William Gladstone: New Studies and Perspectives [1 ed.] 1409420469, 9781409420460

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William Gladstone

This volume is dedicated to Professor M.R.D.Foot, Pioneer of modern Gladstone Studies

William Gladstone New Studies and Perspectives

Edited by ROLAND QUINAULT University of London, UK ROGER SWIFT University of Chester, UK RUTH CLAYTON WINDSCHEFFEL The Open University, UK

© Roland Quinault, Roger Swift and Ruth Clayton Windscheffel 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Roland Quinault, Roger Swift and Ruth Clayton Windscheffel have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data William Gladstone : new studies and perspectives. 1. Gladstone, W. E. (William Ewart), 1809-1898. 2. Prime ministers–Great Britain–Biography. 3. Great Britain– Politics and government–1837-1901. I. Quinault, Roland E. II. Swift, Roger. III. Windscheffel, Ruth Clayton, 1973941'.081'092-dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data William Gladstone : new studies and perspectives / edited by Roland Quinault, Roger Swift, and Ruth Clayton Windscheffel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-2046-0 (hardcover) 1. Gladstone, W. E. (William Ewart), 1809-1898. 2. Prime ministers–Great Britain–Biography. 3. Great Britain–Politics and government–1837-1901. I. Quinault, Roland E. II. Swift, Roger. III. Windscheffel, Ruth Clayton, 1973DA563.4.W55 2012 941.081092–dc23 ISBN 9781409420460 (hbk) ISBN 9781409449348 (ebk) V

2012001652

Contents List of Figures and Table   List of Contributors   Foreword by David Bebbington Introduction   Ruth Clayton Windscheffel

vii ix xv 1

Part i REPUTATIONS 1

Gladstone: A Political Not a Cultural Radical   Frank M. Turner

15

2

Gladstone and Peel’s Mantle   Richard A. Gaunt

31

3

Gladstone and Labour   Chris Wrigley

51

PART II IMAGES 4

Gladstone’s Visage: Problem and Performance   Joseph S. Meisel

73

5

Material Gladstones   Mark Nixon

99

PART III  PERSONAL QUESTIONS 6

Gladstone as Friend   Denis Paz

129

William Gladstone

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7

Gladstone as Woodsman   Peter Sewter

155

8

The Health of a Prime Minister: Gladstone, 1868–85   Jenny West

177

PART IV  GLADSTONE AS AN OFFICIAL 9

Gladstone, Finance and the Problems of Ireland, 1853–66   Allen Warren

199

10

Gladstone and the Ionian Islands   C. Brad Faught

219

PART V  ETHICS AND INTERNATIONALISM 11

Gladstone and War   Roland Quinault

235

12

Gladstone and the Suppression of the Slave Trade   Richard Huzzey

253

13

Gladstone’s ‘Greater World’: Free Trade, Empire and Liberal Internationalism   Deryck M. Schreuder



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Part VI  EPILOGUE 14 Gladstone’s Legacy   Eugenio Biagini

293

A Selected Bibliography   Index  

313 341

List of Figures and Table Figures 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11

Image of Gladstone, Eveleen Myers, platinum prints, 1890   88 Image of Gladstone, Eveleen Myers, platinum prints, 1890   88 Image of Gladstone, Eveleen Myers, platinum prints, 1890   89 Image of Gladstone, Eveleen Myers, platinum prints, 1890   89 Images of Gladstone, Eveleen Myers, platinum prints, 1890   90 Images of Gladstone, Eveleen Myers, platinum prints, 1890   90 Gladstone, Rupert Potter, albumen print, 1884   93 Gladstone, John Everett Millais, oil on canvas, 1885   93 Gladstone, Franz Seraph von Lenbach, oil on canvas, 1886   94 Harry Furniss, ‘Getting Gladstone’s Collar Up’, Punch, 8 April 1882  96 Gladstone, pen and ink sketch by Phil May, 1893   97

5.1

Portrait roundel above the front door of the Orton Liberal Club, Cumbria. Photograph by Bethan Benwell   Double-page spread from the Glasgow magazine Quiz, 12 September 1884, depicting scenes from the previous Saturday’s ‘Grand Reform Demonstration’ in that city. Composite image by Kevin Kerrigan   Reverse of medallion which on the obverse features a bust of Gladstone in profile facing left, with the words ‘William Ewart Gladstone’ and ‘Born 1809’. Private Collection   ‘Gladstone and the franchise for the two millions’ commemorative medallion, 1884 obverse. Except for these words, the medallion is identical to an 1865 Reform League medallion. Note the attached ribbon bar. Private Collection   Commemorative medallion, 1884 obverse. Private Collection   Commemorative medallion, 1884 reverse. Private Collection   Commemorative medallion, Glasgow, 1884 obverse. Private Collection   Commemorative medallion, Glasgow, 1884 reverse. Private Collection  

5.2

5.3a 5.3b

5.4a 5.4b 5.5a 5.5b

103

106 114

115 116 117 118 119

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5.6

Commemorative medallion, Dundee, 1884 reverse. Note the attached metal pin in a ribbon design, of a different colour and alloy to the medallion itself. Perth Museum and Art Gallery  

7.1 ‘Cabinet-Making’, Punch, 8 May 1880   7.2 ‘Oh, Woodman, Pare that Tree’, Comic News, 23 April 1864   7.3 ‘Tree-Felling by Machinery – Mr Gladstone watching a trial of the New Patent Steam Feller near Tulse Hill’, The Graphic, 16 February 1878   7.4 A Family Gathering at Hawarden, 1886  

120 156 159 163 174

Table 7.1

Graph to show the frequency of axe work by William Gladstone and his family  

158

List of Contributors David Bebbington is Professor of History at the University of Stirling, where he has taught since 1976. He was an undergraduate at Jesus College, Cambridge (1968–71), where he began his doctoral studies (1971–73) before becoming a research fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge (1973–76). He has served several times as Visiting Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, Texas. His many publications include William Ewart Gladstone: Faith and Politics in Victorian Britain (1993), Gladstone Centenary Essays (co-editor, 2000) and The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics (2004). His most recent publication is Victorian Nonconformity (2nd edn, 2011). Eugenio Biagini is Professor of Modern British History and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. His principal research interests are in the study of democracy, liberalism and republicanism in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain and Ireland. Dr Biagini’s numerous publications include Currents of Radicalism (editor, 1991), Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone (1992), Citizenship and Community: Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles, 1865–1931 (editor, 1996), Gladstone (2000) and British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1906 (2007). C. Brad Faught is Associate Professor of History and department chair at Tyndale University College in Toronto. A graduate of the Universities of Oxford and Toronto, he is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Senior Fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Oxford Movement: A Thematic History of the Tractarians and Their Times (2003), Gordon: Victorian Hero (2008), The New A–Z of Empire: A Concise Handbook of British Imperial History (2011) and Into Africa: The Imperial Life of Margery Perham (forthcoming). Richard A. Gaunt is Associate Professor in British History at the University of Nottingham and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. A specialist in late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century political history, his principal

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publications include Sir Robert Peel: The Life and Legacy (2010), Unrepentant Tory: Political Selections from the Diaries of the Fourth Duke of Newcastleunder-Lyne, 1827–38 (2006) and (co-editor, with Michael Partridge) Lives of Victorian Political Figures I: Palmerston, Disraeli and Gladstone (4 vols, 2006). From September 2012, Dr Gaunt will be co-editor of the journal, Parliamentary History. Richard Huzzey is Lecturer in British History at the University of Plymouth. He was an undergraduate at St Anne’s College, Oxford, prior to completing his doctoral research at St Catherine’s College, Oxford (where he was Light Senior Scholar), and a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University. His first book, on anti-slavery after British emancipation, will appear shortly. Joseph S. Meisel is Deputy Provost at Brown University. He was previously a programme officer for the humanities at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and has taught history at Columbia University, Teacher’s College and Baruch College of the City University of New York. His publications on the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain include the books Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone (2001), Knowledge and Power: The Parliamentary Representation of Universities in Britain and the Empire (2011) and (as co-author) Harry Furniss – ‘The Humours of Parliament’: A View of Late Victorian Political Culture (2011). Mark Nixon is an independent historian based in Scotland and a museum and gallery exhibition designer for Scottish Independent Touring Exhibitions (SITE), with particular curatorial expertise in nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular culture. He has been involved in several initiatives which seek to develop research networks which bring together museum and heritage professionals and historians working in universities. His specialist research interests focus on Victorian political culture and historiography and he is the author of Samuel Rawson Gardiner and the Idea of History (2011). Denis Paz is Professor of History at the University of North Texas. His research interests lie primarily in modern British cultural, religious and political history and his numerous publications include The Priesthoods and Apostasies of Pierce Connelly: A Study in Victorian Conversion and Anti-Catholicism (1986), Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (1992), Nineteenthcentury English Religious Traditions: Retrospect and Prospect (editor, 1995) and Dickens and Barnaby Rudge: Anti-Catholicism and Chartism (2006).

