LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL
In 1880 Lord Randolph Churchill was regarded as a trifler; in 1885 he
was definitely numbered among the three or four men who counted in
British politics; in 1890 he was, politically speaking, a ghost; and in
1895 he died. His whole political career—or at least that part of it
which could distinguish him from the ordinary representative of a family
borough—scarcely extended to fifteen years; the significant part of it
was compressed within five. Yet those five years sufficed to give him an
ascendancy in the Tory Party far more marked than that which Disraeli had
established after decades of laborious application. The moment before his
fall it seemed certain that he, and no other, would shape Tory policy;
that he would, sooner or later, oust the Cecils; that he would get rid of
the Birmingham influence; and that, within some quite measurable period,
he would, with undisputed authority, reign over a Cabinet of young Tories
committed to the task of making actual part at least of the Young England
dream of the great Jew who, with his usual generous appreciation of
youthful talent, had marked Lord Randolph early as one who must, with any
reasonable prudence and industry, play a great part in affairs.
[Illustration: LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL.]
The fall came, and within a few weeks Lord Randolph was in the position
of the unfortunate deer “much marked of the melancholy Jacques.” He was
bankrupt, and shunned by every “fat and greasy citizen” on the look out
for rich pasturage. The men who had trembled before him had begun to
wonder why they could have been so foolishly submissive. Lord Salisbury
congratulated himself on having got rid of a troublesome “carbuncle,” and
inwardly resolved not to run a second risk. Mr. Balfour, who could not
forget the comradeship of the Fourth Party days, was like a good-natured
man who sees an old schoolfellow carrying a sandwich-board in the Strand;
unable to give any real help, he was only too glad to bestow some of
the small change of courtesy, especially when no one in particular was
looking. The ordinary crowd of place-holders and place-seekers passed
by on the other side. In the inner councils of the party there reigned
for a moment a queer kind of glee. It was like the breakfast after a
very disturbed night in a country house. The memory of the fire, or
the burglars, or the Zeppelins, or the ghost which made Lady Polly
scream so dreadfully (and which turned out to be only the under-footman
somnambulating in his pyjamas) gives a peculiar zest to the devilled
kidneys and the grilled sole, and the best appetites belong to those who
were most alarmed. Now, Lord Randolph Churchill was, to the ordinary
Conservative, not one but all of these terrors. He was a fire which had
actually burned many dry sticks, and threatened many more. He had broken
into the Cabinet with a most ingeniously contrived set of house-breaking
implements. He was much in the air, and nobody knew when he was going
to drop things of explosive quality. And he was, in a certain political
sense, a sham ghost and a real under-footman. That “Tory Democracy,”
as old as Bolingbroke and perhaps older, was never much more than a
wraith, and nobody really knew how much substance there was behind the
cunning magnesium glares with which Lord Randolph sought to hypnotise the
masses. But everybody did know that, with all his vigour and ability
and success, there was something, so to speak, unestablished about him.
He was the master of his masters, as a servant may become in certain
circumstances rare in real life but common in fiction; and he used his
power while it remained with him without stint or scruple. But he never
quite consolidated that power; he remained always like the schemer in
the novel, apparently omnipotent but really always fearful of a reverse,
and compelled to go on more and more boldly because to stay still is the
most dangerous thing of all. The first false step was irretrievable,
because there was, after all, nothing to retrieve. Lord Randolph was
not a political investor. He was a margin gambler, constantly putting
his winnings to a new hazard. The game is an exciting one, and while he
continues to win much is heard in praise of the punter’s genius. But one
break will ruin him.
In _Vivian Grey_ Disraeli had prophetically drawn the main lines of the
character and method of his admirer and imitator. Vivian, like Lord
Randolph, went in for politics for the excitement of the thing, and,
also like Lord Randolph, proceeded on the assumption that every man who
seems dull is a dolt. We all know how Vivian fooled and bent to his
purpose the stupid Marquess of Carabas. But when the house of cards went
to pieces it was the clever Vivian who looked chiefly the fool. The
Marquess could go back to his park, his coverts, his stables, and his
cellar; the other hardly knew where to hide. Lord Randolph’s case was
not dissimilar. He used and abused men in many ways more important than
himself, but up to a point he showed great dexterity; his victims were
generally those whom other great people were not unwilling to wound,
though delicate of striking. At last he tried his strength against
equals, or perhaps superiors; he failed, and all dullness extant revelled
in its revenge. It is often stated that his one mistake was that he
“forgot Goschen.” It would be truer to say that he forgot the prudence
which had so far underlain his apparent recklessness. We can hardly
believe that a man of Lord Randolph’s intelligence seriously thought
there would be any difficulty in providing a stop-gap Chancellor of
the Exchequer. Goschen did as well as another, but practically anybody
would do. A turn of history seldom depends on the Goschens, whether in
units, or tens, or hundreds. The decided and important turn that came
late in 1886 was due to quite another personality. It had become a
question between the survival of the Cecils and the Cecil idea and the
survival of Lord Randolph and Tory Democracy. Lord Randolph had sneered
at Mr. Gladstone as “an old man in a hurry.” He himself was still a
young man, by all recent political standards a very young man. He was
only in his late thirties. But he was in an even greater hurry than Mr.
