Gladstone: A Biography (101 page)

On the surface at least the collapse of the vote between November–December 1885 and June–July 1886 was a psephological phenomenon without parallel. In the former general election
nearly four million went to the polls. In the latter barely two and a half million did so. Boredom leading to abstention is always liable to be a factor when one general election quickly follows
another. Between the two 1910 elections the turnout fell by about a sixth. But this was much less of a collapse than between 1885 and 1886, and between the two mass plebiscites of 1950 and 1951
there was hardly any decline. In 1886, however, there was a substantial countervailing factor, which was the exceptional number of unopposed returns. To some extent these could be regarded as a
product of boredom. They were also influenced by the cleverly opportunistic Conservative willingness to withdraw candidates against Liberals, whether of the Hartington or Chamberlain persuasion,
who voted against the bill. In Birmingham for instance, the five seats of
Chamberlain’s fief were all without a contest. In total 152 seats, as opposed to 23 in 1885,
were in this category. If in just over 500 seats two and a half million voted, it may be roughly assumed that in the 129 seats which were fought in 1885 but not in 1886 another 600,000 might have
done so. Even so, the decline in the participation between the two elections was striking. And it was concentrated on the collapse in the Liberal vote in the counties. In the boroughs the Liberals
more or less held their own; they polled a few thousand more than the combined Unionist forces. But in the counties their vote, almost unbelievably, fell from 1,113,693 to 534,508. Even adjusting
for the uncontested seats, this was a devastating price which Gladstone paid for first picking up Collings’s amendment as a useful tactical instrument and then doing absolutely nothing about
it, neither himself deflecting his eye from Ireland nor encouraging Chamberlain to pursue a parallel policy on behalf of the rural labourer. The casting of a Liberal vote in squirearchical
villages, except on the great Whig estates, where the allegiance of the proprietor had in any event typically just changed, required some courage. Unfanned by attention, this mostly did not survive
for a second go.

The collapse of the Liberal agricultural vote was the central element in the massive Liberal defeat. The Gladstonians retained only 193 seats, a result comparable with the Conservative massacres
of 1906 and 1945 and with little else except when Liberal and Labour or Labour and the Liberal–Social Democrat Alliance were struggling over which should be the official opposition in modern
British politics. Gladstone himself was a beneficiary of the smaller but not negligible number of unopposed Home Rule returns (forty-two); on 2 July he was elected without a contest,
¹²⁵
but after a vigorous five-day visit to the constituency two weeks before. Exceptionally he stayed at the Royal Hotel in Princes Street and not at Dalmeny, but this appears to have been due to
Rosebery’s absorption in the Foreign Office rather than to any estrangement. Gladstone addressed his usual round of meetings, including a speech of one and a half hours in the Music Hall.
Edinburghshire apart,
however, he spoke only in Glasgow, and in the following week in Manchester and Liverpool. Even these three occasions excited the Queen enough to cause
her to remonstrate against the indignity of Prime Ministers taking part in elections.

After these few excursions Gladstone retired to Hawarden and stayed there (at first semi-solitarily, for his wife was in London) for sixteen days while the increasingly bad electoral news came
in. On 3 July he thought only that ‘the chances now are slightly against us’,
¹⁹
but by the 8th he wrote starkly: ‘The defeat is a smash.’
²⁰
He read and
wrote during the day, and then, evening after evening as the outlook became steadily worse, he walked across to the rectory to dine and play backgammon with his son Stephen. His outpouring of
letters was even more voluminous than was his habit. He was still Prime Minister of course, although cut off from the machinery of government by 200 miles, except for the postal service
supplemented by occasional telegrams. At one level he took his defeat with a resigned calm (‘The Elections perturb me somewhat; but One ever sitteth above’),
²¹
reflecting
that he would be as glad to end his painful relations with the Queen as she would to end hers with him. But at another level he became resentfully argumentative. He wrote two bitter letters of
complaint to John Bright on 2 July. They were provoked by a speech of Bright’s which Gladstone thought attacked his honour and his conduct and not merely his policy, and were remarkable for
containing none of the expressions of personal esteem with which Gladstone normally cloaked his political disagreements, and for referring to their past association with more reproach than
nostalgia.
²²

