Gladstone: A Biography (67 page)

Paradoxically, the number of recess Cabinets was also a record. They were mainly concerned with preparations for the new session, and as time went on they became increasingly concentrated on the
Irish University Bill. The Prime Minister’s own mind was overwhelmingly so directed. He regarded the reform and expansion of university education in Ireland as an essential third leg to the
programme of pacification to which he had already contributed Church disestablishment and the Land Bill. And the Queen’s destruction of his plan to overarch the three by employing the Prince
of Wales to give Ireland a new status in relation to the Crown made him the more anxious to complete the tripod. Furthermore, his tastes, his interests and his experience made him only too anxious
to engage obsessively with the issue, bristling with difficulties and with a history strewn with failure though it was. He made himself a great theoretical expert on the subject. He read
voluminously around it, thus occupying many hours of his Hawarden autumn. The result was that his 13 February speech introducing the bill, for all that it lasted three hours, was the most
fascinating and ingenious lecture, showing an amazing command over the facts of the history of higher education in Ireland and an equally impressive ability to construct his own theory out of them.
He delivered a disquisition on the nominal suzerainty of the ancient but shadowy University of Dublin over its sole constituent college, Trinity, which he described as ‘perhaps the wealthiest
college . . . in Christendom’, far superior in that respect to his own humble
alma mater
of Christ Church. He was equally compelling and original on the paucity of modern
non-vocational university training in Ireland: a total of only 784 arts students, he managed to demonstrate,
of whom no more than an eighth came from the Roman Catholic
three-quarters of the population. This compared with a Scottish figure of 4000 arts students, in a country with barely a half of the Irish population.

The whole speech is a wonderful example of Gladstone’s expository style, compelling, daring (there are a lot of attacks on venerable institutions and practices), with the figures never
boring because, if not exactly made up for the purpose, they are selectively presented so as at once to surprise the listener and to carry him along with the argument. They are manifestly all his
own work. No official would ever have contrived to present them so tendentiously.
⁸¹
Despite the sonorousness the pace is fast, and there is always a tension
about what he is going to say next. The 20,000-word speech is easy and rewarding to read today, and goes far to explain how a full House of Commons, whether in agreement or disagreement, could
listen to him over such broad acres of time.

Unfortunately, however, while Gladstone’s scheme was an elegantly constructed castle in the air, and while his speech advocating it was magnificent, the bill suffered from one fatal flaw,
which was that no one except himself really wanted it. This applied to his Cabinet, which was the reason that he had to have so many meetings to get it through, and it applied particularly to the
most departmentally concerned member of it. Hartington, having gone reluctantly to Ireland at the end of 1870, became enough engaged with its problems that he was offended when Gladstone in the
summer of 1873, with that maladroitness which frequently afflicted their relations, responded to a false rumour that Hartington wanted a change by offering him a return to his old position as
Postmaster-General.

Hartington was sceptical about the form of the University Bill, but even more did he believe that there were two other measures of Irish reform which should be given priority over it. The first
was public ownership of the railways and the second was local government reorganization. The object of the latter was to get away from the haphazard rule, at once inefficient and undemocratic, of
Dublin Castle. The Castle was not corrupt but it was remote and relied on favourites who were almost by definition unrepresentative ‘Castle Catholics’, the Irish equivalent of Uncle
Toms. And beneath it there was only the archaic structure
of grand juries. Hartington could not much interest Gladstone in either issue. The Prime Minister’s mind was all
on raising the number of students of the humanities in Ireland from 784 to perhaps 1500, or at most 2000. It was, to say the least, a disproportionate concentration of attention.

