DISAPPOINTED HOPES
1
It is probably as annoying to an expectant Minister to be offered
what he regards as an inferior post as to be entirely ignored. Sir
Robert Peel, in December 1834, offered Lord Ashley (subsequently the
Earl of Shaftesbury) a seat on the Board of Admiralty, which Lord
Ashley, thinking it altogether beneath him, promptly refused. “Had
I not,” he writes in his _Diary_, “by God’s grace and the study of
religion subdued the passion of my youth, I should now have been
heart-broken. Canning, eight years ago, offered me, as a neophyte,
a seat at one of the Boards, the first step in a young statesman’s
life. If I am not now worthy of more, it is surely better to cease
to be a candidate for public honours. Yet Peel’s letter, so full
of flummery, would lead anyone to believe that I was a host of
excellency. The thing is a contradiction.” Nevertheless, it is
interesting to note that he accepted the post subsequently. He
satisfied himself that it was of more importance than he at first
supposed.
No politician had such curious adventures as an aspirant to office,
and certainly no one has confessed so freely the bitterness of
his disappointments, as Shaftesbury, whose name is so honourably
associated with legislation for the protection of women and children
employed in factories. In 1839 Peel was again engaged in making a
Government. Queen Victoria had hardly been two years on the Throne,
and was only twenty years of age. Peel invited Lord Ashley to accept
a post in the Royal Household, urging that he desired to have around
“this young woman, on whose moral and religious character depends
the welfare of millions of human beings,” persons whose conversation
would tend to her moral improvement. Lord Ashley acknowledges that he
was “thunderstruck” when he received Peel’s letter, as he expected a
far higher position than what he describes as “a mere Court puppet.”
But in his reply he said, somewhat sarcastically, that if Peel
desired it, he was willing to take “the office of chief scullion to
the Court.” However, this Administration was not constituted. It
was wrecked on what is known as “the Bedchamber question.” As one
of the ladies of the Bedchamber, the Mistress of the Robes, who was
most closely in attendance upon Queen Victoria, was related to some
of the outgoing Whig Ministers, by whom she had been appointed—the
office being at the time political, and its occupant bound to go out
on a change of Government—Peel insisted upon her resignation. The
Queen refused to consent to such a course, as one repugnant to her
feelings, and Peel, thereupon refusing to form an Administration, the
Melbourne Ministry were recalled to office. Two years later Peel was
engaged once more in making a Government—this time Queen Victoria
raised no objection to the Mistress of the Robes being changed—and
again he offered Lord Ashley a place in the Royal Household, as a
man who was deeply religious and moral. Lord Ashley now believed
that Peel simply wanted to muzzle him, the leader of the growing
humanitarian movement for the State regulation of factories. He
refused the office. “I told Peel,” he wrote, “the case was altered;
the Court was no longer the same; the Queen was two years older, had
a child, and a husband to take care of her.” So he declined to devote
himself to ordering dinners and carrying a white wand. He discovered
subsequently, to his deep mortification, that Peel had already
offered the post of Vice-Chamberlain of the Household to Lord ——
(“the hero of Madame Grisi,” as Ashley describes him); and that Lord
—— exclaimed: “Thank God, my character is too bad for a Household
place!” Lord Ashley argued that “morality, therefore, was not the
reason for putting me at Court.”
2
On January 27, 1855, the Coalition Government of Lord Aberdeen
and Lord John Russell resigned, being defeated on a vote of
censure charging them with mismanagement of the Crimean War. Lord
Palmerston received the commands of Queen Victoria to form an
Administration. He, too, desired to have a Ministry of both Liberals
and Conservatives. On February 7th he wrote to Ashley—now the Earl
of Shaftesbury and a Conservative—offering him the Chancellorship
of the Duchy of Lancaster with a seat in the Cabinet. That was in
the morning. In the afternoon Shaftesbury received a brief note from
Palmerston requesting him to “consider the offer as suspended,”
in consequence of unforeseen difficulties, which, it subsequently
transpired, were the claims of the Liberals for a greater share
of place and power in the new Government. This explanation came
to Shaftesbury from Lady Palmerston. “Palmerston is distracted
with all the worry he has to go through,” she wrote. In a P.S. she
added: “It is no pleasure to form a Government when there are so
many unreasonable people to please, and so many interested people
pressing for their own gratification and vanity, without any regard
to the public good or the interests of the Government and country.”