List of Contributors

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Roland Quinault is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. He was Honorary Secretary of the Royal Historical Society from 1990 until 1998, Reader in History at London Metropolitan University and, in 2010–11, the Fulbright-Robertson Visiting Professor in British History at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri. His primary research interests are in modern British history, with particular reference to the growth of democracy and the character of political leadership. Dr Quinault has co-edited five books and contributed numerous articles to historical journals. He has written on various aspects of Gladstone’s career and has regularly contributed to conferences on Gladstone over the last decade. His latest publication is British Prime Ministers and Democracy: From Disraeli to Blair (2011). Deryck M. Schreuder is Emeritus Professor of History and Education at the University of Sydney, where he was previously Challis Professor of History. A former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Western Sydney, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Western Australia and past-President of the Australian Historical Association and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, his principal research interests lie in modern British and international history, with a special interest in empires and colonies. His many publications include Gladstone and Kruger: Liberal Government and Colonial Home Rule, 1880–85 (1969), The Scramble for Southern Africa: the Politics of Partition Re-appraised (1981), Imperialisms: Exploration In European Expansion and Empire (1991), The Humanities and a Creative Nation: Jubilee Essays (1995) and, most recently, Australia’s Empire (Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, co-editor, 2008). Peter Sewter is former Deputy Headmaster of Kingsmead School, Hoylake. An independent scholar, he graduated in Classics at Exeter University and subsequently gained an MA in Applied Theology at the University of Liverpool and an MA (with Distinction) in Victorian Studies at the University of Chester, where he developed a specific research interest in Gladstone’s private life. Roger Swift is Emeritus Professor of Victorian Studies at the University of Chester, where he was formerly Director of the Graduate School. His research interests lie primarily in the social and political history of Britain and Ireland during the Victorian period and his publications include The Irish in the Victorian City (co-editor, 1985), The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939 (co-editor, 1989), Victorian Chester: Essays in Social History (1996), The Irish In Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension (co-editor, 1999), Gladstone Centenary Essays

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(co-editor, 2000), Irish Migrants in Britain, 1815–1914: A Documentary History (2002), Problems and Perspectives in Irish History since 1800 (co-editor, 2004) and Politics and Power in Victorian Ireland (co-editor, 2006). Frank M. Turner was the John Hay Whitney Professor of History and the Director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. His research interests lay primarily in British and European intellectual history and his many publications included Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (1974), The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (1981), Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (1993), John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (2002), Reflections on the Revolution in France: Edmund Burke (editor, 2003) and The Western Heritage (co-editor, 2006). Professor Turner tragically passed away during the making of this volume. Allen Warren is Reader in History at the University of York. His research interests focus on British and Irish political and social history during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has written on Gladstone, Disraeli and on AngloIrish relations, and also on the history of youth movements in Britain from 1870 onwards. He has contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, to many scholarly journals, including Parliamentary History, and is the author of A Church for the Nation?: Essays on the Future of Anglicanism (1992) and Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives (2000). Jenny West is Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, where she is undertaking research on the subject of Gladstone’s health. Her PhD was awarded by London University and she has worked at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Her interest in Gladstone’s personal life resulted in a Visiting Scholarship at St Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden in 2005 and papers at that Library’s annual Gladstone conference. Dr West’s publications include Gunpowder, Government & War in the mid-eighteenth century (1991), ‘Gladstone and Laura Thistlethwayte, 1865–75’, in Historical Research (2007) and contributions to N. Harte and R. Quinault (eds), Land and Society in Britain 1700–1914 (1995) and to Chris Miele, From William Morris: Building Conservation and the Arts & Crafts Cult of Authenticity (2005). Ruth Clayton Windscheffel is member of the Faculty of Arts at the Open University. She has held research fellowships in both history and theology at the University of Oxford and taught at the University of Strathclyde. Her research

List of Contributors

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interests lie in the modern history of Britain and its empire, with a particular emphasis on the political, religious and print cultures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has published extensively on the intellectual and cultural life of W.E. Gladstone and her first book, Reading Gladstone (2008), is an interdisciplinary study of Gladstone’s library, reading and intellectual celebrity. Dr Windscheffel is completing a monograph on late nineteenthcentury sectarian culture and their transnational networks. Chris Wrigley is Professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham. His numerous publications include David Lloyd George and the British Labour Movement (1976), Lloyd George and the Challenge of Labour (1990), Arthur Henderson (1990), Lloyd George (1992), British Trade Unions since 1933 (2002), Winston Churchill (2006), A.J.P. Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe (2006) and A Companion to Early Twentieth Century British History, 1900–1939 (editor, 2003). He was also President of the Historical Association, 1996–99.

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Foreword David Bebbington

When John Morley composed his classic life of Gladstone, published only five years after the statesman’s death, the biographer described his subject’s childhood and education, recounted Gladstone’s early career and first book and then paused. At that point Morley devoted a whole chapter, ‘Characteristics’, to summarising Gladstone’s personality and achievements. The quality that he singled out as most salient was adaptability. ‘We are dazzled’, Morley wrote, ‘by the endless versatility of his mind and interests as man of action, scholar, and controversial athlete’. Gladstone towered over his contemporaries, according to Morley, because he displayed the same quality ‘as legislator, administrator, leader of the people; as the strongest of his time in the main branches of executive force, strongest in persuasive force; supreme in the exacting details of national finance; master of the parliamentary arts’. Yet all these political skills were set in a broader context because Gladstone was ‘always living in the noble visions of the moral and spiritual idealist’.1 The diversity of the statesman’s attributes was what struck Morley most. The biographer contrived to bring home his message by the comparisons that he distributed liberally through his chapter. Gladstone is naturally measured by the yardstick of some of his contemporaries in public life: Cobden, Bright, Mill and Aberdeen. He is also set in the company of men of letters: Burke, Butler, Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle. But the net is cast wider. Wesley and Whitefield are introduced as religious leaders whose evangelistic power he might have emulated and Washington and Jefferson as great American statesmen whose political achievements bore similarities to Gladstone’s. The comparisons do not end there, for the ancient world is called into play. Gladstone is like Marcus Aurelius, the stoic emperor of Rome, and, in his oratory, can be mentioned in the same breath as Quintilian and Cicero. In an especially apt simile in view of Gladstone’s Homeric interests, the statesman is said to recall ‘a fiery hero of the Iliad’.2 More recent European history also yields its equivalents. Gladstone is like   J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 3 vols (London, 1903), vol. 1, p. 184.   Ibid., vol. 1, p. 187.

1 2

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Fénelon, the tutor of the dauphin at the court of Louis XIV and Archbishop of Cambrai from 1695, or a ‘grave and studious Benedictine’.3 He had the selective courage of the great Condé, the French general of the seventeenth century, and could be compared to Napoleon himself. ‘No Hohenzollern soldier held with sterner regularity to the duties of his post.’4 The overall effect of the barrage of similitude is to demonstrate exactly what Morley wished to convey: that Gladstone’s greatness was the product of his immense versatility. Historians, naturally preoccupied with the political evolution of Britain under Queen Victoria, have tended to concentrate on Gladstone’s part in the major developments of her reign – the shift to free trade, the enfranchisement of a wider section of the population, the attempts to placate the Irish and so on. They have often lost sight of the sheer variety of Gladstone’s roles in the life of the nation. Even at the conference held at the University of Chester in 1998 to mark the centenary of Gladstone’s death, the papers were overwhelmingly political in coverage. At that gathering, Colin Matthew predicted that in the future there would be more attention to the statesman’s cultural significance. Already there was a tool to hand to make that possible, the diaries that Michael Foot had begun to publish in 1968 and that Colin Matthew had brought to completion. In the pages of the diaries the versatility of Gladstone is very much in evidence. The engagements, the correspondence and the reading all bear witness to the many-sidedeness of the man. The importance of the diaries makes it highly appropriate that this volume of essays should be dedicated to their first editor, Michael Foot. The chapters in this volume, while paying due attention to the political life of Gladstone, attempt to place his public work in a wider setting. They come from a further conference held at Chester in 2009, this time to commemorate the bicentenary of the statesman’s birth. The themes of reputations, images, personal questions, officialdom and ethics and internationalism give an indication of the richness of the issues discussed here. The contributions engage with topics of continuing debate – the ways in which politicians are projected, the interplay between their private and public lives and their willingness to intervene abroad for humanitarian reasons. The chapters therefore reveal something of the enduring relevance of Gladstone for the twenty-first century. The study of so adaptable a man could not fail to have value for subsequent generations.

3 4

  Ibid., vol. 1, p. 187.   Ibid., vol. 1, p. 186.