Then on 14 July he put on an imitation of the Queen and wrote to the Duke of Westminster,
²³
ticking him off for electioneering, on the Unionist side of course. There was then a loose
convention that the corollary of peers having no vote was that they should not attempt directly to influence the votes of others, and Salisbury had indeed subscribed to it to the extent of spending
most of the campaign in the French spa of Royat. Gladstone no doubt thought that he had a special position
vis-à-vis
Westminster, whom he accused of having struck ‘a fresh blow
at the aristocracy’, by virtue of having made him a duke twelve years before. But his action pointed to tetchiness as well as bossiness. And then, after he had returned to London, he suddenly
wrote to Hartington peremptorily demanding chapter and verse for some statements in a speech which the latter had delivered no less than seven weeks earlier.

Gladstone’s reactions to losing, as he certainly claimed, were genuinely based on considerations of public policy (his conviction of the urgency of the Irish issue
and of his own solution having become the only viable one) rather than of personal convenience. He nonetheless reacted to it with some clear and engaging displays of human pique. What was less
clear was how and when he ought to resign. Although he had indisputably lost, and lost heavily, the paradox was that Salisbury was not so indisputably the victor. He had 316 seats in a House of
Commons with a membership of 670. Gladstonians and Irish Nationalists together constituted 278/280. (There were always one or two loose cards in any nineteenth-century party count, so that as
often as lists were compiled so they produced very slightly varying totals.) Liberal Unionists (or ‘seceding Liberals’ as Gladstone preferred to call them) were mostly put at
seventy-two or seventy-three, of whom around sixty were Hartington Whigs and around twelve Chamberlain Radicals. None of these wanted at this stage to enter a Conservative government, although
Goschen (who was not, however, among the sixty Whigs, for he had been defeated in July) was to break ranks by becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer within a few months. No one indeed knew how far
these Liberal Unionists would sustain Salisbury on anything other than Ireland. There was frequent talk of Liberal reunion over the next eighteen months, and the uncertainty was bizarrely
illuminated by the fact that the essential component of the government’s majority sat for the next six years on the opposition side of the House, Hartington and Chamberlain cheek by jowl with
Gladstone and Harcourt on the same front bench. They rose to excoriate each other, and the leaders of the smaller group to give crucial support to the party opposite, from the same despatch
box.

Despite the confusion the collective mind of the defeated Cabinet moved steadily towards an early resignation rather than waiting to meet the new Parliament. Those, notably Rosebery, who were
less dedicated to Home Rule were always predisposed towards resignation, almost as the Spanish Falangists of the 1930s made ‘Long live death’ into a perverse slogan. And those, like
Gladstone, Morley and Spencer, who had become so dedicated, recoiled from the only basis on which they could possibly live with the Parliament, which was that of an Irish policy (or lack of policy)
acceptable to Hartington. Gladstone at last came to London on Wednesday, 14 July, held a Cabinet dinner on Saturday the 17th and a final Cabinet on the Tuesday the 20th, when the decision was
unanimous, and the resignation was sent to the Queen that
afternoon. She was at Osborne, and as had become usual during changes of ministry showed not the slightest
disposition to come to London or even to Windsor.

Nor did she express a single word of regret (which might have been hypocritical) about Gladstone’s departure, or of thanks for his third period of service as her first minister. She
accepted the resignation at once, only reflecting that it might incommode Lord Salisbury by bringing him back two or three days early from his cure.

