Gladstone: A Biography (94 page)

Within the government itself, however, conditions quickly became something between a farce and a shambles. By mid-May Hamilton calculated that at least ten of the sixteen ministers in the
Cabinet had hinted at or threatened or in several cases actually proffered resignations. Dilke and Chamberlain, supported by Shaw-Lefevre and probably by Trevelyan too, were threatening to go as a
result of the blocking by all the peers in the Cabinet, except for Granville, of a Chamberlain scheme for Irish local government reform embracing a central board, which was supported by all the
commoners, including the Prime Minister, except for Hartington. Hartington himself as usual was ready with several reasons why he ought to leave the government, and Rosebery, even with only three
months’ membership behind him, was never behindhand in finding reasons for escaping office.

Childers, the Chancellor, had also threatened resignation by walking out of the room after he was blocked first on his proposal to increase the beer duty, and again when he proposed to use the
wine duty as a half-alternative. Childers was persuaded to come back, but not for long. It was on the beer-duty issue that, early on the morning of 9 June, the government was defeated,
unexpectedly, by 264 to 252. It was an early result of tentative moves towards an alliance between Parnell and the Conservatives. Thirty-nine members of the Irish party voted against the
government. So did six Liberals, and another seventy of them, mostly Radicals, abstained. Thus did the great majority of 1880 run into the sand. Ten hours later there was no dispute
in the Cabinet that this time resignation was both inevitable and desirable. Gladstone took it all calmly. ‘A quiet evening,’ he concluded that day’s diary entry. ‘Worked on
books and papers.’
²⁴

The Queen was at Balmoral and showed as little initial disposal to come south (she eventually arrived on 17 June) as Gladstone did to travel to Aberdeenshire. On the 13th, however, she wrote and
offered him an earldom (as opposed to the unspecified peerage of 1874) and did so in markedly gracious terms. He declined at once, also in generous terms. Such future small services as he could
render would be better done from the Commons. The Queen was disappointed. By accepting the earldom Gladstone would of course have done her much more of a favour than he would have done himself. But
they had both behaved with high propriety, and his farewell visit to Windsor on the 24th also passed off well. ‘Audience of H. M.,’ he recorded, ‘& kissed hands in farewell
after half an hour of kindly conversation. . . . Got to the 3pm service at St George’s. . . .’
²⁵

Salisbury began the first and shortest of his three governments that same day, and Gladstone removed himself from 10 Downing Street but only a few yards across Whitehall to 1 Richmond Terrace, a
house temporarily provided by Stuart Rendel, then MP for Montgomeryshire and for the next decade and in several locations a most generous host to Gladstone.
¹¹⁴
At this stage, however, Gladstone did not for long trouble him. He was much away from London during the summer, he spent nearly the whole of the autumn at Hawarden, and he was
back in office and 10 Downing Street within eight months.

P
ART
F
IVE

IRELAND DOMINATES AND AGE WITHERS

1885–1898

T
HE MOOD IN WHICH
Gladstone left office in 1885, at the age of 75, was paradoxically different from that in which he had done so in 1874, when he was
more than eleven years younger. On the former occasion he had presided over a notably successful administration except for its declining final phase (but which government is free of such a dying
fall?). Yet he was resentful, not so much of his loss of office as of his rejection by the electorate. He was then still short, even by Victorian standards, of being an old man. Yet his talk was of
‘winding out the coil’ of his life and of seeking ‘an interval between parliamentary and the grave’ in which to devote himself to theological studies, to which he was ill
suited.

By 1885 he had become a still more dominating national figure, and a still more famous international one, but his second government, staggering as has been seen from Bradlaugh to Gordon, was at
best a series of improvisations against disaster. Yet at the end of it he was neither resentful nor determinedly seeking a
nunc dimittis
. He no longer believed that he might serve his God
and his age better by being a second-rate theologian than a first-rate politician. In a sense he genuinely wanted retirement, but he wanted it with honour, and he had an almost infinite capacity to
persuade himself that he was more likely to find this around the next corner than where he currently was. His post-resignation attitude was perhaps best summed up by a letter which he wrote to his
only surviving brother, Sir Thomas Gladstone, on 19 June 1885 (an odd and Tory recipient of such a confidence after many decades of coolness): ‘My profound desire is retirement, and nothing
has prevented or will prevent my giving effect to that desire, unless there should appear to be something in which there may be a prospect of my doing what could not be as well done without
me.’
¹
The weight, of course, was contained in the second half of the sentence, expressing his willingness to be prised away from withdrawal by
some high purpose.

Such a cause – in the shape of Irish Home Rule – was easily forthcoming in 1885, although Gladstone was for a few months hesitant
about whether he wished to
embrace it, or indeed whether his doing so was necessary by the strict criterion which he had laid down in his letter to his brother. Up to and over the general election of that November (the very
satisfactory Midlothian poll was on the 28th, and the national result – 333 Liberals, 251 Conservatives and 86 Parnellites – was also clear by then), he gave priority to the holding
together of his party, which he rightly saw as in direct conflict with providing an Irish solution, and also cherished the hope that the Conservatives might grasp the Home Rule nettle. As a result
he gave little guidance to the Liberal party or the nation over that summer and autumn, and little encouragement to Parnell to prepare for a Liberal alliance. His mind was nonetheless deep into
Ireland, or, it would perhaps be more accurate to say, into the acquiring of factual and academic knowledge about that country. But he spoke little. This was at least partly because his voice was
giving him serious trouble. He was diagnosed as suffering from chronic laryngeal catarrh, ‘a condition common enough’, in Matthew’s words, ‘amongst elderly
actors’,
²
and had to undergo twenty-one daily and unpleasant treatments between 17 July and 8 August. How effective they were is not clear,
although they at least staved off the real danger of his becoming a tone-deaf Mozart or a castrated Casanova. In the November Midlothian campaign he was able to make six major speeches to large
audiences, although the faithful Hamilton found them rather hollow shells compared with the great performances to which he had been used, with Gladstone undergoing the almost unheard-of experience
of being upstaged by Rosebery, to whom Hamilton referred as ‘being nearly as much the uncrowned King of Scotland as Parnell is the uncrowned King of Ireland’.
³