Gladstone in his middle seventies. It is said that after the defeat of
the Salisbury Government in 1885 a friend asked him the course of events.
“I shall lead the Opposition for five years,” he replied. “Then I shall
be Prime Minister for five years. Then I shall die.” Only one-third of
this prediction was fulfilled, but that was fulfilled to the letter, or
rather the figure; the estimate of his span of life was almost exact.
This sense, which oppressed him from an early age, that he had not long
to live, was doubtless the explanation of much. He could not wait; unless
the things he wanted came quickly they were useless. Hence, probably,
his break with the Cecils on a detail of finance. It was a matter in
itself capable of easy accommodation. But the real reasons for the
rupture were real indeed. A very little experience in office had shown
Lord Randolph that, while the substantial men of Conservatism had been
tolerant of, if not actually enraptured with, “Tory Democracy” as a bait
for the voter, the last thing they intended to suffer was Tory Democracy
in terms of legislation. His great Budget at first affected the solid
Tories of the Cabinet much as the glare of the boa-constrictor does the
rabbit. They listened in helpless and fascinated silence to the grandiose
plan, involving much of that “spoliation” so often denounced since in
“revolutionary” Chancellors of the Exchequer, and for a moment it seemed
as if the audacious young Minister had won by the sheer momentum of his
attack. But this dazed half-acquiescence did not long endure. Was it for
this, the country gentlemen asked, that they had beaten the Radicals?
And they shudderingly recalled the recent Dartford speech, in which Lord
Randolph had outlined a programme of reform which _The Times_ described
as “recalling the palmy days of Mr. Gladstone.” So the Dartford programme
was conscientiously emasculated. “I see it crumbling into pieces every
day,” wrote Lord Randolph to Lord Salisbury in November, 1886. “I am
afraid it is an idle schoolboy’s dream to suppose that Tories can
legislate, as I did stupidly. They can govern and make war and increase
taxation and expenditure _à merveille_, but legislation is not their
province in a democratic constitution.”
The great question, of course, was how Lord Salisbury would act. He
was not, on some points, a quite typical Conservative, though his main
object, like that later of Mr. Balfour, was to avoid change as much as
possible. He had been heartily with Lord Randolph in Opposition. He
had approved the Churchillian programme. He was not insensible to the
fact that many of the younger elements in the Conservative Party were
sympathetic to it. But temperamentally Lord Salisbury was averse to the
whole scheme of Tory Democracy, except perhaps as a piece of protective
make-believe. If the “classes and dependents of class” could be persuaded
to accept something that would cover Lord Randolph’s election pledges,
well and good. But if it were a choice between the support of those
classes on the one hand and on the other “trusting to public meetings
and the democratic forces generally to carry you through,” then his
verdict was for “work at less speed and at a lower temperature than our
opponents.” When the Prime Minister had arrived at this decision there
were only two courses open to Lord Randolph. In fact, there was really
only one. For it was not possible for him, as for so many men, to accept
the rebuff with feigned cheerfulness, to eat his own words, to defend a
policy not his own, and adroitly explain away the absence of a policy
that was his. His audacity (so far brilliantly successful), his hot
temper, his proud and intractable spirit, and perhaps, above all, his
slight expectation of long life, forbade his waiting with the patience
of Disraeli for the chances time might bring. It is not surprising that
he decided to leave the Cabinet with the notion of being recalled on
his own terms; the astonishing thing is that a man of so strong a sense
of tactics should on this occasion have played so completely into the
hands of his opponents. The man of strategy placed himself in a position
to receive every kind of fire without the possibility of effective
return. The man of drama contrived to reserve for Christmastime, when no
political explosion can vie in interest with the domestic cracker, the
announcement of his resignation. If he had pondered deeply on the means
of sinking himself deeper than e’er plummet sounded, he could hardly have
chosen, in gross and in detail, a better method. Not Goschen, but his own
rashness, made his fall like Lucifer’s.
