Gladstone: A Biography (120 page)

87.
There is no record that at this stage she suggested an earldom, which in spite of the Russell precedent and the shortly-to-follow
Disraeli example was then much less part of the automatic Prime Ministerial rations than became the twentieth-century habit, from Balfour to Eden, until life peerages somewhat queered the
pitch.

88.
Apart from anything else, there were 3500 books to deal with.

89.
Balfour was away on a six-month world tour before which he had been brought even closer to Gladstone by his behaviour when May
Lyttelton, Gladstone’s niece and perhaps the only real love of Balfour’s life, died at the age of twenty-four. The amount of the rent for 4 Carlton Gardens nonetheless suggests an
arm’s-length transaction and rather belies Gladstone’s later reputation for borrowing houses rather than paying for them.

90.
See p. 621n, below, for an estimate of the remarkably few areas of England, Scotland and Wales which Gladstone had not visited by
the time that the infirmity of age made him abandon travel except in search of health.

91.
The Ailesbury house at Savernake latterly became the home of Hawtrey’s preparatory school until its rather scandalous demise
in 1994. But it was with other schools that Gladstone had trouble when staying there. He went into Marlborough and addressed the boys of the then thirty-year-old College, making there almost the
only anti-Etonian remarks of his life. He developed a theme, similar to that of Trollope’s
The Way We Live Now
(1875), critical of the impact upon Eton of the rampantly plutocratic
standards of the 1870s, which new standards many, including the Queen, found offensive. He referred to ‘The constant influx of the wealthy, and the tendency of wealth and large money
indulgences amongst boys . . . to corrupt and lower the tone of the school’ (
Diaries
, IX, p. 191n). This led to a defensive–offensive reply in the
Eton Chronicle
, and to a
few years of shadow over his habitual relationship of excessive devotion to the school. No doubt the heightened political tension of the period contributed to the reaction.

92.
This in the 1870s became an almost obsessive form of recreation. The Hawarden park must have been considerably denuded, and
visiting deputations of supporters expected to be able to take souvenir chips away with them. But it was not only at Hawarden that he performed arboreal slaughter. He was liable to practise his
skill on other people’s grounds; and it would have been a rash act for anyone who did not have substantial parkland with a few redundant trees to invite Gladstone to stay.

93.
See p. 411, below.

94.
The contribution to the Bulgarian pamphlet of Granville, the colleague most naturally disposed to support Gladstone, was to suggest
the excision of ‘bag and baggage’ from the key paragraph, thereby illustrating the capacity of advisers, unless overruled, to destroy all the most resonant passages.

95.
Although Gladstone was so sparing in the amount of time he devoted to the preparation of even his greatest (and longest) speeches, he
compensated by often taking pains subsequently to correct and edit them into a publishable state (there was a strong demand for them as pamphlets). He always found this an irritating burden,
neither relaxing nor intellectually constructive. Thus, twelve days after this occasion, he wrote: ‘Began the ever odious task of correcting my Speeches as made in the late Debate’.
(
Diaries
, IX, p. 220.)

96.
To defeat one’s former private secretary was not perhaps the most glorious of political big-game hunts. It was also the case
that in the same autumn the Duke of Buccleuch had been elected Chancellor by the graduates of Glasgow; only undergraduates voted in the rectorship election.

97.
With Bedford (the ninth Duke, 1819–91), whom he described as ‘
most
worthy’, he acted in a very firm and, for
Gladstone, surprisingly Whiggish way. Disraeli had offered a peerage to the Duke’s younger brother, Lord Odo Russell, for his special services as ambassador in Berlin at the time of the
Congress. Russell accepted with enthusiasm, but was then warned off by his brother acting as Gladstone’s agent. ‘Great was therefore my surprise,’ Russell wrote to Gladstone,
‘when the Duke told me that in your opinion by accepting this peerage I was virtually repudiating the political principles of my family and of my party, and that you held that I should defer
the acceptance of the Queen’s offer until our party was once again in power.’ (
Diaries
, IX, p. 346.) Nevertheless he reluctantly accepted the ukase, and the Ampthill title did
not come into existence until 1881 – even after the change of government Gladstone made Lord Odo wait another year.

