“I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that
events have controlled me. Now at the end of three years’
struggle, the nation’s condition is not what either party or any
man desired or expected.”—ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1864).
I
Writing to his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, in April 1865, Mr.
Gladstone sets out pretty summarily the three incidents that had been
taken to mark the line of his advance in the paths of extreme and
visionary politics. When it was written, his speech on the franchise the
previous year had not ripened,(162) and his speech on the Irish church was
only on the eve, nor did he yet know it, of taking shape as a deliberate
policy of action.
_To Lord Lyttelton._
_11 Carlton House Terrace, S.W., April 9, ’65._—Our interesting
conversation of Wednesday evening, which looked before and after,
and for your share in which I heartily thank you, has led me to
review the subject matters, a process which every man in public
life as well as elsewhere ought often to perform, but which the
pressure of overwork, and the exhaustion it leaves behind, sadly
hinder. But I sum up in favour of a verdict of “Not guilty,” on
the following grounds.
As far as I know, there are but three subjects which have exposed
me to the charge of radicalism: the Irish church, the franchise,
the paper duty, and the consequent struggle with the House of
Lords.
My opinions on the Irish church were, I know, those of Newcastle
and Sidney Herbert twenty years ago; and they were not radicals.
Ever since Maynooth, in 1845, I have seen that resistance _in
principle_ was gone. That was the main reason which led me to make
such a serious affair of my own case about the Maynooth grant in
that year. But I held this embryo opinion in my mind as there was
no cause to precipitate it into life, and waited to fortify or
alter or invalidate it by the teachings of experience. At last the
time for speaking, and therefore for formulating my ideas came,
and I have spoken according as I believe to be the sense of all
the leading men with whom I acted from Peel’s death onwards, and
within the sense not only of Lord Macaulay, but of the present
Lord Grey.
With respect to the franchise, my belief is that the objection
taken to my speech really turned not upon the doctrine of _prima
facie_ title, but upon the fact that it was a speech decisively
and warmly in favour of the £6 franchise or something equivalent
to it. That is to say, of the very franchise which as a member of
the cabinet I had supported in 1860, on the credit and promise of
which Lord Derby had been put out in 1859, and which, if it did
not appear in the Aberdeen Reform bill of 1852, was represented
there by other concessions equally large. The truth is this, that
ever since the Aberdeen Reform bill, I have remained just where it
placed me; but many seem to think that it is a subject to be
played with or traded on. In thinking and acting otherwise I feel
myself to be upholding principles essential to the confidence of
the people in governments and parliaments, and also a measure
which promises by reasonably widening the basis of our
institutions to strengthen the structure above.
To the repeal of the paper duty the House of Commons, when led by
the Derby government, chose to commit itself unanimously, and this
at a time when the tea duty was at 17d. per lb. In 1860 and 1861
the cabinet considered the respective claims, and took the same
course which the Derby government had assisted the House of
Commons to take before. Upon this it was found that the measure
which they had approved had become in my hands a radical one; the
House of Lords was encouraged to rescue the finance of the country
from the hands of the House of Commons; and the claims of tea were
declared to be paramount to those of paper. In proposing the
repeal of the last remaining excise duty upon a simple article of
manufacture, I adopted a principle which had already received an
unanimous acceptance. In resisting to the uttermost of my power
the encroachment of the House of Lords, I acted, as I believe, on
the only principle which makes it practicable to defend the true,
legitimate, and constitutional powers of that House itself against
encroachment from other quarters.
Now let me look at the other side of the question. On church
rates, on university tests, on clerical subscription (the two last
being the only two questions really of principle which, as far as
I remember, have been raised), I have held my ground; and on the
two last the cabinet of which I form a part has in the main
adopted a course essentially (but with a little _c_) conservative.
