Gladstone: A Biography (97 page)

At whatever precise moment it occurred, Gladstone’s shift of position to Home Rule,
¹¹⁹
although it convulsed British politics in a way that in the past 200 years only
Peel’s conversion to free trade and Lloyd George’s adaptation to a Tory coalition have done, was by no means an astonishing
volte face
. He had given remarkably few hostages to
fortune in the shape of pledges to maintain the Union in all circumstances. Deep though was the aversion which Gladstone’s political genius evoked among his opponents, and profound though was
their conviction that he boxed every compass for reasons of most blatant self-interest, it was impossible for them to produce clear examples of his pledging himself against Dublin autonomy. When,
seventeen years before, he had launched his first government on the keynote of ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland’ he had hoped to do it within the framework of Pitt’s Union. But he
did not exclude an alternative framework, and by the end of that government, in the already cited letter to Lord Fermoy,
¹²⁰
he declined to comment one way or the other on Home Rule
because of the imprecision with which the phrase was used and the many different meanings which it could bear.

However, Gladstone’s freedom from having to eat many of his own words was far from decisive. On the one hand he was widely regarded as the greatest master of explaining away his own
statements who had ever bestridden the political stage. And on the other no absence of embarrassing pledges could soften the violence of the shock to which he subjected his party. Throughout the
election campaign he had reserved his counsel and said nothing in public which made untenable the position of Hartington, Grosvenor and the other Unionist Whigs. His main speech on the subject had
been delivered in the Edinburgh Albert Hall (‘to an audience of very manageable size and excellent temper’)
²¹
on the evening of his arrival in the city. The maintenance of
the unity of the Empire accompanied by more local self-government for Ireland (it had practically none) had been the twin desiderata, and the route to them which he asked the electorate to open was
through a Liberal
majority large enough to give a future government independence of both Tories and Nationalists.

That Gladstone did not achieve, although the Liberals did remarkably well for the end of five years of bumpy Liberal government. There was no revulsion as in 1874. In Great Britain the Liberals
had a hundred more seats than the Conservatives. Had Ireland already gone, it would have been one of the only six great anti-Tory majorities of the past 130 years. But Ireland had not gone, did not
do so for another thirty-seven years, and under Gladstone’s scheme would in any event have continued to affect the strategic shape of the House of Commons. What had gone was the Liberal vote
in Ireland. Whereas in 1880 Ireland had returned thirteen Liberal MPs, the 1885 result allowed them not a single representative. The Conservatives on the other hand retained (mostly in Ulster)
nineteen of the twenty-six seats which they had held under the much more restricted franchise of that previous election. This differential rate of retreat robbed the Liberals of their overall
majority, which would in any case have been more nominal than real, for it was difficult to think of any issue (and certainly not the dominant one of Ireland itself) on which all 333 Liberals could
have been got into the same division lobby.

Far more significant than this squabbling over the remnants of Tory or Liberal representation in Ireland, however, was the extent of the Parnellite victory. This was qualitative as well as
quantitative. They won 85 seats out of 103 in Ireland (and one in Liverpool), and they won them by overwhelming majorities. In the two divisions of Kilkenny, for instance, a relatively prosperous
and urbane Irish county, the Nationalist candidates each polled over 4000 votes, with their Tory opponents getting only 170 for one seat and 220 for the other. In the few Ulster seats which the
Nationalists contested, on the other hand, even in ultra-Protestant Antrim, they ran the Tory very close.

This overwhelming expression of Irish opinion made a profound impression upon Gladstone. It did not strike him like a thunderclap when the results came out because the anticipation of such a
development had affected his thinking at least since the early autumn. But expectation was one thing and the reality of counted votes another, and the clarity with which the Irish constituencies
had spoken was unmistakable. The solidity was such as to create a fear that virtually all the Irish MPs from the three southern and western provinces together with a sizeable minority from Ulster
might withdraw from Westminster and set up their own assembly in Dublin. Home Rule might be achieved by
secession without the constitutional covering of an imperial Act of
Parliament which preserved the theory of Westminster sovereignty. The choice, devastating for the fundamental tenets of Gladstonian Liberalism, would then have lain between military reconquest or
the acceptance of an illegal and revolutionary break-up of the United Kingdom.

That Gladstone’s thoughts had been much on the delicate hinge between law and popular demand is shown by the pattern of his reading that autumn. In October he read a lot of Irish
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history, contrasting the situation before and after what he had come to see as the ‘gigantic though excusable mistake’ of Pitt’s Act of Union.
In November and early December he was into Burke’s thoughts on the treatment of the American colonies and A. V. Dicey’s just published
Law of the Constitution
. Dicey was to be an
unyielding opponent of Home Rule, but his interest for Gladstone lay in his theory of the unfettered supremacy of Parliament and its right both to delegate to and to override subordinate
institutions.