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Acknowledgements This collection of chapters emanate in part from some of the lectures and papers delivered at the Gladstone Bicentenary International Conference held at the University of Chester in July 2009 to commemorate the bicentenary of the birth of William Ewart Gladstone. The conference represented a joint initiative between Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden, and the Centre for Victorian Studies at the University of Chester and, in particular, we wish to thank Sir William Gladstone, the great-grandson of the Prime Minister, the Very Reverend Dr Peter Francis, Warden and Chief Librarian of Gladstone’s Library and Dr Keith McClay, Head of History and Archaeology at the University of Chester, for their endorsement and support. We also gratefully acknowledge the support provided by the staff of the following repositories in the preparation of illustrations and in granting permission for their reproduction in this volume: (for Chapter 4) Bridgeman Art Library International, New York [Figure 4.9]; Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford [Figure 4.8]; National Portrait Gallery, London [Figures 4.1–4.7, 4.11]; University of Canterbury, New Zealand [Figure 4.10]; (Chapter 5) Calderdale Museum; City of Edinburgh Museum and Galleries; McManus Galleries and Museum, Dundee; Mitchell Library, Glasgow City Archives; National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; Newark and Sherwood Museum Service; North Lanarkshire Museums; Perth Museum and Art Gallery; Scottish Borders Council Museum; (Chapter 7) Flintshire Record Office [Figures 7.1– 7.4]. Our greatest debt, however, is to the contributors themselves, for providing these new studies of the public and private life of William Gladstone.

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Introduction Ruth Clayton Windscheffel

I On 29 December 1909, the dark and somewhat sombre memorial to William Ewart Gladstone in London’s Strand was garlanded with an extravagant mass of flowers, ribbons and inscriptions in celebration of the centenary of his birth.1 Londoners revisited Gladstone’s grave in Westminster Abbey, where a special commemorative service was held, and a host of official deputations, from across Britain and throughout Europe, converged on the Strand carrying wreaths to lay at the feet of Hamo Thornycroft’s commanding statue. The most extraordinary of these, borne by a special delegation from Bulgaria, was fashioned from solid silver and was intended, by its givers, to celebrate the life and promote the memory of ‘a man whose large heart and humanitarian feeling deserved the admiration of all the world’.2 In the month leading up to this first Gladstone centenary, man-of-letters Frederic Harrison questioned the sense of marking the anniversary ‘within but 11 short years since he was buried in the Abbey by the nation, whilst the fires that he lighted up are still blazing round us, and hot words are still bandied about over his half-closed grave. ‘Were it not better’, Harrison entreated Times’ readers, ‘that the centenary should wait until 1998, when all that England, Scotland, and Ireland owes to him can be recorded in the dry light of historic time?’3 The same day’s editorial suggested a compromise: why not ‘begin by celebrating only the centenary of the death of a great man’, and only ‘afterwards,

  Sir W. Thornycroft, W.E. Gladstone (1900–1905; Strand, London). See M. Stocker, ‘Thornycroft, Sir (William) Hamo (1850–1925)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 2004; online edn, January 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36513]. 2   ‘The Gladstone Centenary’, Times, Thursday, 30 December, 1909; p. 9; issue 39156; col C. The Bulgarian wreath remains in the possession of Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden, and features in the online collection of Welsh heritage and culture, Gathering the Jewels: www.gtj. org.uk/en/large/GTJ77437. 3   F. Harrison, ‘Centenaries’, Times, Tuesday, 23 November, 1909; p. 14; issue 39124; col A. 1

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if his fame endured, celebrating the bicentenary of his birth’?4 In Gladstone’s case, the cautious optimism of the editorial proved itself amply justified: in 1998, academics and others commemorated the centenary of Gladstone’s death with a series of high profile events. And in 2009, the bicentenary of Gladstone’s birth, an international conference convened at the University of Chester, with speakers including Lord Briggs and Lord Bew, to reassess Gladstone’s life and legacy in the light of recent scholarship. II Gladstone has rarely, if ever, been ‘out of print’ historically speaking. In 1903, John Morley’s authorised biography was, in all other respects, only one amongst many estimations of the Grand Old Man to be published.5 Essays on the lives of notable individual Liberals were amongst the earliest publications in British liberal historiography and Gladstone attracted the earliest and most widespread attention, in both Britain and Europe. Many of these works dramatised Gladstone’s personal struggle to find his true vocation, narrating his progression from high Toryism to radical liberalism, his long dominance of the Liberal party, his gladiatorial contests with Disraeli; they paid tribute to his fervent religious faith, trumpeted his commitment to his family and finally revealed (in a melodramatic dénouement) his destined nemesis: the Irish question.6 Whilst many of the early publications were reminiscences by those who had known Gladstone,7 an impressive body of Gladstonian scholarship rapidly accumulated.8 After more than a century of close scrutiny, with well   ‘Centenaries’, Times, Tuesday, 23 November, 1909; p. 11; issue 39124; col F.   J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 3 vols (London, 1903). Notable biographies,

4 5

pre-Morley, included Sir T.W. Reid, (ed.), The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (London, 1899) and D. Williamson, Gladstone the Man: a Non-Political Biography (London, 1898). 6   For a useful summary of Gladstone’s early ‘commemoration’, see M. Bentley, ‘Victorian Prime Ministers: Changing Patterns of Commemoration’, in M. Taylor and M. Wolff, The Victorians Since 1901: Histories, Representations and Revisions (Manchester, 2004), pp. 44–58. 7   L.A. Tollemache, Talks with Mr. Gladstone (London, 1898); G. Smith, My Memory of Gladstone (London, 1904); H. Gladstone, After Thirty Years (London, 1928); I.M. Gordon, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair, ‘Memories of Gladstone’, Contemporary Review, 148 (1935), pp. 405–15. 8   Spearheaded by figures such as A.T. Bassett, whose publications included Gladstone’s Speeches (London, 1916); P. Knaplund, Gladstone’s Foreign Policy (New York, 1935); J.L. Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation (London, 1938); P. Guedalla, The Queen and Mr Gladstone: 1845–1879 (London, 1933); and E. Eyck, Gladstone (London, 1938).

Introduction

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over 600 items published since 1898,9 scholarly interest in Gladstone remains as intense as the public fascination – both popular and academic – devoted to him during his life. That interest was particularly stimulated in the second half of the twentieth century by the publication of Gladstone’s private diaries, which he had kept from his schooldays until shortly before his death; an Herculean editorial task undertaken by Michael Foot and Colin Matthew between 1968 and 1996.10 Up to this point, most studies of Gladstone had focused on his political career.11 All Gladstone’s major biographers have recognised that there was a great deal more to him than that: all have acknowledged and made good use of non-political evidence and, as a result, extensive information about and analysis of Gladstone’s personal, religious and intellectual life has been made available. Nonetheless, specialist studies, especially of Gladstone’s intellectual and spiritual life, lagged significantly behind those of his political career, both in number and scope, and approaches from the field of cultural and gender history made little impact on the way full-scale portraits of Gladstone were painted. By contrast, the historiography of Gladstone’s great political ‘rival’, Benjamin Disraeli, reflected an entirely different conceptualisation of him as an historical individual, with coverage of his orientalism, Jewishness, romanticism and health featuring prominently in the literature.12 When David Bebbington and Roger Swift reviewed the state of Gladstone studies in Gladstone Centenary Essays in 2000,13 they demonstrated that the historical focus was still very much on Gladstone’s political career. Bebbington   Key biographies published up to 1998 include those by P. Magnus, Gladstone: A Biography (London, 1954); H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1898 (Oxford, 1997); R. Jenkins, Gladstone (London, 1995); and R. Shannon, Gladstone: Peel’s Inheritor 1809–1865 (London, 1982). 10   M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew (eds), The Gladstone Diaries: With Prime Ministerial Correspondence, 14 vols, (Oxford, 1968–96). 11   An exception needs to be made here for T. Crosby’s The Two Mr Gladstones: A Study in Psychology and History (New Haven, CT, 1997), which was innovative in its methodological approach and, in many ways, prefigured a wider move within biographical writing more generally. 12   For example, C. Richmond and P. Smith (eds), The Self-Fashioning of Disraeli, 1818– 1851 (Cambridge, 1998); A.S. Wohl, ‘“Dizzi-Ben-Dizzi”: Disraeli as alien’, Journal of British Studies, 34 (1995), pp. 375–411; B. Hilton, ‘Disraeli, English Culture, and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit’ in L. Brockliss and D. Eastwood (eds), A Union of Multiple Identities: the British Isles, 1750–1850 (Manchester; New York, 1997), pp. 44–59; A.S. Wohl, ‘“Ben JuJu”: Representations of Disraeli’s Jewishness in the Victorian Political Cartoon’, Jewish History, 10/2 (1996), pp. 89–134. 13   D. Bebbington, ‘Introduction’ and R. Swift, ‘William Ewart Gladstone: A Select Bibliography’ in D. Bebbington and R. Swift, Gladstone Centenary Essays (Liverpool, 2000), pp. 1–9; 260–75. 9

