Gladstone: A Biography (91 page)

Gladstone on the other hand was delighted by the outcome, which
made up for some of the vicissitudes, deserved and undeserved, which constantly beset that government. Mary
Gladstone recorded that after the final meeting of the quintet on 27 November he was ‘splitting and chuckling’. His pleasure was at the early and suddenly secure prospect of getting the
franchise bill on to the statute book. He never took particular pride in the seats bill, regarding it as little more than a key to unlock the door to franchise enlargement. It was nonetheless
itself a major measure and as near to a final settlement as is ever possible amid the impermanence of politics. It decisively redrew the electoral map of Britain. There was no further
redistribution (or pressure for it) until 1918, and even with the changes of that year and the subsequent and more frequent ones which started in 1950, today’s constituency pattern is
recognizably based on that of 1884–5, and on no earlier arrangement. The modern single-member county constituency and the modern divided borough are both creations of Dilke under
Gladstone.

The autumn session was wound up on 6 December, with the franchise bill on the statute book, although not to come into operation until redistribution was through, and the seats bill past its
House of Commons second reading. ‘Mr G. went off to Hawarden with Herbert [Gladstone],’ Hamilton wrote. ‘He never quitted London in greater personal triumph. No one could have
achieved what he has done, and at the same time kept his party completely in hand.’
¹³

T
HE IMPERIAL AND FOREIGN
policy of the government of 1880, the latter being in those days almost a subsidiary of the former, never achieved any moment
of substantial triumph remotely comparable with the home policy success described at the end of the last chapter. In a sense this was in accordance with deserts for that government never achieved
an external policy based on any firm ground which brought together principle and practice. Gladstone had both the unconventional vision to see that the British Empire was already over-extended in
relation to the metropolitan country’s economic strength and the fastidiousness to dislike the tinsel of jingoistic adventures. But he also had a sense of British dignity, perhaps even a
subconscious one of the superiority of white Anglo-Saxon men, although his vast writings and innumerable speeches are, for the period, remarkably free of any racist expressions. More oppressively
he had the Queen, who believed that she had a special position in matters touching her generals and her proconsuls, as well as half of his own Cabinet and party, and the whole of the opposition in
favour of a forward expansionist policy. The almost inevitable result was a mishmash of an imperial policy, withdrawing from the Transvaal, bombarding Alexandria, taking over Egypt, sending out
Gordon, taking terrible flak for his insubordinate death and for the wise refusal to avenge it, getting very near to war over the Pendjeh affair in 1885, when the Russians defeated an Afghan force
and appeared to threaten the North-west Frontier of India.

Sometimes Gladstone would bring off a minor coup, as when in the first autumn of the government he got the Turks to cede without hostilities the barren little port of Dulcigno to the
Montenegrins – always one of his favourite peoples. (Granville announced the news by dancing with joy around Gladstone’s room; the Prime Minister received it at once more portentously
and more prosaically. ‘God Almighty be praised,’ he said. ‘I shall go to Hawarden by the 2.45 train.’
¹
) Equally, at the very
end of the government, the conclusion without war of the Pendjeh incident had the spin-off effect of diverting attention and troops
from Egypt to Afghanistan and thus turned
even the mind of the Queen away from a punitive expedition – in theory limited to avenging Gordon but in practice only too likely to end up with the annexation of the whole of Sudan.

More frequently, however, Gladstone was ducking and weaving to try to preserve the standards of mid-Victorian restraint in the much more imperialist climate of the 1880s. No one became more
extreme a jingo than the Queen herself, so that the Prime Minister’s view of April 1885 that her judgement had become ‘quite worthless’ would not have been seriously dissented
from by her Foreign Secretary Granville, or her Colonial Secretary Derby (who admittedly was a pretty useless minister himself), or her War Secretary Hartington, or even her own private secretary
Ponsonby. Nevertheless Gladstone was constantly compromising between imperialist pressures and his own instincts, which were a mixture of Little Englander caution and Concert of Europe
idealism. Neither pointed to the expansion of territory or colonial wars, which were nonetheless a frequent feature of the life of that government. They were mostly backed into without enthusiasm.
This reluctance was a good recipe for getting the worst of both worlds, and by no stretch of the imagination could foreign and colonial policy in 1880–5 be called a resounding success. It
consumed a lot of the Prime Minister’s time, but the highest claim that could be made for it was that, in a somewhat hand-to-mouth way, worse excesses were avoided.

