Gladstone: A Biography (92 page)

It could be said that he was too tired to resign. Resignation, certainly of a Prime Minister from his own Cabinet, would be an energy-demanding process, and Gladstone for once was at the limit
of his reserves. So he acquiesced. Admiral Beauchamp Seymour was authorized
to send Arabi an ultimatum. If he did not desist from strengthening his forts, a bombardment would
commence. Arabi sent no reply, and on 11 July British naval guns pounded the Alexandria waterfront for ten and a half hours. There were not vast casualties (although when Arabi then withdrew from
the city there followed substantial death and destruction from rioting), but the action was rough, and was widely seen to be so, both at home and abroad. Bright said in private that it ‘was
simply damnable – worse than anything ever perpetrated by Dizzie’, but his resignation statement on 18 July was moderately couched, so that Gladstone was able to go on referring to him
as ‘dear old John Bright’ and describing him as ‘sound as a roach’ (a curious comparison). This was in sharp contrast with Gladstone’s attitude to Bright when they
separated on Home Rule in 1886.
¹¹³
The difference was that on Home Rule Gladstone was passionately convinced of his own rightness, but shared much of
Bright’s hostility to the bombardment of Alexandria.

Once the Egyptian intervention was launched, however, Gladstone accepted it with mounting enthusiasm. On 11 July he made a heavy-hearted statement in the House of Commons and did not enjoy being
baited by his old love, the politically (at least) heartless Arthur Balfour. By the 25th, when he moved a vote of credit to deal with the financial consequences of sending out a land expedition to
back up the bombardment, he was on much more certain form. It was a full-scale operation which was to be mounted, with 15,000 men to be sent from England and another 10,000 from India, and Sir
Garnet Wolseley, the premier general, to be put in charge. The costs were correspondingly large. Gladstone’s vote of credit provided for £2.3 million, paid for by raising income tax
from fivepence to eightpence for half the current financial year. The whole undertaking was treated as a proper war (although without a declaration) and not as a colonial expedition engaging only
the locally available regular troops. The Prince of Wales, for instance, in his early forties, wished to offer himself as an already somewhat corpulent volunteer officer. (Gladstone and the Queen
were agreed – for once – that he should not go.)

Unlike nearly every other British military enterprise between Waterloo and 1914, the Wolseley expedition was a neat, quick and resounding success. He met the Arabi army at Tel-el-Kebir, fifty or
so miles to the north-east of Cairo, on 13 September and gained a complete victory with few casualties. Arabi was captured and exiled to Ceylon, and Tewfik
was maintained as
Khedive, but as a client of the British agent-general (soon to be Baring). Within two months, only half by intention, Britain had put a lid on Egyptian nationalism, which was to be kept down for
more or less seventy years, extruded French political and military if not linguistic and cultural influence, and assumed responsibility for the most populous and sophisticated country in
Africa.

Gladstone was full of immediate satisfaction with the victory. Hamilton, having dined with him (and Sir Reginald Welby of the Treasury and Granville) at the Garrick Club and then gone on to
Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Patience
at the Savoy Theatre, recorded: ‘I never remember seeing him in higher spirits.’ He noted that Gladstone had been cheered on both entering
and leaving the Savoy and that it was noteworthy that ‘any popular signs should be manifested in his favour in a London theatre of all places, where the audience is certainly not much given
to Gladstonianism’.
⁵
Gladstone also ensured that the Secretary of State for War organized major Saturday salutes in the London parks (‘I
hope the guns will crash all the windows’)
⁶
and rallied the senior prelates (Canterbury being ill, he wrote to York and London) to suggest
suitable church thanksgivings on the Sunday. It was a curiously exact forerunner of Churchill’s commemoration almost precisely sixty years later of another battle which took place only 150
miles to the west of Tel-el-Kebir.

Yet there were important differences. No one could doubt Churchill’s total commitment to the North African campaign, in which the battle of El Alamein was the turning-point, as well as
being one, even if the lesser (the other being Stalingrad), of the two 1942 hinges of fate in the Second World War. Tel-el-Kebir by comparison was a minor event. Furthermore Gladstone’s
enthusiasm might have been regarded as opportunistic and even hypocritical: he embraced the campaign when it was won.

Judgement here must turn somewhat on exactly what in his own mind he was celebrating. Was it that British casualties had been so small? Was it that at any rate the first phase of what might have
been an immensely messy undertaking had ended so cleanly? Was it relief rather than triumphalism? Positive answers to these questions, combined with his natural naive enthusiasms, could provide a
respectable explanation of his
volte face
. But the probability is that no simple interpretation of motives is satisfactory. Egypt in 1882 occasioned almost as deep and turbulent a struggle
between Gladstone’s anti-militarist conscience and his belief in the imposition of international authority (preferably by a concert but, if not, by the most responsible power) as did that
between his intense
sexuality and his pervading sense of sin in his more virile decades. The clashing contradictions of his style and behaviour are brilliantly portrayed by a
contemporary cartoon showing him, dressed in the most civilian and almost parsonical of habits, belabouring a wretched Egyptian with his umbrella.

Then there is the issue of his disproportionate holdings of Egyptian bonds. Did these affect his conduct in a way that today might be regarded as corrupt? About the remarkable size of the
holdings there can be no doubt, as careful and original research by H. C. G. Matthew has recently made clear. At the end of 1881, when the Arabi crisis began to erupt, he owned a nominal amount of
£51,500 of Egyptian Tribute loan, divided in the proportion of about two to one between the issue of 1854 and that of 1871. He had acquired about half of this stock by the end of 1875, and
bought the rest in the late 1870s. In his meticulous annual accounts he entered the combined real as opposed to the face value of his two holdings as £40,567 on 31 December 1881. This was
equivalent to about £2 million at today’s values. It was a very substantial sum for one who had as recently as when he left office in 1874 been complaining about his poverty, and acting
upon it to the extent of selling his house (11 Carlton House Terrace), pictures, porcelain and some books. Indeed his going into Egyptians was occasioned by a combination of available funds arising
from these sales and of his need for high-yielding stocks in order to correct his low (1874) ratio of income to assets. Nonetheless it was an extraordinary decision to place 37 per cent of his
total portfolio (for such it was) at double risk from political instability in Cairo and Constantinople.

