Gladstone: A Biography (93 page)

To atone for the mistake the official British objections were
withdrawn and Gordon accepted Leopold’s commission on 2 January 1884 and then returned to London five
days later. He went immediately to stay with his sister in Southampton and was there pursued by W. T. Stead, Morley’s successor as the editor of the
Pall Mall Gazette
and the inventor
of the so-called ‘new journalism’. Stead’s interview with Gordon, published first in his own paper and then in
The Times
, dramatically indicated the power of journalism,
new or old. Although Gordon dissociated himself in it from the British government’s decision to withdraw from Khartoum and the eastern Sudan, the interview nonetheless created a clamour that
he should be appointed to carry out the policy of which he had publicly disapproved. ‘Gordon for the Sudan’ became a catchphrase and also a brand which ignited a forest fire. The result
was that, by 18 January, this crazy appointment had been decided upon.

It was crazy because Gordon was temperamentally unsuited to be the agent of a cautious policy. He was the prototype of a
Boy’s Own Paper
hero, with an additional capacity to seize
the attention and attract the admiration of many who had long passed the age of boyhood. He also saw himself as the hand of God’s purpose to an extent which rivalled Gladstone, although they
seemed to have been revealed differing versions of that purpose. Furthermore, Gordon, whether or not subject to lost weekends of alcoholism (for which there is some evidence, but which his 1993
biographer contests),
⁹
was undoubtedly a person of unstable mood who could plunge from bursts of almost manic activity into troughs of withdrawal
and inertia. And on top of everything else – this the fault of ministers and not of Gordon – the instructions he was given were far from precise.

Gladstone had little to do with the appointment of Gordon. In mid-December, with public opinion already febrile on the issue as a result of the massacre by the Mahdi of a British-officered army
under General Hicks, he delegated Sudanese affairs to a Cabinet committee composed of Hartington, Granville, Northbrook, Dilke and Carlingford. Dilke said that it was ‘in order that Mr. G.
might avoid writing to the Queen about the matter and get Hartington to tell her verbally’.
¹⁰
Cowardice was not one of Gladstone’s
faults in dealing with the Queen, but he may nonetheless well have wisely thought that a few inarticulate sentences from Hartington might provoke less royal extravagance of opinion than one of his
own over-meticulous and over-argumentative letters. This was the origin of the committee which, minus Carlingford, on 18 January commissioned Gordon. It did so in a hurry, pressurized by
Wolseley, the victor of Tel-el-Kebir and increasingly the panjandrum of the whole army, and rather against the initial reactions of Baring, who ought to have been taken more notice of
in view of his central responsibility for British policy in the Nile Valley. Gladstone was equivocal. Two days before he had very sensibly written to Granville about Gordon: ‘While his
opinion on the Soudan may be of great value, must we not be very careful in any instruction we give, that he does not shift the centre of gravity as to political and military responsibility for
that country? In brief if he reports what should be done, he should not be the judge of who should do it. . . .’
¹¹
Equally Hamilton, who in
general closely reflected Gladstonian opinion, wrote on 23 January: ‘[Gordon] seems to be a half cracked fatalist; and what can one expect from such a man?’
¹²

On the other hand Gladstone did not attempt to hold up the appointment. Indeed he wrote apologetically to Granville on the 19th: ‘I telegraphed last night my concurrence in your
proceedings about Gordon: but Chester [telegraph office] would not awake & the message only went on this morning.’
¹³
It would have made
no difference whether it went late on the 18th or early on the 19th, for Gordon with the over-excited and half-ludicrous urgency which characterized the circumstances of his appointment and
despatch, had already left London,
en route
for Brindisi and Alexandria, at eight o’clock on the evening of the 18th, within a few hours of his appointment. At Charing Cross station he
had a send-off party at once magnificent and incongruous. Granville (presumably with Foreign Office funds) bought his ticket. General Wolseley performed an equally necessary and more eccentric
service. Discovering as the departure whistle was blowing that Gordon had no money on him, he both emptied his own pockets and handed over his gold watch. Hartington and the Duke of Cambridge
(still Commander-in-Chief) were also present, but confined to decorative roles.

Three hundred and seventy-four days later Gordon was killed at Khartoum, where he had been under siege for 320 of them. A relief expedition under Wolseley reached the city two days later. The
field for recrimination could hardly have been more wide open. Gordon ought not to have been in Khartoum at all. He was sent to advise on the evacuation of the Sudan, not to occupy it. Furthermore,
his communications from there were of a highly erratic nature. Dilke, who was one of those responsible for his employment and on Gordon’s side to the extent of believing that an early
expedition ought to be sent for his rescue, wrote in March: ‘Twelve telegrams from Gordon of the most
extraordinary nature. . . . We [are] obviously dealing with a wild
man under the influence of that climate of Central Africa which acts even upon the sanest men like strong drink.’
¹⁴
And he added in
September: ‘A telegram from Gordon which shows he’s quite mad.’
¹⁵
The ludicrousness of the whole enterprise was well illustrated
by the fact that within eight weeks of the despatch of a specially chosen agent of evacuation the Cabinet was racked by whether or not to send a major force to extricate him and then to perform the
role which he had wilfully failed to do.

Over this decision ministers hesitated long enough to ensure the worst of both worlds. Gladstone, supported by Granville and about half the Cabinet, thought that once Gordon had broken his
orders he should be left to his fate. Hartington was strong, or at least stubborn, the other way. Dilke and Chamberlain had a position of their own, which was in favour of a small, quick expedition
which would get Gordon out and the whole British presence with him. Hartington by contrast wanted a major offensive leading to a prolonged occupation, and Dilke took the view that had Hartington
(and Northbrook) not held out for this Gordon might well have been saved.

The issue consumed much of the government’s time and energies throughout that franchise bill summer of 1884. In July it provoked yet another of Hartington’s threatened resignations
and on 2 August Gladstone wrote: ‘This day for the first time in my recollection there were three
crises
for us all running high tide at once: Egypt [debt problems], Gordon &
franchise.’
¹⁶

The position was complicated in two other ways. First, Gordon would not accept that he needed a rescue expedition. He regarded it as a derogation from his role as a Christian imperialist who
could subdue primitive races by a mixture of bravery and empathy. When, on 9 September, Wolseley arrived in Cairo to lead the so-called Gordon Relief Expedition, Gordon was furious at its title.
‘I altogether decline the imputation that the projected expedition has come to relieve me. It has come to
save our national
honour in extricating the garrisons. As for myself I could
make good my retreat at any moment. . . . I am not the rescued lamb, and I will not be.’
¹⁷
Second, one of Gladstone’s most dangerous
blind spots was that he could not comprehend the force of Gordon’s appeal to the British public and hence his capacity to damage the government. Gladstone was the least pedestrian of Prime
Ministers. He could ignite an audience and could endow a cause with an enthusiasm which passed well beyond rationalism. But he did not have the
imagination to see how others
might do this too, and for ends of which he disapproved. Gordon quickly became for him an ill-disciplined and rather junior general, whose showy and unsubtle Christianity did not compensate for his
insubordination.

The news of Gordon’s death reached England early on 5 February 1885. Edward Hamilton, awakened at 2.30 in the morning by Brett, Hartington’s secretary, who later as Lord Esher was
the quintessential Edwardian courtier with a finger in many pies, reacted starkly by saying that it was ‘the blackest day since the horrible Phoenix Park murders’.
¹⁸
Gladstone was staying with the Duke of Devonshire at Holker in North Lancashire, one of the Duke’s subsidiary residences, which looked in one direction
to the fells of the Lake District and in the other across the sands of Morecambe Bay. Whether a mainline Cavendish possession or diverted to a cadet branch as it has been for the past 100 years,
Holker has long been said to exercise a peculiar charm of view and ambience. It is doubtful, however, if the charm was strong enough to keep high the spirits of either Gladstone or Hartington, who
was also there and whose responsibility (but not his exposure) was at least as great as that of Gladstone, when they received the news eight hours after Hamilton.

They left at once for London, and at Carnforth Junction another and well-known scene in the drama was played out. Gladstone was there handed by the stationmaster a telegram which the Queen had
sent without use of the habitual cipher. Its terms were more explosive than grammatical: ‘These news from Khartoum are frightful and to think that all this might have been prevented and many
precious lives saved by earlier action is too fearful.’
¹⁹
Low though his royal expectations had become, Gladstone was not pleased by this
signal and semi-public mark of disfavour. Dilke, cynical but well informed, said that the Prime Minister’s immediate reaction was to enquire what were the politics of the Carnforth
stationmaster and what therefore was the probability of the contents of the telegram leaking. Whatever the answer, the question was irrelevant, for there were more than enough other hands through
whom the telegram would necessarily have passed to make certain, as was no doubt the royal intention, its position in the public domain.

Nevertheless Gladstone when he arrived in Downing Street at 8.15 was, according to Hamilton, ‘calm and collected. He always rises to great occasions; and the greater is the crisis, the
more coolly does he keep his head.’
²⁰
That same evening – Gladstone’s lack of procrastination in replying to difficult
communications was consistently remarkable – he wrote to the Queen with frigid dignity:

That day was a Thursday. On the following Tuesday Gladstone dined with Lord and Lady Dalhousie, a respectable if Liberal couple, and then went with them to the Criterion Theatre to see a
contemporary success called
The Candidate
. Gladstone, as was his way and his strength, recorded the event calmly, merely noting that the play was ‘capitally acted’. Hamilton
reproved himself bitterly for having allowed Gladstone to go. The occasion was regarded by Tory opinion as the final brick in his reputation as the heartless murderer of Gordon. Unfortunately
Gladstone stooped to giving a bad excuse. It was not certain, he said, that Gordon was dead; he might be a prisoner. This incident, in itself unimportant, although insensitive, did a lot of harm.
It more than outweighed any benefit which the government derived from Rosebery’s quixotic decision, without for once making any difficulties, to become the First Commissioner of Works (in the
Cabinet) on 8 February.

After the Gordon debacle the second Gladstone government was always a holed hull. It was mainly a question of how long it could keep afloat, with a subsidiary one of how long its chief wanted it
to do so. In the train from Carnforth he wrote with resignation and almost with relief: ‘The circumstances are sad and trying: it is one of the least points about them, that they may put an
end to this Govt.’
²²
And two weeks later Hamilton recorded:

Yet running counter to this was Gladstone’s view that a government should not scuttle, particularly in response to unjust charges. When the vote of
censure came on a few days later he at least made a far better case than Northcote. But the government’s majority fell to fourteen, compared with a margin of forty-four on a similar motion
nine months before.

Most of the Cabinet were in favour of resignation on this vote. But Gladstone decided to rally them. His hope of a favourable plateau for his own retirement following the deal with Salisbury on
the seats bill had been destroyed. But he did not wish to go out in the depths of the grand canyon into which Gordon had plunged him. So he kept the government going for nearly another four months.
But it no longer had either external strength or even such internal cohesion as it had hitherto possessed. Its only achievements during this period were to make progress with the seats bill and to
divert the atavistic desire for avenging Gordon by obfuscating the Mahdi and his followers by the more important Pendjeh conflict with the Russians in Afghanistan, which was itself settled without
war, so that two conflicts were effectively avoided.