In the autumn he had a sharp tussle with the Bank of England, and

displayed a toughness, stiffness, and sustained anger that greatly

astonished Threadneedle Street. In the spring he had introduced a change

in the mode of issuing deficiency bills, limiting the quarterly amount

to such a sum as would cover the maximum of dividends payable, as known

by long experience to be called for. The Bank held this to be illegal;

claimed the whole amount required, along with balances actually in hand,

to cover the entire amount payable; and asked him to take the opinion of

the law officers. The lawyers backed the chancellor of the exchequer.

Then the Bank took an opinion of their own; their counsel (Kelly and

Palmer) advised that the attorney and solicitor were wrong; and

recommended the Bank to bring their grievance before the prime minister.

Mr. Gladstone was righteously incensed at this refusal to abide by an

opinion invited by the Bank itself, and by which if it had been adverse

he would himself have been bound. 'And then,' said Bethell, urging Mr.

Gladstone to stand to his guns, 'its counsel call the Bank a trustee for

the public! Proh pudor! What stuff lawyers will talk. But 'tis their

vocation.' Mr. Gladstone's letters were often prolix, but nobody could

be more terse and direct when occasion moved him, and the proceedings of

the lawyers with their high Bank views and the equivocal faith of the

directors in bringing fresh lawyers into the case at all provoked more

than one stern and brief epistle. The governor, who was his private

friend, winced. 'I do not study diplomacy in letters of this kind,' Mr.

Gladstone replied, 'and there is no sort of doubt that I am very angry

about the matter of the opinion; but affected and sarcastic politeness

is an instrument which in writing to you I should think it the worst

taste and the worst feeling to employ. I admire the old fashion

according to which in English pugilism (which, however, I do not admire)

the combatants shook hands before they fought; only I think much time

ought not to be spent upon such salutations when there is other work to

do.'

In a letter to his wife seven years later, Mr. Gladstone says of this

dispute, 'Mr. Arbuthnot told me to-day an observation of Sir George

Lewis's when at the exchequer here. Speaking of my controversy with the

Bank in 1854, he said, "It is a pity Gladstone puts so much heat, so

much irritability into business. Now I am as cool as a fish."' The worst

of being as cool as a fish is that you never get great things done, you

effect no improvements, and you carry no reforms, against the lethargy

or selfishness of men and the tyranny of old custom.[334]

Now also his attention was engaged by the controversies on currency that

thrive so lustily in the atmosphere of the Bank Charter Act, and, after

much discussion with authorities both in Lombard Street and at the

treasury, without committal he sketched out at least one shadow of a

project of his own. He knew, however, that any great measure must be

undertaken by a finance minister with a clear position and strong hands,

and he told Graham that even if he saw his way distinctly to a plan, he

did not feel individually strong enough for the attempt. Nor was there

time. To reconstitute the Savings Bank finance, to place the chancery

and some other accounts on a right basis, and to readjust the banking

relations properly so-called between the Bank and the state, would be

even more than a fair share of financial work for the session. Before

the year was over he passed a bill, for which he had laid before the

cabinet elaborate argumentative supports, removing a number of

objections to the then existing system of dealing with the funds drawn

from Savings Banks.[335]

The year closed with an incident that created a considerable stir, and

might by misadventure have become memorable. What has been truly called

a warm and prolonged dispute[336] arose out of Mr. Gladstone's removal

of a certain official from his post in the department of woods and

forests. As Lord Aberdeen told the Queen that he could not easily make

the case intelligible, it is not likely that I should succeed any

better, and we may as well leave the thick dust undisturbed. Enough to

say that Lord John Russell thought the dismissal harsh; that Mr.

Gladstone stood his ground against either the reversal of what he had

done, or any proceedings in parliament that might look like contrition,

but was willing to submit the points to the decision of colleagues; that

Lord John would submit no point to colleagues 'affecting his personal

honour'--to such degrees of heat can the quicksilver mount even in a

cabinet thermometer. If such quarrels of the great are painful, there is

some compensation in the firmness, patience, and benignity with which a

man like Lord Aberdeen strove to appease them. Some of his colleagues

actually thought that Lord John would make this paltry affair a plea for

resigning, while others suspected that he might find a better excuse in

the revival of convocation. As it happened, a graver occasion offered

itself.

FOOTNOTES:

[331] Northcote, _Financial Policy_, p. 242; Buxton, _Mr. Gladstone: A

Study_, pp. 154-5.

[332] Greville, Part III. i. pp. 150, 151, 157.

[333] Not many years before (1838), Talleyrand had surprised the French

institute by a paper in which he passed a eulogy on strong theological

studies; their influence on vigour as well as on finesse of mind; on the

skilful ecclesiastical diplomatists that those studies had formed.

[334] See Appendix.

[335] 17 and 18 Vict., c. 50.

[336] Walpole's _Russell_, ii. p. 243 _n_.

CHAPTER VI

CRISIS OF 1855 AND BREAK-UP OF THE PEELITES

(_1855_)

Party has no doubt its evils; but all the evils of party put

together would be scarcely a grain in the balance, when compared

with the dissolution of honourable friendships, the pursuit of

selfish ends, the want of concert in council, the absence of a

settled policy in foreign affairs, the corruption of certain

statesmen, the caprices of an intriguing court, which the

extinction of party connection has brought and would bring again

upon this country.--EARL RUSSELL.[337]

The administrative miscarriages of the war in the Crimea during the

winter of 1854-5 destroyed the coalition government.[338] When

parliament assembled on January 23, 1855, Mr. Roebuck on the first night

of the session gave notice of a motion for a committee of inquiry. Lord

John Russell attended to the formal business, and when the House was up

went home accompanied by Sir Charles Wood. Nothing of consequence passed

between the two colleagues, and no word was said to Wood in the

direction of withdrawal. The same evening as the prime minister was

sitting in his drawing-room, a red box was brought in to him by his son,

containing Lord John Russell's resignation. He was as much amazed as

Lord Newcastle, smoking his evening pipe of tobacco in his coach, was

amazed by the news that the battle of Marston Moor had begun. Nothing

has come to light since to set aside the severe judgment pronounced upon

this proceeding by the Universal opinion of contemporaries, including

Lord John's own closest political allies. That a minister should run

away from a hostile motion upon affairs for which responsibility was

collective, and this without a word of consultation with a single

colleague, is a transaction happily without a precedent in the history

of modern English cabinets.[339] It opened an intricate and unexpected

chapter of affairs.

The ministerial crisis of 1855 was unusually prolonged; it was

interesting as a drama of character and motive; it marked a decisive

stage in the evolution of party, and it was one of the turning points in

the career of the subject of this biography. Fortunately for us, Mr.

Gladstone has told in his own way the whole story of what he calls this

'sharp and difficult passage in public affairs,' and he might have added

that it was a sharp passage in his own life. His narrative, with the

omission of some details now dead and indifferent, and of a certain

number of repetitions, is the basis of this chapter.

I

LORD JOHN'S RESIGNATION

On the day following Lord John's letter the cabinet met, and the prime

minister told them that at first he thought it meant the break-up of the

government, but on further consideration he thought they should hold on,

if it could be done with honour and utility. Newcastle suggested his own

resignation, and the substitution of Lord Palmerston in his place.

Palmerston agreed that the country, rightly or wrongly, wished to see

him at the war office, but he was ready to do whatever his colleagues

thought best. The whigs thought resignation necessary. Mr. Gladstone

thought otherwise, and scouted the suggestion that as Newcastle was

willing to resign, Lord John might come back. Lord John himself actually

sent a sort of message to know whether he should attend the cabinet. In

the end Lord Aberdeen carried all their resignations to the Queen. These

she declined to accept, and she 'urged with the greatest eagerness that

the decision should be reconsidered.' It is hard at this distance of

time to understand how any cabinet under national circumstances of such

gravity could have thought of the ignominy of taking to flight from a

motion of censure, whatever a single colleague like Lord John Russell

might deem honourable. On pressure from the Queen, the whigs in the

government, Lord John notwithstanding, agreed to stand fire. Mr.

Gladstone proceeds:--

Lord John's explanation, which was very untrue in its general

effect, though I believe kindly conceived in feeling as well as

tempered with some grains of policy and a contemplation of another

possible premiership, carried the House with him, as Herbert

observed while he was speaking. Palmerston's reply to him was

wretched. It produced in the House (that is, in so much of the

House as would otherwise have been favourable), a flatness and

deadness of spirit towards the government which was indescribable;

and Charles Wood with a marked expression of face said while it was

going on, 'And this is to be our leader!' I was myself so painfully

full of the scene, that when Palmerston himself sat down I was on

the very point of saying to him unconsciously, 'Can anything more

be said?' But no one would rise in the adverse sense, and therefore

there was no opening for a minister. Palmerston [now become leader

in the Commons] had written to ask me to follow Lord John on

account of his being _a party_. But it was justly thought in the

cabinet that there were good reasons against my taking this part

upon me, and so the arrangement was changed.

Roebuck brought forward his motion. Mr. Gladstone resisted it on behalf

of the government with immense argumentative force, and he put the point

against Lord John which explains the word 'untrue' in the passage just

quoted, namely, that though he desired in November the substitution of

Palmerston for Newcastle as war minister, he had given it up in

December, and yet this vital fact was omitted.[340] It was not for the

government, he said, either to attempt to make terms with the House by

reconstruction of a cabinet, or to shrink from any judgment of the House

upon their acts. If they had so shrunk, he exclaimed, this is the sort

of epitaph that he would expect to have written over their remains:

'Here lie the dishonoured ashes of a ministry that found England in

peace and left in it war, that was content to enjoy the emoluments of

office and to wield the sceptre of power, so long as no man had the

courage to question their existence: they saw the storm gathering over

the country; they heard the agonising accounts that were almost daily

received of the sick and wounded in the East. These things did not move

them, but so soon as a member of opposition raised his hand to point the

thunderbolt, they became conscience-stricken into a sense of guilt, and

hoping to escape punishment, they ran away from duty.' Such would be

their epitaph. Of the proposed inquiry itself,--an inquiry into the

conduct of generals and troops actually in the field, and fighting by

the side of, and in concert with, foreign allies, he observed--'Your

inquiry will never take place as a real inquiry; or, if it did, it would

lead to nothing but confusion and disturbance, increased disasters,

shame at home and weakness abroad; it would convey no consolation to

those whom you seek to aid, but it would carry malignant joy to the

hearts of the enemies of England; and, for my part, I shall ever

rejoice, if this motion is carried to-night, that my own last words as a

member of the cabinet of the Earl of Aberdeen have been words of solemn

and earnest protest against a proceeding which has no foundation either

in the constitution or in the practice of preceding parliaments; which

is useless and mischievous for the purpose which it appears to

contemplate; and which, in my judgment, is full of danger to the power,

dignity, and usefulness of the Commons of England.' A journalistic

observer, while deploring the speaker's adherence to 'the dark

dogmatisms of medieval religionists,' admits that he had never heard so

fine a speech. The language, he says, was devoid of redundance. The

attitude was calm. Mr. Gladstone seemed to feel that he rested upon the

magnitude of the argument, and had no need of the assistance of bodily

vehemence of manner. His voice was clear, distinct, and flexible,

without monotony. It was minute dissection without bitterness or

ill-humoured innuendo. He sat down amid immense applause from hearers

admiring but unconvinced. Mr. Gladstone himself records of this speech:

'Hard and heavy work, especially as to the cases of three persons: Lord

John Russell, Duke of Newcastle, and Lord Raglan.' Ministers were beaten

(January 29) by 325 to 148, and they resigned.

_Jan. 30, 1855._--Cabinet 1-2. We exchanged friendly adieus. Dined

with the Herberts. This was a day of personal light-heartedness,

but the problem for the nation is no small one.

END OF THE COALITION

The Queen sent for Lord Derby, and he made an attempt to form a

government. Without aid from the conservative wing of the fallen

ministry there was no hope, and his first step (Jan. 31) was to call on

Lord Palmerston, with an earnest request for his support, and with a

hope that he would persuade Mr. Gladstone and Sidney Herbert to rejoin

their old political connection; with the intimation moreover that Mr.

