Gladstone: A Biography (95 page)

Spencer was more of an independent force and one with a deep knowledge of Ireland. He arrived at Hawarden on 8 December and lived up to Granville’s encouraging anticipatory report from
Chatsworth: ‘You will find Spencer as usual very pleasant to discuss with.’
⁷
Rosebery was there for the first night of Spencer’s
visit, and might easily have imported a more querulous note into the discussions. Unlike Spencer, who was to be a dedicated and vital ally for Gladstone on this subject, he was never a steady
enthusiast for Home Rule. Nor was he a man to miss many opportunities to make difficulty. But on this occasion he was amenable. Gladstone wrote back to Granville on 9 December: ‘I think my
conversations with Rosebery and Spencer have also been satisfactory. What I expect is a healthful slow fermentation of many minds, working towards the final product.’
⁸

The final two political visitors were less mainstream. They were Lord Wolverton, Gladstone’s former Chief Whip and ever amenable host
and companion from Cannes to
Kingston-upon-Thames, and Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, his Christ Church contemporary (and the only one of his early friends who lasted the distance with him, being born in the year of Gladstone’s
birth and dying in the year of his death). Acland in 1885 was a Privy Councillor and still a West Country MP, although he had never been a seeker after office. He was more independent than
Wolverton, but in the last resort neither of them was likely to gainsay Gladstone.

A curious clerical go-between, Malcolm MacColl, whom Gladstone had made a canon of Ripon in 1884, was also at Hawarden for the night of 13 December, and with Lord Salisbury by the evening of the
next day. For communication with his successor as Prime Minister Gladstone also used a more eminent emissary. On the 15th he went to Eaton Hall, the Westminster house eight or ten miles from
Hawarden, for a ‘beautiful morning service’ and a luncheon. Arthur Balfour, who had so delighted him in the early 1870s and so offended him in 1882, currently President of the Local
Government Board (outside the Cabinet but with the special access which came from being Salisbury’s nephew), was staying there, and Gladstone took the opportunity to pour out to him a
political message with the expectation that ‘he will probably repeat it in London’.
⁹
To make sure that he did so, Gladstone followed up
his words with a letter, but after a five-day interval, curiously long in view both of the importance of the issue and of Gladstone’s normal promptness in correspondence. Although it was
encased in a typical Gladstonian penumbra of opaqueness its meaning was nonetheless clear enough:

To some extent the verbal overture, and still more the letter, were counter-productive. Gladstone’s message was received with almost complete cynicism by the Tory leaders. The virulence of
party hatreds at the time was such that they were incapable of believing him to be activated by any motive other than that of greed for office. To this they saw him as now adding the sin of a
nauseating hypocrisy. They were wrong, and the narrowness of their spirit gave them a heavy responsibility for throwing away an unusual opportunity for constructive statesmanship.

A tentative Irish flirtation with the Conservatives had begun in the late spring of 1885, and its first fruits had been seen in the Nationalist votes against Childers’s budget, which had
played a significant part in the defeat and consequent resignation of the government. Then a few weeks into the life of the Salisbury government Parnell had a secret and melodramatic meeting in a
dust-sheeted Mayfair house with Carnarvon, the new Irish Viceroy. For the four or five months after that meeting, which period spanned the November general election, Parnell thought that he had at
least as good a chance of getting Home Rule from the Tories as from the Liberal party. And Gladstone assisted him in this belief, even accepting the consequence of the diversion to the
Conservatives of the Irish vote in the English towns. There was no period at which Gladstone held Parnell more rigidly at arm’s length. When the Irish leader applied to Gladstone in October
for guidance on the development of his thought he got a distinct brush-off, delivered through Mrs O’Shea, who in this interchange had replaced her husband as go-between. Gladstone resolutely
refused to enter into any competition with the Conservatives on the question of how far he would go in the direction of self-rule. His advice to Parnell was to seek a settlement with the party
actually in office, that is the Conservatives.

This sounded disdainful, but in fact it was high-minded on Gladstone’s part and in total contradiction of the view, so sedulously held in Conservative circles, that his Irish policy was
nothing but a self-seeking search for votes and office by a power-drunk old man. Gladstone was already well down the road to his conviction that nothing short of a separate parliament (although one
subordinate to the imperial connection) would settle Ireland. He was prepared, as was proved by future
events, to devote another eight years of his ebbing life to trying to
achieve Home Rule. But in 1885 he thought that it would be better done by a Conservative government.

The idea that the Conservatives might perform this role was optimistic, but not ludicrous. Carnarvon was in favour. Randolph Churchill was a loose cannon which might go off in any
direction. Hicks Beach and W. H. Smith did not seem totally opposed. And the rationale for wishing the Conservatives to do the job was clear. The implementation of Home Rule would manifestly be
difficult and divisive, even if there were few of its supporters who would have expected a delay of thirty-seven years, during which the hope of doing it within a continuing British entity would be
destroyed.