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pointed to an ongoing debate between historians concerned with Gladstone’s relationship with the sphere of popular politics and radicalism, and those whose main interest was in the high politics of the Victorian elite. Another debate focused on the influence of particular individuals on his career. Looking ahead to the future direction of Gladstonian studies, Bebbington noted that a number of full biographies published around the centenary of Gladstone’s death were to be praised for ‘trying to see Gladstone whole’,14 and expressed the hope that future work on Gladstone would seek to be more integrated than had historically been the case. Indeed, the outputs from the 1998 Centenary Conference had been themselves divided into two separately published volumes with distinctive content profiles.15 These, if not divided along as strict political/personal lines as Gladstone’s own papers had been in the early years of the twentieth century,16 still privileged church and state in their presentation of his historical significance.17 In 2000, it was also foreseen that Gladstone’s posthumous legacy would attract increasing scholarly attention, and that the continued development of cultural history and the impact of postmodernism would influence future approaches to Gladstone.18 If we survey the field now, the impact of the publication of Gladstone’s diaries – with their evidences of the interconnectedness of Gladstone’s ‘public’ and ‘private’ worlds – is evident. Indeed, it is plain to see in the present volume. In a letter of 1869, part of a carefully guarded correspondence preserved for   Bebbington, ‘Introduction’, Centenary Essays, p. 5. He cites in particular the biographies by Matthew (1997), Jenkins (1995) and Crosby (1997). 15   Bebbington and Swift, Centenary Essays (2000) and P. Francis (ed.), The Gladstone Umbrella: Papers Delivered at the Gladstone Centenary Conference 1998 (Hawarden, 2001). (A third volume of sermons and speeches delivered at the Centenary was also published: P. Francis (ed.), The Grand Old Man: Sermons and Speeches in Honour of W.E. Gladstone (1809–1898), (Hawarden, 2000). 16   For an engaging narrative of this complex and fraught process, see R.J. Olney, ‘The Gladstone Papers 1822–1977’ in J. Brooke and M. Sorensen (eds), W.E. Gladstone IV: Autobigraphical Memoranda 1868–1894 (The Prime Ministers’ Papers Series) (London, 1981), appendix 3, pp. 118–30. For further details of the exceptional treatment of the manuscript diaries, see M.R.D. Foot, ‘Introduction’ in M.R.D. Foot (ed.) The Gladstone Diaries I 1825–1832 (Oxford, 1968), pp. xix–xlix. 17   Thus, the Centenary Essays contained chapters on politics and state religion, with only David Bebbington’s chapter on ‘Gladstone and Homer’ (pp. 57–74) representative of Gladstone’s intellectual concerns. The Gladstone Umbrella (2001) was also dominated by issues of church and state, empire and Ireland but was also the place where the few papers on domestic issues and Gladstone in a broader cultural context were placed: for instance, C. d’Haussy, ‘Gladstone, France and His French Contemporaries’ (pp. 115–36), J.S. Meisel, ‘The Word in Man: Gladstone and the Great Preachers’ (pp. 137–55) and L. Morris, ‘Catherine Gladstone and Victorian Philanthropy’ (pp. 35–49). 18   Bebbington, ‘Introduction’, Centenary Essays, p. 7. 14

Introduction

5

decades together with the manuscript diaries in Lambeth Palace, Gladstone admitted that: ‘Friendships with women have constituted no small part of my existence’.19 Evidence from the unexpurgated diaries and this associated private correspondence showed how varied and how historically important his relationships with women had been, ranging as they had done from influential aristocrats, such as the Duchess of Sutherland, to the prostitutes that he encountered during his ‘rescue work’. Over the last ten years, Gladstone’s relations with women have received serious scholarly attention.20 Recent studies of Gladstone have also been facilitated and enriched by the interrogation of other previously ignored or underused sources. These include his personal book collection, part of which he used to establish a residential library in his home village at Hawarden in Flintshire, North Wales, just before his death.21 Many of the works in that collection were annotated by Gladstone and thus provide other myriad entry points into his complex mental world and intellectual outlook. As such, it has provided much material for new perspectives on Gladstone. Ruth Clayton Windscheffel, for example, in Reading Gladstone (2008), has investigated Gladstone’s life, activity and reputation as a reader, book collector and humanitarian scholar.22 The ‘linguistic turn’, with its attendant privileging of discourse-constructed identity, has also laid its mark on Gladstonian studies and has fundamentally challenged many of the previously accepted frames of references common to studies of Gladstonian liberalism, principally the undergirding operations

  W.E. Gladstone to Laura Thistlethwayte, 25 October 1869, reproduced in Gladstone Diaries, vol. 8, p. 570. The surviving Gladstone–Thistlethwayte correspondence was deemed sensitive enough to be lodged with the manuscript diaries under the care of successive Archbishops of Canterbury. 20   See, especially, A. Isba, Gladstone and Women (London, 2006) and her ‘Trouble with Helen: the Gladstone Family Crisis, 1846–1848’, History, 88/290 (2003), pp. 249–61; R. Aitken, ‘A Tender Tyranny: William and Catherine Gladstone as Victorian Parents’, Flintshire Historical Society Journal, 38 (2010), pp. 155–81; J. West, ‘Gladstone and Laura Thistlethwayte, 1865–75’, Historical Research, 80/209 (2007), pp. 368–92; L. Davidoff, ‘Kinship as a Categorical Concept: A Case Study of Nineteenth Century English Siblings’, Journal of Social History, 39/2 (2005), pp. 411–28. 21   St Deiniol’s Library was renamed Gladstone’s Library in 2010. 22   R.C. Windscheffel, Reading Gladstone (Basingstoke, 2008). For other work which has particularly benefited from the evidences of Gladstone’s book collection and his literary writings, see R.C. Windscheffel, ‘Gladstone and Scott: Family, Identity, and Nation’, Scottish Historical Review, 86/1/221 (2007), pp. 69–95; W.R. McKelvy, The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774–1880 (Charlottesville, VA; London, 2007); A. Isba, Gladstone and Dante: Victorian Statesman, Medieval Poet (Woodbridge, 2006). 19

William Gladstone

6

of class as a personal and tribal identifier and electoral motivator.23 Notable amongst this body of scholarship has been the work of Joseph Meisel, whose monograph, Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone,24 examines in great depth the intermingling linguistic and rhetorical worlds of the key constituencies of Victorian public life: politics, the law and the church, underlining – as literary scholar David Wayne Thomas has emphasised – the all–round interests and shared languages of elite Victorians.25 Gladstone studies have also been influenced by a growing interest in the visual and material culture of the Victorian period.26 With the exception of Queen Victoria and other members of the Royal Family, Gladstone was the most represented public figure in Victorian Britain and yet, until recently, little had been done by historians to interrogate these images to uncover evidence of Victorian codes of masculinity both hegemonic and apostate. There is now a growing literature, also bolstered by important advances in gender history and, especially, studies of masculinity, to which the present volume contributes further, offering important insights into the role and political significance of representation in Victorian culture.27   Spearheaded by historians such as James Vernon, Patrick Joyce and Jon Lawrence, whose influential book Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867– 1914 (Cambridge, 1998) was published in Gladstone’s centenary year. 24   J.S. Meisel, Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone (New York, 2001). Other recent studies featuring analysis of Gladstone from a linguistic or rhetorical perspective include: K. Campbell, ‘W.E. Gladstone, W.T. Stead, Matthew Arnold and a New Journalism: Cultural Politics in the 1880s’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 36/1 (2003), pp. 20– 40; H. Hoekstra, ‘De kracht van het gesproken woord: politieke mobilisatie en natievorming bij Kuyper en Gladstone’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 116 (2003), pp. 494–511 [‘The Power of the Spoken Word: Political Mobilization and Nation Building by Kuyper and Gladstone’]; I. McLean, Rational Choice and British Politics: An Analysis of Rhetoric and Manipulation from Peel to Blair (Oxford, 2001). 25   D.W. Thomas, Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (Philadelphia, PA, 2004). 26   For a rapid summary of historians’ and others’ engagements with visual culture, see P. Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London, 2001), and for a deployment of the ‘material turn’ in history and cognate disciplines, see T. Bennett and P. Joyce (eds) Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn (Routledge, 2010). 27   See, in particular, D. Mares, ‘Die visuelle Inszenierung des modernen Politikers: William Ewart Gladstone in der “Illustrated London News”’, in U. Schneider, L. Raphael, S. Hillerich (eds), Dimensionen der Moderne: Festschrift für Christof Dipper (Frankfurt; Berlin; Berne, 2008), pp. 309–30 [‘The Visual Representation of the Modern Politician. William Ewart Gladstone in the “Illustrated London News”’]; R.C. Windscheffel, ‘Politics, Portraiture and Power: Reassessing the Public Image of William Ewart Gladstone’ in M. McCormack, (ed.), Public Men: Political Masculinities in Modern Britain (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 93–122. 23