Disraeli, with a self-abnegation that did him the highest credit, was

willing to waive in Lord Palmerston's favour his own claim to the

leadership of the House of Commons. Palmerston was to be president of

the council, and Ellenborough minister of war. In this conversation Lord

Palmerston made no objection on any political grounds, or on account of

any contemplated measures; he found no fault with the position intended

for himself, or for others with whom he would be associated. Lord Derby

supposed that all would depend on the concurrence of Mr. Gladstone and

Herbert. He left Cambridge House at half-past two in the afternoon, and

at half-past nine in the evening he received a note from Lord Palmerston

declining. Three hours later he heard from Mr. Gladstone, who declined

also. The proceedings of this eventful day, between two in the afternoon

and midnight, whatever may have been the play of motive and calculation

in the innermost minds of all or any of the actors, were practically to

go a long way, though by no means the whole way, as we shall see,

towards making Mr. Gladstone's severance from the conservative party

definitive.

_Jan. 31._--Lord Palmerston came to see me between three and four,

with a proposal from Lord Derby that he and I, with S. Herbert

should take office under him; Palmerston to be president of the

council and lead the House of Commons. Not finding me when he

called before, he had gone to S. Herbert, who seemed to be

disinclined. I inquired (1) whether Derby mentioned Graham? (2)

Whether he had told Lord Palmerston if his persevering with the

commission he had received would depend on the answer to this

proposal. (3) How he was himself inclined. He answered the two

first questions in the negative, and said as to the third, though

not keenly, that he felt disinclined, but that if he refused it

would be attributed to his contemplating another result, which

other result he considered would be agreeable to the country. I

then argued strongly with him that though he might form a

government, and though if he formed it, he would certainly start it

amidst immense clapping of hands, yet he could not have any

reasonable prospect of stable parliamentary support; on the one

hand would stand Derby with his phalanx, on the other Lord J.

Russell, of necessity a centre and nucleus of discontent, and

between these two there would and could be no room for a

parliamentary majority such as would uphold his government. He

argued only rather faintly the other way, and seemed rather to come

to my way of thinking.

I said that even if the proposition were entertained, there would

be much to consider; that I thought it clear, whatever else was

doubtful, that we could not join without him, for in his absence

the wound would not heal kindly again, that I could not act without

Lord Aberdeen's approval, nor should I willingly separate myself

from Graham; that if we joined, we must join in force. But I was

disposed to wish that if all details could be arranged, we should

join in that manner rather than that Derby should give up the

commission, though I thought the best thing of all would be Derby

forming a ministry of his own men, provided only he could get a

good or fair foreign secretary instead of Clarendon, who in any

case would be an immense loss....

I went off to speak to Lord Aberdeen, and Palmerston went to speak

to Clarendon, with respect to whom he had told Derby that he could

hardly enter any government which had not Clarendon at the foreign

office. When we reassembled, I asked Lord Palmerston whether he had

made up his mind for himself independently of us, inasmuch as I

thought that if he had, that was enough to close the whole

question? He answered, Yes; that he should tell Derby he did not

think he could render him useful service in his administration. He

then left. It was perhaps 6.30. Herbert and I sat down to write,

but thought it well to send off nothing till after dinner, and we

went to Grillion's where we had a small but merry party. Herbert

even beyond himself amusing. At night we went to Lord Aberdeen's

and Graham's, and so my letter came through some slight emendations

to the form in which it went.[341] I had doubts in my mind whether

Derby had even intended to propose to Herbert and me _except_ in

conjunction with Palmerston, though I had no doubt that without

Palmerston it would not do; and I framed my letter so as not to

assume that I had an independent proposal, but to make my refusal a

part of his.

_Feb. 2._--I yesterday also called on Lord Palmerston and read him

my letter to Lord Derby. He said: 'Nothing can be better.'

LORD DERBY'S PROPOSALS

Lord Derby knew that, though he had the country gentlemen behind him,

his own political friends, with the notable and only half-welcome

exception of Mr. Disraeli, were too far below mediocrity in either

capacity or experience to face so angry and dangerous a crisis.

Accordingly he gave up the task. Many years after, Mr. Gladstone

recorded his opinion that here Lord Derby missed his one real chance of

playing a high historic part. 'To a Derby government,' he said, 'now

that the party had been _drubbed_ out of protection, I did not in

principle object; for old ties were with me more operatively strong than

new opinions, and I think that Lord Derby's error in not forming an

administration was palpable and even gross. Such, it has appeared, was

the opinion of Disraeli.[342] Lord Derby had many fine qualities; but

strong parliamentary courage was not among them. When Lord Palmerston

(probably with a sagacious discernment of the immediate future)

declined, he made no separate offer to the Peelites. Had Lord Derby gone

on, he would have been supported by the country, then absorbed in the

consideration of the war. None of the three occasions when he took

office offered him so fine an opportunity as this; but he missed it.'

On the previous day, Mr. Gladstone records: 'Saw Mr. Disraeli in the

House of Lords and put out my hand, which was very kindly accepted.' To

nobody was the hour fraught with more bitter mortification than to Mr.

Disraeli, who beheld a golden chance of bringing a consolidated party

into the possession of real power flung away.

II

ERROR OF REFUSING LORD LANSDOWNE

Next, at the Queen's request, soundings in the whig and Peelite waters

were undertaken by Lord Lansdowne, and he sent for Mr. Gladstone, with a

result that to the latter was ever after matter of regret.

_Feb. 2._--In consequence of a communication from Lord Lansdowne, I

went to him in the forenoon and found him just returned from

Windsor. He trusted I should not mind speaking freely to him, and I

engaged to do it, only premising that in so crude and dark a state

of facts, it was impossible to go beyond first impressions. We then

conversed on various combinations, as (1) Lord J. Russell, premier,

(2) Lord Palmerston, (3) Lord Clarendon, (4) Lord Lansdowne

himself. Of the first I doubted whether, in the present state of

feeling, he could get a ministry on its legs. In answer to a

question from him, I added that I thought, viewing my relations to

Lord Aberdeen and to Newcastle, and _his_ to them also, the public

feeling would be offended, and it would not be for the public

interest, if I were to form part of his government (_i.e._

Russell's). Of the second I said that it appeared to me Lord

Palmerston could not obtain a party majority. Aloof from him would

stand on the one hand Derby and his party, on the other Lord J.

Russell, who I took it for granted would never serve under him.

Whatever the impression made by Russell's recent conduct, yet his

high personal character and station, forty years career, one-half

of it in the leadership of his party, and the close connection of

his name with all the great legislative changes of the period, must

ever render him a power in the state, and render it impossible for

a government depending on the liberal party to live independently

of him. I also hinted at injurious effects which the substitution

of Palmerston for Lord Aberdeen would produce on foreign Powers at

this critical moment, but dwelt chiefly on the impossibility of his

having a majority. In this Lord Lansdowne seemed to agree.

Lastly, I said that if Lord Lansdowne himself could venture to risk

his health and strength by taking the government, this would be the

best arrangement. My opinion was that at this crisis Derby, if he

could have formed an administration, would have had advantages with

regard to the absorbing questions of the war and of a peace to

follow it, such as no other combination could possess. Failing

this, I wished for a homogeneous whig government. The best form of

it would be under him. He said he might dare it provisionally, if

he could see his way to a permanent arrangement at the end of a

short term; but he could see nothing of the sort at present.

_An autobiographic note of 1897 gives a further detail of

moment_:--He asked whether I would continue to hold my office as

chancellor of the exchequer in the event of his persevering. He

said that if I gave an affirmative reply he would persevere with

the commission, and I think intimated that except on this condition

he would not. I said that the working of the coalition since its

formation in December 1852 had been to me entirely satisfactory,

but that I was not prepared to co-operate in its continuation under

any other head than Lord Aberdeen. I think that though perfectly

satisfied to be in a Peelite government which had whigs or radicals

in it, I was not ready to be in a whig government which had

Peelites in it. It took a long time, with my slow-moving and

tenacious character, for the Ethiopian to change his skin.

In the paper that I have already mentioned, as recording what, when all

was near an end, he took to be some of the errors of his life, Mr.

Gladstone names as one of those errors this refusal in 1855 to join Lord

Lansdowne. 'I can hardly suppose,' he says, more than forty years after

that time, 'that the eventual failure of the Queen's overture to Lord

Lansdowne was due to my refusal; but that refusal undoubtedly

constituted one of his difficulties and helped to bring about the

result. I have always looked back upon it with pain as a serious and

even gross error of judgment. It was, I think, injurious to the public,

if it contributed to the substitution as prime minister of Lord

Palmerston for Lord Lansdowne,--a personage of greater dignity, and I

think a higher level of political principle. There was no defect in Lord

Lansdowne sufficient to warrant my refusal. He would not have been a

strong or very active prime minister; but the question of the day was

the conduct of the war, and I had no right to take exception to him as a

head in connection with this subject. His attitude in domestic policy

was the same as Palmerston's, but I think he had a more unprejudiced and

liberal mind, though less of motive force in certain directions.'

III

FRUITLESS NEGOTIATIONS

The next day Mr. Gladstone called on Lord Aberdeen, who for the first

time let drop a sort of opinion as to their duties in the crisis on one

point; hithertofore he had restrained himself. He said, 'Certainly the

most natural thing under the circumstances, if it could have been

brought about in a satisfactory form, would have been that you should

have joined Derby.' On returning home, Mr. Gladstone received an

important visitor and a fruitless visit.

At half-past two to-day Lord John Russell was announced; and sat

till three--his hat shaking in his hand. A communication had

reached him late last night from the Queen, charging him with the

formation of a government, and he had thought it his duty to make

the endeavour. I repeated to him what I had urged on Lord

Lansdowne, that a coalition with advantages has also weaknesses of

its own, that the late coalition was I thought fully justified by

the circumstances under which it took place, but at this juncture

it had broken down. This being so, I thought what is called a

homogeneous government would be best for the public, and most

likely to command approval; that Derby if he could get a good

foreign minister would have had immense advantages with respect to

the great questions of war and peace. Lord John agreed as to Derby;

thought that every one must have supported him, and that he ought

to have persevered.

I held to my point, adding that I did not think Lord Aberdeen and

Lord Palmerston represented opposite principles, but rather

different forms of the same principles connected with different

habits and temperaments. He said that Lord Palmerston had agreed to

lead the House of Commons for him, he going as first minister to

the Lords; but he did not mention any other alteration. Upon the

whole his tone was low and doubtful. He asked whether my answer was

to be considered as given, or whether I would take time. But I said

as there was no probability that my ideas would be modified by

reflection, it would not be fair to him to ask any delay.

With the single exception of Lord Palmerston, none of his colleagues

would have anything to do with Lord John, some even declining to go to

see him. Wood came to Mr. Gladstone, evidently in the sense of the

Palmerston premiership. He declared that Aberdeen was impossible, to

which, says Mr. Gladstone, 'I greatly demurred.'

IV

Thus the two regular party leaders had failed; Lord Aberdeen, the

coalition leader, was almost universally known to be out of the

question; the public was loudly clamouring for Lord Palmerston. A

Palmerston ministry was now seen to be inevitable. Were the Peelites,

then, having refused Lord Derby, having refused Lord John, having told

Lord Lansdowne that he had better form a system of homogeneous whigs,

now finally to refuse Lord Palmerston, on no better ground than that

they could not have Lord Aberdeen, whom nobody save themselves would

consent on any terms to have? To propound such a question was to answer

it. Lord Aberdeen himself, with admirable freedom from egotism, pressed

the point that in addition to the argument of public necessity, they

owed much to their late whig colleagues, 'who behaved so nobly and so

generously towards us after Lord John's resignation.'

'I have heard club talk and society talk,' wrote an adherent to Mr.

Gladstone late one night (February 4), 'and I am sure that in the main

any government containing good names in the cabinet, provided Lord John

is not in it, will obtain general support. Lord Clarendon is

universally, or nearly so, looked on as essential. Next to him, I think

you are considered of vital importance in your present office. After

all, rightly or wrongly, Lord Palmerston is master of the situation in

the country; he is looked upon as the man. If the country sees you and

Sidney Herbert holding aloof from him, it will be said the Peelites are

selfish intriguers.' The same evening, another correspondent said to Mr.