Even without knowledge of this dismal perspective the attractions of being able to do it on the run were great. There is a well-known political rule that difficult and necessary measures are
best accepted from the party or the leader least expected to do them. This was General de Gaulle’s strength in relation to withdrawal from Algeria. It was nearly that of the 1964–70
Labour government in relation to trades union reform. Furthermore the Conservative party in late-nineteenth- (and indeed most of twentieth-) century Britain carried the additional advantage that
what was proposed by its leaders was almost invariably accepted by the House of Lords. A solution could have been achieved so much more quickly and smoothly without the sterile struggles with the
second chamber of 1893 and 1912–14.

It was therefore a clear shaft of perception which made Gladstone see the national benefit of a Conservative-proposed (and Gladstone-supported) Home Rule commitment in the autumn of 1885, and an
act of statesmanship which made him tolerant of the pursuit of such an alliance by Parnell. As is always the case a more cynical explanation was possible. Home Rule was one of the most powerfully
fissiparous issues of the politics of the past two centuries. It was liable to split any party which touched it. There were obvious attractions to a Liberal in the Conservative party taking the
first brunt of the nuclear explosion. Yet as Gladstone’s primary motive this is unsustainable. Whatever else characterized his handling of the Home Rule issue it was not the tactics of
party manoeuvre.

Conservative incomprehension of Gladstone’s high-mindedness was fortified by two accidents of timing, the second a deeply unfortunate one. In the first place Gladstone intervened too late.
On the day before he spoke to Balfour the Conservative Cabinet had met and had decided,
in the words of Salisbury’s letter to the Queen, ‘that it was not possible
for the Conservative Party to tamper with Home Rule’.
¹¹
In other words the Carnarvon initiative was dead. (Balfour would not necessarily
have known of this before the Eaton Hall conversation.) By the time that Gladstone’s dilatory letter arrived and was passed around, the circumstances which had given it relevance were more
than a week downwind. This heightened the artificiality with which ministers wished to endow it.

It had also been superseded by an apparently contradictory initiative known as the ‘Hawarden kite’. Herbert Gladstone, still not quite thirty-two, unmarried and often acting as a
private secretary to his father, but an MP of five years’ standing, had spent most of the first half of December at Hawarden. He was close to his father, but did not always merely echo his
views. He had for instance been known as a declared Home Ruler at least since the previous July. During the autumn he had wished his father would take a more forward line, not keep Parnell so much
at arm’s length, and look to an early return to Liberal government and not to a Conservative conversion to deal with the Irish problem. On top of this, Herbert Gladstone received a disturbing
appeal from a disturbing source (particularly for him, as a member for Leeds) at the beginning of this same over-animated week when the Conservative Cabinet was meeting and Gladstone was talking to
Balfour. The source was Wemyss Reid, the editor of the
Leeds Mercury
and in general an important as well as a moderate Liberal who might equally easily follow Hartington as Gladstone. He
complained that the Gladstonian case was being allowed to go by default, and that, unless the serious Liberal press were given some guidance, all the running was left to be made by Chamberlain,
who, it was thought, had his own reasons for being against an early Liberal return to office.

Herbert Gladstone decided to respond by going to London and seeing Reid on 15 December. The next day he also gave an interview to the editor of the National Press Agency, which supplied material
to about 170 local newspapers. He saw his father before he went, but there is no evidence that they substantially discussed Reid’s letter or Herbert’s mission. Nonetheless the son was
of course privy to his father’s developing thought and the general drift of his conversations with Granville, Rosebery and others. This knowledge formed the basis of the very hard briefing
which he gave to Reid and to the representatives of the National Press Agency. It was the latter which caused the main trouble when its result started to appear in the evening papers of
17 December. The
Pall Mall Gazette
began its long, politically sensational and personally tendentious story on a note of authority.

The article then added authenticity by giving some detail about the scheme in Gladstone’s mind, in particular saying that Irish members would not be excluded from the House of Commons, but
would continue to share in deliberations ‘in Imperial affairs’. Still more tendentiously the article concluded:

The article was at once deadly accurate and designed to produce an adverse reaction on the part of every person or group of persons mentioned. Spencer was the first to be affronted. His support
of the Gladstonian line was as described and he was not diverted from it, but he nonetheless abhorred the form of the disclosure. ‘I never was so disgusted in my life’, he wrote to
Rosebery at the end of the month, ‘as I was by the
Standard
and the
Pall Mall
, not to say Leeds revelations.’
¹³
Then the
views of the majority of Liberals as well as of ‘the English people’ were pre-empted, and any recalcitrant ‘moderate Liberals’ as well as the House of Lords were threatened
with a punitive dissolution
if they stood out against a Home Rule bill. Hartington and Goschen (the latter had hardly been in Liberal communion on any issue since 1874 and was
to be Chancellor of the Exchequer in a Conservative government within a year) were roughly informed of their expected duty – but counter-productively so, for they both voted against the 1886
bill. And finally Chamberlain and Dilke were sharply given their marching orders.