Introduction

7

Several recent studies have reassessed Gladstone’s relationships with his political contemporaries and focused on him as part of a wider politico-cultural grouping. For instance, in The Rule of Freedom, Patrick Joyce considered how Gladstone played a facilitating role, ‘linking Oxbridge to a new sort of governing class’ in his civil service reforms,28 whilst Roland Quinault has reassessed Gladstone’s relationship with Disraeli.29 Both, in their different ways, have successfully problematised any simplistic understanding of Gladstone’s relations with his political contemporaries by revealing complex webs of shifting alliances and dense interplays between personal feelings and professional agendas. Equally important insights have been gained by looking at Gladstone as an agent of ideological and doctrinal transmission within his wider social and cultural framework. In his seminal study of the Grand Old Man, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics,30 David Bebbington traces the ways in which myriad intellectual influences worked on creating – and changing – the mind of Gladstone and how he, in turn, transmitted these ideas and conclusions to those around him. Bebbington constructs a persuasive chronology which charts Gladstone’s (often apparently bizarre) developments whilst making us believe that there was a serious and organic rationale behind them. His interpretation elucidates how Gladstone prioritised and integrated his diverse interests and managed to negotiate the private and public aspects of his life. The book undermines the stubborn view that Gladstone’s mature liberalism was shaped principally by one obdurate old man’s desire to hold on to power, whilst possessing no discernable motivating philosophy.31 That view has also been undermined by a number of recent studies of Gladstone’s dealings with Ireland and the long gestation of his ‘conversion’ to Irish Home Rule, most notably in Eugenio Biagini’s British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906 (2007),32 and in key essays presented in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day’s

  P. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003), pp. 30,

28

122ff.

  R. Quinault, ‘Gladstone and Disraeli: A Reappraisal of their Relationship’, History, 91/304 (2006), pp. 557–76. 30   D. Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics (Oxford, 2004). 31   See, for example, A. Cooke and J. Vincent, The Governing Passion: Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain, 1885–86 (Brighton, 1974); D.A. Hamer, ‘Gladstone: the Making of a Political Myth’, Victorian Studies, 22 (1978), pp. 29–50; R. Shannon, Gladstone: Peel’s Inheritor 1809–1865 (London, 1982), Gladstone: Heroic Minister, 1865–1898 (London, 1999) and, most recently, Gladstone: God and Politics (London; New York, 2007); D.J. Dutton, A History of the Liberal Party in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke, 2004). 32   E.F. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906 (Cambridge, 2007). 29

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8

edited collection, Gladstone and Ireland (2010).33 Equally questionable, as the late Michael Partridge observed in his 2003 biography of Gladstone, is the thesis that Gladstone bore significant responsibility for the subsequent problems faced by the Liberal Party after his death.34 Gladstone’s standing as an international statesman has remained a touchstone for modern politicians and his reputation in this field continues to receive significant attention from historians. This key aspect of his legacy was initially acknowledged by J.L. Hammond in an essay entitled ‘Gladstone and the League of Nations Mind’ in a festschrift for Gilbert Murray in 1936.35 Far from being simply a British prime minister, Gladstone had achieved a global reputation during his lifetime, and interest in Gladstone the international statesman has regularly been revived by a succession of international crises ranging from the First World War to the recent western interventions in the Middle East. At the 2001 Labour Party Conference, for example, Prime Minister Tony Blair invoked the words and the memory of his predecessor when he called for a new world order based on interdependent community, social justice and the moral duty to act in the interests of those ‘living in want and squalor’ in ‘the mountain ranges of Afghanistan’.36 Historians, journalists and cartoonists were quick to identify the overt Gladstonian parallels and Blair was swiftly rebranded ‘Tony Gladstone’.37   See, especially, J.P. McCarthy, ‘History and Pluralism: Gladstone and the Maynooth Grant Controversy’ and . Sheehy ‘“A Deplorable Narrative”: Gladstone, R. Barry O’Brien and the “Historical Argument” for Home Rule, 1880–90’ in D.G. Boyce and A. O’Day, Gladstone and Ireland: Politics, Religion and Nationality in the Victorian Age (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 13–40, 110–39. See also, A. O’Day, ‘Gladstone and Irish Nationalism: Achievement and Reputation’ and D.G. Boyce, ‘In the Front Rank of the Nation: Gladstone and the Unionists of Ireland, 1868– 1893’, in D. Bebbington and R. Swift, Centenary Essays, pp. 163–83, 184–201. 34   M. Partridge, Gladstone (London, 2003), pp. 250–1. The ‘crisis’ of Edwardian Liberalism was famously delineated in G. Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London, 1936). 35   J.L. Hammond, ‘Gladstone and the League of Nations Mind’ in J.A.K. Thomson and A.J. Toynbee (eds) Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray (London, 1936), pp. 95–118. 36   ‘Tony Blair’s Speech to the Labour Party Conference, Brighton 2001 (Part Two)’, The Guardian, Tuesday 2 October 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/oct/02/ labourconference.labour7. Accessed 20 May, 2011. On 26 November, 1879, at the Foresters’ Hall, Dalkeith, Gladstone had implored his audience to ‘remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own’. W.E. Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, November and December 1879 (Edinburgh, 1879), pp. 92–4. 37   See ‘Tony Blair’s speech at the Labour party conference in Blackpool 2002’, The Guardian, Tuesday 1 October, 2002; R. Shannon, ‘History lessons’, The Guardian, Thursday 4 October, 2001, p. A2; and T.G. Ash, ‘Gambling on America’, The Guardian, Thursday 3 October, 2002, p. 19 (illustrated with a caricature of Blair as Gladstone by Nicola Jennings). For further discussion 33

Introduction

9

The continued relevance of Gladstone as a political influence and international icon accurately reflects Gladstone’s political, cultural and historiographical status, which has endured over the more than hundred years since his death. In recent years the prominence given to Gladstone in this field has also been stimulated by the veritable explosion of historical interest in international and global history.38 The present volume reflects these preoccupations by investigating the contemporary resonances of Gladstone’s contributions towards ethical internationalism and humanitarianism in the complex, transnational world of war, peace, empire and global trade in which he operated, and by emphasising the long-standing character of Gladstone’s concern with international issues, which was apparent earlier in his career than has previously been appreciated. III The following volume is composed of five thematic sections, which, whilst freestanding, are nevertheless undergirded and informed by the book’s overarching theme: Gladstone’s historical and ongoing reputation and legacy. This abiding preoccupation is signalled by the opening and closing chapters, penned by the late Frank Turner and Eugenio Biagini. The entire volume is supported by Roger Swift’s extensive, thematic bibliography, which further testifies to the enduring attraction and continuing historical relevance of William Ewart Gladstone. ‘Reputation’ is the subject with which Part One is crucially concerned. This part offers a sophisticated and interlocking reading of Gladstone’s political ideologies, affiliations and influences developed and established over a long and eventful life. Frank Turner’s broad, culturally informed reading of Gladstone’s relationship with liberalism tackles head-on many unhelpful assumptions which persist about this relationship in both Gladstone Studies and Victorian Studies more broadly. Turner’s chapter is followed by a reassessment, by Richard Gaunt, of Blair’s representation of himself as Gladstonian, see the chapters by Quinault, Schreuder and Wrigley in this volume. 38   See, with reference to Gladstone: W. Mulligan, ‘Gladstone and the Primacy of Foreign Policy’, in W. Mulligan and B. Simms (eds), The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660–2000: How Strategic Concerns Shaped Modern Britain (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 181–96; P.J. Cain, ‘Radicalism, Gladstone and the Liberal Critique of Disraelian “Imperialism” in D. Bell (ed.), Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Ideas in Context, 86) (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 215–38; M. Ceadel, ‘Gladstone and a Liberal Theory of International Relations’ in P. Ghosh and L. Goldman, (eds), Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain: Essays in Memory of Colin Matthew (Oxford, 2006), pp. 74–94; C.B. Faught, ‘An Imperial Prime Minister? W.E. Gladstone and India, 1880–1885’, Journal of the Historical Society, 6/4 (2006), pp. 555–78.

