Gladstone: A Biography (96 page)

What did Herbert Gladstone think he was up to? He was not a wholly foolish and in no way a malevolent young man. He claimed that he expected his briefing to be treated as background rather than
as a verbatim expression of view, and also as though he were giving his own opinions rather than those of his father. The first hope was naive, the second silly. The idea that his own
off-the-record opinions on what exact shape of the bill, or on what Hartington or the House of Lords would do to it, would themselves have commanded vast newspaper space was presumptuous and
misplaced. And Herbert Gladstone, whatever else he was, which included being an innovative Home Secretary nearly a quarter of a century later, was not presumptuous. Perhaps for this reason the GOM
took his intervention with exemplary parental calm. Herbert was his youngest son, the most politically committed and the most frequently at his father’s service of the four. These were all
marks of credit or grounds for affection in Gladstone’s eyes.

Nonetheless he must have been sorely tried. The ‘kite’, unfurled in a way that was at once crude and with a touch of subterfuge, not only upset his Liberal colleagues and negated the
delicacy with which he had hitherto been endeavouring to bring them along, but also provided fuel for Tory leaders who wished to see his Balfour overture as typical hypocrisy. The first fluttering
of the kite was indeed the reason why Gladstone delayed from 15 to 20 December sending the confirmatory letter to Balfour. He in fact wrote it on the 16th, but by that day the preliminary ripples
from Herbert’s London visit began to reach Hawarden, and he delayed sending it. His relevant diary entries for the 16th read: ‘A day of anxious & very important correspondence [he
lists,
inter alia
, letters to Mrs O’Shea, Hartington and Balfour]. . . . Matters of today required meditation. After dealing with the knottiest point, I resumed Huxley.
¹¹⁵
We felled a good ash. Read Burke – Dicey. Suspended the Balfour letter.’
¹⁴

The next day Gladstone issued a limited and unconvincing denial of the validity of the leak: ‘The statement is not an accurate representation of my views, but is, I
presume, a speculation upon them. It is not published with my knowledge or authority, nor is any other beyond my own public declarations.’
¹⁵
The denial was of course unavailing. What had been published was near enough to the truth to make any disavowal highly conditional, and the damage had been done. Hartington, to whom Gladstone had written a defensive letter
¹¹⁶
on the same day that he issued the denial, well summed up the new position when he wrote back on the 18th:

The second sentence was tantamount to a polite indication from Hartington that he was about to
prendre congé
. Two days later, although Gladstone had written to him again on the
19th, and was to do so yet again on the 20th, and again on the 23rd, he wrote to his constituency chairman to tell him that he would not move from the position he had taken up in the November
election, that is to say he would not sail again under a Gladstonian flag. The strong probability is that Hartington would have broken on Home Rule in any event. But the maladroitness of the kite
gave him an excuse for cutting the knot more quickly and therefore more easily, because it meant that he could settle his position before he had to expose himself to the pressure of
Gladstone’s presence, more formidable than his letters, in the new year.

Could Herbert Gladstone possibly have supposed that he was aiding either his father or the cause of Home Rule by his actions? The first
would be plausible only on the
assumption that his father had tipped him the wink to go ahead, while no doubt warning him, with what Tories and some Whigs would regard as typical machiavellianism, that the kite would have to be
disavowed. There is no evidence for this other than a hypothetical passage in Hamilton’s diaries. Hamilton, in spite of his personal loyalty to and friendship for the whole Gladstone family,
was very sceptical about Home Rule and critical (to his diary at least) of Gladstone’s handling of the matter, which he regarded as precipitate in substance and dissimulating in form. He did
however have the ‘horse’s mouth’ advantage of dining with Herbert Gladstone on the evening after his arrival from Hawarden (15 December). And on the 23rd he recorded the version
of events at which he had arrived.

Gladstone’s reactions on 16 and 17 December were relatively calm, because he was too experienced in political nonsenses and confusions to overreact to them and because, as Hamilton had
written after the Gordon débâcle, ‘the greater is the crisis, the more coolly does he keep his head’. But there was no sense that he had lit the fuse and was waiting with a
mixture of expectation and apprehension for the explosion. Nor was there any doubt that he was discommoded. Herbert Gladstone (rather a bold step in the circumstances) went back to Hawarden by the
Irish mail train late on the evening of 16 December. So he would have been there on the morning of the 17th when Gladstone was writing defensively to Hartington and issuing his unconvincing
denial.

Herbert Gladstone wrote in his diary for that day the odd comment that ‘Father was quite
compos
.’ This fairly common abbreviation of
compos mentis
(literal translation:
‘sane, of sound mind’) appears from the context to have been used by him in the sense of ‘calm and composed’ as opposed to the more frequent modern meaning of ‘in full
possession of his faculties, not senile’. Any of the three meanings might in the circumstances have been regarded as distinctly patronizing. It was Herbert Gladstone who needed his
father’s forbearance at the time, rather than the GOM requiring the son’s assurance that he was balanced
and of sound mind. And this forbearance was on the whole
forthcoming. There is a slight impression that Gladstone might for the moment have preferred the company of his other sons. It was a vigorous tree-cutting season with some noble trunk falling
almost every day between then and Christmas. But the woodcraft was recorded as being with Willy or Harry rather than with Herbert. By Christmas Eve, however, he was taking pleasure in the
completeness of the family party ‘young and old’.

