Dilke (30 page)

In the middle of September Dilke crossed to Paris to await the arrival of Mrs. Pattison. There had been some dispute as to whether, in the circumstances, the wedding had not better be celebrated in France than in England. Eventually
Chamberlain came down decisively in favour of a marriage in London. The original plan of a ceremony in the cathedral at Oxford had been abandoned, and Chelsea parish church was substituted. They were married there on October 3rd, Dilke having returned from Paris two days before, and Mrs. Pattison having followed him twenty-four hours later. Chamberlain was best man, but in other respects the ceremony was as austere as Dilke's first marriage, nearly fourteen years before.

After the wedding the Dilkes did not use 76, Sloane Street for some time. They went first to the Oatlands Park Hotel, near Weybridge, and remained there, except for occasional visits to London (during one of which they stayed, a little strangely, at Bailey's Hotel) until the beginning of November. They then returned to Sloane Street and Dilke began his election campaign. His constituents had remained friendly, and he found it possible to abandon the earlier plan, by which, if the case should not have been heard when the campaign began, the chairman of his local Liberal Association should fight in his stead. His meetings were well attended and enthusiastic, and the result satisfactory. Under Dilke's own redistribution act Chelsea had become a one-member seat with its boundaries roughly the same as those of the present constituency. In those days there were proportionately many more working-class electors within these boundaries than there are to-day. The new borough, therefore, offered Dilke a fair radical prospect, although it was a seat which he would have done well to win even without the complication of the divorce suit.
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He had shed the Tory wastes of South Kensington, but he had also lost the electorally more encouraging areas of Hammersmith and Kensal Green.

Furthermore, the big towns—particularly London, Liverpool and Manchester—swung heavily against Gladstone at this election. A few days before the beginning of the campaign,
Parnell, after several weeks of hesitation, decided that he preferred the prospect held out by Lord Salisbury's Newport speech to that which emerged from Mr. Gladstone's tortuous Hawarden letter-writing, and instructed the Irish in England to vote against the Liberals. This decision is generally thought to have swung up to forty urban seats to the Tories. In the counties the movement was the other way. The newly enfranchised electors were not much interested in Ireland, and they went mostly for the party which had given them the vote. On balance, however, the Liberals emerged from the election in a weaker position than they had achieved in 1880. Then they had 347 seats and an absolute majority of 42 over any possible alliance of Conservatives and Irishmen. In 1885 they had 335 seats, which was enough to equal, but not to surpass, the combined Tory and Parnellite vote. In Chelsea, Dilke polled 4,291 against 4,116 for his Conservative opponent.

This result was declared on November 25th. Some of the others dragged on until the third week in December. But the general pattern was clear by the beginning of the month and a most complicated manoeuvring for position then set in.

During the week-end of December 5th-7th the radicals—Chamberlain, Dilke, Shaw Lefevre and Morley—met in conclave at Highbury. Chamberlain was in a difficult mood. He had brooded over his grievances against the Irish for six months, he was disappointed and embittered by the result of the election (which added to his anti-Irish feeling), and he felt no glimmer of loyalty towards Gladstone. Indeed his opportunist pro-Gladstone feeling, which he had shared with Dilke during the previous summer, had largely evaporated by the early autumn. Correspondence in September convinced him that Gladstone would never accept the greater part of the radical programme. Furthermore, the G.O.M. was becoming much too preoccupied with Ireland for Chamberlain's post-Warrington taste. These suspicions were not lessened when Gladstone unexpectedly summoned Chamberlain to spend a few days with him at Hawarden in early
October.
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The visit was not a great success, for both the habits of life and methods of thought of the two men were too dissimilar for easy contact. It ended without Gladstone having confided his new thoughts about Ireland to his guest.

When the radical cabal assembled, therefore, Chamberlain's mood was one of unwillingness to promote a third Gladstone premiership. He thought it better for the Liberals to sort out their differences in opposition than to take office dependent upon Irish votes. Indeed he had written to Dilke a week before saying, “I should like the Tories to be in for a couple of years before we try again, and then I should ‘go for the Church.'”
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This offered no basis for agreement at Highbury. No one except Chamberlain himself wanted to hitch the radical wagon to the star of disestablishment, and Morley at least was preparing to give enthusiastic support to Gladstone's Irish policy.