Even with his French sojourn so foreshortened it was 25 July before the new Prime Minister formally kissed hands. And it was another five days after that before Gladstone was summoned to the
Isle of Wight for his farewell audience. The Queen found him ‘pale and nervous’ and complaining of his train being late. She had made no attempt to assuage the inconvenience of the day
trip by offering him luncheon. He found her ‘in good spirits’ with ‘her manners altogether pleasant’. He also noticed that during what he thought (falsely) might be his last
audience after fifty-five years in political life and ‘a good quarter of a century’s service to her in office’,
²⁴
she was unwilling to discuss with him any matter of
public substance except for civil list allowances for her grandchildren. The next day, however, she wrote him a letter which can be not unfairly summarized as rubbing in the point that she had
always thought that his Irish policy was bound to fail, that she had been proved right in this, and that a period of silence from him on the issue would now be most welcome, as well as his clear
patriotic duty.
²⁵

As Gladstone made his early-evening way back across the Solent after that ungrateful audience he was too absorbed in Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Kidnapped
, which had just been
published and which he read through complete in the day, to be obsessed with grievance. Nor was he really in a valedictory mood, however much, partly for the purposes of pointing up its barren
thinness, he might suggest that the audience could be final. His seventy-seventh birthday was approaching but he did not regard himself as beaten on Ireland. One of the reasons that he gave (to
Spencer on 4 July) for an early resignation was that ‘if there is to be an anti-Irish Government the sooner it begins the sooner it will end’.
²⁶
Even before the defeat was
certain, his power of recovery was already enabling him to look to the next government but one. Nor was he any longer saying that the next battle must be fought by other and younger generals. The
truth was that he trusted neither their judgement nor their martial determination. For himself, on the other hand, the twelve
years which had gone by since his withdrawal of
1874 had increased rather than diminished his appetite for the fray. He set out his game plan for himself with great clarity in a letter to his Calcutta son on 16 July: ‘What I think possible
is that . . . I should obtain a dispensation from ordinary and habitual attendance in Parliament but should not lay down the leadership so as to force them to chose another leader; and should take
an active part when occasion seemed to require it, especially on the Irish question.’
²⁷

To the implementation of this prescription he proceeded forthwith. He moved out of 10 Downing Street by the end of July. This was much easier for him than on the previous occasion when he had
the accumulation of five years’ residence. This time he had merely to pack a few crates of books and despatch them to the ever hospitable Lucy Cavendish at 21 Carlton House Terrace (he found
it very difficult to keep away from one house or another on that old stamping ground), which he made his not greatly used base until the following spring when he effectively retreated to the
Aberdeen-owned villa at Dollis Hill. In early August, however, he was mostly in the near countryside, first with Wolverton outside Kingston, then near Guildford with Sir Algernon West, his private
secretary of the prosperous early years of his first government, whom he had made chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue in 1881, and finally outside Chislehurst with Charles Morley, the
determinedly Liberal younger son of the Nottingham textile magnate. Gladstone was becoming increasingly fond, more so than of broad-acred ducal palaces, of well-appointed Home Counties residences
of more comfort than fame in which the life of the house and the services of the household revolved around himself.

From these various bases he descended upon the House of Commons for three leader’s speeches. He seconded the re-election of Speaker Peel, he spoke on the first day of the debate on the
Address, and five days later he made a further intervention, this time for fifty minutes, on Irish land, and involving some altercation with the Speaker, whom he had so recently supported. Then he
disappeared to Bavaria and Austria for three and a half weeks, although the unusually timed session of Parliament continued throughout this period and up to the last week of September. Lord Acton,
but not Catherine Gladstone, was with him. Theological conversations with the now aged Dr Döllinger (eighty-seven) were once again the principal object of the visit, although the scenery of
the Traunsee and the Halstattersee attracted much admiration. Lehnbach, the portraitist of 1879, had also survived and on this
visit did a double portrait of
Döllinger and Gladstone which until recently hung in the German Embassy in London.

Gladstone regained London on Sunday, 19 September, and on the following day gave qualified support to an Irish Tenants Relief Bill which Parnell had introduced. On the Tuesday, he voted for it
in a division of 202 against 297, which figures neatly illustrated the balance of the Parliament, an unassailable but not overwhelming anti-Irish majority. On the Wednesday afternoon he went to
Hawarden, and stayed there for 125 consecutive nights, the longest continuous period that he ever spent under the Hawarden roof, or for that matter any other roof, between his marriage in 1839 and
his death in 1898. He was not giving up, but he was husbanding his energies, which he recognized to be in decline. The question was whether, in Aberdeen’s immortal phrase, he was once again
capable of being ‘terrible in the rebound’.