Shaftesbury thus poured out his virtuously indignant soul on the
subject to his son: “The selfishness, the meanness, the love of place
and salary, the oblivion of the country, of man’s welfare and God’s
honour, have never been more striking and terrible than in this
crisis. These, added to the singular conceit of all the candidates
for office (and all have aspired to the highest), have thrown
stumbling-blocks in Palmerston’s path at every step. The greediness
and vanity of our place-hunters have combined to make each one of
them a union of the vulture and the peacock.”
Shaftesbury declares that he had then no desire for place; and it
is impossible to doubt the genuineness of the thanksgiving on his
“escape from office” in which he indulges. A month later some of
the Members of the Administration resigned, and Palmerston again
offered Shaftesbury the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster.
But Shaftesbury was still reluctant. “I could not satisfy myself,”
he says, “that to accept office was a Divine call. I was satisfied
that God had called me to labour among the poor.” However, one
morning he received this note from Lady Palmerston: “Palmerston is
very anxious now that you should put on your undress uniform and be
at the Palace a quarter before three to be sworn in. Pray do this,
and I am sure you will not repent it.” Shaftesbury gave way to these
pleading entreaties. The result was certainly curious. “I went and
dressed,” he writes in his _Diary_, “and then, while I was waiting
for the carriage, I went down on my knees and prayed for counsel,
wisdom and understanding. Then there was someone at the door, as
I thought to say that the carriage was ready. But instead of that
a note, hurriedly written in pencil, was put into my hand. It was
from Palmerston—‘Don’t go to the Palace.’” Many would have groaned
in the anguish of their souls over this crowning disappointment.
Shaftesbury declares he danced with joy. “It was to my mind,” he
says, “as distinctly an act of special Providence as when the hand
of Abraham was stayed and Isaac escaped.” Palmerston’s sudden change
of mind is no doubt accounted for in a passage which I find in the
_Autobiography_ of the eighth Duke of Argyll, who was a member of
Palmerston’s Cabinet. He states that one day Palmerston astonished
all his colleagues by proposing that Lord Shaftesbury should be
one of their number. “I was far too fond of Shaftesbury, and had
much too great a respect for him to say one word in opposition,”
Argyll writes; “but I saw that it rather took away the breath from
a good many of my colleagues. His fervid nature, his uncompromising
temperament, and his somewhat individual opinions were evidently not
considered as promising well for united councils. My opinion, which,
however, I kept to myself, was that he was a far more valuable man
out of office than in it.” Argyll adds: “Palmerston evidently saw
that the proposal was not very well received, and we heard nothing
more of it.”
3
In July 1886 Henry Cecil Raikes, a distinguished Conservative
M.P., awaited, with hope and misgiving alternating in his breast,
a letter from Lord Salisbury—then engaged in forming his first
Unionist Administration—inviting him to join the Cabinet. As the
list of Ministerial appointments announced in the Press grew towards
completion, and nothing was heard from the Prime Minister, the fear
grew upon him that he was about to be shelved. But he had staunch
friends at the Carlton Club, and they took the unusual course of
addressing a “round-robin” to Salisbury, earnestly requesting him not
to forget “the long and arduous services to the Party” of Henry Cecil
Raikes. A day or two later Raikes received the following letter from
the Prime Minister:
20 ARLINGTON STREET, S.W.,
_July 28, 1886_.
MY DEAR RAIKES,
Are you disposed to join us as Postmaster-General? I am very
anxious to meet your views. I wish I was in a position to do so
more fully. But that is a species of regret which clogs me at every
step of the arduous task in which I am engaged. I shall be very
glad if we are able to persuade you to associate yourself with
us—for the present in this office.
Believe me, yours very truly,
SALISBURY.
