Gladstone: A Biography (28 page)

In voting for Conservative principles, however, he took good care to do so on a motion and in circumstances which would give him plenty of Whig and Radical allies. That was the point of
Disraeli’s jibe about coalitions. When Gladstone left the House at four o’clock in the morning he may have proclaimed Conservative principles but he had destroyed the only flicker of a
Conservative government between 1846 and 1858. It was therefore surprising and perhaps insensitive that on his way home he went into the Carlton Club (as now exclusively Conservative and then in
Pall Mall) to write a letter.
³⁵

That visit provoked no reported reaction – the club was presumably fairly empty at 4.30 in the morning, even after a critical division – but when Gladstone next went into the club,
after dinner on 20 December, and was sitting reading, he was mildly harassed by a baying group of young members who threatened to throw him across the road into the Reform Club, where, they
insisted, he properly belonged. However, he clung on to his Carlton membership for another seven years, despite or perhaps because of the fact that in 1855, when he had turned against a
continuation of the Crimean War, the Duke of Beaufort tried to have him expelled. Eventually, in 1860 when he had passed over most watersheds away from Conservatism, he allowed his membership to
lapse. It was probably the only club in which he ever felt at home. He had been a member for a long time, and it was very convenient for his various residences in Carlton Gardens and Carlton House
Terrace. At the end of his life he was a member of the Athenaeum and of the United Universities Club, as well as being the literal founder – he laid the
foundation stone
– of the National Liberal Club. But he never belonged to the Reform Club or to the Whig citadel of Brooks’s where, however, he was frequently entertained by his private secretaries in
his later governments.

When he got home from his Carlton Club letter-writing he managed only two hours’ sleep: ‘My nervous system was too powerfully acted upon by the scene of last night. A recollection of
having mismanaged a material point (by omission) came into my head when I was half awake between 7 and 8 and utterly prevented my getting more rest.’
⁹
Then he was agitated by the fact that
The Times
that morning contained only ‘a mangled abbreviation’ of his speech. (It might be thought a feat far beyond
modern technology that it contained even the semblance of a report of a speech delivered in the middle of the night.) He was somewhat mollified by the following day’s edition containing a
laudatory comparison between his style and that of Disraeli.

In the subsequent days Gladstone could contemplate with increasing satisfaction the repercussions of his oration. Indeed, one reason the atmosphere had been so charged in the Carlton Club on the
evening of Monday 20 December was that the government had that afternoon announced its resignation, Derby with petulance in the Lords and Disraeli with good humour in the Commons.

Aberdeen became Prime Minister of a Whig–Peelite coalition. Russell was a used-up man and the Queen and the Prince were set against Palmerston. So a Whig premier was effectively excluded. These
two eagles of Whiggery occupied the two senior secretaryships of state, but Palmerston was kept out of the Foreign Office because of his rashness over Prince Louis Napoleon (who had in the meantime
become the Emperor Napoleon III) and Russell was kept out of the Home Office because of the mess he had made of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. So they each went to the department for which they
were less suited. For the rest the Peelites, who provided barely a tenth of the new government’s parliamentary backing, got the pickings. Apart from the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of
the Exchequer, they filled the War Office, the Admiralty and the Colonial Office, as well as holding the Privy Seal.

For the chancellorship Russell as the leader of the Whigs would have preferred Graham (who, however, preferred the Admiralty), and Delane of
The Times
tried to promote Charles Wood, who
had been at the Treasury from 1846 to 1851. The most resolute for Gladstone were the Queen and Prince Albert. Aberdeen was content to fall in with their
wish, and Gladstone for
once accepted without demur or agonizing or conditions. In reality it would have been nonsense to have had anyone else. He had destroyed the previous budget and he obviously had to make the next
one. After two and a half days at Hawarden, where he arrived in a hurricane at five o’clock on Christmas morning, he went to Windsor to be sworn in on 28 December, one day short of his
forty-third birthday. His introspective musings on the year which was past, while mildly self-critical, were only a tithe in length (and self-abasement) of what had been his recent annual habit. It
was a sign of his absorption, for the moment at least, in public business. He prepared to engage with the nation’s finances, the control of which he was to dominate for most of the next
twenty years. But first he engaged between January and March 1853 with Disraeli about the furniture of 11 Downing Street (then numbered 12) and the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s robe.