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William Gladstone

of Gladstone’s long relationship with Conservatism through the lens of his relationship with Robert Peel. A broad-ranging consideration of Gladstone and Labour politics, from the days of Macdonald to Blair, follows from Chris Wrigley. These contributions place Gladstone (and his legacy) firmly in a full political and cultural context – something that his biographers have often failed to do. Reputation and image are tightly intertwined concepts, and Part Two of this collection has a pair of matched chapters analysing Gladstone’s image as perceived by his Victorian contemporaries. The first of these, by Joseph Meisel, focuses on representations and discussion of Gladstone’s face amongst artists, parliamentarians and the public. It draws on a range of rarely-before-used iconographical source material to produce a chapter which reveals fresh new insights into the phenomena of Gladstone’s personal charisma and political celebrity. Meisel’s chapter is balanced by Mark Nixon’s reading of an important and previously largely neglected corpus of source material – the material culture artefacts produced and paraded by political adherents during the Gladstonian era. His analysis of this material sheds new light on the character and motivation of Gladstone’s supporters and admirers, who ranged across the Victorian class divides. Part III – Personal Questions – is composed of three chapters, each of which contributes to an intricate picture of the reflexive relationship between Gladstone’s private life and preoccupations and his public profile and responsibilities. Gladstone’s friendships are the topic first under discussion by Denis Paz. By focusing on a number of Gladstone’s most important and longest enduring friendships, Paz demonstrates the tensions as well as the advantages of having ‘friends in high places’. As Gladstone’s popular reputation grew in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, many ordinary people sought to see him in his home environment at Hawarden. There his frequent engagement in tree-felling attracted much public interest. Peter Sewter’s chapter shows that Gladstone’s arboreal activities were not merely designed to produce press headlines, but were also driven by his interest in conservation, his desire for opportunities to spend time with his sons, as well as his commitment to remaining fit and healthy. In recent years there has been an increasing interest in and study of the important relationship between politicians’ public and private lives and their state of health.39 In the final chapter in this section, Jenny West considers Gladstone’s health at the height of his career, particularly in relation to his political activities. West demonstrates that the connection between Gladstone’s health and his 39   See, for example, W.A. Speck, ‘“The end of all existence is debarred me”: Disraeli’s depression 1826–30’, The Historian 102 (2009), pp. 6–10; D. Leach and J.A. Beckwith, ‘Dr. John Mitchell Bruce’s notes relating to the last illness and death of Benjamin Disraeli’, Journal of Medical Biography, 9/3 (2001), pp. 161–6.

Introduction

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performance as a politician was far more complicated than historians have previously acknowledged. Part IV explores Gladstone’s life and career as an Official. From his earliest days in public life, Gladstone was closely involved with the workings of the British state, both at home and in the empire. He contributed largely to that unseen but always felt ‘official mind’ detected by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher in their seminal work on British imperialism.40 Allen Warren’s chapter looks at the economic and financial aspects of Gladstone’s long-running relationship with the government of Ireland, particularly with reference to his role as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1850s. That experience greatly influenced his subsequent approach to Irish issues, notably Home Rule. Brad Faught’s assessment of Gladstone’s brief period as British Commissioner Extraordinary to the Ionian Islands in the late 1850s demonstrates how he acquired first-hand experience of nascent colonial nationalism on the margins of the European world, which subsequently proved useful when he became embroiled in the international crisis, which contemporaries termed the Eastern Question, in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The volume’s final section – Ethics and Internationalism – builds on two important themes touched on in the preceding part. It begins by tackling two aspects of Gladstone’s internationally engaged political life that, perhaps more than any others, have up to now been surrounded by misconception and lack of rigorous analysis: Gladstone’s attitudes to war and to the abolition of slavery. Roland Quinault’s chapter challenges the long-standing assumption that Gladstone’s international politics were consistently wedded to the ideas of ‘peace, retrenchment, and reform’ and investigates Gladstone’s involvements with war in both theory and practice. He concludes that Gladstone did not favour peace at any price and thought that war, in certain circumstances, was morally justified. Gladstone’s example in that respect, moreover, provided support for Britain’s involvement in the two world wars of the twentieth century. Gladstone’s support for internationalism still has contemporary resonance but his attitude to slavery was much less enlightened by modern standards. His initial reluctance to condemn slavery and his dependence on profits from it has recently been pointed out by Roland Quinault.41 Richard Huzzey’s chapter examines Gladstone’s opposition to the British government’s attempts to use the Royal Navy to suppress the slave trade, illustrating the complexity of his stance, which was influenced as much by pragmatic as by moral considerations. It also provided a clear precedent for his policy as prime minister when he resisted   R. Robinson, J. Gallagher and A. Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London, 1961). 41   R. Quinault, ‘Gladstone and Slavery’, The Historical Journal, 52/2 (2009), pp. 363–83. 40

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humanitarian demands for military intervention and colonial annexation both in Africa and the Pacific region. On this issue, Gladstone’s outlook – commercial, political and moral – was that of a convinced internationalist, with respect not only to the British Empire, but also to the nations of Europe and indeed the worldwide cause of humanity. The final chapter in this section, by Derek Schreuder, presents a survey of Gladstone’s international involvement and legacy which recreates and explicates Gladstone’s global ‘world view’ through an interrogation of three interlocking themes: his international ideas, his imperial and foreign policies in action and – finally – the long-term influence of those ideas and practices. It concludes with a consideration of why Gladstone remains such a redolent source for idealist international theory in current debates – not least over strategic but ethically responsible roles for major powers within the international order. The final chapter comprises an epilogue from Eugenio Biagini in which Gladstone’s legacy from his death to the present day is considered. Touching on many of the themes explored by other contributors to the volume, Biagini explores key aspects of twentieth and early twenty-first century Gladstonianism, focusing on the enduring significance of Gladstone’s attitudes to the relationship between state and society and his ‘politics of humanitarianism’. Contrary to the expectations of sceptics like Frederic Harrison, interest in Gladstone shows no sign of diminishing, despite his ‘stormburst of centenaries’.42 The reluctance of such near contemporaries to believe that they could pass enduring historical judgements upon the lives and reputations of their fellow Victorians was understandable: ‘In such circumstances it is absolutely impossible for any man to acquire the detachment and the perspective which are indispensible if centenary essays are to be anything more than echoes of the partial and prejudiced appraisements current during the hero’s lifetime.’43 As we have seen, many of these early estimations were partial or over privileged the importance of certain aspects of their subject’s life and experience. However, some of these insights have stood the test of time: Gladstone, for good or ill, remains the international icon his contemporaries deemed him to be and he also remains resistant to any type of neat categorisation. These bicentenary essays offer their series of fresh perspectives in a spirit which appreciates these continuities as much as they celebrate the welcome breaking of new ground. As such, it is hoped that this volume will act as a catalyst for further studies of a man who, in so many ways, epitomised the diverse aspects of the Victorian age. 42   F. Harrison, ‘Centenaries’, Times, Tuesday, 23 November, 1909; p. 14; issue 39124; col. A. 43   ‘The Gladstone Centenary’, Times, Wednesday, 29 December, 1909; p. 7; issue 39155;

col D.

Part i REPUTATIONS

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Chapter 1

Gladstone: A Political Not a Cultural Radical Frank M. Turner

The year 2009 marked the bicentennial of three major nineteenth-century transatlantic figures: Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin and William Gladstone. Enormous celebrations, numerous conferences, special courses and lectures, new books and articles, as well as various museum exhibitions commemorated the first two. Lincoln and Darwin remain widely recognised names, and their ideas and lives are still debated in the media and among the broadly educated public, and still touch public policy. Both figures adorn the currency of their respective nations. By contrast, William Gladstone does not command such current attention. Whether in Britain, Ireland, the United States or parts of the former British Empire, only a few people, mostly professional historians, recall the name Gladstone. His home, which drew thousands to political rallies in his lifetime or to the sight of him felling trees, remains owned by his family and closed to the public. His vast body of publications can be found only through channels for acquiring rare books and pamphlets. Why does Gladstone command relatively little attention today? First, Gladstone’s personality, his values and some of his causes barely resonate, or resonate badly, with many people today. As S.G. Checkland noted in 1971: To much of the modern mind Mr. Gladstone’s upbringing is unreal and his outlook unsympathetic. There is a strong temptation to patronize him, with his appalling burden of guilt, his sense of personal inadequacy, his masochism, his indulgence in tortuous religious controversy, his awful moral clarity and his dedication that seemed to critics to be mere self-righteousness. Yet few men have shown the same power to break with earlier conditioning, making new terms with reality.1

  S.G. Checkland, The Gladstones: A Family Biography 1764–1851 (Cambridge, 1971),

1

p. 403.