From the beginning a government elected on a largely anti-imperialist platform found itself uncomfortably squelching in too many imperial quagmires. Within the first two years British forces
were engaged in battle at either end of Africa and in central Asia. In 1880 there was renewed Afghan trouble, with the defeat of General Burrows at Maiwand followed by the victory of General
Roberts after a brilliant 300-mile march to Kandahar. In 1881, General Colley was defeated and killed by the Boers at Majuba Hill. Neither of these campaigns struck at the heart of British power.
But they were equally far from being recreational shooting parties. Burrows, for instance, lost nearly a thousand men killed at Maiwand, a casualty rate which, a century later, would have been
regarded as unacceptable in either the Falklands or the Gulf wars. And the proportion of defeats made it more difficult to disengage without humiliation, although this was eventually achieved in
the Transvaal (for a decade) and Afghanistan.

In 1882 there was the more serious affair of the bombardment of Alexandria, followed by the victory of Wolseley at Tel-el-Kebir and the
occupation of Egypt. This embroilment
led on through a chapter of mistakes and accidents to the despatch and death in Khartoum of General Gordon, which
dégringolade
overshadowed the last year of the government and gravely
weakened Gladstone. Egypt at the beginning of the 1880s was still nominally a Turkish province of which the strategic importance had been much increased by the completion of the French-inspired and
French-financed Suez Canal in 1869. This enterprise, on top of the role which France had played through the early campaigns of Napoleon and the cryptology of Champollion in opening Egypt to the
modern world, made French influence powerful in Cairo. Their predominance was somewhat redressed by Disraeli’s 1875 raid on the shares of the Suez Canal Company. This coup had, however, been
strongly opposed by Gladstone, who regarded it as a showy and dangerous example of forward diplomacy, carrying in its train over-extended future entanglement. Such fears proved abundantly true,
with the main burden of the over-extension falling upon Gladstone himself, who accepted it with a curious mixture of reluctance and bravado.

Egypt’s impact on Europe stemmed not only from its permanent position as the hinge of Africa and Asia fortified by its new function as the conduit to India and beyond. Nor even was the
drawing power of an ancient civilization with unique surviving artefacts under a benign winter climate the only or even the main supporting factor. There was a more material one, which was the
enormous size of the Egyptian national debt and the wide distribution of its bonds, partly through an indirect formula, among the propertied classes of Vienna, Paris and London and a habit of
active trading in the bonds on the bourses of Europe. The size of the debt is indicated by interest upon it consuming two-thirds of the total revenues of Egypt in 1880. Its indirectness arose from
much of it being Turkish government stock, issued on behalf of Egypt and underpinned by a so-called annual Egyptian Tribute to Constantinople designed to cover the servicing. Throughout Europe many
prosperous investors kept moderate holdings in their portfolios. Gladstone, however, allowed his investment policy to be quite remarkably concentrated upon them. The details of his holdings,
together with an attempt at an appraisal of their significance, will be given later.

