Gladstone: A Biography (36 page)

In mid-May Lord Ellenborough, who had been intermittently President of the Board of Control since 1828, resigned from that office as a result of a dispute with Gladstone’s old Eton and
Christ Church contemporary Charles Canning, who was Governor-General in Calcutta. Indian affairs were at a crucial juncture, with the Mutiny only a few months over and the governor-generalship and
the presidency of the Board of Control about to be turned into respectively a viceroyalty and a secretaryship of state. Derby sent an envoy to offer Gladstone the vacancy, accompanying it with the
alternative offer of his old office of Colonial Secretary. This was presumably designed to cover the possibility
that he might be disposed to enter the government while
remaining unstirred with the challenge of India, a department of public affairs from which he remained almost wholly detached throughout his career. The offer was maladroitly made. It was confined
to Gladstone alone at that stage, for it was to fill a specific vacancy (but the Colonial Office alternative made rather a nonsense of that), although there were hints that other Peelites might be
brought in later, and more than a hint that Disraeli might be prepared to give up the leadership of the House of Commons to Graham. The existence of these nuances made it the more mysterious that
Derby (who always had a good relationship with Gladstone) did not see him himself rather than using Spencer Walpole, the Home Secretary, as an intermediary.

Three days later, having returned a negative but not perhaps totally door-slamming reply to Derby via Walpole, Gladstone received a more surprising but equally maladroit letter from Disraeli.
This was in sharp contrast with the coldly affected style of his ‘Exchequer robes and Downing Street furniture’ 1853 letters. Disraeli began without prefix and on a note of almost
gushing urgency:

Disraeli then deployed three or four points designed to show that he had always been prepared to behave unselfishly to promote the reunion of the Conservative party.

He then continued for another page before concluding, still in a gush: ‘Think of all this in a kindly spirit. These are hurried lines, but they are
heartfelt.’
²

G. W. E. Russell, devoted Gladstone acolyte and chronicler of his later life (Russell, nephew of Lord John and himself an MP and junior minister, was born only in 1853) interpreted this letter
(in a short, hagiographic but often perceptive biography of Gladstone which was published in 1891) as a coldly machiavellian ploy by Disraeli to turn Gladstone into his creature, with ‘the
satisfaction of knowing that the one contemporary statesman whose powers and ambition were equal to his own was subordinated, in all probability for ever, to his imperious will’.
³
This was ludicrous. Disraeli’s motives may well have been mixed, but there was more (possibly self-deceiving) spontaneity than plotting about them, and he
would never have been so foolish as to believe that he could permanently turn Gladstone into a subordinate.

What is certain, however, is that Disraeli’s letter was not well directed to achieving its immediate objective of getting Gladstone into the government. The flattery was too transparent,
the attempt to persuade him that he could be Canning to Disraeli’s Castlereagh (was Disraeli suggesting that he might follow Castlereagh in committing suicide?) was too blatant an appeal to
Gladstone’s ambition rather than his duty. Above all, however, Gladstone was not going to have Disraeli lecturing him about ‘a Power, greater than ourselves’. His reply was much
more superficially courteous but fundamentally just as chilling as Disraeli’s 1853 brush-off:

The ‘counsel’ which Gladstone took was with Aberdeen and the other members of the little band of Peelites, and the result, arrived at more or less unanimously
but on what all agreed was a narrow balance of considerations, was to confirm the negative. Thus passed Gladstone’s last sight of the shore of serving in a Conservative government. The
refusal was in a sense instinctive, but it gave Gladstone no sense of the exhilaration of freedom. He was beginning to feel the futility of his political position. Having played a material part in
bringing down Palmerston in February, he was inhibited from doing the same with the only practical alternative government. Yet he did not feel enough affinity to join it. It was the old
‘devil and the deep blue sea’ paradigm between Palmerston and Disraeli which afflicted him throughout the 1850s. He attempted to resolve (or at least to escape) it by retreating to
Hawarden for much of June and July and then by accepting an unlikely overseas mission for the autumn and winter which kept him abroad for four months.

That flaccid summer led him partly to fill the vacuum with what became the most famous recreational activity of the second half of his life. For 31 July 1858 one of his diary lines read:
‘Spent the afternoon in woodcutting & the like about the old Castle: my first lesson.’
⁵
Thereafter the felling of trees became a
central occupation. In Lord Randolph Churchill’s unforgettable phrase of a quarter of a century later, ‘The forest laments, in order that Mr Gladstone may perspire’.
⁶
There were another seven arboreal assaults during that August. One even took priority over accompanying Bishop Wilberforce (who was staying at Hawarden) to a
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel meeting at Mold.

In that third summer out of office, without even the compensation of having a clear thrust to oppose the government, there was something which Gladstone needed more than either an opportunity
for sweating or even a new subject for holiday studies, and that was some public occupation into which he could get his teeth. The morsel which he succeeded in masticating was the very modest one
of the string of a dozen islands which run down the west coast of Greece from Corfu to Zante, and the status in which he performed was that of a quasi-constitutional governor-general. The islands
had been made a British protectorate in an almost absent-minded disposition of the spoils of victory in 1815.

