Gladstone: A Biography (90 page)

Gladstone, who had already made a speech which even Hamilton described as ‘more rattling perhaps than judicious’,
⁷
immediately
insisted that the Journals of the House should most unusually note the
nemine
contradicente result. This quick-footedness was due as much to tactics as to triumphalism. The next move lay
with the House of Lords, and Gladstone wished to subject them to as effective as possible a preliminary barrage. This was not because he wished to provoke a conflict between the two Houses. Others,
most notably Chamberlain, welcomed such a prospect, but Gladstone both feared a dispute which could endanger the hereditary principle and wanted the bill on the statute book as soon as possible. He
made the most strenuous efforts to maximize government support in the Lords. He even brought it home to Tennyson that there is no such thing as a free peerage. The Laureate, who eventually repaid
him with a chiding poem (‘Steersman, be not precipitate in thine act’) was at first loath to pay his debts with the harder currency of a vote. Eventually, however, after two Gladstone
letters to himself, as well as one to his son and another to his wife, he gave way ‘despite gout’.

The bishops, on whom Gladstone was equally pressing, were less trouble. After consultation with Benson of Canterbury he wrote to twelve of them, mainly those who had been his own nominees to the
bench, and was gratified that all but Stubbs of Chester (and of medieval charters) sent friendly replies within two days. In fact ten of the twelve, plus another two (Thomson of York and Temple of
Exeter, later of Canterbury) whom Gladstone had not approached, voted for the bill. Only one bishop (Ellicott of the then united see of Gloucester and Bristol) voted against. Altogether it was much
more favourable an episcopal performance than anything which Asquith was able to achieve in the disputes between the two Houses of a generation later. Gladstone, of course, did not attempt to crack
a party whip over their mitres, but concentrated, with different letters tailor-made for each bishop, on the high constitutional issues and the dangers to the House of Lords which were
involved.

There was also a good turnout of Liberal peers, effectively for the last time. There was never subsequently any major party vote in the House of Lords before life peerages came in seventy-four
years later in which
the Conservative majority was not overwhelming. It was an end-of-term speech day for the old Liberal-Whig party in which those participating did not
realize that it was not merely the term which was ending but the school which in its existing form was to be shut down. Nevertheless the Tories had a majority of 205 to 146 for Salisbury’s
motion of outright rejection. However, quite a few of the 205 thought that Salisbury’s ‘leap in the dark’ had been rash and were muttering that they were not prepared to vote for
a second rejection. This was moreover likely to be a matter of early practical import, for the government’s plan, announced by Gladstone two days after the Lords vote, was to bring Parliament
back in late October, to re-present the franchise bill, and to follow it with a redistribution of seats bill provided there was a scheme sufficiently agreed between the two sides to offer the
prospect of reasonable parliamentary progress.

Compromise was therefore lurking in the background right from the moment of the Lords’ intransigence. But before this could come to the surface a noisy overture of denunciation and
counter-denunciation between the politicians had to be played out. And while this was going on in public a still more intensive and at the beginning equally implacable exchange was taking place in
private between the Queen and Gladstone. The doubts of some of the more moderate Tory peers about the wisdom of Salisbury’s lead were in no way shared by their Sovereign. The Queen thought
that the Lords had every right to reject the bill, opined that they represented ‘the true feeling of the country’ better than did the Commons, and acceded only reluctantly to the
proposal for an autumn session, saying that she thought ‘
a more fair & judicious
course’ would have been to seek the opinion of the country by dissolution, thereby provoking
Gladstone to remark to Hamilton that the logic of her argument really led to the abolition of the House of Commons.

Moreover the Queen settled down to a summer in which she appeared to read obsessively every speech made by a member of the government, senior or junior, and many by backbenchers as well, and
write and complain to Gladstone about them. Between 10 July and the end of August he had to write to her no less than sixteen letters, amounting to a total of nearly 4000 words, wearily explaining,
excusing, and occasionally half apologizing for what she regarded as the excesses of his colleagues.

Mainly it was Chamberlain who was to blame, but Dilke and even Herbert Gladstone, the GOM’s thirty-year-old son, attracted a share of the opprobrium. The Prime Minister on the whole showed
admirable
restraint under this burden, but he did permit himself a late-July expostulation that: ‘Your Majesty will readily believe that he [Mr Gladstone] has neither the
time nor the eyesight to make himself acquainted by careful perusal with all the speeches of his colleagues. . . .’
⁸
Nor was he himself spared
her partisan criticism. When he made a few speeches in Scotland in mid-September, some of them admittedly a little close to Balmoral, she wrote to her private secretary, ‘. . . the Queen is
utterly
disgusted with his
stump
oratory so unworthy of his position – almost under her very nose’.
⁹
Fortunately the
emollient – and Liberal – Ponsonby, so far from passing this on, wrote to Gladstone wishing him rest ‘after your most successful visit to the North’.
¹⁰

Despite or perhaps half because of these trials and burdens Gladstone found time in mid-August to write a most formidable memorandum for the Queen. He heralded its importance by referring to it
in a covering note as ‘a paper which goes beyond the ordinary limits of his official submissions’. The core was contained in the following paragraphs:

Sir Henry Ponsonby’s letter of acknowledgement indicated that this powerful document may have had some favourable effect upon the Queen. October produced a spate of oratory. Salisbury was
uncompromising in Glasgow. The appearance of Randolph Churchill and Stafford Northcote in Birmingham provoked a riot (from the organization of which Chamberlain was not far distant). Hartington,
Harcourt and Mundella addressed a reform demonstration ‘under the windows’ at Chatsworth (that was perhaps even more the finale of the Whig–Liberal party than the July vote in the
House of Lords). Hartington’s speech there was robust, although it neither incurred the censure of the Queen nor rivalled Chamberlain’s provocations about ‘the insolent
pretensions of an hereditary caste’. It was John Morley, however, not then a member of the government but a rising backbencher, who coined the neatest of the anti-peers slogans. ‘Mend
them or end them,’ he said, must be the policy, thereby going far beyond Gladstone’s attempt to confine the controversy to the enormity of the Lords’ actions and to avoid raising
issues of their composition or powers.