Inevitably the burden of this huge debt resulted in hesitations in Egyptian government payments and resentment in Egyptian popular opinion. Ismail Pasha, the effectively independent (of
Constantinople) Khedive was extravagant and financially ill organized. In 1879 the Anglo-French (so called) Dual Control deposed him in favour of his son
Tewfik Pasha, who was
an appropriate precursor of King Farouk. And to balance him there arose in 1881 an equally appropriate precursor of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Arabi was a colonel and an indigenous Egyptian, not a Turk or
a Circassian or an indeterminate Levantine like most of those who surrounded the Khedive. ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’ was the core of his message and the main vehicle for its achievement
was to be a fourfold increase in the size of the Egyptian regular army, which was moreover to be paid on time, an experience which had hitherto eluded it – thus setting it at variance with
the more promptly serviced bondholders. It was a classic colonels’ revolt, half nationalist, half anti-privilege, except for that of the army. Arabi carried out a sort of half-coup in the
autumn of 1881, not deposing the Khedive, but forcing him to dismiss his ministers and rendering him semi-impotent.

Gladstone, partly under the influence of the notable Arabist and great
coureur
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, was at first well disposed towards Arabi, whom he was prepared to see as a latter-day
Garibaldi. But in the winter and spring of 1882 he swung away from Blunt
¹¹²
to the more conventional advice of the two British consuls on the spot, Malet and
Colvin. (The quintessential proconsular figure, Evelyn Baring, later Cromer, was not in Egypt at the time; he had been there from 1877 to 1879 as debt controller, but was in Calcutta as Finance
Minister of the Viceroy’s Council before returning to Cairo in 1883 and remaining there until 1907 as the effective ruler of the country.) Partly under their influence Gladstone delivered to
the House of Commons in mid-June a most conservative statement of the aims of British policy: ‘they are well known to consist in the general maintenance of all established rights in Egypt,
whether they be those of the Sultan, those of the Khedive, those of the people of Egypt, or those of the foreign bondholders.’
²
That was three
days after Arabi-inspired anti-foreign riots had broken out in Alexandria and had led to the death of fifty and the injuring of another sixty, including the British consul. Arabi then began to
fortify the harbour at Alexandria, which activity, it was a little implausibly claimed, threatened
the safety of the British fleet which was lying offshore. What it more
evidently threatened was the European view of Alexandria as a port open to all nations, a gateway which by its architecture and its ethnic mix proclaimed Egypt’s status as the eastern outpost
of the West rather than as the leader of the Arab world.

When Gladstone reluctantly became convinced that in the interests of ‘order’ some action against Arabi was necessary his natural preference was for a Concert of Europe intervention,
and an ineffective conference was called at Constantinople to explore this possibility. It failed, mainly because Bismarck, who was the pivotal statesman, was indifferent. Let the British and the
French do what they judged necessary was his shoulder-shrugging view, and, if they got into a weakening entanglement, so much the better. But the French, only twelve years after the defeats of
Sedan and Metz and obsessed with Germany, were cautious, particularly as the more robust Gambetta government had fallen at the end of 1881. The French fleet, which had also been anchored off
Alexandria, simply steamed away. So it was the British on their own or nothing. Gladstone was still reluctant to take military action – not surprisingly in view of his past attitude to Egypt
and to Disraeli’s adventures in general. But he was at variance with the majority of his colleagues, was preoccupied with Ireland, and was additionally worn down by the burdens of the
Exchequer. In the Cabinet he was isolated except for Bright and Harcourt. The line of Bright, who eventually resigned on the issue, was close to absolute pacifism, which was never Gladstone’s
position. Harcourt was far too quarrelsome to be a pacifist, but worked off his aggressiveness by denouncing imperial illusions.
Per contra
all the ‘imperial’ ministers, the
Secretaries of State for India, Colonies, War, Foreign Affairs, and the First Lord of the Admiralty, were firm for action. Chamberlain, much influenced by Dilke’s ‘Greater
Britain’
realpolitik
, was showing his first signs of jingoism. So the line-up was overwhelming, and Gladstone’s ability to resist was weakened by his tiredness. For 1 July, after
a continuous sitting on the Irish Crimes Bill from the Friday afternoon to 8.00 on the Saturday evening, he wrote: ‘My share of the sitting I take at nineteen hours. Anxious Cabinet on Egypt
behind the [Speaker’s] Chair 4–5.’
³
And four days later: ‘My brain is
very
weary.’
⁴