It was in several senses a preposterous undertaking. Edward Bulwer Lytton, the Colonial Secretary who got Gladstone to accept
the commission, was one of the most amateur of
all nineteenth-century politicians, which made it the more remarkable that he got Gladstone, who was the most accomplished and in that sense the most professional politician of the same period, to
agree to be temporarily one of his satraps.

Lytton, although primarily a novelist, was an MP for twenty-four years, first as an advanced reformer and then as a Conservative. His year as Colonial Secretary, which he became as a direct
result of Gladstone’s refusal, was his only experience of office. It was not, however, felt that he was showing gratitude towards Gladstone. Indeed the general view was that Gladstone by
going to Corfu was conferring a wholly bizarre favour upon the government rather than that they were discharging any obligation by offering him the appointment. All the Peelites except Newcastle,
who had much the worst judgement, were strongly against his accepting the mission. Graham thought it would ruin his career. Herbert, his ‘best friend’, was the most exasperated,
probably because he was the one who most minded Gladstone being away. Herbert thought Gladstone had got himself into ‘an infernal position’ and that he ‘really is not safe to go
about out of Lord Aberdeen’s room’. Aberdeen was calmer but thought him too ‘headstrong’ for the task.

It was of course precisely this headstrong quality which made him accept against all the advice, and indeed against all rational evaluation of the prospects. The chances of achievement, or
indeed its significance even if attained, would never have been adequate in the eyes of a calmly calculating politician of stature to compensate for the probability of failure and the possibility
of ridicule. Nonetheless sheer rashness would not have been enough on its own to send Gladstone off for nearly half a year to the eastern Adriatic. He needed some supporting motives, and there were
several available.

First, he loved the Mediterranean, both in romantic anticipation and in reality, and he had not been there for nearly eight years. He also thought a winter sojourn would be good for Catherine
Gladstone after the oppression of her sister’s death, and he planned that their sixteen-year-old daughter Agnes should also be of the party. Third, his head was still full of Homer, and an
odyssey of his own around the famous islands had much attraction. Fourth, he was always attracted by the Greek Orthodox Church, and the thought of seeing a whole new group of archbishops and
bishops with whom he could engage in theological and Christian reunion conversation was an intoxicating one. But, above all, he was disenchanted and even a little bored (a most unusual condition
for Gladstone) with the home political scene, and wanted a new stimulus, even if it was concerned only with the unpromising affairs of 250,000 people. Therefore, the idea
having first surfaced at the beginning of October, he was ready by the end of the month to give a definite acceptance. He was sworn in at Windsor on 5 November 1858 and he left London on the
8th.

Although his acceptance was definite, the offer to which he was giving this clear answer was itself a good deal less so. He was asked to go out as Commissioner Extraordinary and to report and
make recommendations to the government on the situation in the islands and the possible remedies. But there was already a High Commissioner there. Sir John Young was both a friend of
Gladstone’s from Eton and Christ Church days, and a senior man, being a Privy Counsellor and a former Chief Secretary for Ireland in the Aberdeen government. Gladstone said that he could have
had him recalled, and he was no doubt right. But he did not wish to do so. This rendered his own position ambiguous from the beginning.

Nor was his staff entirely satisfactory, although it was in a sense both high-powered and notable. As secretary of the mission he enlisted James (soon to be Sir James) Lacaita, his former
amanuensis at the time of his Neapolitan gaol investigations, who had since become a professor at King’s College, London. Arthur Gordon, the fourth and then twenty-nine-year-old son of
Aberdeen, who subsequently governed several colonies and ended as Lord Stanmore, also described himself as the secretary of the mission, but was intended to act more as an aide-decamp to
Gladstone. In the role he was lackadaisical and by the time they got to Brussels on the way out had already irritated Gladstone by casually making both of them late for dinner with the King of the
Belgians. His slackness eventually led to Gladstone steeling himself for a great scene of rebuke (he was of course torn between his regard for Aberdeen and his impatience with his son) and the
arrival of another ADC at the end of January.
⁴⁸

Lacaita was an altogether more serious adviser. Inevitably however he gave a somewhat italianate tilt to the delegation, and may have been responsible for Gladstone’s
decision to deliver all his major addresses in Italian. This was doubtfully good for comprehension and certainly not good for giving an impression of evenhandedness. For several centuries Venetian
influence had been dominant in the islands, and the upper classes, such as they were, were italianophone. But the demotic language was Greek, and the predominant sentiment was for
enosis
or
union with Athens. Gladstone had a lot of underlying sympathy with this philhellenism, but he was persuaded that it was not politically practical or opportune, and set himself the intractable task
of persuading (in Italian) the Greek-speaking population through their representatives in the Assembly (which had been set up in 1849) that this was so. The result was that he was regarded with
suspicion by the leaders of both the main currents of opinion. The proponents of
enosis
rejected his constitutional schemes, while the agents of British colonialism (above all the garrison,
and those who clustered under its shade), thought him a dangerous and ignorant native-lover. He was shocked by their lack of interest in Homer. They were even more shocked by his kissing the ring
of a Greek Orthodox bishop.