Dilke, however, was moved by the Highbury discussions to give public expression in an extreme form to the Chamberlain view. On December 12th he addressed the Eleusis Club in Chelsea and argued strongly, on radical grounds, in the favour of keeping the Tories in. This meant shelving Gladstone, and it directly provoked a counter move from the leader's camp. Gladstone himself remained isolated at Hawarden, but on December 14th Herbert Gladstone went to London and, on his own initiative, announced to the press his father's conversion to Home Rule. This flying of the “Har-warden Kite,” as it was known, was directly attributed to Dilke's speech, and further exacerbated Gladstone-Chamberlain relations. By the turn of the year Chamberlain had come down still more decidedly in opposition to his nominal leader. “For myself I would sooner the Tories were in for the next ten years,” he wrote to Dilke on December 27th, “than agree to what I think the ruin of the country.”
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What accounts for the sudden switch of the radicals between the summer when they wanted to keep Gladstone
because he could deal with Ireland, and the autumn when they wanted to get rid of him for the same reason? In Dilke's case it was not due to a sharp revulsion from Home Rule. Indeed he subsequently attributed his Eleusis Club speech to his failure to realise “how far Mr. Gladstone was willing to go in the Home Rule direction” and to a consequent underestimate of the chances of “securing the real support of the Irish party.”
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This was an
ex post facto
explanation, although supported by the facts that at the Eleusis Club Dilke went rather too far for Chamberlain, but that six days later, when he had seen the “Hawarden Kite” and knew of an even more decisive letter which Gladstone had written to Hartington, he did not go far enough. In this second speech Dilke announced “that we ought not to allow ourselves to be driven either forward or backward from the principles we have put forward with regard to Ireland, and that our course should be to continue to propose the measures which we had previously proposed without reference to the Parnellite support of conservative candidates.”
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This earned from Chamberlain the cool comment: “Your own speech was most judicious.”

Chamberlain was able to carry Dilke with him in his fear that Gladstone's obsession with the Irish problem might lead to the formation of a purely “Home Rule” government which would have no time for constructive radicalism at home, but not in his growing opposition to Home Rule as such.

What emerges most clearly from their interchanges of this period, however, is not the extent to which Dilke was in agreement or disagreement with Chamberlain but the collapse of his influence. This was partly because he was not consulted by the leadership. Gladstone, who in the previous few years had conducted most of his negotiations with the radical wing through Dilke, began to deal with Chamberlain instead. In the early autumn correspondence between Hawarden and Highbury had become much more frequent, even if not noticeably more intimate; but this led more to misunderstanding than to a meeting of minds.

Much of the decline in Dilke's influence, however, came less from the actions of others than from the growth of his own abstraction. He had always been a less profuse letter-writer than Chamberlain, but this had never previously made him a passive participant in the correspondence. It had been his habit to return hard, sharp answers, forcibly expressing his own point of view. But from the letters of this autumn there emerges the impression of a flood of tentative views from Chamberlain breaking over the head of an almost indifferent Dilke. The importance of this can hardly be exaggerated. With Dilke either indifferent or making occasional rather thoughdess interventions—as at the Eleusis Club—Chamberlain's old dislike of Gladstone and new dislike of the Irish were given a free rein. The consequences of this determined the course of English politics for the next twenty years.