Gladstone: 'Two or three people have come in since eleven o'clock with

the news of Brooks's and the Reform. Exultation prevails there, and the

certainty of Palmerston's success to-morrow. There is a sort of rumour

prevalent that Lord Palmerston may seek Lord J. Russell's aid.... This

would, of course, negative all idea of your joining in the concern.

Otherwise a refusal would be set down as sheer impracticability, or else

the selfish ambition of a clique which could not stand alone, and should

no longer attempt to do so. If the refusal to join Palmerston is to be a

going over to the other side, and a definite junction within a brief

space, that is clear and intelligible. But a refusal to join Lord

Palmerston and yet holding out to him a promise of support, is a

half-measure which no one will understand, and which, I own, I cannot

see the grounds to defend.'

PALMERSTON FORMS A MINISTRY

We shall now find how after long and strenuous dubitation, the Peelite

leaders refused to join on the fifth of February, and then on the sixth

they joined. Unpromising from the very first cabinet, the junction was

destined to a swift and sudden end. Here is the story told by one of the

two leading actors.

_Sunday, Feb. 4._--Herbert came to me soon after I left him, and

told me Palmerston had at last got the commission. He considered

that this disposed of Lord Lansdowne; and seemed himself to be

disposed to join. He said _we_ must take care what we were about,

and that we should be looked upon by the country as too nice if we

declined to join Palmerston; who he believed (and in this I

inclined to agree), would probably form a government. He argued

that Lord Aberdeen was out of the question; that the vote of Monday

night was against him; that the country would not stand him.

No new coalition ought to be formed, I said, without a prospect of

stability; and joining Lord Palmerston's cabinet would be a new

coalition. He said he rather applied that phrase to a junction with

Derby. I quite agreed we could not join Derby except under

conditions which might not be realised; but if we _did_ it, it

would be a reunion, not a coalition. In coalition the separate

existence is retained. I referred to the great instances of change

of party in our time; Palmerston himself, and Stanley with Graham.

But these took place when parties were divided by great questions

of principle; there were none such now, and no one could say that

the two sides of the House were divided by anything more than this,

that one was rather more stationary, the other more movable. He

said, 'True, the differences are on the back benches.'

I said I had now for two years been holding my mind in suspense

upon the question I used to debate with Newcastle, who used to

argue that we should grow into the natural leaders of the liberal

party. I said, it is now plain this will not be; we get on very

well with the independent liberals, but the whigs stand as an

opaque body between us and them, and moreover, there they will

stand and ought to stand.

Lord Palmerston came a little after two, and remained perhaps an

hour. Lord Lansdowne had promised to join him if he formed an

administration on a basis sufficiently broad. He wished me to

retain my office; and dwelt on the satisfactory nature of my

relations with the liberal party. He argued that Lord Aberdeen was

excluded by the vote on Monday night; and that there was now no

other government in view. My argument was adverse, though without

going to a positive conclusion. I referred to my conversation of

Wednesday, Jan. 31, in favour of a homogeneous government at this

juncture.

At half-past eleven I went to Lord Aberdeen's and stayed about an

hour. His being in the Palmerston cabinet which had been proposed,

was, he said, out of the question; but his _velleities_ seemed to

lean rather to _our_ joining, which surprised me. He was afraid of

the position we should occupy in the public eye if we declined....

_Feb. 5._--The most irksome and painful of the days; beginning with

many hours of anxious consultation to the best of our power, and

ending amidst a storm of disapproval almost unanimous, not only

from the generality, but from our own immediate political friends.

At 10.30 I went to Sir James Graham, who is still in bed, and told

him the point to which by hard struggles I had come. The case with

me was briefly this. I was ready to make the sacrifice of personal

feeling; ready to see him (Lord Aberdeen) expelled from the

premiership by a censure equally applicable to myself, and yet to

remain in my office; ready to overlook not merely the inferior

fitness, but the real and manifest unfitness, of Palmerston for

that office; ready to enter upon a new venture with him, although

in my opinion without any reasonable prospect of parliamentary

support, such as is absolutely necessary for the credit and

stability of a government--upon the one sole and all-embracing

ground that the prosecution of the war with vigour, and the

prosecution of it to and for peace, was now the question of the day

to which every other must give way. But then it was absolutely

necessary that if we joined a cabinet after our overlooking all

this and more, it should be a cabinet in which confidence should be

placed with reference to war and peace. Was the Aberdeen cabinet

without Lord Aberdeen one in which I could place confidence? I

answer, No. He was vital to it; his love of peace was necessary to

its right and steady pursuit of that great end; if, then, _he_

could belong to a Palmerston cabinet, I might; but without him I

could not.

In all this, Sir J. Graham concurred. Herbert came full of doubts

and fears, but on the whole adopted the same conclusion. Lord

Aberdeen sent to say he would not come, but I wrote to beg him, and

he appeared. On hearing how we stood, he said his remaining in the

cabinet was quite out of the question; and that he had told

Palmerston so yesterday when he glanced at it. But he thought we

should incur great blame if we did not; which, indeed, was plainly

beyond all dispute.

THE PEELITES JOIN

At length, when I had written and read aloud the rough draft of an

answer, Lord Aberdeen said he must strongly advise our joining. I

said to him, 'Lord Aberdeen, when we have joined the Palmerston

cabinet, you standing aloof from it, will you rise in your place in

the House of Lords and say that you give that cabinet your

confidence with regard to the question of war and peace?' He

replied, 'I will express my hope that it will do right, but not my

confidence, which is a different thing.' 'Certainly,' I answered,

'and that which you have now said is my justification. The

unswerving honesty of your mind has saved us. Ninety-nine men out

of a hundred in your position at the moment would have said, "Oh

yes, I shall express my confidence." But you would not deviate an

inch to the right or to the left.'

Herbert and I went to my house and despatched our answers. Now

began the storm. Granville met us driving to Newcastle. Sorry

beyond expression; he almost looked displeased, which for him is

much. _Newcastle_: I incline to think you are wrong. _Canning_: My

impression is you are wrong. Various letters streaming in, all

portending condemnation and disaster. Herbert became more and more

uneasy.

_Feb. 6._--The last day I hope of these tangled records; in which

we have seen, to say nothing of the lesser sacrifice, one more

noble victim struck down, and we are set to feast over the remains.

The thing is bad and the mode worse.

Arthur Gordon came early in the day with a most urgent letter from

Lord Aberdeen addressed virtually to us, and urging us to join. He

had seen both Palmerston and Clarendon, and derived much

satisfaction from what they said. We met at the admiralty at

twelve, where Graham lay much knocked up with the fatigue and

anxiety of yesterday. I read to him and Lord Aberdeen Palmerston's

letter of to-day to me. Herbert came in and made arguments in his

sense. I told him I was at the point of yesterday, and was

immovable by considerations of the class he urged. _The only

security worth having lies in men_; the man is Lord Aberdeen; moral

union and association with him must continue, and must be publicly

known to continue. I therefore repeated my question to Lord

Aberdeen, whether he would in his place as a peer declare, if we

joined the cabinet, that it had his confidence with reference to

war and peace? He said, much moved, that he felt the weight of the

responsibility, but that after the explanation and assurances he

had received, he would. He was even more moved when Graham said

that though the leaning of his judgment was adverse, he would place

himself absolutely in the hands of Lord Aberdeen. To Herbert, of

course, it was a simple release from a difficulty. Palmerston had

told Cardwell, 'Gladstone feels a difficulty first infused into him

by Graham; Argyll and Herbert have made up their minds to do what

Gladstone does.' Newcastle joined us, and was in Herbert's sense. I

repeated again that Lord Aberdeen's declaration of confidence

enabled me to see my way to joining....

I went to Lord Aberdeen in his official room after his return from

Palmerston. It was only when I left that room to-day that I began

to realise the pang of parting. There he stood, struck down from

his eminence by a vote that did not dare to avow its own purpose,

and for his wisdom and virtue; there he stood endeavouring to cure

the ill consequences to the public of the wrong inflicted upon

himself, and as to the point immediately within reach successful in

the endeavour. I ventured, however, to tell him that I hoped our

conduct and reliance on him would tend to his eminence and honour,

and said, 'You are not to be of the cabinet, but you are to be its

tutelary deity.'

I had a message from Palmerston that he would answer me, but at

night I went up to him.

V

THE COMMITTEE REVIVED

The rush of events was now somewhat slackened. Lord John called on

Graham, and complained of the Peelites for having selfishly sought too

many offices, alluding to what Canning had done, and imputing the same

to Cardwell. He also thought they had made a great mistake in joining

Palmerston. He seemed sore about Mr. Gladstone, and told Graham that

Christopher, a stout tory, had said that if Gladstone joined Derby, a

hundred of the party would withdraw their allegiance. At the party

meeting on Feb. 21, Lord Derby was received with loud cries of 'No

Puseyites; No papists,' and was much reprehended for asking Gladstone

and Graham to join.

'I ought to have mentioned before,' Mr. Gladstone writes here, 'that,

during our conferences at the admiralty, Lord Aberdeen expressed great

compunction for having allowed the country to be dragged without

adequate cause into the war. So long as he lived, he said with his own

depth and force, it would be a weight upon his conscience. He had held

similar language to me lately at Argyll House; but when I asked him at

what point _after_ the fleet went to Besika Bay it would have been

possible to stop short, he alluded to the _sommation_, which we were

encouraged however, as he added, by Austria to send; and thought _this_

was the false step. Yet he did not seem quite firm in the opinion.'

Then came the first cabinet (Feb. 10). It did not relieve the gloom of

Mr. Gladstone's impressions. He found it more 'acephalous' than ever;

'less order; less unity of purpose.' The question of the Roebuck

committee was raised, on which he said he thought the House would give

it up, if government would promise an investigation under the authority

of the crown. The fatal subject came up again three days later.

Palmerston said it was plain from the feeling in the House the night

before, that they were set upon it; if they could secure a fair

committee, he was disposed to let the inquiry go forward. On this rock

the ship struck. One minister said they could not resign in consequence

of the appointment of the committee, because it stood affirmed by a

large majority when they took office in the reconstructed cabinet. Mr.

Gladstone says he 'argued with vehemence upon the breach of duty which

it would involve on our part towards those holding responsible commands

in the Crimea, if we without ourselves condemning them were to allow

them to be brought before another tribunal like a select committee.'

Dining the same evening at the palace, Mr. Gladstone had a conversation

on the subject both with the Queen and Prince Albert. 'The latter

compared this appointment of a committee to the proceedings of the

Convention of France; but still seemed to wish that the government

should submit rather than retire. The Queen spoke openly in that sense,

and trusted that she should not be given over into the hands of those

"who are the least fit to govern." Without any positive and final

declaration, I intimated to each that I did not think I could bring my

mind to acquiesce in the proposition for an inquiry by a select

committee into the state of the army in the Crimea.'

Time did not remove difficulties. Mr. Gladstone and Graham fought with

extreme tenacity, and the first of them with an ingenuity for which the

situation gave boundless scope. To the argument that they accepted

office on reconstruction with the decision of the House for a committee

staring them in the face, he replied: 'Before we were _out_, we were

_in_. Why did we go out? Because of that very decision by the House of

Commons. Our language was: The appointment of such a committee is

incompatible with the functions of the executive, therefore it is a

censure on the executive; therefore we resign! But it is not a whit

_more_ compatible with the functions of the executive now than it was

then; therefore it is not one whit less a censure; and the question

arises, (1) whether any government ought to allow its (now) principal

duty to be delegated to a committee or other body, especially to one not

under the control of the crown? (2) whether _that_ government ought to

allow it, the members of which (except one) have already resigned rather

than allow it? In what way can the first resignation be justified on

grounds which do not require a second?' He dwelt mainly on these two

points--That the proposed transfer of the functions of the executive to

a select committee of the House of Commons, with respect to an army in

the face of the enemy and operating by the side of our French allies,

and the recognition of this transfer by the executive government, was an

evil greater than any that could arise from a total or partial

resignation. Second, that it was clear that they did not, as things

stood, possess the confidence of a majority of the House. 'I said that

the committee was itself a censure on the government. They had a right

to believe that parliament would not inflict this committee on a

government which had its confidence. I also,' he says, 'recited my

having ascertained from Palmerston (upon this recital we were agreed) on

the 6th, before our decision was declared, his intention to oppose the

committee....'

