Gladstone: A Biography (61 page)

His second action was utterly different but equally surprising. That year, as in the previous one, he did not go to Hawarden when (on 10 August) he had disposed for the session of both
Parliament and Cabinets, but went as in 1869 to ‘Granville’s hospitable abode at Walmer’. There he remained, with a short London interlude, until 6 September. On 23 August he
began to read a recently published work of Emile de Laveleye, a Belgian savant who then enjoyed considerable international fame, entitled
La Prusse et l’Autriche depuis Sadowa
. On the
26th he wrote to
Reeve, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, to ask whether he would like a substantial anonymous review of this book for his October number. Reeve accepted on
the 29th (who would not in the circumstances?), and on 1 September Gladstone began to write, although he did not finish reading Laveleye until the 6th, and continued through and beyond his Walmer
holiday. He was still sending ‘revises’ to Reeve from Hawarden as late as 7 October.

The result was an 18,000-word article which used Laveleye’s book only as a launching pad and was indeed rightly entitled
Germany, France and England
, rather than
Prussia and
Austria
, with which latter country it had relatively little to do. It surveyed with great frankness, and equal orotundity the behaviour of France and Prussia before and during hostilities, and
did so in a way which was sufficiently pro-Prussian and anti-French as to meet even the exacting standards in this respect of Queen Victoria. There was, however, one exception, and that was the
rumoured (at that stage) Prussian intention to annex Alsace-Lorraine. That was castigated as ‘harsh, almost brutal’. He concluded with a survey of England’s position in the
shaken-up world which followed from France’s loss of ‘ten great battles running’ culminating in Sedan and the capture and overthrow of the Emperor. Here he attempted to ride two
very different and difficult circus horses. The first was one of simple rejoicing at the good luck (not the moral superiority, he was quick to add) which flowed from his own country’s
geographical position. ‘Happy England!’, he actually wrote, and attributed this happiness, without eschewing even the most hackneyed of clichés, to ‘that streak of silver
sea’.

The second horse was his devotion to the Concert of Europe. By a supreme irony, in that summer when the ultramontanism of Piux IX drove Gladstone’s anti-Roman Catholic feeling to its peak,
he concluded by citing St Augustine’s already quoted maxim ‘
Securus judicat orbis terrarum
’. Gladstone used it in the context that ‘the general judgement of civilized
mankind . . . has censured the aggression of France; it will censure, if need arise, the greed of Germany’.

What was most striking about this article, however, was not its content, but the fact that he wrote it, and also his desire and belief that it might remain anonymous. The inversion of the habits
of modern politicians is almost complete. Rare are the speeches without speech-writers, and rare too are the memoirs without ghost-writers, even when the putative author has the leisure of
semi-retirement. And then it is hoped that the surrogates will so capture the style of the principal that
their intervention may be concealed. Gladstone, on the contrary, had
both the energy and the intellectual grasp to pour out the words from his own pen, but wished to suggest, for reasons of tact and diplomacy, that they were written by someone else. When he
republished the essay, eight years later and then under his own name, he added the footnote: ‘This article is the only one ever written by me, which was meant, for the time, to be in
substance, as well as in form, anonymous. Motives of public duty, which appeared to be of sufficient weight, both led to its composition, and also prohibited me from divulging the
authorship.’
¹⁸

Once again, Gladstone’s naivety had reared it head. There was probably not much chance in any event of the anonymity holding. The temptations for Reeve, the editor, to drop delicate hints
that he had a most notable contributor must have been considerable. Apart from this, Gladstone chose to write his ‘anonymous’ article in his most recognizable style. Even read today, it
is impossible not to imagine him declaiming it in the House of Commons. The slightly prolix courtesy, the elaborate constructions, the Latin (and one Greek) quotations occurring at just the
appropriate intervals are all there. But above all it is instinctively predicated on the assumption that the statements were in a sense
ex cathedra
, interesting because of who was making
them. The secret of the authorship lasted at most for forty-eight hours. It was a characteristic Gladstone enterprise: born of surplus energy, intellectually interesting without being of the
highest quality, simple in apparently believing in a utopian secrecy, yet sufficiently shrewd that nothing which came out was beyond what he really wanted to say.

