Gladstone: A Biography (105 page)

In 1891 there were no comparable nostalgic excitements, although he spent a short weekend at Eton in March and gave a lecture on the Greek goddess Artemis. Most of that winter he alternated
between London, where he stayed mostly at 1 Carlton Gardens in the house of Stuart Rendel, MP for Montgomeryshire until he became a peer in Gladstone’s 1894 resignation honours list, and
Dollis Hill, the Aberdeen villa. So his housing needs were well and economically looked after. Rendel was an Etonian engineer, who had been a partner of Sir William Armstrong, from 1887 Lord
Armstrong of Cragside, the Newcastle shipbuilder and armaments manufacturer, from which association Rendel had clearly made a lot of money. But by the age of little over fifty his chief pleasure
and even purpose in life seemed to have become that of entertaining Gladstone, which he did not only in Carlton Gardens but also at Hatchlands, his Surrey mansion, and the Château Thorenc at
Cannes.

As a purveyor of hospitality he was closely rivalled by George Armitstead, ten years his senior and intermittently Liberal MP for Dundee until 1885. He came of a more exotic background. He gave
his education as ‘Wiesbaden, Heidelberg, etc’ and his occupation as ‘Russia
merchant’. This activity must have been as remunerative as Rendel’s
engineering for in cash terms Armitstead was an even more generous host to the Gladstones. Although he had fine houses in London and Perthshire, he mostly entertained them in hotels. At Easter
1891, they were his guests first at the Victoria Hotel at St Leonards and then at the newly opened Metropole Hotel (‘what an abode of luxurious comfort,’ Gladstone wrote) in Brighton.
Then in September 1891, when Armitstead was staying at Hawarden (so the entertaining was not entirely one way) and when the Gladstones were unusually low in the aftermath of Willy’s death, he
suddenly performed a major feat of spirit-lifting. ‘Mr Armitstead in the morning opened the subject of his giant treat to us,’ Gladstone wrote.
⁸

And so indeed it was. He proposed to take three Gladstones (Helen as well as Catherine) for a ten-week Christmas and New Year holiday in Biarritz and back via Pau, Toulouse, St Raphaël,
Nice and Paris. John Morley and Sir Algernon West were also of the party for some of the time, although whether they were encompassed in Armitstead’s generosity was not clear. The Biarritz
visit was a clear success. Gladstone loved the turbulent but mild Atlantic weather. ‘The sea continued grand and terrible,’ he wrote on 30 December. Biarritz with its Basque coast and
hinterland was henceforward a favourite destination of Gladstone’s. He went back for two subsequent long visits, Armitstead acting as a combination of courier, conversation–backgammon
partner and bill-payer on all three occasions. Like Rendel he did eventually get a peerage but it did not come from Gladstone; he had to wait until his eighty-second year, 1906, and the new
Campbell-Bannerman government.

For the rest 1891 had few uplifts. It was either flat or worse. In May Gladstone had had a severe attack of influenza with nine days of fever which even involved a break in his diary-writing,
the first since his 1880 pneumonia, and kept him away from his regular early church for three weeks. At the beginning of July his eldest son Willy had died after desperate surgery. Gladstone, still
convalescent after his ’flu, had been staying near Lowestoft accompanied by his wife until she went to London for the attempt at salvation by operation, and by his daughter Mary, complemented
by a three-night visit from John Morley. His host at the house which he had never previously visited was J. J. Colman, the Norwich mustard manufacturer, who welcomed him and his party, without much
obtruding. When the dread news came it was at first kept from Gladstone. The penultimate day he wrote of as ‘a day of illusion’. Then on the final day Mary Gladstone wrote: ‘At 6
[in the morning] I
went in to Papa and told him gradually of the alarming news, tho’ keeping the worst from him till we were within half an hour of London. He was
terribly shocked and broken down, and at Liverpool Street the little note from Helen reached us telling us of the end at 5.30.’
⁹

Twelve days later after the funeral at Hawarden he went back to Lowestoft for the second half of July. The Clyffe there was the epitome of a semi-anonymous reposeful house of comfort. Such
houses, rather than those of historic note, even when accompanied by the ‘overflowing kindness’ of the hosts, were what he now liked. He did however occasionally venture on to ground
which, while mostly loyal and always friendly, was less tailored for his own needs. In February he went to Lord Rothschild’s Tring Park for a Saturday to Monday, and commented on the
‘extreme kindness’ but (not surprisingly) found the Sunday ‘very unsabbatical’;
¹⁰
in September he spent a week at Fasque,
his first visit under the reign of the new baronet his nephew, and his last visit ever to that family house in which he had spent long autumns during his periods of greatest emotional turbulence
between thirty-nine and fifty-seven years before. And in December he divided four days between visits to Spencer at Althorp and Rosebery at Mentmore. Both of these visits were, however, essentially
political, Spencer’s party being almost a shadow Cabinet in the country.

