Gladstone: A Biography (86 page)

The reverence which Gladstone excited was real and widespread, but it was far from being universal. The exceptions were particularly and obviously to be found among the Tory political classes.
The wildest rumours about him were there likely to spread fast. When his insomnia drove him to the South of France it was widely believed that he had gone mad and was being kept away to conceal
this embarrassing fact. While such fantasies were no doubt rejected by those of cooler temperament and more sophisticated information, there was plenty of venom forthcoming from such sources, even
when they had in the not too distant past been in close and friendly relationship with Gladstone. Salisbury in 1882 attributed every step in his opponent’s Irish policy since 1869 to a greed
for votes and office, which as a personal and not merely a political attack was much resented by Gladstone who had several times been Salisbury’s house guest and on whose kindness as a host
he had commented extravagantly. What he found still more wounding, however, was the virulence of Salisbury’s nephew, Arthur Balfour, in whom he had so ‘delighted’ and with whom he
had enjoyed the closest relations barely half a decade earlier.

On 16 May of that same year, only ten days after Gladstone had received the crushing blow of Cavendish’s death, Balfour denounced the so-called ‘Kilmainham
Treaty’ for the release of Parnell from gaol and Gladstone’s part in it in terms which were in both intent and effect as offensive as it is possible to imagine. ‘I do not
think’, Balfour said, ‘any such transaction can be quoted from the annals of our political history. It stands alone in its infamy. . . . They have negotiated in secret with treason. . .
.’
²⁰
Balfour never apologized, although he said privately that he regretted that in the heat of the moment he had used such an emotive word
as ‘infamy’, which although objectively justified was better avoided in debate. In fact it was less a matter of heat than an early example of the ‘cool ruthlessness’, as
Churchill described it in
Great Contemporaries
, which enabled Balfour to cross a muddy street ‘like a powerful graceful cat walking delicately and unsoiled’.

The depth of Gladstone’s feeling was expressed in a letter which he wrote to his daughter Helen in Cambridge: ‘I cannot refrain from writing to tell you how vexed, I might also say
cut to the heart, I am about Mr Balfour’s exhibition yesterday. . . .’ There was then a routine and unconvincing denial that he was ‘personally wounded’ or ‘sorry for
the Government’.

It was not perhaps a wise or wholly dignified letter for Gladstone to write, but it gave startling evidence that the wound was at least as deep as that in his head fifteen months before and also
of his epistolatory energy. Many might have half composed such a letter in their heads during a night when grievance predominated over sleep, but few, even if they were not carrying a Prime
Minister’s burdens, would have put it on paper the next morning. Sloth can have its advantages.

Those hostile to Gladstone were not confined to his professional parliamentary opponents. Hamilton recorded an experience two months later, on 20 July:

The Queen’s antipathy no doubt somewhat encouraged this hostility in the fashionable world, but it could not be regarded as a decisive cause of it. In the first place the Queen was not
fashionable, and her pattern of life remained sufficiently withdrawn, even if not quite so obsessively so as in the 1860s and early 1870s, that few except for former Conservative ministers, whom
she entertained with unusual frequency, were in contact with her views. And both her private secretary, Ponsonby, and her heir (who
was
a leader of fashion) maintained a much more friendly
attitude towards Gladstone, the secretary because of a general Liberal disposition and because he knew better than anyone else with how much Gladstone had to put up, and the future King Edward VII
because of an inherent tendency on the part of crown princes to provide a counterbalance to their parents and sovereigns, tinged in his case with a certain natural benevolence provided there was no
conflict with his own pleasures and indulgences.