PEELITES RESIGN

Graham did not feel disposed to govern without the confidence of the

House of Commons, or to be responsible for the granting of a committee

which the cabinet had unanimously felt to be unprecedented,

unconstitutional, and dangerous. Lord Palmerston met all this by a

strong practical clincher. He said that the House of Commons was

becoming unruly from the doubts that had gone abroad as to the

intentions of the government with respect to the committee; that the

House was determined to have it; that if they opposed it they should be

beaten by an overwhelming majority; to dissolve upon it would be

ruinous; to resign a fortnight after taking office would make them the

laughingstock of the country.

Mr. Gladstone, Herbert, and Graham then resigned. Of the Peelite group

the Duke of Argyll and Canning remained.

_Feb. 22._--After considering various _sites_, we determined to ask

the Manchester school to yield us, at any rate for to-morrow, the

old place devoted to ex-ministers.[343] Sir J. Graham expressed his

wish to begin the affair, on the proposal of the first name [of the

committee].

Cardwell came at 4 to inform me that he had declined to be my

successor; and showed me his letter, which gave as his reason

disinclination to step into the cabinet over the bodies of his

friends. It seems that Palmerston and Lord Lansdowne, who assists

him, sent Canning to Lord Aberdeen to invoke his aid with Cardwell

and prevail on him to retract. But Lord Aberdeen, though he told

Canning that he disapproved (at variance here with what Graham and

I considered to be his tone on Monday, but agreeing with a note he

wrote in obscure terms the next morning), said he could not make

such a request to Cardwell, or again play the peculiar part he had

acted a fortnight ago. The cabinet on receiving Cardwell's refusal

were at a deadlock. Application was to be made, or had been made,

to Sir Francis Baring, but it seems that he is reluctant; he is,

however, the best card they have to play.

_Feb. 28._--On Sunday, Sir George Lewis called on me, and said my

office had been offered him. This was after being refused by

Cardwell and Baring. He asked my advice as to accepting it. This I

told him I could not give. He asked if I would assist him with

information in case of his accepting. I answered that he might

command me precisely as if instead of resigning I had only removed

to another department. I then went over some of the matters needful

to be made known. On Tuesday he came again, acquainted me with his

acceptance, and told me he had been mainly influenced by my

promise.[344]

This day at a quarter to three I attended at the palace to resign

the seals, and had an audience of about twenty minutes. The Queen,

in taking them over, was pleased to say that she received them with

great pain. I answered that the decision which had required me to

surrender them had been the most painful effort of my public life.

The Queen said she was afraid on Saturday night [Feb. 17, when he

had dined at the palace] from the language I then used that this

was about to happen. I answered that we had then already had a

discussion in the cabinet which pointed to this result, and that I

spoke as I did, because I thought that to have no reserve whatever

with H. M. was the first duty of all those who had the honour and

happiness of being her servants. I trusted H. M. would believe that

we had all been governed by no other desire than to do what was

best for the interests of the crown and the country. H. M. expressed

her confidence of this, and at no time throughout the conversation

did she in any manner indicate an opinion that our decision had

been wrong. She spoke of the difficulty of making arrangements for

carrying on the government in the present state of things, and I

frankly gave my opinion to H. M. that she would have little peace or

comfort in these matters, until parliament should have returned to

its old organisation in two political parties; that at present we

were in a false position, and that both sides of the House were

demoralised--the ministerial side overcharged with an excess of

official men, and the way stopped up against expectants, which led

to subdivision, jealousy, and intrigue; the opposition so weak in

persons having experience of affairs as to be scarcely within the

chances of office, and consequently made reckless by acting without

keeping it in view; yet at the same time, the party continued and

must continue to exist, for it embodied one of the great

fundamental elements of English society. The experiment of

coalition had been tried with remarkable advantage under a man of

the remarkable wisdom and powers of conciliation possessed by Lord

Aberdeen, one in entire possession too of H. M.'s confidence. They

intimated that there were peculiar disadvantages, too, evidently

meaning Lord J. Russell. I named him in my answer, and said I

thought that even if he had been steady, yet the divisions of the

ministerial party would a little later have brought about our

overthrow.[345] H. M. seeming to agree in my main position, as did

the Prince, asked me: But when will parliament return to that

state? I replied I grieved to say that I perceived neither the time

when, nor the manner how, that result is to come about; but until

it is reached, I fear that Y. M. will pass through a period of

instability and weakness as respects the executive. She observed

that the prospect is not agreeable. I said, True, madam, but it is

a great consolation that all these troubles are upon the surface,

and that the throne has for a long time been gaining and not losing

stability from year to year. I could see but one danger to the

throne, and that was from encroachments by the House of Commons. No

other body in the country was strong enough to encroach. This was

the consideration which had led my resigning colleagues with myself

to abandon office that we might make our stand against what we

thought a formidable invasion.... I thought the effect of the

resistance was traceable in the good conduct of the House of

Commons last night, when another attempt at encroachment was

proposed and firmly repelled.... I expressed my comfort at finding

that our motives were so graciously appreciated by H. M. and

withdrew.

PUBLIC OUTCRY

Loud was the public outcry. All the censure that had been foretold in

case they should refuse to join, fell with double force upon them for

first joining and then seceding. Lord Clarendon pronounced their

conduct to be actually worse and more unpatriotic than Lord John's. The

delight at Brooks's Club was uproarious, for to the whigs the Peelites

had always been odious, and they had been extremely sorry when

Palmerston asked them to join his government.[346] For a time Mr.

Gladstone was only a degree less unpopular in the country than Cobden

and Bright themselves. The newspapers declared that Gladstone's epitaph

over the Aberdeen administration might be applied with peculiar force to

his own fate. The short truth seems to be that Graham, Gladstone, and

Palmerston were none of them emphatic or explicit enough beforehand on

the refusal of the committee when the government was formed, though the

intention to refuse was no doubt both stated and understood. Graham

admitted afterwards that this omission was a mistake. The world would be

astonished if it knew how often in the pressure of great affairs men's

sight proves short. After the language used by Mr. Gladstone about the

inquiry, we cannot wonder that he should have been slow to acquiesce.

The result in time entirely justified his description of the Sebastopol

committee.[347] But right as was his judgment on the merits, yet the

case was hardly urgent enough to make withdrawal politic or wise. Idle

gossip long prevailed, that Graham could not forgive Palmerston for not

having (as he thought) helped to defend him in the matter of opening

Mazzini's letters; that from the first he was bent on overthrowing the

new minister; that he worked on Gladstone; and that the alleged reason

why they left was not the real one. All the evidence is the other way;

that Graham could not resist the obvious want of the confidence of

parliament, and that Gladstone could not bear a futile and perilous

inquiry. That they both regretted that they had yielded to

over-persuasion in joining, against their own feelings and judgment, is

certain. Graham even wrote to Mr. Gladstone in the following summer that

his assent to joining Palmerston was perhaps the greatest mistake of his

public life. In Mr. Gladstone's case, the transaction gave a rude and

protracted shock to his public influence.

LORD PALMERSTON'S REIGN

Lord Palmerston meanwhile sat tight in his saddle. When the crisis first

began, Roebuck in energetic language had urged him to sweep the Peelites

from his path, and at any rate he now very steadily went on without

them. Everybody took for granted that his administration would be

temporary. Mr. Gladstone himself gave it a twelvemonth at most. As it

happened, Lord Palmerston was in fact, with one brief interruption,

installed for a decade. He was seventy-one; he had been nearly forty

years in office; he had worked at the admiralty, war department, foreign

office, home office; he had served under ten prime ministers--Portland,

Perceval, Liverpool, Canning, Goderich, Wellington, Grey, Melbourne,

Russell, Aberdeen. He was not more than loosely attached to the whigs,

and he had none of the strength of that aristocratic tradition and its

organ, the Bedford sect. The landed interest was not with him. The

Manchester men detested him. The church in all its denominations was on

terms of cool and reciprocated indifference with one who was above all

else the man of this world. The press he knew how to manage. In every

art of parliamentary sleight of hand he was an expert, and he suited the

temper of the times, while old maxims of government and policy were

tardily expiring, and the forces of a new era were in their season

gathering to a head.

FOOTNOTES:

[337] On Bute's plan of superseding party by prerogative, in the

introduction to vol. iii. of the Bedford _Correspondence_.

[338] See Appendix.

[339] See Chap. x. of Lord Stanmore's _Earl of Aberdeen_.

[340] 'This _suppressio veri_ is shocking, and one of the very worst

things he ever did.'--_Greville_, iii. i. p. 232.

[341] At Lord Aberdeen's the question seems to have been discussed on

the assumption that the offer to Mr. Gladstone and Herbert was meant to

be independent of Palmerston's acceptance or refusal, and the impression

there was that Mr. Gladstone had been not wholly disinclined to consider

the offer.

[342] Malmesbury's _Memoirs of an Ex-Minister_, i. pp. 8, 37.

[343] On Feb. 23, he writes to Mr. Hayter, the government whip: 'We have

arranged to sit in the orthodox ex-ministers' place to-night, _i.e._

second bench immediately below the gangway. This avoids constructions

and comparisons which we could hardly otherwise have escaped; and Bright

and his friends agreed to give it us. Might I trust to your kindness to

have some cards put in the place for us before prayers?'

[344] While Lewis went to the exchequer, Sir Charles Wood succeeded

Graham at the admiralty, Lord John, then on his way to Vienna, agreed to

come hack to the cabinet and took the colonial office, which Sir George

Grey had left for the home office, where he succeeded Palmerston.

[345] This seems to contradict the proposition in the article on

Greville in the _Eng. Hist. Rev._ of 1887.

[346] _Greville_, III. i. p. 246.

[347] Mr. Gladstone projected and partly executed some public letters on

all this, to be addressed, like the Neapolitan letters, to Lord

Aberdeen.

CHAPTER VII

POLITICAL ISOLATION

(_1855-1856_)

[Greek: êkista gar polemos epì rêtois chôrei]--THUC. i. 122.

War is the last thing in all the world to go according to

programme.

Statesmen are invincibly slow to learn the lesson put by Thucydides long

centuries ago into the mouth of the Athenian envoys at Sparta, and often

repeated in the same immortal pages, that war defies all calculations,

and if it be protracted comes to be little more than mere matter of

chance, over which the combatants have no control. A thousand times

since has history proved this to be true. Policy is mastered by events;

unforeseen sequels develop novel pretexts, or grow into startling and

hateful necessities; the minister finds that he is fastened to an

inexorable chain.

NEW VIEWS OF THE WAR

Mr. Gladstone now had this fatal law of mundane things brought home to

him. As time went on, he by rapid intuition gained a truer insight into

the leading facts. He realised that Mahometan institutions in the

Ottoman empire were decrepit; that the youthful and vigorous elements in

European Turkey were crushed under antiquated and worn-out forms and

forces unfit for rule. He awoke to the disquieting reflection how the

occupation of the Principalities had been discussed, day after day and

month after month, entirely as a question of the payment of forty

thousand pounds a year to Turkey, or as a violation of her rights as

suzerain, but never in reference to the well-being, happiness, freedom,

or peace of the inhabitants. He still held that the war in its origin

was just, for it had been absolutely necessary, he said, to cut the

meshes of the net in which Russia had entangled Turkey. He persisted in

condemning the whole tone and policy of Russia in 1854. By the end of

1854, in Mr. Gladstone's eyes, this aggressive spirit had been

extinguished, the Czar promising an almost unreserved acceptance of the

very points that he had in the previous August angrily rejected. The

essential objects of the war were the abolition of Russian rights in the

Principalities, and the destruction of Russian claims upon Greek

Christians under Ottoman sway. These objects, Mr. Gladstone insisted,

were attained in January 1855, when Russia agreed to three out of the

Four Points--so the bases of agreement were named--and only demurred

upon the plan for carrying out a portion of the fourth. The special

object was to cancel the preponderance of Russia in the Black Sea. No

fewer than seven different plans were simultaneously or in turn

propounded. They were every one of them admitted to be dubious,

inefficient, and imperfect. I will spare the reader the mysteries of

limitation, of counterpoise, of counterpoise and limitation mixed.

