Gladstone: A Biography (88 page)

All this was well short of Gladstone’s 1897 remark: ‘I cannot tell you how much I think of him, and what an interest I take in everything concerning him. A marvellous man, a terrible
fall.’
⁴
This was of course well after Gladstone in what he saw as the best interests of Home Rule had ensured that the fall was indeed
terrible and had himself suffered heavily from it. Nonetheless it is easier to write with dramatic appreciation of those on whom the gates of history have slammed shut than of those with whom
one has day-to-day dealings. However, Gladstone’s panegyric has to be considered in relation to another statement of his that ‘Parnell was the most remarkable man he had ever
met’;
⁵
to a judgement of the notably cool Asquith that he was ‘one of the three or four men of the nineteenth
century’;
⁶
and to R. B. Haldane’s opinion that he was the strongest man the House of Commons had seen in 150 years.
⁷

What was Parnell’s special quality which evoked such extravagant (although admittedly posthumous) tributes from a variety of discriminating judges? A large part of his power of leadership
stemmed from his disdainful imperiousness. He added a special ingredient of authority to the natural arrogance of the Anglo-Irish landowners. In his youth he had been something of an upper-class
lout, rusticated from Magdalene
College, Cambridge, after a drunken fracas in the Station Road with a manure merchant, and brought to court in his local market town of Rathdrum
after another disturbance in the hotel at Glendalough. At this stage in his life he was equally indifferent to his Co. Wicklow squirearchical responsibilities and to the holiness of the Glendalough
early Christian site.

Later his arrogance took more dignified even if still ungracious forms. In 1883 his financial affairs had become sufficiently embarrassed that the sale of his house and estate at Avondale in Co.
Wicklow seemed the only way out. This was avoided by the raising of a public subscription which by the end of that year had produced £37,000 (not much less than £2 million at
today’s values). At Morrison’s Hotel (a locale which played a chequered part in Parnell’s life) the Lord Mayor of Dublin, in the presence of about twenty Nationalist MPs,
conducted a small ceremony and handed over the cheque. According to most accounts Parnell cut short the Lord Mayor’s encomium, merely asked him whether the cheque was ‘made payable to
order and crossed’, tucked it into his pocket and brought the ceremony to an end. At the banquet that evening Parnell spoke powerfully about the state of Ireland, but confined any reference
to the munificent subvention to two cold sentences.

Another example of Parnell’s capacity for detachment was later provided during sittings of the 1888–9 Special Commission of Enquiry (into Irish agrarian crime and the allegations of
The Times
about his own involvement), the deliberations of which were vital to Parnell’s repute and future. His star counsel, Sir Charles Russell (later Lord Chief Justice), was
irritated by Parnell’s fitful attendance and threatened through Michael Davitt to throw up his brief if Parnell did not attend the next day’s hearing. Parnell dismissed this as a
prima donna’s
tantrum, but did attend at the Law Courts on the following morning. He brought with him a small brown-paper parcel, to the unwrapping of which, before a mystified Davitt,
who was beside him, and an exasperated Russell, he completely devoted himself. It contained a tiny particle of gold, which he had assayed from a lump of stone, sent to him by his agent in Avondale.
‘After fourteen years’ search,’ he triumphantly told Davitt, whom he expected to be as excited as he was himself. The incident illustrated many aspects of Parnell’s unusual
and contradictory character: his interest in rather simple scientific experiments, his proprietorial optimism accompanied by some financial naivety, his self-absorption, and his imperviousness to
the reactions of others.

After the Phoenix Park murders the Parnellites were too thrown back on their heels to muster their previous virulence against coercion, and at the same time any British
optimism about an early solution was stilled. Government and Nationalists went into a relationship of standoff, the old parliamentary bitterness somewhat diminished but with no lively constructive
hopes, which lasted for two to three years. The deadsea fruits of this flaccid period were memorably summed up by Dilke when he stayed in Viceregal Lodge, Dublin, at the very end of the
government’s life:

In a separate letter Dilke added the comment, directed as much against the whole government’s policy as against the Viceroy: ‘What a life is Spencer’s –
cut off from nearly the whole people – good and bad! What sense of duty, what high-mindedness, and what stupidity!’
⁸

Dilke’s devastating description of the position of the British Governor-General in Ireland within a few weeks of the end of five years of Liberal power showed how far that government was
from having settled the problem of Ireland, although on the land issue it had made one important step forward. Ireland was nearer to having settled the fate of the government. Of the ten out of
sixteen Cabinet members who at that disintegrating time had submitted tentative resignations, over half of the threats were on the Irish issue. Any early successor administration, Conservative or
Liberal, looked likely to be dominated by Irish policy. It was also already clear that the issue was a fissiparous one for the
Liberal party, although the lines of potential
division were confused, Chamberlain (and Dilke) then demanding a greater devolution of power than Gladstone, under Whig pressure, was prepared for the moment to push through.