In spite of the war and its repercussions Gladstone’s 1870 autumn was calmer than those of the two previous years. He avoided Balmoral, although superficially his relations with the Queen
were in quieter waters than in either 1869 or 1871, in both of which years he spent a substantial period there. He also had fewer Cabinets in preparation for the session of 1871 than in the two
previous years. Although he did not get to Hawarden until late in September he nonetheless spent a total of sixty-eight nights there between 1 October and 12 January. He should have returned to
London invigorated, but in fact he came back to observe the beginning of the decline of his government. It was a slow process, for the government still had another three years to run.
Coincidentally, for neither was the cause of the other, there also began a deep disenchantment in Gladstone’s relations with the Queen, and
vice versa
. And that, once it took place,
was irrevocable.

S
OVEREIGN AND
P
RIME
M
INISTER

A
SALIENT FACT
of late-nineteenth-century Britain was that the two figures who most symbolized the nation and the age, Queen Victoria and Gladstone, did
not get on. This had by no means always been so. While Prince Albert was alive Gladstone had been a Court favourite. And in the early years of the Queen’s widowhood, while she was withdrawn
from all politicians, he was considerably preferred not only to ‘those two dreadful old men’ Palmerston and Russell, but also to Disraeli who, although he had progressed a good deal
from being ‘that detestable Mr D’Israeli’ of 1846, was still regarded as a little exotic for full trust.

The deterioration began during Gladstone’s first premiership, and was underpinned by Disraeli’s successful flattery and constitutional impropriety in deliberately turning the
Queen’s mind against Gladstone in the six years after 1874. By 1880 she was a partisan Tory imbued with a deep dislike of the leading Liberal statesman, whom she nonetheless had to endure as
her first minister for a longer cumulative period than any of the other nine who served her in this capacity. It was not Disraeli’s finest service to his monarch or his country.

It would however be ludicrous to put the whole blame upon Disraeli. He was unrestrained in exploiting an opportunity, but the opportunity had first to be there. How and why did Gladstone,
possessing as he did a great, even excessive, respect for the institution of the monarchy, and starting from his very strong Court position in the 1850s and his perfectly adequate one in the 1860s,
allow it to arise? He undoubtedly changed more during the course of his long career than do most public figures. It is difficult to reconcile the neat and primly good-looking young Church and state
High Tory of the 1830s with the somewhat wild eyes and flying locks of the People’s William of the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s. The Queen could have claimed that the sober and earnest young
statesman whom she and her husband had found so much in tune with what they saw as the needs of mid-century Britain was very different from the towering leader (as his supporters saw him) or the
destructive demagogue (as she and most members of the South of England prosperous classes saw him) of the last twenty-five years of his life. His first premiership caught him
almost at the end of the transition and on the threshold of this last phase.

But, if Gladstone changed to a bewildering extent, so too did Queen Victoria, perhaps even more so, and mostly in a diametrically opposite direction to that in which Gladstone was proceeding.
Philip Guedalla, a largely forgotten non-academic historian of the inter-war years, and, insofar as he is remembered, underestimated – because of his straining after epigram and over-dramatic
imagery – produced a penetrating
jeu d’esprit
in his introduction to the correspondence of the
The Queen and Mr Gladstone
. He amused himself and some others by claiming
that the long reign of Victoria was a myth. There were really three Victorias:

Just as Melbourne and Palmerston were the political favourites of the reign of Victoria I, so Peel and Aberdeen and Gladstone were those of that of Victoria II, when material progress, earnest
endeavour and liberal thoughts mingled together to produce a Court atmosphere from which Melbourne was lucky to be spared by death, which would have oppressed Palmerston had he not had the brazen
assurance to be indifferent to it, and in which Disraeli was regarded as a flamboyant parvenu. But the reign of Victoria III was still to come. It was essentially a Disraeli creation and therefore
began only in 1874. But it was casting its shadow before it in the early 1870s, when the guiding presence of Albert was becoming less immanent and Gladstone’s moral imperatives were coming to
grate.

If this thesis is even half accepted, Gladstone around 1870 had to deal with a Queen who had run her race as Victoria II, and was at least becoming ready for the Prince Charming who, somewhat
arthritic and asthmatic although Disraeli had become, was to transform her into Victoria III. And at the same time Gladstone himself was in firm transit in the other direction, increasingly finding
crowds more attractive than Courts, and with a growing conviction of his own righteousness. The contrary movement of two such formidable objects was a guarantee of the turbulence of the water
around them.