Russia preferred counterpoise, the allies were for limitation. Was this

preference between two degrees of the imperfect, the deficient, and the

ineffective a good ground for prolonging a war that was costing the

allies a hundred million pounds a year, and involved to all the parties

concerned the loss of a thousand lives a day? Yet, for saying No to this

question, Mr. Gladstone was called a traitor, even by men who in 1853

had been willing to content themselves with the Vienna note, and in 1854

had been anxious to make peace on the basis of the Four Points. In face

of pleas so wretched for a prolongation of a war to which he had

assented on other grounds, was he bound to silence? 'Would it not, on

the contrary,' he exclaimed, 'have been the most contemptible effeminacy

of character, if a man in my position, who feels that he has been

instrumental in bringing his country into this struggle, were to

hesitate a single moment when he was firmly convinced in his own mind

that the time had arrived when we might with honour escape from it?'

The prospect of reducing Russia to some abstract level of strength, so

as to uphold an arbitrary standard of the balance of power--this he

regarded as mischief and chimera. Rightly he dreaded the peril of

alliances shifting from day to day, like quicksands and

sea-shoals--Austria moved by a hundred strong and varying currents,

France drawing by unforeseen affinities towards Russia. Every war with

alliances, he once said, should be short, sharp, decisive.[348]

As was to be expected, the colleagues from whom he had parted insisted

that every one of his arguments told just as logically against the war

in all its stages, against the first as legitimately as the last. In

fact, we can never say a plain sure aye or no to questions of peace and

war, after the sword has once left the scabbard. They are all matter of

judgment on the balance of policy between one course and another; and a

very slight thing may incline the balance either way, even though mighty

affairs should hang on the turn of the scale. Meanwhile, as the months

went on, Sebastopol still stood untaken, excitement grew, people forgot

the starting point. They ceased to argue, and sheer blatancy, at all

times a power, in war-time is supreme. Mr. Gladstone's trenchant

dialectic had no more chance than Bright's glowing appeals. Shrewd and

not unfriendly onlookers thought that Graham and Gladstone were

grievously mistaken in making common cause with the peace party,

immediately after quitting a war government, and quitting it, besides,

not on the issues of the war. Herbert was vehement in his remonstrances.

The whole advantage of co-operation with the Manchester men, he cried,

would be derived by them, and all the disrepute reaped by us. 'For the

purposes of peace, they were the very men we ought to avoid. As

advocates for ending the war, they were out of court, for they were

against beginning it.'[349] If Gladstone and Graham had gone slower,

their friends said, they might have preached moderation to ministers and

given reasonable advice to people out of doors. As it was, they threw

the game into the hands of Lord Palmerston. They were stamped as

doctrinaires, and what was worse, doctrinaires suspected of a spice of

personal animus against old friends. Herbert insisted that the

Manchester school 'forgot that the people have flesh and blood, and

propounded theories to men swayed by national feeling.' As a matter of

fact, this was wholly untrue. Cobden and Bright, as everybody nowadays

admits, had a far truer perception of the underlying realities of the

Eastern question in 1854, than either the Aberdeen or the Palmerston

cabinet, or both of them put together. What was undeniable was that the

public, with its habits of rough and ready judgment, did not understand,

and could not be expected to understand, the new union of the Peelites

with a peace party, in direct opposition to whose strongest views and

gravest warnings they had originally begun the war. 'In Gladstone,'

Cornewall Lewis said, 'people ascribe to faction, or ambition, or

vanity, conduct which I believe to be the result of a conscientious,

scrupulous, ingenuous, undecided mind, always looking on each side of a

question and magnifying the objections which belong to almost every

course of action.'[350]

ADVOCATES OF PEACE

A foreign envoy then resident in England was struck by the general

ignorance of facts even among leading politicians. Of the friends of

peace, he says, only Lord Grey and Gladstone seemed to have mastered the

Vienna protocols: the rest were quite astonished when the extent of the

Russian concessions was pointed out to them. The envoy dined with Mr.

Gladstone at the table of the Queen, and they talked of Milner Gibson's

motion censuring ministers for losing the opportunity of the Vienna

conferences to make a sound and satisfactory peace. Mr. Gladstone said

to him that he should undertake the grave responsibility of supporting

this motion, 'because in his opinion the concessions promised by Russia

contain sufficient guarantees. Those very concessions will tear to

pieces all the ancient treaties which gave an excuse to Russia for

interfering in the internal affairs of Turkey.'[351]

At all times stimulated rather than checked by a difficult situation,

Mr. Gladstone argued the case for peace to the House during the session

of 1855 in two speeches of extraordinary power of every kind. His

position was perfectly tenable, and he defended it with unsurpassed

force. For the hour unfortunately his influence was gone. Great

newspapers thought themselves safe in describing one of these

performances as something between the rant of the fanatic and the trick

of the stage actor; a mixture of pious grimace and vindictive howl, of

savage curses and dolorous forebodings; the most unpatriotic speech ever

heard within the walls of parliament. In sober fact, it was one of the

three or four most masterly deliverances evoked by the Crimean war. At

the very same time Lord John Russell was still sitting in the cabinet,

though he had held the opinion that at the beginning of May the Austrian

proposal ought to have ended the war and led to an honourable peace. The

scandal of a minister remaining in a government that persisted in a war

condemned by him as unnecessary was intolerable, and Lord John resigned

(July 16).

The hopes of the speedy fall of Sebastopol brightened in the summer of

1855, but this brought new alarms to Lord Palmerston. 'Our danger,' he

said in remarkable words, 'will then begin--a danger of peace and not a

danger of war.' To drive the Russians out of the Crimea was to be no

more than a preliminary. England would go on by herself, if conditions

deemed by her essential were not secured. 'The British nation is

unanimous, for I cannot reckon Cobden, Bright, and Co. for

anything.'[352] His account of the public mind was indubitably true.

Well might Aberdeen recall to his friends that, with a single exception,

every treaty concluded at the termination of our great wars had been

stigmatised as humiliating and degrading, ignominious, hollow and

unsafe. He cited the peace of Utrecht in 1713, the peace of

Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, the peace of Paris in 1763, the peace of

Versailles in 1783, and the peace of Amiens in 1801. The single

exception was the peace of Paris in 1814. It would have been difficult

in this case, he said, for patriotism or faction to discover humiliation

'in a treaty dictated at the head of a victorious army in the capital of

the enemy.'

AT PENMAENMAWR

While the storm was raging, Mr. Gladstone made his way with his family

to Penmaenmawr, whence he writes to Lord Aberdeen (Aug. 9): 'It was a

charitable act on your part to write to me. It is hardly possible to

believe one is not the greatest scoundrel on earth, when one is assured

of it from all sides on such excellent authority.... I am busy reading

Homer about the Sebastopol of old time, and all manner of other fine

fellows.' In another letter of the same time, written to Sir Walter

James, one of the most closely attached of all his friends, he strikes a

deeper note:--

_Sept. 17._--If I say I care little for such an attack you will

perhaps think I make little of sympathy like yours and Lord

Hardinge's, but such, I beg you and him to believe, is not the

case. Public life is full of snares and dangers, and I think it a

fearful thing for a Christian to look forward to closing his life

in the midst of its (to me at least) essentially fevered activity.

It has, however, some excellent characteristics in regard to mental

and even spiritual discipline, and among these in particular it

absolutely requires the habits of resisting temper and of

suppressing pain. I never allow myself, in regard to my public

life, to realise, _i.e._ to dwell upon, the fact that a thing is

_painful_. Indeed life has no time for such broodings: neither in

session nor recess is the year, the day, or the hour long enough

for what it brings with it. Nor was there ever a case in which it

was so little difficult to pass over and make little of a personal

matter: for if indeed it be true, as I fear it is, that we have

been committing grave errors, that those errors have cost many

thousands of lives and millions of money, and that no glare of

success can effectually hide the gloom of thickening complications,

the man who can be capable of weighing his own fate and prospects

in the midst of such contingencies has need to take a lesson from

the private soldier who gives his life to his country at a shilling

a day.

'We are on our way back,' he writes at the end of September, 'after a

month of sea-bathing and touring among the Welsh mountains. Most of my

time is taken up with Homer and Homeric literature, in which I am

immersed with great delight up to my ears; perhaps I should say out of

my depth.' Mr. Gladstone was one of the men whom the agitations of

politics can never submerge. Political interests were what they ought to

be, a very serious part of life; but they took their place with other

things, and were never suffered, as in narrower natures sometimes

happens, to blot out 'stars and orbs of sun and moon' from the spacious

firmament above us. He now found a shelter from the intensity of the

times in the systematic production of his book on Homer, a striking

piece of literature that became the most definite of his pursuits for

two years or more. His children observed that he never lounged or

strolled upon the shore, but when the morning's labour was over--and

nothing was ever allowed to break or mutilate the daily spell of serious

work--he would stride forth staff in hand, and vigorously breast the

steepest bluffs and hills that he could find. This was only emblematic

of a temperament to which the putting forth of power was both necessity

and delight. The only rest he ever knew was change of effort.

While he was on the Welsh coast Sebastopol fell, after a siege of three

hundred and fifty days. Negotiations for peace were opened tolerably

soon afterwards, ending, after many checks and diplomatic difficulties,

in the Treaty of Paris (March 30, 1856), as to which I need only remind

the reader, with a view to a future incident in Mr. Gladstone's history,

that the Black Sea was neutralised, and all warships of every nation

excluded from its waters. Three hundred thousand men had perished.

Countless treasure had been flung into the abyss. The nation that had

won its last victory at Waterloo did not now enhance the glory of its

arms, nor the power of its diplomacy, nor the strength of any of its

material interests. It was our French ally who profited. The integrity

of Turkey was so ill confirmed that even at the Congress of Paris the

question of the Danubian Principalities was raised in a form that in a

couple of years reduced Turkish rule over six millions of her subjects

to the shadow of smoke. Of the confidently promised reform of Mahometan

dominion there was never a beginning nor a sign. The vindication of the

standing European order proved so ineffectual that the Crimean war was

only the sanguinary prelude to a vast subversion of the whole system of

European states.

II

WORK ON HOMER

Other interests now came foremost in Mr. Gladstone's mind. The old

ground so constantly travelled over since the death of Peel was for

three years to come traversed again with fatiguing iteration. In the

spring of 1856 Lord Derby repeated the overtures that he had made in

specific form in 1851 and in 1855. The government was weak, as Mr.

Gladstone had predicted that it would be. Lord Derby told Sir William

Heathcote, through whom he and Mr. Gladstone communicated, that as

almost any day it might be overturned, and he might be sent for by the

Queen, he was bound to see what strength he might rely upon, and he was

anxious to know what were Mr. Gladstone's views on the possibility of

co-operation. What was the nature of his relations with other members of

the Peel government who had also been in the cabinet of Lord Aberdeen?

Did they systematically communicate? Were they a party? Did they intend

to hold and to act together? These questions were soon answered:--

On the first point, Mr. Gladstone said, you cannot better describe

my views for present purposes than by saying that they are much

like Lord Derby's own as I understand them--there was nothing in

them to prevent a further consideration of the subject, if public

affairs should assume such a shape as to recommend it. On the

second, I said Graham, Herbert, Cardwell, and I communicated

together habitually and confidentially; that we did not seek to

act, but rather eschewed acting, as a party; that our habits of

communication were founded upon long political association, general

agreement, and personal friendship; that they were not, however, a

covenant for the future, but a natural growth and result of the

past.

