.

Yet again Bradlaugh presented himself at the bar and yet again he was excluded, although apparently without on this occasion the seat being declared vacant. That, however, occurred once more in
the following February (1884), and in what had become an equally routine way he was once more returned for Northampton. Perhaps out of boredom, he did not again trouble the House until July 1885,
when in the dying days of that Parliament and with a new Conservative government on the Treasury bench he put the matter to a somewhat
pro forma
further test and was again excluded.

At the general election of November 1885 he was re-elected for the fourth time and at the meeting of the new Parliament in January 1886, the whole charade of the previous Parliament was simply
cut into shreds by the firmness of the new (1884) Speaker, Arthur Wellesley Peel, the youngest son of Gladstone’s old mentor, who in spite of his names was a Liberal MP. Peel absolutely
refused to hear any objections to the taking of the oath by Bradlaugh (who wisely avoided any affirmation complications at that stage). Without debate he was swept in with the others.

The House of Commons then proceeded to coat its previous prejudice and hysteria with a sentimental surface which made its overall performance no more attractive. Bradlaugh became, in the words
of his
Dictionary of National Biography
chronicler (who, intriguingly, was Ramsay MacDonald), ‘very popular with the House of Commons’. He got a Tory Parliament to pass an
Affirmation Bill in 1888, and in 1891, when he lay dying, it unanimously expunged from its records the motion of 22 June 1880, which had been carried in an ‘ecstatic transport’.

Whether or not this consoled Bradlaugh, it could not possibly undo the damage which the twists and turns of the affair inflicted upon the authority and momentum of Gladstone in his second
government. The Prime Minister could not command the House of Commons on the issue, and his embarrassments were brilliantly and shamelessly exploited by Lord Randolph Churchill with his little
group of
francs-tireurs
, commonly called the Fourth Party, who sat below the gangway on the opposition side. Churchill behaved as though Gladstone’s support for Bradlaugh’s
rights meant that he had suddenly become converted to atheism, republicanism and contraception, but did so with such wit and impudence that this preposterous claim both amused and inflicted damage.
Churchill’s object was to humiliate Northcote, the leader of his
own party, as well as to bait Gladstone, and it was an important factor in the equation that Northcote
never had the authority to stand up to his own party and lance the Bradlaugh boil, which he would probably have liked to do. Apart from its weakening of the Prime Minister’s prestige, the
Bradlaugh issue, particularly in the summer of 1880, was a heavy drain on Gladstone’s energy and patience, and a contributory factor to his severe pneumonia (as it turned out to be) at the
end of July.