The truth, no doubt, was that he seriously miscalculated the strength
of his position. He made the clever man’s mistake of under-rating dull
men, forgetting the patience of their malice and the perfection of their
hypocrisy. There were people with great names and claims, but little
brains, who had cried “Hosannah!” as loudly as any in public, but never
ceased to mutter “Crucify him” in the Carlton Club arm-chairs. He had
invaded all kinds of prescriptive rights, had smothered all sorts of
peddling ambitions, had trodden heavily on the tail of Tadpole and pulled
unceremoniously the nose of Taper. Success like his was bound in any case
to create an imposing array of enemies; he rather unnecessarily assisted
in their manufacture. With intimates, indeed, and those who came into
close official relation with him, he could be charming; his manner ranged
from the airiest and easiest familiarity to an old-fashioned courtesy
rather strangely in contrast with his boyish face and dandyish figure.
But he rarely troubled whether a chance word hurt unimportant people,
and the great misery of politics is that nobody can safely be classed as
unimportant. “Why will you insist on being an Ishmael—your hand against
every man?” asked Mr. Chamberlain (first enemy, then friend, then enemy
again) when, not content with his other troubles, Churchill went out of
his way to attack a warm friend and well-wisher. There was a good deal of
the Ishmaelite in Lord Randolph; his nerves seemed to demand the stimulus
of combat, and in the absence of war he was given to the duel. But other
men have triumphed over equal difficulties, and more is needed to explain
the sudden and final failure of Lord Randolph. That the showy edifice
he had erected disappeared almost as suddenly as the palace of Aladdin
was due as much to the character of the material as to that of the
architect. He had used the actual bricks of nineteenth-century Toryism,
but the mortar he employed was no more binding than snow or butter.
Something very like genius enabled him to make his house look strong and
habitable—so long as it was uninhabited. But with the very day of the
housewarming the mischief began.
The career of Lord Randolph, in short, was founded on a hatred and an
illusion. The hatred was for the middle class. The illusion was that
the Conservative Party was still the party of aristocracy, that the
old quarrel between the landowner on the one side and the banker, the
manufacturer and the tradesman on the other, yet persisted. He failed,
not because he was before, but because he was behind his time. His
dislike of the middle class was seldom hidden. Nearly every contemptuous
figure he invented was suggested either by trade or by the vanities
of rich tradesmen. Mr. Chamberlain, because he had made money and not
inherited it, was attacked for “bandying vulgar compliments” with
the young Earl of Durham. Mr. Gladstone was sneered at for living
in a “castle,” not because he was a Liberal, but because he was of
middle-class origin. A public man of old descent might have amused
himself in chopping down one of his ancestral oaks without scornful
comment from Lord Randolph. But it was intolerable, in the circumstances,
that the forest should “lament, in order that Mr. Gladstone may
perspire.” “Marshall and Snelgrove of debate,” “lords of suburban villas,
owners of vineries and pineries”—a score of such expressions of contempt
for the successful middle-class man could be culled at random from
Churchill’s speeches, and they account for much of the orator’s success
with working-class audiences. But though, in the revulsion against
the views fashionable a little earlier, he could command much popular
applause, though he could inflict great damage on the Liberal claim to
represent the masses, he could, no more than Disraeli, translate his
own dream of “Tory Democracy” into reality. For the Tory Party was now
itself very largely middle class and only very slightly democratic. It
regarded Lord Randolph’s creed much as Lord Palmerston did the Christian
religion—excellent in its own place, but it must not intrude in practical
affairs. The party might have forgiven him if quite convinced of his
insincerity. It destroyed him on the first suspicion that he might
actually be in downright earnest.
It would have been better for Lord Randolph’s fame had Fate struck once
and struck no more. For him was reserved a crueller destiny. The Eighties
saw his brief splendours. The Nineties witnessed only the culmination of
his slow and mournful decline. He himself seems hardly to have been aware
of the ravages which disease and disappointment had wrought on his fine
intellect, and the latter scenes were scarcely less painful to his more
generous antagonists than to the few friends who still refused to believe
that he was an exhausted man and a spent political force. Nobody is more
quickly forgotten than a living politician who has ceased to count, and
when the end came it was with an almost ridiculous sense of remoteness
that the average member of the public read the inevitable homilies on
Lord Randolph’s strange and sad career. He had written his name in water
and builded his house on the sands.