Only the minor post of Postmaster-General, when he had expected the
Home Office, which carries a seat in the Cabinet! But to refuse an
offer of office because it does not come up to one’s expectations
often means the exclusion from office for ever. Raikes accordingly
decided to take the post of Postmaster-General. “He fully recognized
the difficulties of his chief’s position,” writes his son and
biographer, “and, of course, was not blind to the fact that if he
were to refuse this office he would probably be throwing away the
substance for the shadow, and would cut himself off from any but a
remote chance of future advancement.” It is not every politician who
has had an offer of an office which was less than he expected that
can follow the example of Henry Brougham, who contemptuously tore
up the letter of Earl Grey offering him the post of Attorney-General
in the first Reform Administration. Brougham wanted the Lord
Chancellorship, and would not be put off with anything else; and
though Grey was reluctant to trust Brougham in so exalted a post,
Brougham had his way, for he was in the strong position of being
indispensable to the new Government, not only in his own estimation,
which did not so much matter, but also in the estimation of many
leading Whigs, which did. But Raikes knew that he could be done
without, and, sensible man, he accepted what was offered. Naturally
he was mortified that the Secretaryship of State for the Home
Department was carried off by an entirely outside and unsuspected
rival, Henry Matthews (afterwards Lord Llandaff), who was discovered
in the Law Courts as a powerful advocate and pleader by Lord Randolph
Churchill.
4
Is there anything more poignant in the history of the making of
Governments than the entreaty addressed by Benjamin Disraeli to
Sir Robert Peel, in 1841, that he should not be forgotten in the
distribution of the offices in the Tory Administration which was then
being formed? Writing from Grosvenor Gate on September 5, 1841, and
addressing “Dear Sir Robert,” Disraeli said he should not dwell upon
his services to the Tory Party, though since 1834 he had fought four
contests, expended large sums of money, and exerted his intelligence
to the utmost for the propagation of Peel’s policy. He adds: “But
there is one peculiarity in my case on which I cannot be silent. I
have had to struggle against a storm of political hate and malice,
which few men ever experienced, from the moment—at the instigation
of a member of your Cabinet—I enrolled myself under your banner,
and I have only been sustained under these trials by the conviction
that the day would come when the foremost man of this country would
publicly testify that he had some respect for my ability and my
character.” Then, throwing all reserve aside, he ends his letter
with the following outburst of genuine feeling: “I confess to be
unrecognized at this moment by you appears to me to be overwhelming,
and I appeal to your own heart—to that justice and magnanimity which
I feel are your characteristics—to save me from an intolerable
humiliation.”
The same post brought the Prime Minister a most appealing letter
signed, “Mary Anne Disraeli,” addressed “Dear Sir Robert Peel,” and
marked “Confidential.” She begins: “I beg you not to be angry with
me for my intrusion, but I am overwhelmed with anxiety. My husband’s
political career is for ever crushed if you do not appreciate him.
Mr. Disraeli’s exertions are not unknown to you; but there is much he
has done that you cannot be aware of, though they have no other aim
but to do you honour, no wish for recompense, but your approbation.”
Her husband had made Peel’s opponents his personal enemies, she goes
on; he had stood four expensive elections since 1834. “Literature,”
she concludes, “he has abandoned for politics. Do not destroy all his
hopes, and make him feel his life has been a mistake.”
Peel’s reply was cold and formal. He disliked Disraeli, regarding
him as a political adventurer, and disliked him personally. “My
dear sir,” he addresses him, and, fastening on the statement that
Disraeli had joined the Tory Party at the instigation of a member
of Peel’s former Cabinet, he declares that no one had ever got from
him the slightest authority to make such a communication. Then Peel
gives a remarkable account of the difficulties which beset him in
constituting the new Government:
But, quite independently of this consideration, I should have been
very happy, had it been in my power, to avail myself of your offer
of service; and your letter is one of the many I receive which too
forcibly impress upon me how painful and invidious is the duty
which I have been compelled to undertake. I am only supported in it
by the consciousness that my desire has been to do justice.
I trust, also, that when candidates for parliamentary office calmly
reflect on my position, and the appointments I have made—when they
review the names of those previously connected with me in public
life whom I have been absolutely compelled to exclude, the claims
founded on acceptance in 1834 with the almost hopeless prospects
of that day, the claims, too, founded on new Party combinations—I
trust they will then understand how perfectly insufficient are
the means at my disposal to meet the wishes that are conveyed to
me by men whose co-operation I should be proud to have and whose
qualifications and pretensions for office I do not contest.
Disraeli, writing from Grosvenor Gate, September 8, 1841, hastens to
explain that he never intended to even suggest, much less to say,
that a promise of official promotion had ever been made to him at
any time by any member of Peel’s Cabinet. “Parliamentary office,” he
says, “should be the recognition of Party services and parliamentary
ability, and as such only was it to me an object of ambition.” He
ends with a dignified touch of pathos: “If such a pledge had been
given me by yourself, and not redeemed, I should have taken refuge in
silence. Not to be appreciated may be mortification; to be baulked
of a promised reward is only a vulgar accident of life, to be borne
without a murmur.”
Five years passed, and in the debate on the third reading of the
Bill for the repeal of the Corn Duties, Disraeli, from the back
Ministerial benches, made a scathing attack upon Peel and what he
called his betrayal of the Tory Party in bringing in such a Bill to
establish Free Trade. The Prime Minister, in reply, disclosed to the
country the curious incidents of 1841. “It is still more surprising,”
said he, “that if such were the hon. gentleman’s views of my
character he should have been ready, as I think he was, to unite his
fortunes with mine in office, thereby implying the strongest proof
which a public man can give of confidence in the honour and integrity
of a Minister of the Crown.” Disraeli rose at once to make a personal
explanation. He denied that his opposition to the Free Trade policy
of the Prime Minister was inspired by his disappointment of office.
He was not an applicant for office in 1841. “I never shall—it is
totally foreign to my nature—make an application for any place,” he
cried. “Whatever occurred in 1841 between the right hon. gentleman
and myself,” said he, “was entirely attributable to the intervention
of another gentleman, whom I supposed to be in the confidence of
the right hon. baronet, and I daresay it may have arisen from a
misconception.” The correspondence which I have quoted was not
published until long afterwards. The abrupt ending of the incident
in the House of Commons is strange in the light thrown upon it by
the correspondence. According to the report in _Hansard_, Peel made
no reply to Disraeli. Peel held the correspondence in his hands, and
resisted the temptation to read it and crush Disraeli, because he was
advised by one of his colleagues that the disclosure of a private
application for office would be contrary to the high and honourable
traditions of statesmanship.
5
Gladstone agreed with Peel that it was not advisable to put a man
into the Cabinet without a previous official training. It was also
Gladstone’s custom, once he had invited a man to office, to hold on
to him to the last possible moment. “The next most serious thing to
admitting a man into the Cabinet,” said he, mentioning one of the
principles which guided him in the making of a Government, “is to
leave a man out who has once been in.” Still, there were occasions
when he was compelled to pass over an old comrade-in-arms on the
ground of age. He was himself seventy-one years of age when, in 1880,
he was called upon to form his second Government. To one old member
of his former Administration he wrote: “I do not feel able to ask
you to resume the toils of office.” He admitted that he himself was
“the oldest man of his political generation,” and that, therefore,
he should be a solecism in the Government which he was engaged in
constructing. “I have been brought,” he added, “by the seeming force
of exceptional circumstances to undertake a task requiring less of
years and more of vigour than my accumulating store of the one and
waning residue of the other.” Here we have the answer to the question
of age and office. The exclusion of a veteran politician from office
is not a matter of the number of years he has counted. Is he an
extinct political volcano as well as an old man? May he safely be
set aside? On the answer which the Prime Minister gives to these
questions in his own mind depends the fate of the office-seeker of
advanced years. Gladstone was eighty-four in 1893, but he was still
inevitable as Prime Minister. If the strong young man of achievement,
and still greater promise, cannot be ignored, neither can the old
man, who, having built up a commanding reputation, takes care that it
is duly and fittingly recognized.
It is a singular thing that, among the twelve hundred men or so who
constitute the two Houses of Parliament, there has never been any
reluctance to take office. Probably the only instance of a public
man who had a positive repugnance of office was Lord Althorp, the
Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons in the
Grey and Melbourne Administrations from November 1830 to December
1834. Office destroyed all his happiness, he declared, and so
affected his mind that he had to remove his pistols from his bedroom
lest he should be tempted to shoot himself. He remained in office
because he felt that one in his rank and position—born, as it were,
to the purple, a member of one of the great territorial families,
who boast of long lines of ancestors in the public service—could no
more set aside the responsibility of office than the earldom and
broad acres of which he was also the heir. The one consolation he
derived from the death of his brother, Earl Spencer, was that his own
accession to the House of Lords compelled him to lay down the burden
of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Sir George Cornewall Lewis seems to
have been animated by somewhat the same uncommonly high sense of
duty. When Palmerston, in the forming of his Administration in 1855,
offered him the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer which Gladstone
had vacated, he says he entertained the strongest disinclination
to accept the office. “I felt, however,” he writes, “that in the
peculiar position of the Government”—they were in difficulties over
the Crimean War—“refusal was scarcely honourable, and would be
attributable to cowardice, and I therefore, most reluctantly, made up
my mind to accept it.”
But these cases of objection to office on the part of public men,
however wealthy or however old, are exceedingly rare. The hunt for
posts when a new Government is being formed after a dissolution
is eager and untiring. The old men, who will not admit that
their weight of years unfits them for the cares of office, haunt
the political clubs and Downing Street, so as to keep themselves
conspicuous in the eyes of the new Prime Minister. But they cannot
all get “jobs,” to use a word commonly employed while a Government
is being made. Some of them must be sacrificed; there are so many
able and pushful young men to be provided for. The same cry is
heard in politics as in other walks of life: “Why should these old
fellows lag superfluous on the stage?” But “the old gang”—as they are
called by the young—will not retire from public life voluntarily and
gracefully. It is not alone that they instinctively revolt against
the assumption that their capacity for work is at an end, but they
also dislike change of habits and pursuits, and, above all, they
desire for a little longer to play a leading part on the prominent
stage of Parliament. Public life, therefore, retires from them. It is
only the few who have made a great reputation and acquired a great
authority that cannot lightly be set aside. For most politicians, no
matter how fine their services in the past, a time comes when they
are designated “old fogeys,” and, while still anxious to be once more
Ministers of the Crown, they experience the humiliation, as they look
upon it, of being shunted for ever. It is idle to talk of acquiescing
patiently in the inevitable. Political history affords many a sad
instance of such a fate being regarded as one of the sorest of the
injustices of life.
The young and pushful have their disappointments and vexations also.
Disraeli—according to Buckle, his biographer—having completed his
Administration in 1874, wrote to a lady friend: “I have contrived in
the minor and working places to include every representative man,
that is to say, everyone who might be troublesome—all those sort
of men who would have made a Tory cave.” He adds: “There are some
terrible disappointments, but I have written soothing letters, which,
on the whole, have not been without success.” But not altogether.
For in another letter, written in 1876, Disraeli says that at a
dinner party he met Lord Randolph Churchill—“he glaring like one
possessed of a devil, and quite uncivil when I addressed him rather
cordially.” “Why?” he asks, and answering, he says it was perhaps
that “I gave the lordship of the Treasury to Crichton instead of
himself.”
The making of a Government may be completed in a week if all goes
well. Should there be difficulties in reconciling the claims of
influential rivals for particular offices, it may extend over a
fortnight. And what does it all signify to the people or nation?
Charles Dickens was disposed to take an ironic view of the matter,
if we judge from some passages in _Bleak House_. “The limited choice
of the Crown,” he writes, “in the formation of a new Ministry would
lie between Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle, supposing it to be
impossible for the Duke of Foodle to act with Goodle, which may be
assumed to be the case, in consequence of the breach arising out
of that affair with Hoodle. Then, giving the Home Department and
the Leadership of the House of Commons to Joodle, the Exchequer to
Koodle, the Colonies to Loodle, and the Foreign Office to Moodle,
what are you to do with Noodle? You can’t offer the Presidency of the
Council. That is reserved for Poodle. You can’t put him in the Woods
and Forests. That is hardly good enough for Quoodle. What follows?
That the country is shipwrecked, lost, and gone to pieces because you
can’t provide for Noodle!” That, however, does not quite settle the
matter. May it not be said, rather—Happy country which has so many
able and honest men striving for the opportunity of toiling in its
service!