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So much about Gladstone, personally and politically, is difficult to engage with or to do so with any empathy. Those aspects include a family fortune built largely on slavery and an invasion of Egypt which boosted the value of his large investment in Egyptian bonds. Even when he did make ‘new terms with reality’, Gladstone’s efforts in that direction always seemed pained, possibly hypocritical, unpredictable, opportunistic and often hesitant. This was the case even with respect to his support for Irish Home Rule and reform of the House of Lords. Moreover, his political, religious and classical thinking retained (even indulged in) so many of its own internal points of orientation, that it is difficult to follow and explicate in a satisfactory fashion. Second, Gladstone’s intellectual world, with its emphasis on the ancient classics as modes of understanding the present, also belongs to a world of the past. The ancient world no longer stands as a model for intellectual engagement on political issues and, until the recent penetrating scholarship of David Bebbington, Gladstone’s mind and ideas appeared to most scholars as simply too difficult and idiosyncratic to try to penetrate or master.2 Third, the rapidly changing Victorian religious marketplace, in which Gladstone played so important and fascinating a role, has also vanished. It is a fine point of debate and judgment whether the Church of England remains a genuinely national institution, while British Nonconformity is certainly no longer a great political or religious force. In contemporary Ireland, many Catholics are now alienated from the Roman Catholic Church, and Irish bishops and priests stand accused of misbehaviour far more grievous than that perpetrated by Parnell and Katherine O’Shea. At the same time, Gladstone’s fervent anti-Catholicism seems anachronistic, as does much, though not everything, that he contributed to the Victorian conflict over science and religion, while the secularism he feared has largely triumphed in the British Isles. Fourth, the Victorian Liberal Party represents very largely a political world we have lost. The tasks and goals the Liberal Party addressed under Gladstone’s leadership have either been accomplished or co-opted by others. In particular, the Irish problem as Gladstone understood, experienced and eventually redefined became radically and irreversibly transformed by the Easter Rising in l9l6 and its aftermath. Likewise, the Europe of his time was altered and largely destroyed by the rapaciously destructive ideologies of the twentieth century. Lastly, the shifts in historiography of the past half century have made Gladstone much less central to the concerns of Victorian historians. The emphasis on social history over political history and on popular political

2

  D. Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer, and Politics (Oxford, 2004).

Gladstone: A Political Not a Cultural Radical

17

movements rather than political leaders has shifted the focus of the modern British historical enquiry. Eschewing Cultural Apostasy One of the key reasons why Gladstone now seems so elusive, irrelevant or difficult to approach is that, unlike so many other Victorians, he was not a Victorian cultural apostate. He became a political radical, but he was not a cultural radical. Gladstone stood profoundly at one with his age, even as he sought throughout much of his life to reform his world, often in the face of bitter partisan opposition. He wanted to reform, not to transform in any Utopian manner. He understood his was an age of transition, but thought it should not be one of upheaval. Again and again he attempted to channel the exploding forces of the day, often through reliance on religion, still more often through institutional accommodation and, finally, by a careful, if increasingly enthusiastic, embrace of freedom. Modern sympathies, by contrast, have come to reside with those Victorians who challenged the values and ideals and social expectations of their day. For this reason Gladstone has tended to elude us. Historians of the Victorian era have thus tended to emphasise those figures who were at odds with the prevailing thought and institutions of their day and who were impatient with moderate reform in the areas of their respective endeavours. Those whom I have previously denoted by the term ‘cultural apostates’,3 rebelled intellectually, morally or religiously against the predominant Anglican culture from within. The cultural apostates rejected those presuppositions about English culture in terms of Protestantism, natural religion and neoclassicism that had marked the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. It was exactly these cultural presuppositions that Gladstone never abandoned nor seriously questioned. Gladstone, from at least his first troubled vote for the Maynooth Grant in l845, entered upon a career of political rather than cultural reform. The trajectory of his political development over the next half century led him into increasingly radical and disruptive political positions that generated enormous controversy, distrust and conservative enmity. But throughout his political crusades, he at no time challenged the cultural presuppositions of British life. He remained a supporter of the Bible and natural theology. He remained a firm supporter of the Church of England. He eschewed virtually any changes in personal or sexual   F.M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 38–72. 3

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morality including contraception. He remained firmly hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, if not to individual Roman Catholics. But he did steadily, if quite gradually, embrace the tenets of liberal democracy. He stood prepared to rethink Ireland’s relationship to the United Kingdom and to imagine a radical restructuring of the House of Lords. Like many great Victorian liberals, he could engage in radical political reform because he believed the existing cultural foundations of society would provide the bulwarks of stability in the face of political restructuring. He believed in an expanding realm of political liberty because he thought that the surrounding culture would preserve essential social and moral order. By contrast, figures such as Charles Darwin, John Ruskin and John Henry Newman overturned the cultural presuppositions of early Victorian Anglican religious and intellectual life from within. Darwin achieved his evolutionary thinking less by assaulting the opponents of transmutation than by working through those presuppositions of Paleyan natural theology that had so permeated his thought aboard the Beagle and which had persisted until at least the l860s. Ruskin worked towards a new, daring and expansive aesthetic that would eventually pave the way towards the ‘modern’ through a profound rethinking of aesthetic neoclassicism. John Henry Newman embodied a profound cultural apostasy by overturning in his own mind and spirit the three pillars on which the theology of the various parties in the Church of England rested. In his sermons and theological publications of the l830s, he critically dissected – more deeply than any other writer of his age – evangelical faith in the adequacy of the Bible alone as providing the basis for faith, the role of emotions in validating evangelical religious experience and the evangelical understanding of the doctrine of justification by faith. In his ‘Tract 90’ of l841, as James Anthony Froude commented, Newman broke ‘the back of the [Thirty-nine] Articles’ as a device for defining the Church of England as something distinctly other than the Roman Catholic faith.4 In his Tamworth Reading Room letters of the same year, he produced a devastating critique of natural theology as a foundation for the Anglican faith and Protestantism more generally, and of both as sustaining contemporary British society. Finally, in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine of l845 he assaulted the High Church confidence in the authority of Antiquity. His ever-polemical theological writings thus swept away the intellectual foundations from all versions of Anglican Protestantism and the cultural self-identity they fostered. What is important to note is that Newman 4   J.A. Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects (4 vols, London, l898), vol. 4, p. 308. See also .M. Turner, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (New Haven, 2002) and F.M. Turner, ‘Newman’, D.A. Fergusson (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Theology (Oxford, 2010), pp. 119–38.

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forged those sceptical conclusions from reasoning within the Anglican culture and the theological world that he had long inhabited and came implicitly to reject, hence his cultural apostasy. Gladstone had initially shown sympathy for Newman and the Tractarians, though never any kind of absolute identification with them. However, from the late l830s onwards, he steadily (and with no little political opportunism) separated himself from them. So long as he understood Newman and the Tractarians to be reviving ancient church principles in order to give new vitality to Anglican religious life, he lent them sympathy. But when he came to understand that they had undertaken a genuinely radical experiment in their own self-styled Catholic religion, he both abandoned and denounced them. For all his capacity to evolve in his own religious faith and commitment over the course of his life, Gladstone was no religious radical. He was not a religious Utopian any more than he was a political Utopian.5 The cultural apostates are understandable and sympathetic figures to us because we can interpret them in terms of modern science, modern aesthetics, modern Roman Catholicism or modern secularist outlooks. That is to say, we can interpret them outside the self-referential world of provincial English culture and the religious provincialism of the Church of England. Such is absolutely impossible in the case of Gladstone, who cannot be described in these terms. Gladstone was a Victorian forger of modernity who did not seek to overturn his society or Anglican culture, but rather sought to keep up with contemporary change whilst at the same time retaining numerous traditional intellectual and social outlooks that stood directly at odds with the modernising efforts of the apostates. Gladstone can only be understood strictly within the contours of the Victorian age itself and not as one on the cultural or intellectual cutting edge of that age. It is significant that Gladstone opposed, in one way or another, the thought of Darwin, Newman and Ruskin, the leading cultural apostates of his day. He was determined to make the Anglican institutions and most of the Anglican cultural outlooks of his youth and early middle-age work, and he resisted challenges to those institutions, whether they arose in his mind, from modern science, reviving Roman Catholicism or modern aesthetic departures. This sets him aside from many of the Victorians who now and traditionally have commanded the attention of historians because we see them pointing toward the modern.

  P. Butler, Gladstone: Church, State, and Tractarianism; A Study of His Religious Ideas and Attitudes, 1809–1859 (Oxford, 1982). 5

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Reading, Writing and Education in the Classics Gladstone’s Homeric scholarship marked a major motif in his temperamental loyalty to the world from which he emerged as a young adult and, if Gladstone’s complicated religious commitments still puzzle but also illumine, his commitment to classical study probably tends only to puzzle. However, even if Gladstone’s analysis of Homer commanded – and still commands – virtually no followers, the fact that he worked his way to new political outlooks through an engagement with the classics marks him as a Victorian deeply at home in his culture. Moreover, as both David Bebbington and Ruth Clayton Windscheffel have demonstrated, that interest in the classics was part of Gladstone’s wider engagement with the burgeoning print culture of his day.6 Gladstone’s career covered more major areas of political endeavour than that of any other minister of his age. He made himself at home on issues of colonial administration, taxation, finance, land reform, ecclesiastical disestablishment, land reform, foreign policy and Irish Home Rule in such a manner as to dominate the parliamentary debate called forth by such issues. In each and every case, he would master the history and complexities of the subject by working his way through a vast pile of books. He learned from reading rather than from listening (he was never a great listener) or from being briefed. Reading was his path to the mastery of his world and the exploration of his soul, and he thought this would, or should be, the case for other people as well. Gladstone did not simply devour books, consign them to their proper shelf and then move on to the next. His private collection of books was a work-in-progress as he constructed it, but also a work-in-progress as he consulted, understood and then later reacquainted himself with and rethought particular authors. Gladstone was also concerned at the end of his long life with the fate of his collection, hence his founding and endowment of St Deiniol’s Library, to which institution he transferred approximately 30,000 volumes.7 Gladstone’s library composed a universe of personal intellectual and religious orientation. Just as in the therapeutic age of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries people revisit their early life, recollections, memories and relationships to reframe their feelings and thoughts, Gladstone rethought and reframed his earlier life and thoughts by re-reading books and rethinking their contents. Much of Gladstone’s political thinking, which emerges in the liberalism of his late middle and old age, arose from his engagement with Homer. His   R.C. Windscheffel, Reading Gladstone (London, 2008).   To give some comparative idea of the size of such a personal library, it is well to recall that

6 7

when the United States Congress purchased the library of Thomas Jefferson early in the century, the collection consisted of approximately 6,400 volumes.