The question of franchise was settled, the question of the powers of the
Lords in matters of taxation was settled. The Irish church held its
ground. In 1865 Mr. Gladstone voted against a radical member who had moved
that the case of the Irish church “called for the early attention of the
government.” He agreed with the mover on the merits, but did not believe
that the time had come. In 1866, when he was leader of the House, he
concurred with Lord Russell, then first minister, in meeting a motion
against the Irish church with a direct negative. “In meeting a question
with a negative,” he wrote to the Irish secretary (April 7), “we may
always put it on the ground of time, as well as on the merits. To meet a
motion of this kind with the previous question only, implies almost an
engagement to take it up on some early occasion, and this I take it we are
not prepared for.” In the summer of 1865 he wrote to the warden of
Glenalmond that the question was “remote and apparently out of all bearing
on the practical politics of the day.” So far as his own judgment went, he
had told Sir Roundell Palmer in 1863, that he had made up his mind on the
subject, and should not be able to keep himself from giving expression to
his feelings. Why did he say that he did not then believe that the
question would come on in his time? “A man,” he replied, “who in 1865
completed his thirty-third year of a laborious career, who had already
followed to the grave the remains of almost all the friends abreast of
whom he had started from the university in the career of public life; and
who had observed that, excepting two recent cases [I suppose Palmerston
and Russell], it was hard to find in our whole history a single man who
had been permitted to reach the fortieth year of a course of labour
similar to his own within the walls of the House of Commons; such a man
might be excused ... if he formed a less sanguine estimate of the fraction
of space yet remaining to him, than seems to have been the case with his
critics.”(163)
It was Maynooth that originally cut from under his feet the principle of
establishment in Ireland as an obligation of the state. When that went,
more general reflections arose in his mind. In 1872 he wrote to Guizot:—
It is very unlikely that you should remember a visit I paid you, I
think at Passy in the autumn of 1845, with a message from Lord
Aberdeen about international copyright. The Maynooth Act had just
been, passed. Its author, I think, meant it to be final. I had
myself regarded it as _seminal_. And you in congratulating me upon
it, as I well remember, said we should have the sympathies of
Europe in the work of giving Ireland justice—a remark which
evidently included more than the measure just passed, and which I
ever after saved and pondered. It helped me on towards what has
been since done.
“I must own,” he wrote to Lord Granville (April 11, 1868), “that for years
past I have been watching the sky with a strong sense of the obligation to
act with the first streak of dawn.” He now believed the full sun was up,
and he was right. In an autobiographic note, undated but written near to
the end of his days, he says:—
I am by no means sure, upon a calm review, that Providence has
endowed me with anything that can be called a striking gift. But
if there be such a thing entrusted to me it has been shown at
certain political junctures, in what maybe termed appreciations of
the general situation and its result. To make good the idea, this
must not be considered as the simple acceptance of public opinion,
founded upon the discernment that it has risen to a certain height
needful for a given work, like a tide. It is an insight into the
facts of particular eras, and their relation one to another, which
generates in the mind a conviction that the materials exist for
forming a public opinion and for directing it to a particular end.
There are four occasions of my life with respect to which I think
these considerations may be applicable. They are these: 1. The
renewal of the Income-tax in 1853; 2. The proposal of religious
equality for Ireland, 1868....
The remaining two will appear in good time. It is easy to label this with
the ill-favoured name of opportunist. Yet if an opportunist be defined as
a statesman who declines to attempt to do a thing until he believes that
it can really be done, what is this but to call him a man of common sense?
II
(M70) In 1867 Ireland was disturbed by bold and dangerous Fenian plots and
the mischief flowed over into England. In September, at Manchester, a body
of armed men rescued two Fenian prisoners from a police van, and shot an
officer in charge, a crime for which three of them were afterwards hanged.
In December a Fenian rolled a barrel of gunpowder up to the wall of a
prison in London where a comrade was confined, and fired it. The explosion
that followed blew down part of the wall and cost several lives.
In my opinion,—Mr. Gladstone said afterwards in parliament, and
was much blamed for saying,—and in the opinion of many with whom I
communicated, the Fenian conspiracy has had an important influence
with respect to Irish policy; but it has not been an influence in
determining, or in affecting in the slightest degree, the
convictions which we have entertained with respect to the course
proper to be pursued in Ireland. The influence of Fenianism was
this—that when the habeas corpus Act was suspended, when all the
consequent proceedings occurred, when the tranquillity of the
great city of Manchester was disturbed, when the metropolis itself
was shocked and horrified by an inhuman outrage, when a sense of
insecurity went abroad far and wide ... when the inhabitants of
the different towns of the country were swearing themselves in as
special constables for the maintenance of life and property—then
it was when these phenomena came home to the popular mind, and
produced that attitude of attention and preparedness on the part
of the whole population of this country which qualified them to
embrace, in a manner foreign to their habits in other times, the
vast importance of the Irish controversy.(164)
This influence was palpable and undoubted, and it was part of Mr.
