Gladstone: A Biography (98 page)

Although he was becoming exasperated with some of his former colleagues, notably Selborne, who on 28 December had written a ‘very able but I think deplorable paper’ slamming the door
on his support for Home Rule, and Hartington, whom he accused to Granville of becoming an agent of chaos by making it impossible in differing ways for either of them (Gladstone or Hartington) to
lead the Liberal party, his own
public position remained tentative and conciliatory during the mid-January weeks. In reality of course his mind was made up, and therefore his
apparent hesitation was no more than the gliding of an eagle waiting to swoop. But he had more than enough wing power to enable him to choose his time. And, while there was a good deal of churning
within the Conservative government, he preferred to await the outcome. The agents of the rejected policy of Irish conciliation resigned, first Hart Dyke the Chief Secretary and then Carnarvon the
Viceroy. Dyke was replaced by W. H. Smith, the great newsagent who, five and a half years later and ironically in view of his 1886 role, was to share a day of death with Parnell, and to find
himself obituarily upstaged. Smith had the honest clarity to see that the only alternative to conciliation was more coercion, and during his brief inaugural visit to Dublin, from 24 to 26 January,
successfully recommended a new bill to the Cabinet. They accepted his recommendation, which had the effect of turning his inaugural into a farewell. By the time that he stepped ashore at Holyhead
on the 27th the first Salisbury government had been defeated.

In the first days of the debate on the Queen’s Speech both sides held off from a direct engagement on Ireland, and Parnell, even though he had by then abandoned his hopes of Home Rule from
Salisbury, was equally disinclined to force the issue by putting down and voting on his own amendment. Gladstone’s ‘waiting’ speech, delivered on 21 January, was the one in which
he referred to himself as ‘an old parliamentary hand’, and on this basis advised his supporters to follow him in keeping their own counsel and to await for a little while the
development of events. In the retrospective fragment which he wrote in the autumn of 1897, only six months before his death, Gladstone explained his hesitancy on the ground that to have provoked an
early division on Home Rule in a House of many new Liberal members might well have resulted in it attracting the support of no more than 200 (as opposed to the 311 who eventually voted for the
bill) and killing the issue for the Parliament.

He did not however allow the ‘little while’ to cover more than a few days, although still avoiding any vote which was nominally on Ireland. When, on the 28th, it became known that
three days later the Irish Secretary would bring in a Coercion Bill, he decided to treat that as a
casus belli
and turn off the life machine which until then he had provided for the minority
Conservative government. In one sense his indignation could be regarded as synthetic, for there was no member of the House who had been responsible for as many Irish coercion bills as Gladstone
himself. But in another sense he was fully justified in seeing this as the
final and public rejection of ‘Carnarvonism’ (Carnarvon’s own resignation,
decided upon before Christmas, had been made public on 16 January) and thus destroying the basis for Gladstone’s tolerance of Salisbury’s retention of office. Gladstone’s own
retrospective description of his reaction was as follows:

The instrument which Gladstone found most conveniently to hand was hardly in the great imperial category. Jesse Collings, then member for the Bordesley division of Birmingham and as complete a
Chamberlain henchman as it is possible to imagine, had on the order paper an amendment regretting the omission from the Queen’s Speech of any measures benefiting the rural labourer. It took
up the smallholdings theme which had been part of Chamberlain’s ‘unauthorized programme’ of 1884, and is commonly referred to as the ‘three acres and a cow’ amendment.
Without Gladstone’s swoop to attack, it would have been left to languish as a gesture amendment. Suddenly, however, it was underpinned by the whole weight of the official opposition, it was
brought forward for a few hours of debate, Gladstone himself spoke, there was a vote soon after midnight, and the Conservatives were out. There is no more symbolic a test of whether or not a
government commands the general confidence of the House of Commons than its ability to carry the Address unamended. The Salisbury government failed that test by a margin of seventy-nine.

No one saw the issue as primarily bucolic. Collings had his few hours of glory, but the speeches were not confined to the cows and their three acres, nor were the votes so cast. Goschen voted
with the Conservatives, but he had become used to doing that. What was more serious was that Hartington and Henry James did so too. And neither of them, not Hartington, the too-long-awaiting heir
apparent, for whom like several
in that position the cards had not fallen right, nor James, the putative Lord Chancellor and epitome of an amenable but respected lawyer
politician, split from the party within which they had advanced so near to the differing summits of their ambition on any argument about whether cows should have two or three acres. They and most
of the House of Commons realized that what they were voting about was whether Gladstone should form a Home Rule government. Two hundred and fifty-seven Liberals and seventy-four Irish Nationalists
voted that he should. Two hundred and thirty-four Conservatives and eighteen Whigs, elected as Liberals, voted that he should not. And, more menacingly, seventy-six Liberals (including John Bright)
were absent or present and abstaining.

That division was the beginning of the volvulus which knotted British politics for the next thirty years. The Liberals, having embraced Home Rule, could command no clear majority without the
Irish, save in the exceptional circumstances of 1906, for which election they had in any event placed Home Rule on the back burner. Yet their policy was dedicated to getting rid of this
parliamentary segment which alone made them, again with the exception of 1906, an intermittent party of government. The Conservatives, on the other hand, who increasingly came to be called
Unionists, and whose success largely depended upon the Liberals keeping prominent in their shop window the Home Rule cause, which was unpopular in England, were two or three times deprived of
office (in 1886, in 1892–5 and arguably 1910–15) by the Irish, whom they were determined to keep within the British polity, yet whose influence there they deeply resented. It was a fine
recipe for stasis in the government of an already challenged empire and led to the efforts of Lloyd George and a varying number of Conservatives to resolve it by coalition in 1910, 1916 and
1919–22.