Furthermore, in order to give his higher education scheme even a chance of success he had to hobble the very meaning of the word ‘university’ and limit the studies of those arts
undergraduates to an extent which meant that they might almost as well have been studying dentistry or one of the other vocational courses about which he was so disparaging. The saddest passage in
his otherwise magnificent speech was that in which he described the restrictions which would have to be placed upon the university:

It was curious that he should have got himself impaled, from the other direction as it were, upon the same stakes which had speared Newman in his Dublin lectures twenty years before. In one of
the uneasiest passages in
The Idea of a University
Newman endeavours to reconcile his view that ‘the very name of University is inconsistent with restrictions [on the range of its
teachings] of any kind’ with his reluctant acceptance of the Pope’s view that the university he had been asked to set up in Dublin must be a purely Catholic one. Newman tied himself in
knots to try to resolve this contradiction, yet Gladstone, who was always very well up in Newmaniana, seemed to have learnt little from it. He exposed himself to the derision contained in that
bracketed ‘Laughter’, yet failed to win over the Irish hierarchy. Cardinal Cullen was a very hardline Archbishop of Dublin, whose mission was to impose the will of Rome upon the Irish
Catholic Church, which on his appointment in 1852 he had found almost as Gallican as the French Church of those days. The Irish Church obviously did not have the prestige of being the ‘eldest
daughter’, but it had the alternative advantage of remoteness coupled with devout adherents.

Cullen and his bishops, contrary to the hopes and expectations of Manning, on whom, in spite of his ultramontane excesses at the Vatican
Council, Gladstone still depended
too much, killed the bill. They wanted no system of education which mingled the religious and the secular power. But Gladstone had already made too many concessions to them for the bill to arouse
any advanced Liberal enthusiasm. And the vested interests, in the shape primarily of Trinity, which he proposed to federate with Maynooth, Magee (a Presbyterian) College and two of the three
existing Queen’s Colleges, were obviously opposed. So was the third Queen’s College at Galway, which he proposed to wind up on the ground that its main product were lawyers trained at
too high a public cost. The bill therefore had plenty of enemies and hardly more than one friend, although powerful and dedicated in his solitariness.

The bill perished soon after 2.00 a.m. on the night of 11–12 March. Gladstone had moved the second reading in another long expository speech on the 3rd, and then, after four nights of
debate, wound up immediately before the fatal division. As he described it to the Queen, ‘Mr Disraeli rose at half past ten, and spoke amidst wrapt attention until midnight [despite deep
underlying disapproval Gladstone was nearly always much more gracious about Disraeli’s speeches than vice versa]. Mr Gladstone followed in a speech of two hours.’
¹¹
The bill was then defeated by 287 votes to 284. The margin was narrow, but as this was in a House with a normal Liberal majority (even after a few
bye-election losses) of eighty-five, and as Gladstone had described the bill as ‘vital to the honour and existence of the government’, the effect was nonetheless shattering.

Gladstone’s winding-up speech won more praise than votes. Speaker Brand described it as ‘a magnificent speech, generous, high-minded, and without a taint of bitterness, although he
was sorely tried, especially by false friends’.
¹²
But its effect was less than that of the sullenly hostile pastoral letter which Cardinal
Cullen caused to be read in all the Catholic churches of Ireland two days before the vote. It was the defection of Irish members which provided the seismic shift against the bill, and it was the
prospect of this opened up by Cullen’s broadside which encouraged Disraeli to alert his whips, sharpen his words and thus provide a solid Conservative vote. Only this could make the shift
decisive. Morley was both neat and justified in writing that ‘the measure that had been much reviled as a dark concordat between Mr. Gladstone and the pope, was now rejected by a concordat
between the pope’s men and Mr. Disraeli’.
¹³

Forty-three Liberals voted against the bill, but only eight of them were English or Scottish members. The other thirty-five were from
Ireland, twenty-five of them Catholics.
On an alternative basis of classification, the unsuccessful ‘aye’ lobby was made up of 222 English members, 47 Scottish and only 15 Irish. The ‘no’ lobby contained 209
English, 10 Scottish and no less than 68 Irish members. This was the reverse of the pattern which was subsequently to become a feature of all measures of Irish reform over the thirty years when
Gladstone and then Asquith tried to carry Home Rule in time to prevent the rise of Sinn Fein republicanism and the move to complete separation. In 1886, 1893 and 1912 (as in the subsequent re-runs
of 1913 and 1914 made necessary by the Parliament Act) there was never an English majority for a Home Rule Bill. The majority, when it existed, was provided by an overwhelming preponderance of
Irish members and strong support from the Scots, this last feature being the only one which was present in 1873.