His main speech-making excursion of 1891 was to Newcastle for the October annual meeting of the National Liberal Federation. It was his first overnight visit to the Tyne since his unfortunate
praise there of Jefferson Davis in 1862. This second visit, for quite different reasons, was not much happier. While his only real interest now lay in Ireland he realized that there had to be some
sort of general Liberal platform. So he allowed Harcourt, Morley and others to cobble together the so-called ‘Newcastle Programme’, which was a capacious ragbag but weak on theme. Home
Rule was of course at the head, but it was buttressed by proposals for Church disestablishment in Scotland as well as Wales, for triennial parliaments, for a further measure of franchise reform
simply embracing ‘one man (but not one woman), one vote’, for local vetoes on drink sales, for the establishing of parish and district councils, for employers’ liability in
industrial accidents and, a little more tentatively, the payment of MPs and restrictions on the hours of work (not of them but of the manual labour force, or at least some parts of it). And
brooding over the whole manifesto were heavy warnings to the House of Lords about the consequence for their shape and powers if they resisted the items in this catalogue.

A number of these items were positively distasteful to Gladstone. Most of the others failed to excite his appetite. But he did not have the time or the energy to argue about
them in detail. So he decided that the only way to get enough of them down was to abandon his well-known habit of over-mastication and swallow them whole. It was a necessary price for keeping the
Liberal faithful enthusiastic for Home Rule. The result was a flailing speech delivered with more vehemence than conviction. It lasted an hour and twenty minutes in the rococo and many-tiered
Theatre Royal and was best remembered for the extravagance of his oratorical movements. Sometimes his arms rose high above his head in indignation, sometimes his knees sagged almost to the ground
in supplication. When taken in conjunction with the recordings of Gladstone’s voice which were made in 1890 and are still extant, with their undulating cadences, slight northern accent and
hint of retribution, it is difficult not to recall the opening words of the old American ‘Wobbly’ song: ‘Long haired preachers come out every night / Try to tell you what’s
wrong and what’s right.’ But Newcastle was an off day, with Gladstone in his own memorable phrase of thirteen years earlier, ‘putting on the steam perforce’ in an unusually
mechanical way. On more favourable occasions his voice could still have a wonderful vibrancy and his arguments a massive momentum.

The morning after the Theatre Royal speech he received the freedom of Newcastle in the City Hall with a speech of twenty-five minutes and an audience of 2500. Then he retired quickly to Hawarden
and wrote: ‘Deo gratias for having finished a work heavy at near 82.’
¹¹
With that he endeavoured to put Newcastle out of his mind. He
was still a very good judge of the quality of his own performances.

For two months after his return from Newcastle Gladstone slept every night at Hawarden. He made no speech other than on a one-day swoop to Port Sunlight at the end of November when he addressed
the Wirral Liberals, and he had no specifically political visitors except for Rosebery, who was typically playing hard to get as a member of a future Liberal government, Arnold Morley, his current
Chief Whip, and Edward Marjoribanks, who was to succeed to that office in 1892. He cut down a few of his last trees (it was he who was becoming exhausted, not the arboreal resources of Hawarden),
he worked on the text and then the proofs of two long articles on Olympian religion which he wrote for the New York publication
North American Review
. But above all he worked on sorting
books in the Temple of Peace, then transporting and installing them in his new memorial library. ‘Worked on books here and
at St. Deiniols’ became a constant daily
refrain. In mid-December he left for his ‘great treat’ at Biarritz and in Provence.