Gladstone, however, was rarely a cautious investor. He seemed to have learnt little from his own trouble in clearing up the result of the Glynne family’s Oak Farm disaster thirty years
before. And although his Egyptian investments turned out satisfactorily (partly as a result of his own political actions) they were at least balanced by heavy losses, realized in 1884, on an
equally excessive holding of Metropolitan District Railway stock. Through what he then described as ‘one heavy mistake in buying largely into the District R. before it was in a paying
condition’,
⁷
he lost about £25,000 (or £
I
million if the factor of
fifty is applied).

While the lower Nile Valley paradoxically proved a safer investment haven than the Inner Circle and its offshoots, the Egyptian loans were nonetheless a volatile stock, with their movements
closely following politico-military events. When Gladstone bought the 1871 bonds they
stood at 42. By 1881 they had risen to 62, but had fallen to 57 when in the early summer
of 1882 first the Concert of Europe failed to work and then even the Anglo-French Dual Control fell apart. But by the end of that year, with Alexandria bombarded, Wolseley victorious at
Tel-el-Kebir, and the territory of the pharaohs under British occupation, they had risen to 82. On the 1871 stock alone Gladstone thus made a capital gain (unrealized however until a few years
later) of £7500 (£375,000) over the period of the hostilities.
⁸

Superficially this looks a clear case of improper financial interest. By modern standards and with modern press attention, without even intrusive investigation, for his holdings were never
concealed, his position would have been wholly untenable. Yet I do not believe for a moment that his primary or even his significantly supporting motivation sprang from financial self-interest. Any
contrary view can be refuted both objectively and subjectively. Objectively there was the fact that, with the exception of Bright and Harcourt, Gladstone was the most reluctant of the fourteen
members of the Cabinet to accept the need for intervention. Furthermore, when over the next couple of years he had occasion to influence the interests of bondholders, he threw his weight against
them, so far as both their coupon return and their priority of security were concerned. He believed strongly that, in the interests of future lending, foreign debts should be honoured, but not
elevated above their station.

More important were the subjective considerations. Gladstone’s blend of innocence and grandeur transcended the possibility of corruption. It was all of a piece with his purchase and sale
of Consols during the Franco-Prussian War; with his rash rescue operations with prostitutes, particularly late in life when his carnal flame had burnt down but the desire of his political opponents
to traduce him was stronger than ever; and with his willingness to borrow houses from rich friends and take holidays at their expense without it ever occurring to him that they could expect any
return except for the pleasure of his company. In his own mind at least, and to some substantial extent in reality, his purposes were too high for petty corruption to be a possibility. Knight of
the Garter although he never aspired to be – it was an honour for the more patrician of his adjutants, not for himself – there was no one for whom the order’s motto of ‘Honi
soit qui mal y pense’ was more instinctively appropriate.

For a year or so after the excitements of the summer and early autumn of 1882 Egypt receded from a central position on the London
Cabinet agenda. This quiescence was
something of an illusion, for behind only the thinnest of screens there was building up a combination of circumstances which gave striking support to the view that one commitment always leads to
another. In the middle and upper Nile Valley there lay a vast territory which was then known as the Egyptian Soudan. Insofar as it was governed at all it was ill governed from Cairo. A
self-proclaimed Mahdi or Messiah, who had some experience as both a slave-trader and a middle-rank Egyptian official, raised a banner of rebellion in 1881 and implanted it in soil which was fertile
for revolt if not for crops. In 1883 the Khedive’s government attempted to put him down. They employed an English commander and 10,000 Egyptian troops. The expedition ought to have been
vetoed by the British government, and probably would have been had Baring already been long enough in control. The result was almost an annihilation. Baker Pasha, to give him the title, at once
commanding and self-indulgent, by which most Englishmen (but not Gordon, who was too fanatical to be a pasha) in Egyptian service were known, together with his army, was cut to pieces in November
1883. This defeat produced an edgy mood in London and led on, within two and a half months, to the disastrous despatch of Gordon to Egypt and the Sudan.

After turning a difficult corner with Hartington on franchise reform over the New Year of 1884 Gladstone went back to Hawarden for two and a half weeks, no doubt feeling he had earned a further
respite. During this period ‘Chinese’ Gordon (as General Charles Gordon, a fifty-year-old major-general of engineers, was at the time generally known, because of his remarkable exploits
on behalf of the Emperor of China during the Taiping rebellion of 1863–4) appeared briefly and, as it turned out, for the last time in England. After service in Egypt and the Sudan in the
1870s and in India (incongruously as private secretary to Ripon as Viceroy, but lasting in that post only for a few weeks), China again, then Mauritius and South Africa in the early 1880s, Gordon
had spent 1883 in semi-retirement interspersed with biblical researches in Palestine. From there he committed himself to King Leopold II of the Belgians to take over from H. M. Stanley as
administrator in the Congo. Granville and Hartington were asked for their approval and refused to give it. The telegram was drafted as saying that the Secretary of State
declines
to sanction
the arrangement. It was transmitted as saying that he
decides
to sanction it. This was by no means the last of the confusions which clouded the final stages of the Gordon saga.