Despite more widespread unease on his own benches, Gladstone would have got his second reading, and maybe sustained the whole bill more or less intact, had it not been for Cullen and his
supporting bishops. He was probably justified when he wrote bitterly to Manning on 13 March: ‘Your Irish Brethren have received in the late vote of Parliament the most extravagant compliment
ever paid them. They have destroyed the measure; which otherwise was safe enough.’
¹⁴

Until a late stage Gladstone was unaware of the danger. ‘No apprehension is at present entertained,’ he wrote to the Queen on 5 March. Four days later he had changed his mind and
when the defeat occurred he recorded that it ‘was believed to cause more surprise to the opposite side than it did to me’. He then acted with all deliberate speed. He adjourned the
House of Commons for thirty-six hours and promised them a statement of the government’s intentions at the end of that interval. He caused the Queen to be immediately informed, despite it then
being 2.45 a.m. And he summoned the Cabinet for 1.00 p.m. on what had become the same day. There was a complication because, although contrary to his frequent practice he does not record himself as
being ill, he was engaged in intensive medical consultation. He wrote to his doctor – Andrew Clark – on the day which concluded with his winding-up speech and the great defeat; he went
to see him at 11.30 on the following morning immediately before visiting the Queen, and did so again on the morning after that, which was the day when he formally tendered his resignation. For the
last occasion he recorded that Clark ‘completed his examination and gave me his careful judgement’.
¹⁵
Twenty-one years later he
reminiscently but obscurely wrote that ‘Clark . . . would give me on medical grounds no encouragement whatsoever.’
¹⁶

Gladstone’s complaint appears to have been general exhaustion, from which he suffered during the remainder of the session of 1873 and indeed through to the end of the
government, rather than anything more specific and immediately menacing. He nonetheless obviously gave a high priority to his visits to Clark, which added to the commitments of a peculiarly
burdensome week. It may also have turned his mind towards resignation rather than dissolution. These were the alternatives (as opposed to ignoring the defeat, revising the bill or going for a vote
of confidence) to which the Cabinet quickly narrowed their options. Resignation would give him the ‘temporary rest’, about the need for which he recorded himself as ‘strongly
advised’. Dissolution would do the reverse. It also offered little prospect of a Liberal victory.

The Cabinet being satisfactorily amenable – Gladstone had written a few days before of it as being ‘most harmonious, at this critical time’ – resignation was the course
determined upon, and he formally presented it to the Queen thirty-six hours after the defeat. An hour and a half later he announced it to the House of Commons. Disraeli then proceeded to throw his
spanner into the works. The deadlock was complete, and Gladstone was furious, as he often was, with Disraeli’s manoeuvres. The latter’s motive was of course tactical. Although the
Conservatives had gained thirteen by-election seats from the Liberals in the previous two years, Disraeli did not believe that the prospect for a decisive Conservative victory was yet secure. And
the Parliament, under the Septennial Act, still had a possible two years and ten months of life. Gladstone insisted that when the opposition deliberately set out to inflict a major defeat on a
government, as it had done with its heavy whipping for 11 March, there was a special obligation on it to provide an alternative.

The only person who might have resolved the impasse in the way Gladstone wanted was the Queen. But she chose not to do so. This was perhaps her first act of gross favouritism towards Disraeli.
Undoubtedly by that stage she would have welcomed a change of government, and she might have been right from a national point of view. The Liberal administration was running down, as all its
principal members had the sense and the public spirit to see. March 1873 would have been the right time for a change. But if Disraeli counselled otherwise she accepted his judgement, in a way that
she would not have done without protest with Gladstone. And she accepted the price, which was that she had to soldier on for another eleven months (it could have been longer) with an unloved Prime
Minister.