The more plausible explanation of the kite is that Herbert Gladstone brashly believed that his father needed a little push and Liberal opinion a considerable steer in order to bring the two into
constructive harmony with each other, and that he himself was a necessary catalyst. This at any rate was the explanation on which he had settled by 31 December when he wrote a long letter (no doubt
also intended as a record for himself and others) to his cousin Lucy Cavendish, in which he set out, defensively, defiantly and sometimes a little contradictorily, his version of all the events
surrounding the flight of the kite. He defended his own right to speak ‘on his own responsibility’ as he had done for the previous five years. He specifically denied any collusion with
his father: ‘With all these matters [that is, his own decision to go to London and the briefings there] my Father had no more connection than the man in the moon, and until each event
occurred he knew . . . no more of it than the man in the street.’

He then delivered what may be thought the less than convincing core of his self-justification: ‘in regard to my general action I have nothing to conceal and no apology to make. If I had
not acted we should have got into hopeless confusion. It may be true that influential men are now all at variance on the question. On the other hand the Liberal Press is for the most part working
smoothly and well on certain given lines.’ He then concluded a little sententiously but no doubt his words were heartfelt: ‘May the end of this great question be good; I can only pray
that your great loss may tend more and more to bring ultimate peace to Ireland.’
¹⁸
Lucy Cavendish showed this letter to her brother-in-law Hartington, but it is unlikely that it
was written for that purpose or had much effect with him. It should have convinced Hartington that the GOM had not contrived the revelation, but this did not affect his central point that, once it
had been made, it could not be satisfactorily contradicted because it truly represented Gladstone’s state of mind.

What was more to the point was whether Gladstone needed the filial push. This raises the anterior questions of when and how firmly he made up his mind on Home Rule. To dispose of the second of
these questions first, the push, insofar as it had any effect on the firmness of Gladstone’s
commitment, was counter-productive. In the first half of December he gave
every impression of moving steadily through the quiet conversion of his colleagues, except that, as so frequently in the past, he saw Chamberlain and Hartington at the end and not at the beginning
of the line as he ought to have done – in neither case until after he had returned to London on 11 January 1886.
¹¹⁷
Insofar as he was thought to have a period of hesitation, such
disparate sources as Hamilton, Chamberlain, Harcourt and Hartington thought (wrongly) that lack of support (partly caused by the kite) was giving him pause, and that his mind was swinging back
towards retirement.

If a date for the settling of Gladstone’s mind on Ireland is sought, the best answer is that it was probably when he committed himself to paper at Dalmeny on Saturday, 14 November 1885, a
third of the way through his electioneering in Midlothian. It was an example of Gladstone’s still pulsating energy that at the age of nearly seventy-six in the midst of the preoccupations of
a campaign and without breaking his normal letter-writing and reading pattern (on that day he read parts of Greville’s
Diaries
, of Lotze’s
Microcosmus
and of the
Annual
Register
for 1819), he should find time to outline a detailed Home Rule scheme, which was not merely unnecessary for the campaign but which it was essential should be kept secret for weeks to
come. He did not disclose his draft scheme to Rosebery, in whose house he was staying, although he did outline its main points in a letter which he wrote on the same day to his son Herbert, who was
campaigning in Leeds.

Among the circumstances in which he wrote this outline a salient one was that he had two weeks before received from Parnell via Mrs O’Shea an at least equally detailed – and
conservative – ‘Proposed Constitution for Ireland’. The two papers were different in style and intellectual premiss (as was not surprising) but they rarely contradicted each
other, although the one was sometimes precise where the other was vague, and vice versa. Gladstone, for instance, was at this stage firm that ‘Irish representation in Imperial Houses [should]
remain, for Imperial purposes only,’
^19
118
whereas Parnell said that it ‘might be retained or might be given up’.
²⁰
Conversely Parnell was precise on the size and duration between elections of the Irish Chamber, whereas Gladstone was vague. But there was no question at this stage of Gladstone deliberately
cleaving close to Parnell. He was still in the phase of being anxious that the latter should make a deal with the Conservative government. He had consequently returned a fairly chilly answer to Mrs
O’Shea, even though it had been ironically somewhat warmed up on the advice of Lord Richard Grosvenor, who, despite his incipient Unionism, was too much of a whip to like the idea of losing
even Irish votes.

The votes were however to some substantial extent already lost, particularly in the Lancashire boroughs where the Irish were strong, and still more damagingly for the future a gulf of bitterness
was opened between many Liberal candidates and Parnell and his party. The Nationalists had issued a manifesto calling upon Irishmen in England to vote against Liberals as ‘the men who coerced
Ireland, deluged Egypt in blood, menace religious liberty in the school, the freedom of speech in Parliament, and promise to the country generally a repetition of the crimes and follies of the last
[1880–5] Liberal Administration’. Sir Henry James, for example, former Attorney-General and a ball-bearing of influence whom Gladstone tried hard to persuade to be Lord Chancellor in
his 1886 government, was probably pushed into Liberal Unionism by the virulence with which the Irish attacked him in Bury. It is dangerous to allow parties which may be destined to work together
after a campaign to abuse each other too vehemently during its course.

Nevertheless Gladstone’s action, somewhat instigated by Parnell’s similar exercise, in setting down his own views on the shape of a possible Home Rule measure may well have been
decisive in the evolution of his own commitment. No doubt he did not intend this Dalmeny outline to be committing. He merely thought it would be useful to clarify his thoughts and to have a scheme
by him if he came to think it right to implement one. But by so doing he immediately moved his mind forward. The act of tentative drafting was a catalyst even more than it was a fall-back. It is a
well-known syndrome. The man who has a draft to hand has a powerful weapon with which to overcome those with whom he is arguing. But a draft is a prison as well as a weapon. Having invested
intellectual capital he becomes most anxious to use it. Gladstone’s Saturday-morning work at Dalmeny, half by accident and half because it captured, as a flash of lightning illuminates a
landscape, the way in which his mind was moving, may well have been the few hours
in which the last major orientation of his life was fixed. The proposition has the
advantages and the disadvantages of being as irrefutable as it is unprovable.