Gladstone’s courage not to muffle up plain truth, from any spurious
notions of national self-esteem. He never had much patience with people
who cannot bear to hear what they cannot fail to see. In this case the
truth was of the plainest. Lord Stanley, then a member of his father’s
government, went to a banquet at Bristol in the January of 1868, and told
his conservative audience that Ireland was hardly ever absent from the
mind of anybody taking part in public affairs. “I mean,” he said, “the
painful, the dangerous, the discreditable state of things that unhappily
continues to exist in Ireland.” He described in tones more fervid than
were usual with him, the “miserable state of things,” and yet he asked,
“when we look for a remedy, who is there to give us an intelligible
answer?” The state of Ireland, as Mr. Gladstone said later,(165) was
admitted by both sides to be the question of the day. The conservatives in
power took it up, and they had nothing better nor deeper to propose than
the policy of concurrent endowment. They asked parliament to establish at
the charge of the exchequer a Roman catholic university; and declared
their readiness to recognise the principle of religious equality in
Ireland by a great change in the status of the unendowed clergy of that
country, provided the protestant establishment were upheld in its
integrity. This was the policy of levelling up. It was met by a
counter-plan of religious equality; disestablishment of the existing
church, without establishing any other, and with a general cessation of
endowments for religion in Ireland. Mr. Disraeli’s was at bottom the
principle of Pitt and Castlereagh and of many great whigs, but he might
have known, and doubtless did know, how odious it would be to the British
householders, who were far more like King George III. than they at all
supposed.
III
(M71) In May 1867, Mr. Gladstone had told the House that the time could
not be far distant when parliament would have to look the position of the
Irish church fairly and fully in the face. In the autumn Roundell Palmer
visited Mr. Cardwell, and discovered clearly from the conversation that
the next move in the party was likely to be an attack upon the Irish
church. The wider aspects of the Irish case opened themselves to Mr.
Gladstone in all their melancholy dimensions. At Southport (Dec. 19) he
first raised his standard, and proclaimed an Irish policy on Irish lines,
that should embrace the promotion of higher education in a backward
country, the reform of its religious institutions, the adjustment of the
rights of the cultivator of the soil. The church, the land, the college,
should all be dealt with in turn.(166) It might be true, he said, that
these things would not convert the Irish into a happy and contented
people. Inveterate diseases could not be healed in a moment. When you have
long persevered in mischief, you cannot undo it at an instant’s notice.
True though this might be, was the right conclusion that it was better to
do nothing at all? For his own part he would never despair of redeeming
the reproach of total incapacity to assimilate to ourselves an island
within three hours of our shores, that had been under our dominating
influence for six centuries.
At Christmas in 1867 Lord Russell announced to Mr. Gladstone his intention
not again to take office, in other words to retire from the titular
leadership of the liberal party. Mr. Gladstone did not deny his claim to
repose. “Peel,” he said, “in 1846 thought he had secured his dismissal at
an age which, if spared, I shall touch in three days’ time.”(167) Lord
Russell was now seventy-five. He once told Lord Granville that “the great
disappointment of his life had been Grey’s refusal to join his government
in December 1845, which had prevented his name going down in history as
the repealer of the corn laws.” “A great reputation,” wrote Mr. Gladstone
to Granville in 1868, “built itself up on the basis of splendid public
services for thirty years; for almost twenty it has, I fear, been on the
decline. The movement of the clock continues, the balance weights are
gone.”(168)
A more striking event than Lord Russell’s withdrawal was the accession of
Mr. Disraeli to the first place in the counsels of the crown. In February
1868 Lord Derby’s health compelled him to retire from his position as head
of the government. Mr. Gladstone found fault with the translator of
Stockmar’s _Memoirs_ for rendering “leichtsinnig” applied to Lord Derby as
“frivolous.” He preferred “light-minded”:—
The difference between frivolous and light-minded is not a broad
one. But in my opinion a man is frivolous by disposition, or as
people say by nature, whereas he is light-minded by defect or
perversity of will; further he is frivolous all over, he may be
light-minded on one side of his character. So it was in an eminent
degree with Lord Derby. Not only were his natural gifts
unsurpassed in the present age, but he had a serious and earnest
side to his character. Politics are at once a game and a high art;
he allowed the excitements of the game to draw him off from the
sustained and exhausting efforts of the high art. But this was the
occasional deviation of an honourable man, not the fixed mental
habit of an unprincipled one.