Then he proceeds to tell with a new and rather startling conclusion the

old story of the Peelite responsibility for the broken and disorganised

state of the House of Commons:--

We, the friends of Lord Aberdeen, were a main cause of disunion and

weakness in the executive government, and must be so, from

whichever side the government were formed, so long as we were not

absolutely incorporated into one or the other of the two great

parties. For though we had few positively and regularly following

us, yet we had indirect relations with others on both sides of the

House, which tended to relax, and so far disable, party

connections, and our existence as a section encouraged the

formation of other sections all working with similar effects. I

carried my feeling individually so far upon the subject as even to

be ready, if I had to act alone, to surrender my seat in

parliament, rather than continue a cause of disturbance to any

government to which I might generally wish well.[353]

RELATIONS WITH LORD DERBY

This exchange of views with Lord Derby he fully reported to Graham,

Herbert, and Cardwell, whom Lord Aberdeen, at his request, had summoned

for the purpose. Herbert doubted the expediency of such communications,

and Graham went straight to what was a real point. 'He observed that the

question was of the most vital consequence, Who should lead the House of

Commons? This he thought must come to me, and could not be with

Disraeli. I had said and repeated, that I thought we could not bargain

Disraeli out of the saddle; that it must rest with him (so far as we

were concerned) to hold the lead if he pleased; that besides my looking

to it with doubt and dread, I felt he had this right; and that I took it

as one of the _data_ in the case before us upon which we might have to

consider the question of political junction, and which might be

seriously affected by it.' Of these approaches in the spring of 1856

nothing came. The struggle in Mr. Gladstone's mind went on with growing

urgency. He always protested that he never at any time contemplated an

isolated return to the conservative ranks, but 'reunion of a body with a

body.'

Besides his sense of the vital importance of the reconstruction of the

party system, he had two other high related aims. The commanding

position that had first been held in the objects of his activity by the

church, then, for a considerable space, by the colonies, was now filled

by finance. As he put it in a letter to his sympathetic brother

Robertson: He saw two cardinal subjects for the present moment in

public affairs, a rational and pacific foreign policy, and second, the

due reduction in our establishments, economy in administration, and

finance to correspond. In 1853 he had, as he believed, given financial

pledges to the country. These pledges were by the present ministers in

danger of being forgotten. They were incompatible with Palmerston's

spirit of foreign policy. His duty, then, was to oppose that policy, and

to labour as hard as he could for the redemption of his pledges. Yet

isolated as he was, he had little power over either one of these aims or

the other. The liberal party was determined to support the reigning

foreign policy, and this made financial improvement desperate. Of Lord

Derby's friends he was not hopeful, but they were not committed to so

dangerous a leader.[354] As he put it to Elwin, the editor of the

_Quarterly_: There is a policy going a begging; the general policy that

Sir Robert Peel in 1841 took office to support--the policy of peace

abroad, of economy, of financial equilibrium, of steady resistance to

abuses, and promotion of practical improvements at home, with a

disinclination to questions of reform, gratuitously raised.[355]

His whole mind beset, possessed, and on fire with ideals of this kind,

and with sanguine visions of the road by which they might be

realised--it was not in the temperament of this born warrior to count

the lions in his path. He was only too much in the right, as his

tribulations of a later date so amply proved, in his perception that

neither Palmerston nor Palmerstonian liberals would take up the broken

clue of Peel. The importunate presence of Mr. Disraeli was not any

sharper obstacle to a definite junction with conservatives, than was the

personality of Lord Palmerston to a junction with liberals. As he had

said to Graham in November 1856, 'the pain and strain of public duty is

multiplied tenfold by the want of a clear and firm ground from which

visibly to act.' In rougher phrase, a man must have a platform and work

with a party. This indeed is for sensible men one of the rudiments of

practical politics.

Of a certain kind of cant about public life and office Mr. Gladstone was

always accustomed to make short work. The repudiation of desire for

official power, he at this time and always roundly denounced as

'sentimental and maudlin.' One of the not too many things that he

admired in Lord Palmerston was 'the manly frankness of his habitual

declarations that office is the natural and proper sphere of a public

man's ambition, as that in which he can most freely use his powers for

the common advantage of his country.' 'The desire for office,' said Mr.

Gladstone, 'is the desire of ardent minds for a larger space and scope

within which to serve the country, and for access to the command of that

powerful machinery for information and practice, which the public

departments supply. He must be a very bad minister indeed, who does not

do ten times the good to the country that he would do when out of

office, because he has helps and opportunities which multiply twenty

fold, as by a system of wheels and pulleys, his power for doing it.' It

is true, as the smallest of men may see--and the smaller the man, the

more will he make of it--that this sterling good sense may set many a

snare for the politician; but then even the consecrated affectations of

our public life have their snares too.

The world was not in the secret of the communications with Lord Derby,

but the intrinsic probabilities of a case often give to the public a

trick of divination. In the middle of December (1856) articles actually

appeared in the prints of the day announcing that Mr. Gladstone would at

the opening of the next session figure at the head of the opposition.

The tories, they said, wanted a leader, Mr. Gladstone wanted a party.

They were credulous, he was ingenious. The minority in a party must

yield to a majority, and he stood almost by himself. He would be a

returned prodigal in the conservative household, for unlike Sir James

Graham, he had never merged himself in the ordinary ruck of liberalism.

A tory peer writes to assure him that there never was such a chance for

the reunion of the party. Even the nobleman who had moved Mr.

Gladstone's expulsion from the Carlton said that he supposed reunion

must pretty soon come off. A few, perhaps under a score, made a great

noise, but if Lord Derby would only form a government, the noisy ones

would be as glad as the rest. True--and here the writer came nearer to

the central difficulty--'Disraeli ought _at first_ to lead the Commons,'

because he had been leader before; second, he had the greater number of

followers; third, because on public grounds he must desire to see Mr.

Gladstone at the exchequer; and to transfer to him both the great

subject of finance and the great prize of leadership would be

impossible. So easy do flat impossibilities ever seem to sanguine

simpletons in Pall Mall. Another correspondent has been staying at a

grand country-house, full of tory company, and the state of parties was

much discussed--'There was one unanimous opinion,' he tells Mr.

Gladstone, 'that nothing could save the conservative party except

electing you for their leader.' The same talk was reported from the

clubs. 'The difficulty was Disraeli, not so much for any damage that his

hostility could do the party, as because Lord Derby had contracted

relations with him which it would perhaps be impossible for him to

disown.'

Meanwhile the sagacious man in the tents of the tories, whose course was

so neatly chalked out for him by sulky followers not relishing his lead,

was, we may be sure, entirely wide-awake, watching currents, gales, and

puffs of wind without haste, without rest. Disraeli made a bold stroke

for party consolidation by inviting to his official dinner at the

opening of the session of 1857, General Peel, the favourite brother of

the great minister and his best accredited representative. Peel

consulted Mr. Gladstone on the reply to Disraeli's invitation, and found

him strongly adverse. The public, said Mr. Gladstone, views with much

jealousy every change of political position not founded on previous

parliamentary co-operation for some national object. Mr. Gladstone might

have put it on the narrower ground that attendance at the dinner would

be an explicit condonation of Disraeli's misdeeds ten years before, and

a direct acceptance of his leadership henceforth.

Elwin believed that he had the direct sanction of Lord Derby for a

message from him to Mr. Gladstone suggesting communication. After much

ruminating and consulting, Mr. Gladstone wrote (Dec. 13, 1856) in

sufficiently circuitous language to Elwin, that though he should not be

justified in communicating with Lord Derby, considered simply as a

political leader with whom he was not in relations of party, yet, he

proceeds, 'remembering that I was once his colleague, and placing entire

reliance on his honour, I am ready to speak to him in confidence and

without reserve on the subject of public affairs, should it be his

desire.' His three friends, Graham, Aberdeen, and Herbert, still viewed

the proceeding with entire disfavour, and no counsels were ever dictated

by sincerer affection and solicitude. Your financial scheme, says

Graham, is conceived in the very spirit of Peel; it would be most

conducive to national welfare; you alone and in high office can carry

it; but it must be grafted on a pacific policy and on a moderate scale

of public expenditure; it is not under Palmerston that such blessings

are to be anticipated; but then are they more probable under Derby and

Disraeli? Lord Aberdeen took another line, insisting that to make any

sort of approach to Lord Derby, after joining Palmerston only the

previous year, would be unjustifiable; the bare apprehension of a

vicious policy would be no intelligible ground for changing sides; more

tangible reasons would be needed, and they were only too likely soon to

arrive from Palmerston's foreign policy. Then a reasonable chance might

come. Herbert, in his turn, told Mr. Gladstone that though he might

infuse vigour and respectability into a party that stood much in need of

both, yet he would always be in a false position. 'Your opinions are

essentially progressive, and when the measures of any government mast be

liberal and progressive, the country will prefer the men whose

antecedents and mottoes are liberal, while the conservatives will always

prefer a leader whose prejudices are with themselves.' As Graham put it

to him: 'If you were to join the tory party to-morrow, you would have

neither their confidence nor their real good will, and they would openly

break with you in less than a year.' It all reminds one of the chorus in

Greek plays, sagely expostulating with a hero bent on some dread deed of

fate.

III

MEDITATIONS

In the autumn of 1856 ecclesiastical questions held a strong place in

Mr. Gladstone's interests. The condemnation of Archdeacon Denison for

heresy roused him to lively indignation. He had long interviews with the

archdeacon, drafted answers for him, and flung his whole soul into the

case, though he was made angry by Denison's oscillations and general

tone. 'Gladstone tells me,' said Aberdeen, 'that he cannot sleep for it,

and writes to me volumes upon volumes. He thinks that Denison ought to

have been allowed to show that his doctrine, whether in accordance or

not with the articles, is in accordance with scripture. And he thinks

the decision ought to have been in his case as it was in Gorham's, that

the articles are comprehensive, that they admit Denison's view of the

Eucharist as well as that of his opponents.'[356]

His closing entry for the year (1856) depicts an inner mood:--

It appears to me that there are few persons who are so much as I am

enclosed in the invisible net of pendent steel. I have never known

what tedium was, have always found time full of calls and duties,

life charged with every kind of interest. But now when I look

calmly around me, I see that these interests are for ever growing

and grown too many and powerful, and that were it to please God to

call me I might answer with reluctance.... See how I stand. Into

politics I am drawn deeper every year; in the growing anxieties and

struggles of the church I have no less [interest] than I have

heretofore; literature has of late acquired a new and powerful hold

upon me; the fortunes of my wife's family, which have had, with all

their dry detail, all the most exciting and arduous interest of

romance for me now during nine years and more; seven children

growing up around us, and each day the object of deeper thoughts

and feelings, and of higher hopes to Catherine and me,--what a

network is here woven out of all that the heart and all that the

mind of man can supply....

FOOTNOTES:

[348] See Appendix.

[349] Herbert to Gladstone, May 27, 1855.

[350] _Many Memories_, p. 229.

[351] Vitzthum, _St. Petersburg and London_, i. p. 170. A full account

of these parliamentary events from May to July, 1855, is to be found in

Martin's _Prince Consort_, iii. pp. 281-307.

[352] Ashley, ii. pp. 320, 325.

[353] Memo. April 17, 1856.

[354] To Robertson Gladstone, Dec. 16, 1856.

[355] To Mr. Elwin, Dec. 2, 1856.

[356] Simpson's _Many Memories_, p. 238.

CHAPTER VIII

GENERAL ELECTION--NEW MARRIAGE LAW

(_1857_)

No wave on the great ocean of Time, when once it has floated past

us, can be recalled. All we can do is to watch the new form and

motion of the next, and launch upon it to try in the manner our

best judgment may suggest our strength and skill.--GLADSTONE.

In spite of wise counsels of circumspection, Mr. Gladstone clung to the

chances that might come from personal communication between himself and

Lord Derby. Under pressure from his friends, he agreed with Lord Derby

to put off an interview until after the debate on the address. Then,

after parliament met, they took the plunge. We are now at the beginning

of February.

This afternoon at three I called on Lord Derby and remained with

him above three hours, in prosecution of the correspondence which

had passed between us.