Despite this potentially crippling vicissitude Gladstone in 1885 showed little of his 1874 desire to have done with politics. He stayed in or about London for the whole of July and early August
and did not go to Hawarden until nearly three months after his resignation. Most of his ‘about London’ visits that summer were either to Dollis Hill, the Aberdeen villa in what is now
NW
2, or to Combe Wood, a Wolverton house in an almost equally suburban location on the Wimbledon Common side of Kingston. He also spent a weekend at Keble College, Oxford,
with his Lyttelton niece and her Warden husband, the future Bishop of Rochester, next Southwark, and finally Winchester, and at Waddesdon, the then three-year-old Rothschild extravaganza beyond
Aylesbury which inspired him to the lapidary comment: ‘a remarkable construction, no commonplace [a] host’.
⁴

On 8 August he left for a Norwegian cruise of no less than three and a half weeks as the guest of Sir Thomas Brassey, son of a major railway contractor and himself a junior
minister in the 1880 government, who subsequently accumulated honours as a fly-paper accumulates flies. He was made a baron by Gladstone in 1886 and an earl by Asquith in 1911. Campbell-Bannerman,
not to be left out, made him a GCB in 1906 and Oxford an honorary DCL in the year of his earldom. In 1885 he contributed the yacht,
Sunbeam
(in which, he eccentrically informed
Who’s Who
readers, he had travelled 400,000 knots before giving it to the government of India as a hospital ship in 1916), and Gladstone contributed the company. They included his
wife, his daughter Mary, his doctor, the man he was soon to appoint his Chief Whip (Arnold Morley), George Leveson Gower, who had been one of his private secretaries from 1880 and who, amazingly,
managed to live until 1951, and ‘Lulu’ Harcourt, the engaging twenty-three-year-old son of ‘the great [but sometimes curmudgeonly] gladiator’, who met a sticky end in 1922.
Lady Brassey and the wife of an admiral were also allowed aboard.

Gladstone always liked the look (even if not the motion) of a rugged Atlantic-influenced sea, whether it was at Penmaenmawr or Brighton or Biarritz; the Mediterranean by contrast, in spite of
his enthusiasm for the lands of Italy and of Greece, made little appeal to him until his ninth decade. That August he was prostrate during the two passages across the North Sea, but highly content
during the long sojourn in Norwegian coastal waters. Despite frequent treatments by Sir Andrew Clark, he was doubtful whether the ‘soft air’ was doing his throat much good but he
pronounced that his general health was excellent. One day he walked eighteen miles on very rough ground. On another he started to learn Norwegian, which at the age of nearly seventy-six perhaps
pointed more to surplus energy than to a careful husbanding of time. He was delighted with his high recognition factor around the fjords and the warmth of the reception.

On 1 September he disembarked at Fort George at the mouth of Inverness Firth and went to Fasque, where he had not been for more than ten years, for a week’s visit and the celebration of
his brother’s golden wedding. Once back at Hawarden, he stayed there, apart from a twenty-four-hour medical visit to London, until he went to Edinburgh (Dalmeny) on 9 November for nearly
three weeks of electioneering. Most there thought (wrongly) that it was to be his last campaign, but he did not skimp it. Then he had another uninterrupted six weeks at
Hawarden, going to London only on the day the new Parliament met (11 January 1886) for the re-election of the Speaker.

During this six weeks, which was the key period for the resolution of his mind on Ireland, he had half a dozen political visitors to Hawarden. Lord Richard Grosvenor, still his Chief Whip, came
on 30 November and stayed a couple of nights. On one of the two Gladstone spoke for him in his Flintshire election, where polling day was a week later than in Midlothian. On the other he had a long
conversation with him ‘on men and things’. Gladstone at this stage could not be faulted on the trouble he took with his Whip. He had written to him frequently during his Norwegian
cruise and throughout the autumn. And Grosvenor again came to Hawarden for the inside of a day on 21 December. But it was unavailing. The Whig and family pressure on Grosvenor was too strong. After
this second visit Gladstone wrote: ‘Three hours conversation friendly but with differences.’
⁵
Grosvenor became what J. L. Hammond
described as ‘a bitter Liberal Unionist’ in 1886.

The other political visitors were more loyal or the exchanges with them more fruitful. Granville was there on 5–6 December and Gladstone noted with satisfaction that ‘we are already
in promising harmony’. Granville then went as an envoy to Chatsworth, where he found Spencer as well as Hartington, but decided not to report back in person to Hawarden as this ‘would
give rise to some foolish talk’.
⁶
Granville remained wholly loyal to Gladstone until his death six years later, but his powers, always supple
rather than rugged, were visibly weakening by this time.