(M72) Mr. Disraeli became prime minister. For the moment, the incident was
more dramatic than important; it was plain that his tenure of office could
not last long. He was five years older (perhaps more) than Mr. Gladstone;
his parliamentary existence had been four or five years shorter. During
the thirty-one years of his life in the House of Commons, up to now he had
enjoyed three short spells of office (from 1852 to 1868), covering little
more than as many years. He had chosen finance for his department, but his
budgets made no mark. In foreign affairs he had no policy of his own
beyond being Austrian and papal rather than Italian, and his criticisms on
the foreign policy of Palmerston and Russell followed the debating needs
of the hour. For legislation in the constructive sense in which it
interested and attracted Mr. Gladstone, he had no taste and little
capacity. In two achievements only had he succeeded, but in importance
they were supreme. Out of the wreckage left by Sir Robert Peel twenty-two
years before he had built up a party. In the name of that party, called
conservative, he had revolutionised the base of our parliamentary
constitution. These two extraordinary feats he had performed without
possessing the full confidence of his adherents, or any real confidence at
all on the part of the country. That was to come later. Meanwhile the
nation had got used to him. He had culture, imagination, fancy, and other
gifts of a born man of letters; the faculty of slow reflective brooding
was his, and he often saw both deep and far; he was artificial, but he was
no pharisee, and he was never petty. His magniloquence of phrase was the
expression of real size and spaciousness of character; as Goethe said of
St. Peter’s at Rome, in spite of all the rococo, there was _etwas
grosses_, something great. His inexhaustible patience, his active
attention and industry, his steadfast courage, his talent in debate and
the work of parliament; his genius in espying, employing, creating
political occasions, all made him, after prolonged conflict against
impediments of every kind, one of the imposing figures of his time. This
was the political captain with whom Mr. Gladstone had contended for some
sixteen years past, and with whom on a loftier elevation for both, he was
to contend for a dozen years to come.
On a motion about the state of Ireland, proceeding from an Irish member
(March 16, 1868) Mr. Gladstone at last launched before parliament the
memorable declaration that the time had come when the church of Ireland as
a church in alliance with the state must cease to exist. This was not a
mere sounding sentence in a speech; it was one of the heroic acts of his
life. Manning did not overstate the case when he wrote to Mr. Gladstone
(March 28, ’68): “The Irish establishment is a great wrong. It is the
cause of division in Ireland, of alienation between Ireland and England.
It embitters every other question. Even the land question is exasperated
by it. The fatal ascendency of race over race is unspeakably aggravated by
the ascendency of religion over religion.” But there were many pit-falls,
and the ground hid dangerous fire. The parliament was Palmerstonian and in
essence conservative; both parties were demoralised by the strange and
tortuous manœuvres that ended in household suffrage; many liberals were
profoundly disaffected to their leader; nobody could say what the majority
was, nor where it lay. To attack the Irish church was to alarm and
scandalise his own chosen friends and closest allies in the kindred church
of England. To attack a high protestant institution “exalting its mitred
front” in the catholic island, was to run sharp risk of awaking the
sleuth-hounds of No-popery. The House of Lords would undoubtedly fight, as
it did, to its last ditch. The legislative task itself was in complexity
and detail, apart from religious passion and the prejudice of race,
gigantic.