D
URING THE RUN-UP
to the 1883 session when Gladstone was recovering from his insomnia at Cannes, his mind and those of the Radicals were turning towards
franchise reform. It had always been part of his strategy that the extension of household suffrage from the towns to the countryside should be the major task for the government in the second half
of its life. By 1883 his administration was already three years old, and despite the Septennial Act there was no example between 1832 and 1914 of a parliament lasting for more than six years.
However, in Gladstone’s absence, the Cabinet preferred procrastination to the dangers of disruption with the Whigs which this extension of the franchise might involve. The Radicals were
compensated with the inclusion of bills in the Queen’s Speech for the reform both of London government and of local government in England generally. The first foundered on the departmental
intransigence of Harcourt, who half counted as a Radical, and the second got blocked in its wake.

Harcourt, then aged fifty-five, was a brilliant academic lawyer and a fierce parliamentary controversialist whose party loyalties were more fixed than his views. His confidence was that of a
Whig patrician, his style that of a partisan Liberal bruiser and his temper that of a mixture of the irascible, the boorish and the wittily charming. By the end of his life he had earned (among the
Liberal faithful) the sobriquet of ‘the great gladiator’. There were strong elements of Hugh Dalton in him, as well as a touch of Willie Whitelaw’s ability to attract affectionate
mockery. He would have been more disliked by his often injured opponents had he not been a natural figure of fun.

However, in the following year it was his colleagues and not his opponents whom Harcourt succeeded in bruising. The proposed scheme for London local government was not markedly different in its
destination from that which was enacted under Salisbury in 1888. It was to set up a unified (although two-tier) local government for that part of the capital which was already solidly urban, in
other words the four-million core which, with its twenty-eight metropolitan boroughs, became for
three-quarters of a century the area of the London County Council. But the
routes were sharply different. The Liberals proposed to do it by extending (and democratizing) the City of London Corporation. The Conservatives eventually did it by leaving the City as a fine
anomaly set in aspic and providing for the serious although not the ceremonial representation of London over its head and around its narrow boundaries.

The key practical difference related to the control of the police. The City controlled its own force through a municipal committee, like any provincial borough. In the rest of the metropolis the
constabulary, as remains so today, was directly responsible to the Home Secretary and under no local control. The majority of Gladstone’s colleagues, and particularly those who had interest
in or knowledge of local government, regarded it as inconceivable that the contribution of a Liberal government to democracy in London should involve the removal from an expanded City Corporation
of any power over its own police force. Harcourt, on the other hand, obsessed as he was with the Fenian threat and fancying himself as a Fouché, was equally resolute and a good deal more
vehement against any surrender of Home Office prerogatives. Showing an imperfect grasp of the difference between operational and administrative control, he tried to frighten his colleagues with
nightmare scenarios of committees and sub-committees having to be summoned before there could be any response to an explosives threat.

The result was impasse. A strong even if sometimes risible Home Secretary is difficult to shift on his own ground, and the outcome was the foundering for that session and indeed for the lifetime
of the government of the London bill. And the wider local government measure became rather like a train which is blocked, not because of its own failure, but because the one ahead of it on the line
has lost its power. During the early stages of these disputes Gladstone was recovering at Cannes, but failed to resolve them on his return. To a large extent he allowed such issues to pass over his
head. They were not for him the essence of politics. It was nevertheless a failure of generalship and produced the second unnecessarily barren session. Moveover it left the government well into the
fourth year of its life with remarkably little domestic result to show for its efforts.

This was belatedly but substantially corrected in 1884. Gladstone spent the two middle weeks of September 1883 on a northern-waters cruise in another of Donald Currie’s ships, this time
the
Pembroke Castle
. Currie’s invitation had been for a week around the Hebrides. Once
aboard, however, if youth was not exclusively on the prow, pleasure, aided
by almost perfect weather, quickly took over at the helm. The party included Tennyson and Mrs Gladstone as well as the GOM, with a middle-aged leavening of Currie himself, Sir Arthur Gordon, who
had progressed from ADC in the Ionian Isles to Governor of New Zealand, and Sir William Harcourt, who appropriately for the Home Secretary was present in British waters only, as well as a younger
contingent of Mary Gladstone, Hallam Tennyson, Lewis (‘Lulu’) Harcourt and Laura Tennant, Margot Asquith’s short-lived elder sister. Gladstone’s uninhibited ability to enjoy
such a jollification, and to infuse others into his own sense of enjoyment, was one of his striking and attractive qualities. As a result the cruise, with Currie’s happy concurrence, extended
from the Hebrides to Orkney, Oslo (then Christiania) and Copenhagen. In the Danish capital there were great junketings with the Danish, Russian and Greek sovereigns, as well as the Princess of
Wales, who were all assembled there. There was a Danish royal dinner at the palace of Fredensborg and a return luncheon on the ship, after which Tennyson read ‘The Bugle Song’ and
‘The Grandmother’, absent-mindedly beating out his rhythm on the thigh of the Tsarina, whom he mistook (shades of Palmerston?) for a maid of honour.
¹