98.
By then he had been tormented for a couple of years by Lord Randolph Churchill, particularly on the issue of Bradlaugh’s oath.
He never knew Winston Churchill. The words, although quoted in Roy Foster’s admirable study of Randolph Churchill, do not sound quite authentically Gladstonian.

99.
This at first sight sounds total hypocrisy in view of his relish for the past and future battles for which he was divinely armed. But
an opaque and convoluted previous sentence suggests that what he really had in mind was an early retirement
after
he had won an election, probably formed a government, and corrected the
evils of ‘Beaconsfieldism’.

100.
This intimacy continued at least to the halfway mark between the Gladstone epoch and today. In the 1930s, when the author’s
father was a South Wales MP, much of the social coherence between him and neighbouring members revolved around shared railway journeys between Paddington and Newport or Cardiff. Aneurin Bevan, the
most notable if not the most popular among them, was always regarded as something of an outsider because he lived in London and did not travel on the normal pattern of ‘parliamentary’
trains. I think the intimacy ceased when compartments were replaced by open coaches. Greater speed may also have had something to do with it.

101.
After the contributions which his father made at Newark, Gladstone never spent any significant sum of his own money on election
expenses. Oxford was cheap, and after that those who were begging him to stand for this or that constituency were always the
demandeur
s and had to finance the campaign if they wished to have
any chance of his accepting. This was in sharp contrast with the position of his father, his brother and his brother-in-law (Stephen Glynne), who had to buy their seats, and often did not get
delivery when they had paid. Furthermore, Gladstone had the indifference of a great man (Churchill was another) to being beholden, to Rosebery for a seat, or Donald Currie for providing a yacht for
cruises, or Aberdeen (in the late 1880s and 1890s) for lending him the Dollis Hill villa. It never occurred to him that they could expect anything in return except for the pleasure of knowing and
serving him.

102.
Kimberley, although only the first Earl, was not a South African diamond merchant but a member of an old Norfolk family. It is one
of the many confusions of British titled nomenclature that while in the case of peerages of metropolitan territorial origin the men were named after the towns (or counties), in the colonies it was
the towns which were named after the men, as in Melbourne, Sydney, Wellington, Auckland, Salisbury (Rhodesia) – and Kimberley.

103.
Littleburys was an Aberdeen-owned house at Mill Hill where Gladstone spent several weekends that summer.

104.
The internecine Connemara murder of a family of five in August 1882 led to the hanging of three men and the deportation of five
others. The guilt of one of the three hanged men was open to serious doubt. The case became a long-reverberating cause of dispute and bitterness between the Irish executive and the indigenous
population.

105.
A striking exception was provided by Lord Carlingford (as Chichester Fortescue, the unesteemed Irish Chief Secretary in
Gladstone’s first Cabinet had become). On Argyll’s resignation Gladstone brought him back into the Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal. By the autumn of 1884, however, the Prime Minister was
anxious to be rid of Carlingford both because of his lack of serious contribution and because he wanted to bring in Rosebery without upsetting the balance between peers and commoners. Despite
strong hints, and even the offer of the Constantinople embassy, Carlingford simply sat tight, and Gladstone doubted his right to dismiss him. By exhibiting what Hamilton called ‘skin . . .
made of buffalo hide’, he survived until the end of the government, reluctantly yielding up the Privy Seal in March 1885, when Rosebery at last joined, but continuing as Lord President.

106.
Benson was a successful archbishop for just under fourteen years before dying suddenly and with dramatic irony at morning service in
Gladstone’s pew in Hawarden church. It was almost exactly the death which Gladstone, still alive at the time of Benson’s death but with only eighteen declining months to go, had wished
for himself three years before Benson’s appointment. (See p. 430 above.)