Nor were Gladstone’s critics to be found only among Conservatives. In October 1884 Chamberlain, rebuked by the Prime Minister at the instigation of the Queen for using provocative language
about Lord Salisbury, responded by bursting out (about Gladstone) to Dilke: ‘I
don’t
like him, really. I hate him.’
^23
108
Dilke could also make more detached
but fairly sceptical comments about Gladstone. After Granville in 1882 had urged him and
Chamberlain to remember who the GOM was and not to push him too hard in discussion, he commented: ‘In other words told [us] to remember [we] were dealing with a magnificent
lunatic.’
²⁴
Harcourt could also mingle his occasional acts of tribute, such as attending at Charing Cross station, with highly acerbic
comments when he disagreed with Gladstone, as over the control of the Metropolitan police. Yet, whatever their occasional exasperations, all his colleagues, including Hartington, the displaced
person of 1880, agreed by this middle phase of the government that Gladstone’s continuation in office was essential. There was no impatience during his 1883 six weeks in Cannes. They would
much rather he had stayed away for another month over Easter than that he resigned and left them to schism. A cynical explanation could be that they needed him as a figurehead, but quite enjoyed
his being an absent one. His being away did not however promote the orderly conduct of business, as was the case when Attlee presided over the 1940–5 War Cabinet in the absence of Churchill.
Few effective decisions about the government’s programme for the 1883 session (which opened on 15 February) had been taken by the time that Gladstone returned in early March. He was then by
no means successful in lancing all the festering boils, but at least the Cabinet and the country felt that the most famous statesman in the world – Bismarck was the only possible rival
– was back in charge.

It was largely due to his fame and popular authority that this government, divided and luckless although it mostly was, maintained at least until the beginning of 1885 a fair degree of public
support. London drawing rooms might be hostile, but Gladstone’s public appearances rarely failed to attract enthusiastic crowds, and the Liberal record in bye-elections (of which there were
then about twenty-five a year), while patchy, was far from one of uniform retreat. There were even occasional gains above the 1880 tide-mark. Particularly if the proposed measure for the extension
of the county franchise were carried, the Liberals looked set to be the natural majority party. It was only the danger of a post-Gladstone split which threatened this prospect. The idea that
Gladstone’s leadership could itself provoke a twenty-year Tory hegemony was remote from the conventional wisdom of 1883.

A
LTHOUGH
G
LADSTONE
came into office in 1880 with his mind much further away from Ireland than in 1868 it was quickly wrenched in
that direction by the scale of the agrarian distress and the threat to civil order which went with it. The number of evictions for non-payment of agricultural rent had risen from 483 in 1877 to
1238 in 1879, with the rate doubling again in the first six months of 1880. In most cases nonpayment followed inexorably from the collapse of his income leaving the rural tenant without any
available resources. The Land League had been set up by Parnell and Michael Davitt in October 1877, and its doctrine of the ‘boycott’ (although the name did not come into use until a
little later when Captain Boycott, Lord Erne’s agent, became an early target), by which anyone concerned with taking the land of an evicted tenant should be treated like a leper, was
proclaimed by John Dillon and Thomas Brennan. Although these leaders were against violence there was also a mounting wave of agrarian crime (or ‘outrages’ as they were normally then
called), particularly in Connaught.

Within eight weeks of taking office the Cabinet reluctantly decided to introduce a Compensation for Disturbance Bill, which not very strong measure of protection for tenants was nonetheless
strong enough to frighten three peers – Lansdowne, Listowel and Zetland – into resignation from junior posts, and nearly to drive Argyll out of the Cabinet. Only determined cosseting
from Gladstone kept the Duke. All four of them need not have worried unduly for the bill lost its momentum through a considerable Liberal revolt. In the Commons it secured a second reading by a
majority of seventy-eight, but this was essentially a majority provided by the Irish (which English arrogance always regarded as making it slightly spurious, particularly on an Irish issue), for
twenty Liberals went into the Conservative lobby and another fifty abstained. This left the bill a sitting target for the Lords, who proceeded to throw it out almost contemptuously by a vote of 281
to 51. This outcome could not even be presented as an exercise in Tory obscurantism, for if the whole of the opposition had abstained the
defection of Liberal peers would in
itself have been sufficient to defeat the government.

This was a severe setback both for Gladstone and for his Irish Secretary, W. E. Forster. Forster was a much more formidable figure than Chichester Fortescue, who had occupied this office in the
1868 government. And the effect on this stubborn man of losing his ameliorative bill was the somewhat paradoxical one of making him see coercion as the only alternative way of governing
Ireland. From the autumn of 1880 Forster became a hardline man on Ireland. He settled into an intransigent groove which led to his resignation eighteen months later. In the interval, however, he
got a lot of Cabinet support, which made matters awkward for Gladstone, whose instincts were all against Crime Bills and special powers. Morley (not then even an MP, let alone a minister, but
already a favoured Gladstone familiar) captured the anguish which Forster’s views and the strength of his support imposed on Gladstone by writing to Chamberlain in Birmingham an account of a
New Year’s Eve (1880–1) dinner in Downing Street at which Granville and Frederick Cavendish were also present: