Sons, Servants and Statesmen (18 page)

Gladstone’s audience on taking office was brief. He thought his sovereign had been ‘natural under effort’. She considered that he looked ill and haggard, and was surprised when he told her that he intended to be his own Chancellor of the Exchequer as well as Prime Minister. In view of his state of health, she probably persuaded herself – mistakenly – that this ‘half-mad firebrand’ of seventy would be unable to shoulder the burdens of high office for long.

On 28 February 1881 the Queen and Disraeli dined together at Windsor Castle. With a chest infection that was developing into bronchitis, he was far from well, and perhaps he had a presentiment that it would be their final meeting. Her gift of flowers a few days later elicited an effusive letter of thanks. ‘No Sovereign could decorate a subject with a new order’, he wrote, ‘which could have conferred greater pleasure, than the box, which contained yesterday the harbingers of spring, and which now adorn my writing table.’
²⁹

A few days later she received her last letter from him, a short note of thanks scrawled in pencil after she had enquired as to his health, to which he answered there was ‘little prospect of my being visible before Easter. I am ashamed to address Your Majesty not only from my room, but even my bed.’
³⁰
He sensed that he would probably never leave his bed again.

‘We are so anxious about dear Lord Beaconsfield who has been very ill for the last fortnight,’ she wrote to the Princess of Wales on 11 April. ‘It is a great sorrow to me and a cause of grief and anxiety to the nation at large.’
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Towards the end, she offered to come and visit him, but he declined, allegedly with the comment that she had better not: ‘she would only ask me to take a message to Albert.’
³²

On 19 April he died, aged seventy-six. The Queen was overwhelmed with grief. Tradition prevented a sovereign from attending the funeral of a subject, but three of her sons, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Connaught and the Duke of Albany, attended the obsequies as he was laid to rest beside Mary Anne in the churchyard at Hughenden. She sent two wreaths of primroses and on the accompanying card wrote, ‘His favourite flowers from Osborne, a tribute of affection from Queen Victoria.’ Above his seat in the chancel at Hughenden church, she had a large marble tablet erected in his memory, with the inscription, ‘This memorial is placed by his grateful Sovereign and Friend, Victoria R.I.’

E
veryone on all sides had expected that Gladstone’s new premiership was going to prove a testing one for sovereign and minister alike. The Queen alone, Gladstone told Lord Rosebery, the ministerial colleague who was destined to be his eventual successor as Prime Minister, was ‘enough to kill any man’.
¹
Nevertheless, on 9 May, some two and a half weeks after Disraeli’s death, he paid his old political adversary a warm, statesmanlike tribute in parliament. Contemplating it beforehand, he said, had made him unwell, and confined him to bed for two days with a stomach upset; writing this eulogy was one of the most difficult things he had ever had to do in his life. Nevertheless, it was a generous, magnanimous address, in which Gladstone praised Disraeli’s long career, his strength of will, long-sighted consistency of purpose and ‘his great parliamentary courage – a quality which I, who have been associated in the course of my life with some scores of Ministers, have, I think, never known but two whom I could pronounce his equal’.
²
. The Queen called it ‘a fine speech’; her attitude towards Gladstone softened for a while, and she even asked him to sit down at their next audience.

However, the truce did not last, and before long they were back to their old inharmonious relationship. It was only a matter of time before she was exasperated by his unwillingness to submit to what he called her ‘intolerable’ claims to be kept fully informed about confidential Cabinet discussions. Before he appeared at major public meetings, she issued him warnings which might have been addressed to her own sons. In October 1881, noting that he was to attend a large banquet at Leeds, she said she hoped he would take care not to say anything which might bind him to ‘any particular measures’. Fifteen months later, when he was planning to go and address his Midlothian constituents for the first time since the general election, she advised him in writing of ‘her earnest hopes that he will be very guarded in his language . . . and that he will remember the immense importance attached to
every
word falling from him’.
³
It was a strange letter for a sovereign to write to one of her most experienced prime ministers and members of parliament.

Another incident caused further problems between them. In September 1883 Gladstone went on a holiday cruise as a guest of the shipowner Sir Donald Currie, with fellow guests including the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, and the Poet Laureate, Alfred Tennyson. Originally they planned to sail around the British Isles but then decided they would make an impromptu visit to Norway and Denmark. They were entertained in Copenhagen, where King Christian and Queen Louise invited them to a dinner at which others present included Tsar Alexander III of Russia and King George of Greece. Gladstone had inadvertently broken one of the golden rules of a premier, namely that he should not set foot in a foreign country without the prior permission of the sovereign.

The Queen was highly indignant and wrote to Earl Granville of ‘her unfeigned astonishment at Mr Gladstone’s want of
all knowledge
, apparently, of what is due to the Sovereign he serves’. Her Prime Minister, she went on, was ‘one
not
gifted with prudence in speech’ and ‘not a person who can go about
where
he likes with impunity’. Relations between Britain and several of the other Great Powers were rather delicate, and his absence was not only inconvenient, but ‘his presence at Copenhagen may be productive of much evil and certainly lead to misconstruction’.
⁴

Gladstone apologised humbly for not seeking the customary permission, excusing himself on the grounds that he and his fellow voyagers had been encouraged ‘to extend their views’. She grudgingly accepted his apology, while stressing that there were so many topics which could not be discussed with foreign sovereigns by the Prime Minister without prior consultation with her Foreign Secretary and the sanction of the sovereign. While she accepted his assurances that he would have avoided politics with the crowned heads he had met at Copenhagen, a man in his position did not have the freedom to move around like a private individual, especially when every step he made was bound to be reported; and any such trip would be bound to lead ‘to political speculations which it is better to avoid’.
⁵

Not without justification, he found her letter ‘somewhat unmannerly’. In reply he regretted that he had not considered the likelihood of her displeasure, on the grounds that ‘increasing weariness of mind under public cares for which he considers himself less and less fitted, may have blunted the faculty of anticipation, with which he was never very largely endowed’.
⁶
He told his private secretary, Sir Edward Hamilton, that the Queen was jealous of the deference paid to an old man of whom she strongly disapproved, while she still remained in seclusion most of the time.

Yet this was no more than a minor difference. The same may be said of a rather testy moment in the summer of 1884, when the Queen seemed to be taking an intense interest in every speech made by a member of her government, as well as in those by several of the backbenchers – and then writing to Gladstone to complain about them. During a six-week period he had to write her a total of sixteen letters, with a combined length of around 4,000 words, explaining, excusing and half-apologising for the speeches as he thought fit.
⁷
It provoked him into one of his rare moments of answering back under extreme exasperation, that Her Majesty would readily believe that he had ‘neither the time nor the eyesight to make himself acquainted by careful perusal with all the speeches of his colleagues’.
⁸

A far worse rupture had occurred the previous year, after his government proposed towards the end of 1883 to withdraw British troops from the Sudan, where a Muslim, Mohammed al-Mahdi, was leading a campaign to free Egypt from foreign domination. Hoping that the Mahdi would be overthrown, the Queen insisted that the Cabinet must take firm action at once. Several thousand Egyptian soldiers were killed by rebels, and General Charles Gordon, sent out to report on the situation, was besieged at Khartoum. The Queen tried to insist on rescuing him, warning the government that she ‘trembled’ for his safety, and that the consequences of any disaster would be catastrophic.

Of a less imperialistic frame of mind than his sovereign, Gladstone strongly believed that the Mahdi’s forces were valiant freedom fighters, and he resented the jingoistic emotions that had been inspired in Britain by Gordon’s mission. He and his Cabinet considered that the General was in a position to withdraw if he wanted, and it was up to him to do so at his discretion. Yet it was increasingly apparent that the public would not tolerate any further delay in trying to ease Gordon’s plight, and in the summer of 1884 an expeditionary force was mobilised in Cairo. In October it began its advance up the Nile to Khartoum, arriving within sight of the town in January 1885, but it came two days too late. Khartoum had fallen, and in the ensuing massacre Gordon had been stabbed to death; his head was cut off and sent to the Mahdi, who had it hung on a tree for three days.

Outraged, the Queen sent identical telegrams
en clair
to Gladstone, War Minister Hartington and Foreign Secretary Granville: ‘to think that all this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too frightful.’
⁹
Gladstone firmly believed he was not to blame. Bitterly wounded by her reaction, he seriously considered resigning the premiership. A dissolution of parliament was due later that year, and he vowed that nothing would induce him to fight another general election.
¹⁰

In June 1885 the government was defeated on a vote on the budget. Gladstone resigned as Prime Minister, and the Queen offered him an earldom, which he declined on the grounds that such future small services as he could render the country would be better done if he remained in the House of Commons. Perhaps he was aware that he would not be out of office for long.

Later that month, the Marquess of Salisbury was invited to form a Conservative administration. Salisbury had been Secretary of State for India during Disraeli’s administration of 1874–80, then Foreign Secretary, in which capacity he accompanied Disraeli to the Congress of Berlin. On the latter’s death he took over leadership of the parliamentary opposition in the House of Lords to Gladstone’s Liberal government.

As a senior minister, Salisbury often expressed views that diverged from those of the Queen, and in September 1874 Sir Henry Ponsonby had noted that they were unlikely to see him at Balmoral, because ‘he is too independent and speaks his mind too freely to be acceptable’.
¹¹
However, when he visited Osborne the following January, she found him ‘particularly agreeable and gentle, and [a person] who one could not believe could be so severe and sarcastic in debate’.
¹²

In January 1886 Salisbury’s government was defeated and he resigned office, turning down the Queen’s offer of a dukedom. When his Cabinet surrendered their seals of office to the Queen at Osborne in February, she spoke to them firmly about their duty to fight the Home Rule Bill, which to her was an irreversible measure that ran counter to her Coronation oath. To the Earl of Cranbrook, outgoing Lord President of Council, she said that they must ‘agitate’, adding that ‘I do not like agitation, but we must agitate every place small as well as large and make people understand.’ Before he took his leave of her, Salisbury assured her that ‘in whatever position he was, he would do anything to help’.
¹³

Gladstone’s third, and brief, administration (February–July 1886) was dominated by his determination to secure the passing of the Home Rule Bill through parliament, repealing the Act of Union with Ireland and establishing a parliament in Dublin responsible for domestic affairs. It was a divisive move bitterly opposed by several members of his own party.