I told him that I deliberately disapproved of the government of

Lord Palmerston, and was prepared and desirous to aid in any proper

measures which might lead to its displacement. That so strong were

my objections that I was content to act thus without inquiring who

was to follow, for I was convinced that any one who might follow

would govern with less prejudice to the public interests. That in

the existing state of public affairs I did not pretend to see far,

but thus far I saw clearly. I also told him that I felt the

isolated position in which I stood, and indeed in which we who are

called Peelites all stand, to be a great evil as tending to prolong

and aggravate that parliamentary disorganisation which so much

clogs and weakens the working of our government; and I denounced

myself as a public nuisance, adding that it would be an advantage

if my doctor sent me abroad for the session.

PEELITES AND TORIES

He concurred in the general sentiments which I had expressed, but

said it was material for him, as he had friends with and for whom

to act, and as I had alluded to the possibility, in the event of a

change, of his being invited by the Queen to form a government, to

consider beforehand on what strength he could rely. He said he

believed his friends were stronger than any other single section,

but that they were a minority in both Houses. Weak in 1852, he was

weaker now, for it was natural that four years of exclusion from

office should thin the ranks of a party, and such had been his

case. He described the state of feeling among his friends, and

adverted to the offer he had made in 1851 and in 1855. The fact of

an overture made and not accepted had led to much bitterness or

anger towards us among a portion of his adherents. He considered

that in 1855 Lord Palmerston had behaved far from well either to

Herbert and me, or to him.[357]

Other interviews followed; resolutions were discussed, amendments, forms

of words. They met at discreet dinners. 'Nobody,' Lord Derby tells him,

'except Disraeli knows the length to which our communications have

gone.' Nobody, that is to say, excepting also Mr. Gladstone's three

personal allies; them he kept accurately informed of all that passed at

every stage. On February 13 the government presented their budget. In

introducing his plan, Cornewall Lewis rashly quoted, and adopted as his

own, the terrible heresy of Arthur Young, that to multiply the number of

taxes is a step towards equality of burden, and that a good system of

taxation is one that bears lightly on an infinite number of points. The

reader will believe how speedily an impious opinion of this sort kindled

volcanic flame in Mr. Gladstone's breast. He thought moreover that he

espied in the ministerial plan a prospective deficiency a year ahead. To

maintain a steady surplus of income over expenditure, he reflected; to

lower indirect taxes when excessive in amount, for the relief of the

people, and bearing in mind the reproductive power inherent in such

operations; to simplify our fiscal system by concentrating its pressure

on a few well chosen articles of extended consumption; and to conciliate

support to the income-tax by marking its temporary character, and by

associating it with beneficial changes in the tariff: these aims have

been for fifteen years the labour of our life. By this budget he found

them in principle utterly reversed. He told his friends that the shade

of Peel would appear to him if he did not oppose such plans with his

whole strength. When the time came (Feb. 3), 'the government was fired

into from all quarters. Disraeli in front; Gladstone on flank; John

Russell in rear. Disraeli and Gladstone rose at same time. Speaker

called the former. Both spoke very well. It was a night of triumph for

Gladstone.'[358]

There is another note of the proceedings on Lewis's budget:--

_Saturday, Feb. 14._--I was engaged to meet Graham, Herbert, and

Cardwell at Lord Aberdeen's, and I knew from Lord Derby that he was

to see his friends at noon. So I went to him on my way, first to

point out the _deficit_ of between five and six millions for 1858-9

which is created by this budget, with the augmentations of it in

subsequent years; and secondly, to say that in my opinion it was

hopeless to attack the scheme in detail, and that it must be

resisted on the ground of deficit as a whole, to give a hope of

success. I said that if among the opposition there still lingered a

desire to revive and extend indirect taxation, I must allow that

the government had bid high for support from those who entertained

it; that it was the worst proposition I had ever heard from a

minister of finance. At Lord Aberdeen's we examined the figures of

the case, and drafted two resolutions which expressed our opinions.

The more serious point, however, was that they all wished me to

insist upon taking the motion into my own hands; and announcing

this to Lord J. Russell as well as to Lord Derby. As to the second

I had no difficulty, could I have acceded to the first. But I did

not doubt that Disraeli would still keep hold of so much of his

notice of Feb. 3 as had not been set aside by the budget. I said

that from motives which I could neither describe nor conquer I was

quite unable to undertake to enter into any squabble or competition

with him for the possession of a post of prominence. We had much

conversation on political prospects: Graham wishing to see me lead

the Commons under Lord John as prime minister in the Lords;

admitting that the same thing would do under Lord Derby, but for

Disraeli, who could not be thrown away like a sucked orange; and I

vehemently deploring our position, which I said, and they admitted,

was generally condemned by the country.

I again went to Derby, as he had requested, at five; and he told me

that he had had with him Malmesbury, Hardwicke, Disraeli, Pakington,

Walpole, Lytton. They had all agreed that the best motion would be a

resolution (from Disraeli) on Monday, before the Speaker left the

chair, which would virtually rest the question on deficit. I made

two verbal suggestions on the resolution to improve its form.

CO-OPERATION WITH MR. DISRAELI

Late in the evening Lord Derby writes, enclosing a note received at

dinner from Disraeli, 'I hope I may take it for granted that there is

now a complete understanding between us as to the move on Monday night.'

'My dear lord,' runs the note, 'I like the resolution as amended. It is

improved. Yours ever, D.' When Monday came, the move was duly made, and

Gladstone and Disraeli again fought side by side as twin champions of

the cause of reduced expenditure. Time had incensed Mr. Gladstone still

further, and he conducted a terrific fusillade. He recounted how between

1842 and 1853 two and twenty millions of taxation had been taken off

without costing a farthing. 'A man may be glad and thankful to have been

an Englishman and a member of the British parliament during these years,

bearing his part in so blessed a work. But if it be a blessed work, what

are we to say of him who begins the undoing of it?' The proposal of the

government showed a gross, a glaring, an increasing deficiency, a

deficiency unparalleled in the financial history of a quarter of a

century. It was deluding the people and trifling with national

interests. It is certain that no financier before or since ever, in

Cromwellian phrase, made such a conscience of the matter, or ever found

the task more thankless.[359] Great as was the effect of the close and

searching argument that accompanied all this invective, even Mr.

Gladstone's friends thought it too impassioned and too severe upon

Lewis, in whose favour there was consequently a reaction. The cool

minister contented himself with quoting Horace's lines upon the artist

skilled in reproducing in his bronze fierce nails or flowing hair, yet

who fails because he lacks the art to seize the whole.[360]

At the end of February (1857), at a party meeting of 160 members, Lord

Derby told his men that the course taken by Mr. Disraeli upon the budget

had been concerted with him and had his entire approval; spoke with

admiration of Mr. Gladstone; justified political union when produced by

men finding themselves drawn to the same lobby by identity of sentiment;

and advised them not to decline such accession of strength as would

place their party in a position to undertake the government of the

country. The newspapers cried out that the long-expected coalition had

at length really taken place. In their hearts the conservative managers

were not sure that Mr. Gladstone's adhesion would not cost them too

dearly. 'He would only benefit us by his talents' (says Lord Malmesbury)

'for we should lose many of our supporters. The Duke of Beaufort, one of

our staunchest adherents, told me at Longleat that if we coalesced with

the Peelites he would leave the party, and I remember in 1855, when Lord

Derby attempted to form a government, and offered places to Gladstone

and Herbert, that no less than eighty members of the House of Commons

threatened to leave him.'[361] All these schemes and calculations were

destined to be rudely interrupted.

II

SPEECH ON THE CHINA WAR

While he was acting with Lord Derby on the one hand, Mr. Gladstone

sought counsel from Cobden on the other, having great confidence in his

'firmness and integrity of purpose,' and hoping for support from him in

face of a faint-hearted disposition to regard Lord Palmerston as a

magician against whom it was vain to struggle. Events were speedily to

show that Lord Palmerston had more magic at his disposal than his

valiant foe believed. The agent of the British government in the China

seas--himself, by the way, a philosophic radical--had forced a war upon

the Chinese. The cabinet supported him. On the motion of Cobden, the

House censured the proceeding. Mr. Gladstone, whose hatred of

high-handed iniquities in China had been stirred in early days,[362] as

the reader may recall, made the most powerful speech in a remarkable

debate. 'Gladstone rose at half-past nine,' Phillimore says (Mar. 3),

'and delivered for nearly two hours an oration which enthralled the

House, and which for argument, dignity, eloquence, and effect is

unsurpassed by any of his former achievements. It won several votes.

Nobody denies that his speech was the finest delivered in the memory of

man in the House of Commons.' Apart from a rigorous examination of

circumstance and fact in the special case, as in the famous precedent of

Don Pacifico seven years before, he raised the dispute to higher planes

and in most striking language. He examined it both by municipal and

international law, and on 'the higher ground of natural justice'--'that

justice which binds man to man; which is older than Christianity,

because it was in the world before Christianity; which is broader than

Christianity, because it extends to the world beyond Christianity; and

which underlies Christianity, for Christianity itself appeals to it....

War taken at the best is a frightful scourge upon the human race; but

because it is so, the wisdom of ages has surrounded it with strict laws

and usages, and has required formalities to be observed which shall act

as a curb upon the wild passions of man.... You have dispensed with all

these precautions. You have turned a consul into a diplomatist, and that

metamorphosed consul is forsooth to be at liberty to direct the whole

might of England against the lives of a defenceless people.' Disraeli

in turn denounced proceedings which began in outrage and ended in ruin,

mocked at 'No reform, new taxes, Canton blazing, Persia invaded,' as the

programme of the party of progress and civilisation, and reprobated a

prime minister who had professed almost every principle, and connected

himself with almost every party. Palmerston replied by a stout piece of

close argument, spiced by taunts about coalitions, combinations, and

eloquent flourishes. But this time in parliament his slender majority

failed him.

_March 3, '57._--Spoke on Cobden's resolutions, and voted in

263-247--a division doing more honour to the House of Commons than

any I ever remember. Home with C. and read Lord Ellesmere's

_Faust_, being excited, which is rare with me. (_Diary._)

LORD PALMERSTON'S TRIUMPH

The repulse was transient. The minister appealed to the constituencies,

and won a striking triumph. Nearly all the Manchester politicians, with

Bright and Cobden at their head, were ruthlessly dismissed, and the

election was a glorious ratification not only of the little war among

the Chinese junks, but of the great war against the Czar of Russia, and

of much besides. This, said Mr. Gladstone, was not an election like that

of 1784, when Pitt appealed on the question whether the crown should be

the slave of an oligarchic faction; nor like that of 1831, when Grey

sought a judgment on reform; nor like that of 1852, when the issue was

the expiring controversy of protection. The country was to decide not

upon the Canton river, but whether it would or would not have Lord

Palmerston for prime minister. 'The insolent barbarian wielding

authority at Canton who had violated the British flag' was indeed made

to play his part. But the mainspring of the electoral victory was to be

sought in the profound public weariness of the party dispersions of the

last eleven years; in the determination that the country should be

governed by men of intelligible opinions and definite views; in the

resolution that the intermediate tints should disappear; in the

conviction that Palmerston was the helmsman for the hour. The result was

justly compared to the plebiscite taken in France four or five years

earlier, whether they would have Louis Napoleon for emperor or not. It

was computed that no fewer than one-sixth, or at best one-seventh, of

the most conspicuous men in the former House of Commons were thrust out.

The Derbyites were sure that the report of the coalition with the

Peelites had done them irreparable harm, though their electioneering was

independent. At Oxford Mr. Gladstone was returned without opposition. On

the other hand, his gallant attempt to save the seat of his

brother-in-law in Flintshire failed, his many speeches met much rough

interruption, and to his extreme mortification Sir Stephen Glynne was

thrown out.

The moral of the general election was undoubtedly a heavy shock to Mr.

Gladstone, and he was fully conscious of the new awkwardness of his

public position. Painful change seemed imminent even in his intimate

relations with cherished friends. Sidney Herbert had written to him that

as for Gladstone, Graham, and himself, they were not only broken up as a

party, but the country intended to break them up and would resent any

attempt at resuscitation; they ought on no account to reappear as a

triumvirate on their old bench. Mr. Gladstone's reply discloses in some

of its phrases a peculiar warmth of sensibility, of which he was not

often wont to make much display:--

_To Sidney Herbert._

_March 22, 1857._--I did not reply to your letter when it arrived,

because it touches principally upon subjects with respect to which

I feel that my mind has been wrought into a state of sensitiveness

which is excessive and morbid. For the last eleven years, with the

exception of only two among them, the pains of political strife

have not for us found their usual and proper compensation in the

genial and extended sympathies of a great body of comrades, while

suspicion, mistrust, and criticism have flanked us on both sides

and in unusual measure. Our one comfort has been a concurrence of

opinion which has been upon the whole remarkably close, and which

has been cemented by the closer bonds of feeling and of friendship.