On New Year's Day, 1886, Chamberlain arranged a quadripartite meeting at Devonshire House. The other participants were Hartington, Harcourt and Dilke. Dilke described the meeting in the following terms:

“I did not see my way clearly, and did not say much; the other three arguing strongly against Mr. Gladstone's conduct in having sent Herbert Gladstone to a news agency to let out his views for the benefit of the provincial press in such a way as to put pressure on his colleagues. It seemed to me that the pressure, though no doubt unfair and indefensible, had nevertheless been pretty successful, as neither Harcourt nor Chamberlain saw their way to opposing Mr. Gladstone, although both of them disliked his scheme. Hartington only said that he ‘thought he could not join a Government to promote any such scheme.'”
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At this stage, therefore, the alignment was that Hartington was firmest in his opposition, that Chamberlain and Harcourt were disaffected but more uncertain, and that Dilke was most inclined, although perhaps without enthusiasm, to go along with Gladstone. Chamberlain was forging no alliance with
Hartington, but the mere fact that the meeting had taken place showed that he had moved a little since December 17th, when he could still write: “The Whigs are our greatest enemies.”

On January 11th Gladstone at last came to London. A few days later there was a meeting of Liberal leaders at 21, Carlton House Terrace, where the G.O.M., always ready to borrow a house, had temporarily established himself. Chamberlain was out of London, but Dilke attended, although, in his own view, he was not welcomed by Gladstone.

“I know you think me over-sensitive, but you've not tried what it is,” he wrote to Chamberlain on January 18th. “After Hartington's second very kind note I thought I ought to go, but I was not wanted; I got there with Grosvenor and Harcourt, and I heard Mr. G. whisper to Harcourt, ‘This is very awkward. ‘That's a pleasant position to be put in. . . . Please let Harcourt know that I did not thrust myself in at 21, Carlton House Terrace, but went on two very kind letters of Hartington, which grew out of the Devonshire House meeting.”
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Despite this discouraging reception Dilke attended another similar meeting of ex-Cabinet ministers at Lord Granville's on January 21st. By this time Parliament had met, the Queen's Speech had been presented, and Salisbury seemed prepared to carry on. Chamberlain and Dilke would still like to have kept the Conservatives in for some time—a course which was obviously in Dilke's personal interest and which would have postponed Chamberlain's final decision about Ireland—but they decided that this was no longer possible. The best that could be done was to avoid turning the Government out on an Irish amendment. With this end in view the two radicals drew up the “three acres and a cow” amendment, which was quickly accepted by the meeting on January 21st. Five days later it was moved by Jesse Collings. Gladstone was then convinced that it was his duty to return to office. Earlier that day Hicks Beach had announced a new coercion bill. This led Gladstone to tell Harcourt that he was prepared to go
ahead without Hartington, without Chamberlain, if necessary without anybody. Late that night the Collings amendment was put to the vote, and although Hartington, Goschen, James and fifteen other Liberals voted with the Tories, the Government was defeated by seventy-four. Salisbury resigned on the following day, and Gladstone kissed hands for the third time on January 30th.

Neither the weakness of his parliamentary position nor the magnitude of his Irish task made the new Prime Minister zealous in his cultivation of the radicals. Perhaps he thought it was enough to have John Morley as Chief Secretary. Chamberlain was first offered the Admiralty, but was reluctant to accept, partly because he was unattracted by the post itself and partly because he was asked to commit himself to an enquiry into the possibility of Home Rule, although to nothing more. On the following day, after consultation with Dilke, who was clear that he ought to join in some capacity, Chamberlain saw Gladstone and asked for the Colonial Office. The Prime Minister's reply was a classical example of his ineptitude in dealing with Chamberlain. “Oh!” he said with surprise, “a Secretary of State.” “Chamberlain is furious and will never forgive the slight,”
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Dilke recorded. Nevertheless, without forgiveness and with personal resentment added to political misgiving, Chamberlain did join the Government. On February 1st he accepted Dilke's old post as President of the Local Government Board.

No offer was made to Dilke himself. His case was due to be heard as soon as February 12th, but Gladstone made no effort to hold a post vacant against the possibility that his name might be cleared. Instead he wrote a courteous but unyielding letter.

February 2nd, 1886

My dear Dilke,

I write you, on this first day of my going regularly to my arduous work, to express my profound regret that any circumstances of the moment should deprive me of the opportunity and the hope of enlisting on behalf of a new
Government the great capacity which you have proved in a variety of spheres and forms for rendering good and great service to Grown and country.