Disraeli had paid his Whig predecessor, Wood, £787 12s 6d for the furniture of the house, and had subsequently got a refund from the Office of Works of £479 16s for that part of it
which related to the public reception rooms. He therefore wanted £307 16s 6d from Gladstone for the rest. (The figures help to put Don Pacifico’s claims into perspective.) Gladstone
thought that Disraeli should get the money from the Office of Works, which under a new disposition had assumed responsibility (subject to charging ministers for wear and tear in the private rooms)
for the whole. Disraeli thought that this should apply only to future transfers, knew that the Office of Works was dilatory and was probably not averse to a private
casus belli
with Gladstone, to
whom he had hardly been endeared by the events of the previous December. He may also have wished to create a diversion under the smoke of which he could hope to escape from the obligation to
transfer the Chancellor’s robes, which he believed had been made for Pitt, and which he wished to keep.

As a result there occurred the most childish epistolatory quarrel. Gladstone wrote courteously if stiffly on 21 January (‘My dear Sir. . . . I remain, my dear Sir, faithfully yours, W. E.
Gladstone’) proposing Office of Works payment for the furniture (on which point he was probably in the wrong) and requesting the transfer of the robes on the normal terms. Disraeli replied
only on 26 February in nominally courteous but even stiffer terms (‘I have the honour to remain, dear Sir, your obedient servant, B. Disraeli’) rejecting the role of the Office of Works
and ignoring the robes. Gladstone wrote again two days later, sticking a little woodenly to his two points. Disraeli on 6 March mounted
into the high and disdainful saddle of
the third person. ‘Mr Disraeli regrets very much that he is obliged to say that Mr Gladstone’s letter repudiating his obligation to pay for the furniture of the official residence is
not satisfactory. . . . Mr Disraeli is unwilling to prolong this correspondence. As Mr Gladstone seems to be in some perplexity on the subject, Mr Disraeli recommends him to consult Sir Charles
Wood,
³⁶
who is a man of the world.’

Gladstone the next day wrote a pained reply, also in the third person. He agreed to pay ‘without in any degree admitting the justice of Mr Disraeli’s assumptions’, and by
omission gave up on the robes. He concluded: ‘It is highly unpleasant to Mr. W. E. Gladstone to address Mr. Disraeli without the usual terms of courtesy, but he abstains from them only
because he perceives that they are unwelcome.’
¹⁰
Gladstone sent his cheque, but Disraeli kept his robes, wore them during his two subsequent
chancellorships, and left them as treasures of Hughenden Manor, his Buckinghamshire house.

Gladstone had to have a new set made, which descended without difficulty until Sir William Harcourt in 1886. Harcourt, however, took these ‘Gladstone’ robes with him when the
government went out. Lord Randolph Churchill therefore had another new set made, but Goschen, who quickly succeeded him, declined to buy and preferred to have yet another set made. The
‘Churchill’ robes were subsequently worn only by Winston Churchill in 1924–9. These ‘Goschen’ robes appear to be the ones still in use today. There have therefore been
at least three breaks in the apostolic succession since Pitt, even assuming the uncertain fact that Disraeli’s robes were Pitt’s.

On 3 February, robeless and with the furniture still unpaid for, Gladstone had moved into 12 (11) Downing Street, which house or its next-door neighbour he was to have at his disposal for
twenty-two of his remaining forty-five years of life. He had already overcome the first obstacle to the success of his chancellorship, which was the need to get re-elected by Oxford. This was more
than a formality, for clerical opinion was distinctly unenthusiastic both about the defeat of the short-lived Conservative government, in which event Gladstone had played so notable a part, and
about the Peelite decision to coalesce with the Whigs. Archdeacon Denison of Taunton, Gladstone’s senior by a year
at both Eton and Christ Church and one of his leading
High Church mentors, had written him a terrible letter on the day after Christmas. ‘I wish to use few words’, Denison wrote, ‘where every word I write is so bitterly distressing
to me, and must be little less so, I cannot doubt, to yourself and to many others whom I respect and love. I have to state to you, as one of your constituents, that from this time I can place no
confidence in you as representative of the university of Oxford, or as a public man.’
^11
37