The loss of this one comfort I have no strength to face. Contrary

to your supposition, I have nothing with which to replace it; but

the attachments, which began with political infancy, and which

have lived through so many storms and so many subtler vicissitudes

will never be replaced. You will never be able to get away from me

as long as I can cling to you, and if at length, urged by your

conscience and deliberate judgment, you effect the operation, the

result will not be to throw me into the staff of Lord Derby. I

shall seek my duty, as well as consult my inclination, first, by

absconding from what may be termed general politics, and secondly,

by appearing, wherever I must appear, only in the ranks.

I can neither give even the most qualified adhesion to the ministry

of Lord Palmerston, nor follow the liberal party in the abandonment

of the very principles and pledges which were original and

principal bonds of union with it. So, on the other hand, I never

have had any hope of conservative reconstruction except (and that

slender and remote) such as presupposed the co-operation--I am now

speaking for the House of Commons only--of yourself and Graham in

particular. By adopting Reform as a watchword of present political

action he has certainly inserted a certain amount of gap between

himself and me, which may come to be practically material or may

not. If you make a gap upon this opportunity, I believe it will be

a novelty in political history: it will be the first case on record

of separation between two men, all of whose views upon every public

question, political, administrative, or financial, are I believe in

as exact accordance as under the laws of the human mind is

possible....

His leaning towards the conservative party seemed to become more decided

rather than less. Lord Aberdeen had written to him as if the

amalgamation of Peel's friends with the liberal party had practically

taken place. 'If that be true,' Mr. Gladstone replies (April 4, 1857),

'then I have been deceiving both the world and my constituents, and the

deception has reached its climax within the last fortnight, during which

I have been chosen without opposition to represent Oxford under a belief

directly contrary in the minds of the majority of my constituents.' He

saw nothing but evil in Lord Palmerston's supremacy. That was his

unending refrain. He tells one of his constituents, the state of things

'is likely to end in much political confusion if it is not stopped by

the failure of Lord Palmerston's physical force, the only way of

stopping it which I could view with regret, for I admire the pluck with

which he fights against the infirmities of age, though in political and

moral courage I have never seen a minister so deficient.' Cobden asked

him in the course of the first session of the new parliament, to take up

some position adverse to the ministers. 'I should not knowingly,' Mr.

Gladstone replies (June 16, 1857), 'allow any disgust with the state of

public affairs to restrain me from the discharge of a public duty; but I

arrived some time ago at the conclusion, which has guided my conduct

since the dissolution, that the House of Commons would sooner and more

healthily return to a sense of its own dignity and of its proper

functions, if let alone by a person who had so thoroughly worried both

it and the country as myself.'

III

DIVORCE BILL

This stern resolve to hold aloof did not last. Towards the end of the

session a subject was brought before parliament that stirred him to the

very depths of heart and conscience. It marked one more stage of the

history of English laws in that immense process of the secularisation of

the state, against which, in his book of 1888, Mr. Gladstone had drawn

up, with so much weight of reading and thought, a case so wholly

unavailing. The legal doctrine of marriage had been established against

the theological doctrine by Lord Hardwicke's famous act of 1753, for

that measure made the observance of certain requirements then set up by

law essential to a good marriage. A further fundamental change had begun

with the legislation of civil marriage in 1836. The conception of

marriage underlying such a change obviously removed it from sacrament,

or anything like a sacrament, to the bleak and frigid zone of civil

contract; it was antagonistic, therefore, to the whole ecclesiastical

theory of divorce.[363]

A royal commission issued a report in 1853, setting forth the case

against the existing system of dissolving marriage, and recommending

radical changes. In the following year the cabinet of which Mr.

Gladstone was a member framed and introduced a bill substantially

conforming to these recommendations. For one reason or another it did

not become law, nor did a bill of similar scope in 1856. In the interval

of leisure that followed, Mr. Gladstone was pressed, perhaps by Bishop

Wilberforce, thoroughly to consider the matter. With his prepossessions,

there could be little doubt that he would incline to that view of

marriage, and the terms and legal effects of loosening the marriage tie,

that the Council of Trent had succeeded in making the general marriage

law of catholic Europe. The subject was one peculiarly calculated to

interest and excite him. Religion and the church were involved. It

raised at our own hearths the eternal question of rendering to Cæsar

what is Cæsar's, and to the church what belongs to the church. It was

wrapped up with topics of history and of learning. It could not be

discussed without that admixture of legality and ethics which delights a

casuistic intellect. Above all, it went to the root both of that deepest

of human relations, and of that particular branch of morals, in which

Mr. Gladstone always felt the vividest concern. So, in short, being once

called upon for a practical purpose to consider divorce and the many

connected questions of re-marriage, he was inevitably roused to a

fervour on one side, not any less heated and intense than the fervour of

the mighty Milton on the other side two centuries before. He began

operations by an elaborate article in the _Quarterly Review_.[364] Here

he flings himself upon the well-worn texts in the Bible familiar to the

readers of _Tetrachordon_,--if, indeed, _Tetrachordon_ have any

readers,--with a dialectical acuteness and force that only make one

wonder the more how a mind so powerful as Mr. Gladstone's could dream

that, at that age of the world, men would suffer one of the most

far-reaching of all our social problems, whatever be the right or wrong

social solution, to be in the slightest degree affected by a Greek word

or two of utterly disputable and unfixed significance.

INTEREST IN LAW OF DIVORCE

I may note in passing that in another department of supposed Levitical

prohibition--the case of the wife's sister--he had in 1849 strongly

argued against relaxation, mainly on the ground that it would involve an

alteration of the law and doctrines of the church of England, and

therefore of the law of Christianity.[365] Experience and time

revolutionised his point of view, and in 1869, in supporting a bill

legalising these marriages, he took the secular and utilitarian line,

and said that twelve or fourteen years earlier (about the time on which

we are now engaged) he formed the opinion that it was the mass of the

community to which we must look in dealing with such a question, and

that the fairest course would be to legalise the marriage contracts in

question, and legitimise their issue, leaving to each religious

community the question of attaching to such marriages a religious

character.[366]

The Divorce bill of 1857 was introduced in the Lords, and passed by them

without effective resistance. It was supported by the Archbishop of

Canterbury and nine other prelates. Authorities no less exalted than

Bishop Wilberforce were violently hostile, even at one stage carrying

amendments (ultimately rejected), not only for prohibiting the

inter-marriage of the guilty parties, but actually imposing a fine or

imprisonment on either of them. This, I fancy, is the high-water mark of

the ecclesiastical theory in the century.[367] Lord Mahon in a letter to

Mr. Gladstone at this date pictures Macaulay's New Zealander being taken

to the House of Lords and hearing learned lords and reverend prelates

lay down the canon that marriage is indissoluble by the law of England

and by the law of the church. But who, he might have asked, are those

two gentlemen listening so intently? Oh, these are two gentlemen whose

marriages were dissolved last year. And that other man? Oh, he was

divorced last week. And those three ladies? Oh, their marriages may in

all probability be dissolved in another year or two. Still this view of

the absurdity of existing practice did not make a convert.

As soon as the bill came down to the House of Commons Mr. Gladstone

hastened up to London in the dog-days. 'A companion in the railway

carriage,' he wrote to Mrs. Gladstone, 'more genial than congenial,

offered me his _Times_, and then brandy! This was followed by a proposal

to smoke, so that he had disabled me from objecting on personal

grounds.' Tobacco, brandy at odd hours, and the newspaper made a triple

abomination in a single dose, for none of the three was ever a favourite

article of his consumption. In London he found the counsels of his

friends by no means encouraging for the great fight on which he was

intent. They deprecated anything that would bring him into direct

collision with Lord Palmerston. They urged that violent opposition now

would be contrasted with his past silence, and with his own cabinet

responsibility for the very same proposal. Nothing would be intelligible

to the public, Lord Aberdeen said, beyond a 'carefully moderated

course.' But a carefully moderated course was the very last thing

possible to Mr. Gladstone when the flame was once kindled, and he fought

the bill with a holy wrath as vehement as the more worldly fury with

which Henry Fox, from very different motives, had fought the marriage

bill of 1753. The thought that stirred him was indicated in a phrase or

two to his wife at Hawarden: '_July 31._--Parliamentary affairs are very

black; the poor church gets deeper and deeper into the mire. I am to

speak to-night; it will do no good; and the fear grows upon me from year

to year that when I finally leave parliament, I shall not leave the

great question of state and church better, but perhaps even worse, than

I found it.'

VEHEMENT OPPOSITION

The discussion of the bill in the Commons occupied no fewer than

eighteen sittings, more than one of them, according to the standard of

those primitive times, inordinately long. In the hundred encounters

between Mr. Gladstone and Bethell, polished phrase barely hid

unchristian desire to retaliate and provoke. Bethell boldly taunted Mr.

Gladstone with insincerity. Mr. Gladstone, with a vivacity very like

downright anger, reproached Bethell with being a mere hewer of wood and

drawer of water to the cabinet who forced the bill into his charge; with

being disorderly and abusing the privileges of speech by accusations of

insincerity, 'which have not only proceeded from his mouth but gleamed

from those eloquent eyes of his, which have been continuously turned on

me for the last ten minutes, instead of being addressed to the chair.'

On every division those who affirmed the principle of the bill were at

least two to one. 'All we can do,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to his wife, 'is

to put shoulder to shoulder, and this, please God, we will do. Graham is

with us, much to my delight, and much too, let me add, to my surprise. I

am as thankful to be in parliament for this (almost) as I was for the

China vote.... Yesterday ten and a-half hours, rather angry; to-day with

pacification, but still tough and prolonged.' An unfriendly but not

wholly unveracious chronicler says of this ten hours' sitting (August

14) on a single clause: 'Including questions, explanations, and

interlocutory suggestions, Mr. Gladstone made nine-and-twenty speeches,

some of them of considerable length. Sometimes he was argumentative,

frequently ingenious and critical, often personal, and not less often

indignant at the alleged personality of others.'

He made no pretence of thinking the principle of divorce _a vinculo_

anything but an immense evil, but he still held himself free, if that

view were repudiated, to consider the legislative question of

dissolubility and its conditions. He resorted abundantly to what

Palmerston called 'the old standard set-up form of objecting to any

improvement, to say that it does not carry out all the improvements of

which the matter in hand is susceptible.' One of the complaints of which

he made most was the inequality in the bill between the respective

rights of husband and wife. 'It is the special and peculiar doctrines of

the Gospel,' he said, 'respecting the personal relation of every

Christian, whether man or woman, to the person of Christ, that form the

firm, the broad, the indestructible basis of the equality of the sexes

under the Christian law.' Again, 'in the vast majority of instances

where the woman falls into sin, she does so from motives less impure

and ignoble than those of the man.' He attacks with just vigour the

limitation of legal cruelty in this case to the cruelty of mere force

importing danger to life, limb, or health, though he was shocked in

after years, as well he might be, at the grotesque excess to which the

doctrine of 'mental cruelty' has been carried in some States of the

American Union. In this branch of the great controversy, at any rate, he

speaks in a nobler and humaner temper than Milton, who writes with a

tyrannical Jewish belief in the inferiority of women to men, and wives

to husbands, that was in Mr. Gladstone's middle life slowly beginning to

melt away in English public opinion. His second complaint, and in his

eyes much the more urgent of the two, was the right conferred by the

government bill upon divorced persons to claim marriage by a clergyman

in a church, and still more bitterly did he resent the obligation

imposed by the bill upon clergymen to perform such marriages. Here the

fight was not wholly unsuccessful, and modifications were secured as the

fruit of his efforts, narrowing and abating, though not removing, his

grounds of objection.[368]

IV

DEATH OF LADY LYTTELTON