Having once decided upon this bold campaign, Mr. Gladstone entered upon it
with military promptitude, and pursued it with an intrepidity all his own
among the statesmen of his day, and not surpassed by Pym in 1640, nor
Chatham in 1758, nor Chatham’s son in 1783, nor anybody else in days gone
by. Within a week of this historic trumpet-blast, he gave notice of three
resolutions to the effect that the established church of Ireland should
cease to exist as an establishment. Attendant and consequential changes
were appended. Within a week of giving notice, he opened the first
resolution, and carried the preliminary motion by a majority of 61. The
cheering at this demonstration of a united and victorious party was
prodigious, both within the House and in Westminster Hall, and an
enthusiastic crowd followed the leader and his two sons as they walked
home to Carlton House Terrace. “This,” he wrote to the Duchess of
Sutherland, “is a day of excitement—almost of exultation. We have made a
step, nay a stride, and this stride is on the pathway of justice, and of
peace, and of national honour and renown.”(169)
(M73) The first resolution was carried (April 30) by a majority of 65, and
a week later the second and third went through without a division. Mr.
Disraeli fought his battle with much steadiness, but did not go beyond a
dilatory amendment. If Mr. Gladstone had old deliverances to reconcile
with new policy, so had his tory antagonist. Disraeli was reminded of that
profound and brilliant oracle of 1844, when he had described the root of
mischief in Ireland as a weak executive, an absentee aristocracy, and an
alien church. He wasted little time in trying to explain why the alien
church now found in him its champion. “Nobody listened,” he said, “at that
time. It seemed to me that I was pouring water upon sand, but it seems now
that the water came from a golden goblet.” The sentiment may have been
expressed, he said, “with the heedless rhetoric which, I suppose, is the
appanage of all who sit below the gangway; but in my historical
conscience, the sentiment of that speech was right.” The prime minister
did not escape taunts from those in his own camp who thought themselves
betrayed by him upon reform the year before. He repaid the taunts by
sarcasm. He told Lord Cranborne that there was vigour in his language and
no want of vindictiveness, what it wanted was finish. Considering that
Lord Cranborne had written anonymous articles against him before and since
they were colleagues—“I do not know whether he wrote them when I was his
colleague”—they really ought to have been more polished. Mr. Lowe, again,
he described as a remarkable man; especially remarkable for his power of
spontaneous aversion; he hates the working classes of England; he hates
the Roman catholics of Ireland; he hates the protestants of Ireland; he
hates ministers; and until Mr. Gladstone placed his hand upon the ark, he
seemed almost to hate Mr. Gladstone.
After Mr. Gladstone’s first resolution was carried, the prime minister
acknowledged the change in the relations of the government and the House.
He and his party had conducted the business of the country though in a
minority, just as Lord John Russell between 1846 and 1851 had conducted
business for five or six years, though in a minority, “but being morally
supported by a majority, as we have been supported by a majority.” In this
crisis he pursued a peculiar course. He advised the Queen to dissolve the
parliament; but at the same time he told her Majesty that if she thought
the interests of the country would be better served, he tendered his
resignation. The Queen did not accept it, he said; and the ministerial
decision was to dissolve in the autumn when the new constituencies would
be in order. The statement was not clear, and Mr. Gladstone sought in vain
to discover with precision whether the prime minister had begun by
resigning, or had presented two alternatives leaving the decision to the
Queen, and did he mean a dissolution on existing registers? The answer to
these questions was not definite, but it did not matter.
This episode did not check Mr. Gladstone for a moment in his course; in a
week after the resolutions were carried, he introduced a bill suspending
the creation of new interests in the Irish church. This proof of vigour
and resolution rapidly carried the suspensory bill through the Commons.
The Lords threw it out by a majority of 95 (June 29). If we sometimes
smile at the sanguine prediction of the optimist, the gloom of his
pessimist opponent is more ludicrous. “If you overthrow the Irish
established church,” cried the Archbishop of Dublin, “you will put to the
Irish protestants the choice between apostasy and expatriation, and every
man among them who has money or position, when he sees his church go will
leave the country. If you do that, you will find Ireland so difficult to
manage that you will have to depend on the gibbet and the sword.” The
Bishop of Chester and Bishop Thirlwall, whom Mr. Gladstone described as
“one of the most masculine, powerful, and luminous intellects that have
for generations been known among the bishops of England,” were
deliberately absent from the division. The effect of the bill was not
impaired, perhaps it was even heightened; for it convinced the public that
its author meant earnest and vigorous business, and the air was instantly
alive with the thrill of battle. For it is undoubted that if the country
cares for a thing, the resistance to it of the hereditary House seems to
add spice and an element of sport.