In January 1886, however, there were shorter-term and clearer-cut consequences. Late at night on Friday the 29th, three days after the vote, the Queen’s secretary, Ponsonby, called upon
Gladstone at Lady Frederick Cavendish’s house, where (as often) he was temporarily installed, and gave him the Queen’s commission, ‘which I at once accepted’.
²
On
the Monday, 1 February, he kissed hands at Osborne, where the Queen, to the astonishment of,
inter alia
, the Prince of Wales, insisted on remaining through the change of government. This did
not mean that she allowed the change to go through easily. If anything, she behaved worse than in 1880 because she then had some justifiable even if unrealistic basis for believing that she might
turn the tables and get
Hartington. In 1886 she was mildly and improperly obstructive without hope or purpose. Her ploy was to write most indiscreet letters to Goschen and to
summon him to Osborne with hints that he might form a coalition government. Goschen, bereft of Liberal loyalty though he was by this time, nonetheless had a sense of constitutional propriety and
declined to go, saying that his presence would cause public misunderstanding, and that she had better get on with it and send for Gladstone.

Salisbury behaved somewhat but not much better than Disraeli in 1880. He refused with style the Queen’s offer of a dukedom (‘His fortune would not be equal to such a dignity. . . .
The kind words in which your Majesty has expressed approval of his conduct are very far more precious to him than any sort of title.’),
³
but he encouraged her foolish view that the
main mistake of his government was to be dilatory in introducing Irish coercion, although that move became its death rattle. They clucked together over the weaknesses of Carnarvon (‘He never
could be entrusted with any post of importance again.’)
⁴
and of Hicks Beach (Randolph Churchill would be a much better Commons leader than the latter, Salisbury opined, a view
which, within a year, he would violently have repudiated). But he never attempted to tell the Queen that her duty, and her interest, was to give Gladstone’s Irish policy a fair if sceptical
trial.

What was that policy as Gladstone announced it for the purpose of getting colleagues to join his new government? He sought to ease the process by putting a thin coating of tentativeness over his
proposals, but his import was clear enough:

On this foundation there was put together a government which included nine – Spencer, Granville, Kimberley, Ripon, Rosebery, Harcourt, Childers, Chamberlain and Trevelyan – who had
previously served in a Gladstone Cabinet. But Hartington, Derby, Northbrook, Selborne, Dodson and Carlingford were all part of the Whig withdrawal.
Bright, from a different
angle, refused to serve and Dilke was regarded as not available (reluctantly by Gladstone, hysterically so by the Queen) because of his sensational divorce case, which first erupted in July 1885
and led to the effective end of his career. Furthermore two of the first nine, Chamberlain and Trevelyan, joined most hesitantly and lasted in the government for less than two
months.
¹²¹

The Queen added her own quota of difficulties. She was determined neither to have Granville back at the Foreign Office, nor to have Kimberley as a replacement. She wanted either Rosebery (still
under forty) or Spencer (although she was much shocked by his conversion to Home Rule), and she got Rosebery. This discrimination against Granville may not have been wholly at variance with
Gladstone’s own feelings, for Granville was over the hill, although nonetheless an essential ambassador from Gladstone to such Whigs as remained open to persuasion. So it was awkward to move
him, and he had to be accommodated with whatever other high-ranking post he found most acceptable. This was the Colonial Office, and from that there followed a notorious piece of maladroitness.

Chamberlain was clearly the marginal adherent, and if he was to be put in the government at all (Gladstone told the Queen that he thought it ‘best to take in Mr
Chamberlain’,
⁶
a statement well short of enthusiasm) it must have made sense to give him an office from which he would be loath to resign. The bold step would have been to
offer him the Exchequer, to which Harcourt, who went there, had at this stage no prescriptive right; he could have been contained at the Home Office for at least a further short Parliament. But
Gladstone put Childers in that senior secretaryship of state. Gladstone’s attachment to Childers, never a figure of great popularity or charm, was curious. There was no intimacy between them;
Childers was never, it seems, at Hawarden. Yet Gladstone allowed him to be several times in the way, with Hartington in 1882, and now (at one remove) with Chamberlain in 1886. Nonetheless these
were the dispositions, adverse to Chamberlain’s desires, which Gladstone had in mind while he carried on the laborious negotiations for Chamberlain’s entry into the government.
Distracting him throughout was the fact that he had not yet secured Granville’s acceptance of dislodgement from the Foreign Office. In reality Chamberlain’s adherence was more important
to the success of a Home Rule government than
was Granville’s, but that was not how Gladstone, who had served with the old Whig in six different Cabinets, saw him in
relation to the screw manufacturer.

First Chamberlain insisted on having a letter of contract such as might have been drawn up between two business partners. The opening paragraph, written by Chamberlain, stipulated that he should
‘retain unlimited liberty of judgment and rejection on any scheme that may ultimately be proposed’. The second, inserted at Gladstone’s request, testified to Chamberlain’s
willingness ‘to give an unprejudiced consideration to any more extensive proposals which may be made’.
⁷
The value of these vague avowals was more than neutralized by
Gladstone’s distaste for the whole concept of such a distrustful letter. However, it having been agreed, he proceeded to offer Chamberlain the Admiralty. The first-lordship scored relatively
high in prestige but wildly low in relation to Chamberlain’s interests. Birmingham was hardly a great naval city, but more important was the hopelessness of Admiralty House as a base from
which to mount a campaign for domestic Radicalism, which still appeared to be Chamberlain’s main concern. Had there been mutual trust, such a campaign might also have suited Gladstone’s
interest. It could have guarded one flank of his concentration upon Ireland.