Then, almost suddenly, at the end of the month the mood changed. Even the Queen (whether or not influenced by Gladstone’s memorandum) became eager for an accommodation, and somewhat
critical of Salisbury’s intransigence. ‘The atmosphere is full of compromise,’ Edward Hamilton wrote on 30 October. Gladstone himself was determined to get his bill, but he became
less and less attracted by an upending of the House of Lords. He recoiled from the threat (and still more the reality) of a mass creation of peers such as King William IV had been forced to agree
to in the 183–2 struggle, and he disliked equally the idea of a root-and-branch reform to make a more rational second chamber. The Conservatives were also doubtful whether they could hold
their forces for a second rejection. The result was some rather fumbling negotiations on the form of a redistribution scheme between Hicks Beach (soon to be leader of the House of Commons and
Chancellor of the Exchequer) and Hartington. They were fumbling because it was never clear to what extent Hicks Beach spoke with Salisbury’s authority and because Hartington (and maybe Beach
too) had a far from perfect understanding of the intricacies of redistribution.

The relevant figure who did have such an understanding was the President of the Local Government Board, Charles Dilke. It was his
finest hour. With ambitious forethought he
had begun working on a scheme in early July. He brought its heads before the Cabinet on 9 August and got a general blessing subject to the recess supervision of a Cabinet committee of six, of which
he was appointed chairman. With typical but not ill-founded Dilke arrogance he then commented: ‘I soon got rid of the committee and went on by myself with Lambert.’ (Sir John Lambert
had been an authoritative permanent secretary of the Local Government Board until he retired in 1882; Dilke brought him back for this special service.) As a result he was able to send Gladstone a
detailed plan on 20 September. This was less radical in several respects than Dilke would have liked. He felt he had to pay regard to Gladstone’s instinctive conservatism on the one hand and
on the other to Hartington’s concern for Whig electoral interests (which broadly meant that Whigs should not be overwhelmed by Radicals in the choice of Liberal candidates).

On the first ground he did not dare to touch university representation or other forms of plural voting. On the second ground two-member constituencies (a great Whig attachment) were to be
maintained in the counties, except for Yorkshire and Lancashire which were curiously regarded as urban throughout. The other counties were to be divided for the first time. Fifty-six boroughs of
under 10,000 were to lose their separate representation, and thirty of under 40,000 their second member. The seats made available by this culling of the remaining semi-rotten boroughs were to be
distributed partly to London (which was advanced from twenty-two to fifty-five seats), partly to the under-represented industrial boroughs, and partly to the counties, which for the first time were
to exceed the strength of the borough representation. Ireland, Scotland and Wales were to continue to be somewhat over-represented, but within that over-representation were to have a pattern of
seats roughly the same as in England.

With his scheme on the table and a mastery of the subject in his head, Dilke was dominant, both within the government and with the Tories in the negotiations of the autumn. ‘Chamberlain
and I and Mr Gladstone were the only three who understood the subject, so that the others were unable to fight except in the form known as swearing at large,’
¹²
he wrote in September. He was for once modest in listing Gladstone and Chamberlain, both of whose knowledge was sketchy, as equal experts with himself. And he had another
fortuitous bonus which they did not at the time share, which was that he had established a good relationship with Salisbury, who was always a mixture of sour and sweet, through
membership of the star-studded Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes (it included the Prince of Wales and Cardinal Manning as well as Salisbury), over which Dilke as
the departmental minister surprisingly presided.

The three key meetings between government and opposition were in late November, by which time the House of Commons had re-passed the franchise bill and the House of Lords had acknowledged the
new atmosphere by letting it through on second reading, although retaining the power to maul it at later stages if the talks went wrong. They did not. Although the negotiating cast changed somewhat
from meeting to meeting, the main business was done by a quintet of Gladstone, Hartington and Dilke on the government side and Salisbury and Northcote from the opposition. There were a number of
modifications to Dilke’s September scheme. Towns up to 15,000 (rather than 10,000) were merged into their counties; the Tories at one stage, with a Disraelian swoop, proposed going to
25,000.

Furthermore the counties and the big towns were all divided into single-member districts. This was the real gain for the Tories. It laid the foundation of ‘villa Conservatism’ and
the safe Tory seats of the Home Counties and the prosperous suburbs in and around the big provincial cities. On this basis, subject to a few loose ends which he and Dilke subsequently tied up,
Salisbury was willing to settle and carried Northcote along with him. There were at least compensating benefits, taking the two bills together, for Gladstone and Dilke. Hartington’s position
was less happy, for the effective end of the two-member constituency meant the end also of the habit of running a Whig and a Radical in double harness. The Whig interest, which was thought to be
dependent upon this tradition (for if a choice had to be made the Radical was likely to be preferred by the selection committee) was only lightly compensated by a last-minute arrangement for about
twenty boroughs outside London. If they had previously possessed and were to retain two members, they were allowed to remain as undivided constituencies. However, Hartington was in no position to
stand out. Having urged the linkage of redistribution with franchise extension, and representing the forces of mild and aristocratic Liberalism, it would have been quite ridiculous for him to have
opposed agreement and insisted on continuing the struggle against the peers. He may have been out-manoeuvred, and the perforation along which the 1886 tear was to occur may have been given a few
more holes, but he had no option.