Denison was naturally disputatious, and was soon to get involved in a quarrel with his diocesan of Bath and Wells which led to his being prosecuted before an ecclesiastical court, but on the
occasion of his letter to Gladstone, unattractively though he licked his lips over the pain it caused, he had some legitimate grievance against the author of
The State in its Relations with the
Church
, the extremism of which work had contributed to Gladstone being elected for Oxford in the first place. Now Gladstone had just joined a government which was overwhelmingly dependent on
Whig parliamentary votes, of which the Prime Minister was a Scots Presbyterian, the Foreign Secretary, who was also leader of the House of Commons, was the nominator to Hereford of the allegedly
heretical Bishop Hampden as well as the heir to all the Erastian and despoiling traditions of the Russells, and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (important for ecclesiastical patronage) was
the Radical Sir William Molesworth, who was accused of being a Socinian, which was more or less the equivalent of a Unitarian.

At the by-election which followed from Gladstone’s appointment as Chancellor, a standard-bearer for these grievances was found in the shape of Dudley Montagu Perceval, son of the
assassinated Prime Minister of 1812. Spencer Perceval is not (except for his end) one of the most remembered heads of government, but he was a model both of statesmanship and of amiability compared
with his son, who mounted a scurrilous but damaging campaign against Gladstone. He polled 892 to the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s 1022, the narrow result a temporary relief but an early
harbinger of the mutual disenchantment of the University constituency and its member which was to end in divorce twelve years later.

Once this hurdle was surmounted, even if narrowly, Gladstone got
down to the long straight run of preparation for his first budget, which he presented on Monday, 18 April.
Even by his own Herculean standards he worked unusually hard in those spring weeks, although Morley’s claim that he put in ‘thirteen, fourteen, fifteen hours a day’ at his
Treasury desk seems an exaggeration. Most nights Gladstone needed seven or eight hours of sleep, and he continued to dine out frequently, to give almost daily Latin lessons to one or other of his
two elder sons, to go to two if not three church services on Sundays, to attend Cabinets, to discharge his normal House of Commons voting duties, and even to do a little ‘rescue’ work.
So Morley’s arithmetic does not quite add up, even though Gladstone compensated for his excursions into both social and sinful London by many hours of subsequent late-night work on income tax
or customs duties.

The budgetary prospect in the spring of 1853 was more strategically challenging than tactically menacing. Nineteenth-century Chancellors, at least in peacetime, were subject to none of the
short-term pressures by which, in the decline of the British economy, their post-1930 successors have been frequently buffeted. In the 1850s there was no danger of a weak budget leading to a run on
sterling. Furthermore, and with greater particularity, the short-term financial prospect had become relatively easy. The official estimates on which Disraeli had framed his December 1852 proposals
were pessimistically false, a somewhat persistent Treasury habit. On the basis of them he had to perform some considerable sleights of hand to pretend that he had a surplus, and on those premisses
Gladstone had been right in criticizing its hollowness. But by the spring the out-turn had produced a genuine surplus of £2½ million and Gladstone had no immediate problem.

The challenge which he had to meet, if he was to be a major Chancellor, was at once a more subtle and a longer-term one. Whig financial policy between 1846 and 1851 had been unimpressive, and
Charles Wood, the Chancellor throughout these years, had not compared in influence within the government with Russell himself, with Palmerston as Foreign Secretary, with George Grey as Home
Secretary or with Lansdowne as Lord President of the Council. (The low regard in which his chancellorship was held did not, however, prevent Wood as President of the Board of Control from being a
querulous Cabinet critic of Gladstone’s 1853 proposals.) Then Disraeli, in his two 1852 budgets, had been looking more for a smokescreen under which his party could escape from the incubus of
protection than for a rational framework of finance for the country. The result was a series of
unconnected improvisations. The second Disraeli budget particularly had been a
conjuror’s rather than a philosopher’s or even a political economist’s budget. That at least was the ground on which Gladstone had destroyed it.