Less theoretically Gladstone also studied the two Acts (of the Imperial Parliament) by which Canada led the way to what came to be called Dominion status. Here, however, part of the interest lay
in his method of procuring copies of the two Acts. On 9 October he wrote from Hawarden to ask Lord Richard Grosvenor if he would obtain for him the Canada Acts of 1840 and of 1867. Grosvenor
complied, although it was hardly a normal part of his Chief Whiply functions. Nor was Gladstone habitually without self-reliance in obtaining his vast intake of books and papers, parliamentary and
other. It is difficult to believe that this was not a coded message, effectively informing Grosvenor, to whom he was very attentive at the time, as not only his Whip but also the ambassador of the
Whigs to his court, that he was prepared to let Ireland follow where Canada had led. He ended this letter by saying: ‘I have been working on Ireland: & have got a speech in me, if I dare
speak it.’
²²

Although he was for the moment moving slowly and cautiously, Gladstone did not doubt that Ireland was in a potentially explosive state with a constitutional crisis overlaying yet another rent
crisis. One of the attractions of both Parnell’s and Gladstone’s own Home Rule schemes was that they would leave the new indigenous government to deal with rent and collect the interest
and repayments due on land purchase advances. Ethnic stresses would thus cease to compound agrarian ones. But all Gladstone’s private sources, from James Bryce, then Regius Professor of Civil
Law at Oxford, as well as Liberal MP for Aberdeen
and a constitutional expert of world repute, to E. G. Jenkinson, who as head of the Special Branch in Dublin had a more
worm’s-eye view, agreed upon the extreme fragility of the social and political fabric in Ireland. Gladstone knew that he was only in slack water so long as he was waiting to see if the
Tories, with his encouragement and promise of support, were willing to grasp an Irish solution. As soon as it became clear that they would not do so, he did not doubt his own urgent
responsibility.

There was another major consideration which weighed with him. Just as in his approach to his first government he was influenced by the thought, unusual for a British politician of the period,
that justice to Ireland was necessary for England’s European reputation, so after the experience of his second government and on the threshold of his third, he was powerfully influenced by an
equally unusual and sophisticated consideration. He thought that Irish violence and English reaction to it was corrupting the whole polity. The most analogous recent situation was
la sale
guerre
in Algeria of the late 1950s and its effect upon metropolitan France. Harcourt may have liked emulating Bonaparte’s Fouché, but Gladstone had hated being the first Prime
Minister since the post-Napoleonic Wars unrest to have a police bodyguard forced upon him. On a broader point he disliked having to introduce the closure and the guillotine into the House of
Commons in order to protect its proceedings from depredations of the disaffected Irish. He found he could not overcome Harcourt’s determination to use the Fenian threat to keep local
democratic control away from the Metropolitan Police. And he had to sponsor coercion bill after coercion bill which between them piled arbitrary powers upon the Viceroy and, even with as reputable
a figure as Spencer in charge, led to very messy cases like the Maamtrasna hangings.

Gladstone saw that the maintenance of the liberal state was incompatible with holding within its centralized grip a large disaffected community of settled mind. The result of the 1885 election
convinced him that the Irish mind was settled. The turn of the year convinced him that the Tories would do nothing. They preferred party unity to national interest. Up to this point at least
Gladstone acted with a rare statesmanship. His overwhelming desire was a quick settlement of the Irish question, which he had come to see, perhaps belatedly but with a strategic instinct which far
outweighed that of Salisbury or Chamberlain or Hartington, as an endemic poison to state and society. His only doubt was whether he had the continuing energy to carry through the new
policy. Such thoughts could give him moments of discouragement. But essentially he preferred action – even with exhaustion – to repose, and he could always persuade
himself that he should attempt one more stage of the perilous ascent which, as in Browning’s
Grammarian’s Funeral
, he saw as his life’s duty.

Unfortunately, at least from the end of 1885 onwards, while his presence and his rhetoric remained magnificent, he was far from surefooted. Like Peel he broke his party for a cause which
was greatly in the national interest. Unlike Peel, however, he failed to carry the cause. He paid the fee, but he missed the reward. What vast benefit for Britain would have followed from an Irish
settlement in the 1880s, thirty years before the Easter Rising. And how right – and generous – Gladstone was to see that the best chance of achieving it quickly was from a Conservative
government with his playing the not very exciting role of a Russell to Salisbury’s Peel. But Salisbury, who was a cynical pessimist as well as a skilled statesman, was not a Peel. The
opportunity passed to Gladstone, who had not sought it, and who responded with courage and passion but without a tactical dexterity to match his strategic vision.

S
CHISM AND
F
AILURE

G
LADSTONE CAME TO
L
ONDON
from Hawarden on 11 January 1886, ten days before the opening of the new Parliament and the need for
him to make a public pronouncement in response to the Queen’s Speech. The unusual amplitude of the cushion of time indicated his sense of both the difficulty and the importance of pending
moves. His habit, to the dismay of his whips and loyal lieutenants, had long been to arrive only at the last moment.

Even in that year of impending schism, however, he declined to summon an early meeting of the shadow Cabinet, or ‘conclave’ as he preferred to call it, and even more firmly dismissed
Lord Richard Grosvenor’s suggestion of his giving an eve-of-session dinner. He had never given such a dinner in opposition (as he had hardly previously been leader of the opposition this was
of doubtful relevance), and never, going back to the time of Peel, attended one, ‘
except
at Hartington’s’. Whenever, at this stage of his life, Gladstone’s memory
went back to Peel it was a certain indication that he was pulling rank or at least age. What he wanted to do, of course, was to deal with his colleagues one by one, and thus exclude the real
possibility, given how many of them were disposed to defect, that he might find himself corralled. Thus, on the evening of his arrival in London, he saw Dilke, Granville, Grosvenor and Harcourt
– all separately – and on the following day he saw Spencer, Chamberlain, Bright and Mundella, and Granville, Harcourt and Grosvenor for the second time. And on the two subsequent days
he introduced Kimberley, Derby, Ripon and Rosebery into the circle of consultation, as well as having a second go at Bright and Mundella, and both a second and a third go at Hartington.