107.
Figures given by Herbert Gladstone in his engaging and, as its title implies, still almost wholly filial memoir, After Thirty Years,
published in 1928, puts a more precise gloss on Hamilton. Gladstone wrote 1017 letters to the Queen, excluding those relating to honours or the formation of the government, in 1880–5. The
Queen sent him 207 letters and 170 telegrams.

108.
Chamberlain’s median attitude to Gladstone was perhaps better represented not by this display of petulance but by a rather good
piece of doggerel, which he composed during a Cabinet meeting inMay 1884 and tossed across the table to Dilke:

109.
See pp. 199–214 above.

110.
Of O’Shea’s general good faith. How early he knew of his position in the triangle is another matter. Parnell was subject
to close police surveillance. Harcourt as Home Secretary was fascinated by police reports (particularly on Irish matters, to deal with which he set up the Special Branch in March 1883), was
prurient and a natural gossip. It is inconceivable that he was not told of Parnell’s irregular arrangements and unlikely that, having been told, he did not pass on the information to his
senior colleagues.

111.
Not really; an experienced speaker can nearly always get it right within a very few minutes.

112.
Blunt got his own back in 1885 by writing a fairly derisory (and maybe imaginary) account of Gladstone’s calls upon Catherine
Walters (‘Skittles’), a
grande horizontale
who captivated, among others, the Prince of Wales and Hartington, in her well-placed nid
d’amour
in South Street, Mayfair.
‘Nothing improper seems to have happened,’ Blunt wrote of Gladstone’s visits. He portrayed him as being archly amatory, congratulating Miss Walters on the smallness of her waist
and suggesting that he might manually measure its size. (Elizabeth Longford,
Pilgrimage of Passion
, pp. 217–18.) There is, however, no mention of visits to Miss Walters in the
Gladstone diaries, and he concealed few secrets from them.

113.
See p. 558, below.

114.
See p. 579, below.

115.
He was engaged in writing for the
Nineteenth Century
a courteous but highly convoluted and argumentative riposte to an article
of T. H. Huxley on the relationship

116.
‘The whole stream of public excitement is now turned against me,’ it began, ‘and I am pestered with incessant
telegrams which there is no defence against but either suicide or Parnell’s method of self-concealment. The truth is I have more or less of opinions and ideas but no intention or
negotiations.’ (
Diaries
, XI, p. 451.)

117.
Gladstone could, however, have deployed good excuses. Chamberlain had been to Hawarden on 7–8 October with ‘three hours
of stiff conversation’ but that was before the election. And Hartington had been invited for an early post-election visit, but had declined on the ground that he was engaged to meet the
Prince of Wales in Lincolnshire; no alternative meeting was suggested from either side.

118.
This qualification opened a large can of worms. Was a vote of censure against a government on, say, Welsh Church disestablishment or
excise duties in Great Britain (the Irish ones being different) an imperial question, or was it not?

119.
He denied that it was a ‘conversion’ in the sense that he had undergone one on Irish Church disestablishment. It was more
an evolution of mind. (See Matthew,
Gladstone
,
1875–1898
, pp. 211–12.)

120.
See p. 378, above.

121.
Trevelyan, unlike Chamberlain, changed his mind in 1887, accepted Home Rule and moved back into the Gladstonian communion.

122.
Sir Reginald (later Lord) Welby was permanent secretary of the Treasury 1885–94 and, a surprising progression, chairman of the
London County Council in 1900. Hamilton is already a familiar. It was before the second reading debate a month later that, despite his high mandarin quality, Hamilton’s figures turned out to
be one of those rare cock-ups which bring forth the profuse apologies of civil servants and the (fairly) gracious tolerance of ministers.

123.
Which Morley, in an uncharacteristic lapse, cites the wrong way round: (
Life of Gladstone
, III, pp. 313–14.)

124.
Dilke, however, gave what turned out to be his last vote for six years to the government, thereby marking the end of his partnership
with Chamberlain.