It cannot be said that when he returned ten weeks later he was like a giant refreshed. But he had enjoyed himself and he was at least in a calm mood as he approached the great test of what must
surely be his last general election and the determinant of whether or not his life’s work was crowned with success. He awaited it more like a gambler with good nerve watching the slowing
revolutions of a roulette wheel than like an athlete making a desperate effort in the last lap. There was no attempt at a repeat of the first Midlothian campaign. He remained in London for six
weeks after his return and made about a speech a week in the House of Commons, but none of them of much note or even length. Then he went to Hawarden for an Easter fortnight, and began a run of
physical ill luck with a not very serious carriage accident on the way to Euston. This was followed by another couple of months in London, although with May spent mostly at Dollis Hill. For the
whole of that spring there comes through an unprecedented sense that he was marking time, waiting upon events, and experiencing a perceptible, but steady rather than dramatic, diminution of
powers.

The 1892 election began in late June. Gladstone wrote his election address on the 22nd and left London for the campaign on the 25th. He went first to Chester for one of his very few speeches
outside Midlothian (the others were whistle-stops on the way to Edinburgh and a big Saturday-afternoon meeting in a Glasgow theatre). At Chester he suffered a nasty eye injury and missed only by a
narrow margin having effective blindness inflicted upon him. As he drove in an open carriage from the station to the Liberal Club ‘a middle aged bony woman’ (he was very precise in his
description) threw at him ‘with great force and skill’
¹²
a small missile from a distance of about two yards. The missile sounds
innocuous. It was a hard-baked piece of gingerbread about one and a half inches across. But it inflicted considerable damage. It cut the skin of the nose and, much worse, lacerated the pupil of his
only serviceable eye. Gladstone felt a heavy blow on the eye and sank back with a curiously measured comment to a companion in the carriage. ‘It was a cruel thing to do,’ he said. Later
he told a doctor that he had never seen ‘a woman throw with such spite and energy’.
¹³
She was not only spiteful and energetic but
agile as well. She disappeared into the crowd and was never identified.

Gladstone’s reaction was robust. ‘After a few minutes of rest & assurance from two casual doctors I went on & made my speech, short
of an hour, only
reading when needful with the utmost difficulty.’
¹⁴
Then he had the eye bound up at the Chester Infirmary and retired to three days of bed
and darkness at Hawarden. On the fourth day he went to Edinburgh (Dalmeny again this time) in dark spectacles – which mafia- or Garbo-like accoutrement seems peculiarly inappropriate to
Gladstone – and on the seventh day, after his major Glasgow speech, he recorded that ‘I thought small thin flat scales were descending upon me: & afterwards observed with some
discomfort that there was a fluffy object floating in the fluid of my serviceable eye.’
¹⁵
He then decided that he had to give up all reading
that was not strictly and officially necessary (a great sacrifice), and even two months later abstained throughout a whole journey from London to Hawarden. Some but not much improvement resulted
from this abstinence.

His expectations of the election had also improved, almost inevitably as a natural reaction from the deep gloom following the Parnell smash. When Hamilton saw him on 15 June and again on the
24th he found him ‘very sanguine about the result of the fight’.
¹⁶
Nor did Gladstone appear to pick up the adverse signs on the
ground, even in his own constituency. His campaign from the opening meeting in the Edinburgh Music Hall to a final one at Penycuik and a cavalcade through eighteen villages was in accordance with
pattern, as were most of his comments. The only exception was that after the Penycuik day he wrote: ‘Thank God all this is over.’ And so it was. He never campaigned again.

The early results came in on 4 July and were deceptively good. ‘At first they were even too rosy,’ Gladstone wrote; ‘afterwards toned down but the general result satisfactory,
pointing to a gain in G Britain of 80 seats. This may be exceeded.’ But the next day it was a different story: ‘Election returns unsatisfactory,’ he bleakly wrote. And on
Wednesday the 6th: ‘The returns of tonight were a little improved: but the burden on me personally is serious: a small Liberal majority being the heaviest weight I can well be called to bear.
But all is with God. His blessed will be done.’
¹⁷

The overall result was that the Liberals had 273 seats (or 274 if Keir Hardie be included) against the Conservatives’ 269. The 269 were firmly buttressed by 46 Liberal Unionists, who by
this time had become both more reliable and more comfortable allies for them than were the 81 Home Rulers, still divided by the Parnell schism, for the Liberals. There was therefore a majority of
forty for a Liberal rather than a Conservative government and, somewhat less enthusiastically, for Home Rule. But this majority was inadequate in size for intimidating the House of Lords
and deficient in coherence for giving a Liberal Cabinet a firm command over its legislative priorities.