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thinking about Homer’s characters, narrative and age served as a vehicle for him to explain how his thinking differed from those who would have carried politics to more radical conclusions than he was willing to contemplate. It is worth recalling that Gladstone wrote more about Homer than any other nineteenthcentury commentator in the English language. It was through his engagement with Homer that he worked his way to a liberalism that differed from both philosophic radicalism and Toryism. And it was through that liberalism that Gladstone transformed the late Victorian political world. Gladstone, like George Grote before him, understood that the classics dominated English university education and that the particular interpretations of the ancient world imparted to university students could, in large measure, shape their political outlooks.8 The Tory interpretation of ancient Greece and especially ancient Greek democracy had been enunciated by William Mitford’s History of Greece (l784–1810). George Grote in his 12-volume History of Greece (l846–l856), written from the standpoint of Benthamite philosophic radicalism and Comtean intellectual history, had vigorously championed Athenian democracy and shattered Mitford’s anti-democratic polemic. Grote’s championing of Athenian democracy depended in large measure on his critique of ancient Greek monarchy. Grote presented Homeric monarchy as lacking the virtues he associated with Athenian democracy, including the capacity to generate patriotism and personal self-sacrifice. He presented the Homeric kings as absolute monarchs ruling in their own selfish interests at the expense of the good of the many. He thought these monarchs permitted no role for criticism or government by discussion. The later Athenian democracy in Grote’s eyes displayed the political virtues absent in the Homeric monarchies. Moreover, Grote ascribed the faults and turmoil of that later Greek democracy to the ongoing presence of aristocratic and religious influences. In effect, Grote had presented the Homeric monarchies as somewhat resembling the contemporary conservative restored monarchies of the European continent, supported as they were by conservative aristocracies and churches. Gladstone wrote about Homer in the hope that he might introduce into the Oxford curriculum, which he knew well from personal experience and his participation in the reform of the universities, the conviction that the ancient world had provided non-radical and non-democratic political models useful to modern life. He wished to forestall both Mitford’s Toryism and Grote’s   For consideration of various aspects of the Victorian appropriation of ancient Greece discussed in this section, see F.M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1981), pp. 135–70, 187–244, 383–446; F.M. Turner, ‘Victorian Classics: Sustaining the Study of the Ancient World’, in M. Daunton (ed.), The Organization of Knowledge in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 2005), pp. 159–72. 8

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philosophical radicalism. Gladstone’s ancient monarchs were much more moderate than the contemporary restored monarchies that he had come to despise after visiting the prisons of Naples. In Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (l858), Gladstone contended that the Homeric monarchs had dwelled in an age of transition between a patriarchal era and one of expanding commerce. In both the Homeric age and the contemporary modern age there remained affection for historic institutions in the process of change and accommodation. Political actors in such moments must avoid both reaction and radicalism. Gladstone’s Homeric monarchs, in contrast to Grote’s image of them, functioned in just that wise tempering fashion. Gladstone presented the Homeric monarchs as multi-talented, almost Peelite, officials who governed through ‘publicity and persuasion’.9 Gladstone went so far as to declare: The Homeric king reigns with the free assent of his subjects – an assent indeterminate, but real, and in both points alike resembling his kingly power. The relation between ruler and ruled is founded in the laws and conditions of our nature. Born in a state of dependence, man, when he attains to freedom and capacity for actions, finds himself the debtor both of his parents and of society at large; and is justly liable to discharge his debt by rending service in return.10

Rather than viewing the Homeric kings as representing a selfish and sinister Benthamite interest, Gladstone saw them as dedicated ‘to lead the common counsels to common ends’.11 Gladstone turned the Homeric Council, which the poet had only portrayed as a military institution, into a deliberative group that later took matters to a more popular Assembly. In effect, the monarchs provided executive leadership to the Council who in turn provided leadership for the Assembly. Those Homeric political actors who became overly outspoken rather than reasonable in deliberation were simply operating beyond the rules and deserved to be discounted or disciplined. Gladstone also praised the fact that the Homeric polity did not operate by majorities. At the same time, Gladstone left no doubt that the power of the Homeric monarchs was and should have been limited. He commented: ‘In heroic Greece the king, venerable as was his title, was the fountainhead of the common life, but only its exponent. The source lay in the community, and the community met in the Agora’.12 The ancient Homeric monarchs had recognised something like modern public opinion.   W.E. Gladstone, Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (3 vols, Oxford, l858), vol. 3, p. 7.   Gladstone, Studies on Homer, vol. 3, pp. 67–8. 11   Gladstone, Studies on Homer, vol. 3, p. 69. 12   Gladstone, Studies on Homer, vol. 3, p. 141. 9

10

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Over ten years later, in l869 in Juventus Mundi, Gladstone abandoned his assault on majorities and instead presented decision-by-majorities as a sign of advancing social development. This was no doubt a realistic recognition of the transformed political landscape following the Second Reform Act and also following the rise of new political groups in the United Kingdom. As part of his accommodation to decision-by-majorities, however, Gladstone introduced the notion of reverence – ‘that powerful principle, the counter-agent to all meanness and selfishness, which obliges a man to have regard to some law or standard above that of force, and extrinsic to his own will, his own passion, or his own propensities’.13 The emotion and habit of reverence represented to ‘the Greek mind and life what the dykes in Holland are to the surface of the country; shutting off passions as the angry sea, and securing a broad open surface for the growth of every tender and genial product of the soil’.14 Grote had looked to democracy to produce a form of politics that suffocated sinister interests. He had furthermore championed Socrates as a rationalistic, critical philosopher who had questioned the status quo without espousing much appreciation for it. Grote had also associated religious reverence in Athens with both sinister and antidemocratic political influences. Gladstone’s praise here and later in his life for reverence thus stood in direct opposition to the questioning by Grote and other philosophic radicals, such as J.S. Mill, of all things established. Gladstone, whether as a middle-aged late Peelite or as an elderly democratic liberal seems never to have seen government as transformative or Utopian. It was rather a vehicle for (among other things) to channel the passions of a fallen creature, and reverence for the past and for experience was one channel to contain those passions. Gladstone’s interpretation of Homer aroused mostly curiosity and contempt among professional scholars. However, his treatment of Homer was actually indicative of where Oxford classical studies would go. They did not champion democracy. Benjamin Jowett would be the major force in the next half century of Greek studies at Oxford. Plato not Homer was his protagonist, but there are curious parallels between the broad-church religiosity Jowett infused into Plato and his elitist vision of a properly governed democracy led by statesmen functioning above party, and the values that Gladstone had sought to inculcate through Homer. Those values would shape several generations of Oxford students who studied Literae Humaniores. More importantly, one can argue that Gladstone’s Homeric studies represented his own inner dialogue with himself. In these books, beyond providing his own curious interpretation of Homer, Gladstone is persuading himself that the   W.E. Gladstone, Juventus Mundi: The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age (London, l869),

13

p. 449.

  Gladstone, Juventus Mundi, pp. 449–50.

14

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traditional English political institutions of monarchy and aristocracy can, if made institutions of publicity and persuasion informed by reverence, lead an expanding electorate. The values that he articulated in his Homeric volumes would shape much of his political thought for the rest of his life as he moved steadily to the left. Politics could and indeed must change, but reverence for traditional institutions and traditional religion must provide the foundation for manners and morals of an increasingly democratic polity. In that sense, Gladstone’s Homeric studies had a profound influence on his political development. The Complexity of Gladstonian Liberalism Through his eschewing of cultural apostasy and political Utopianism, and his extending and modifying the Peelite understanding of political reform through his Homeric studies, Gladstone conjured into reality a political vision previously articulated by idealistic, anglophile eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French liberals. It is well known that French liberals from the time of Voltaire and Montesquieu, through Madam de Staël, Constant and Guizot, idealised the English constitution and many other aspects of English society, including its commercialism, embrace of science and religious toleration. Madame de Staël, in her posthumous Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution (l8l8), devoted the closing section to an analysis of England. She pointed to England since l688 as embodying the kind of polity to which the post-revolutionary French might aspire. She recalled her visit to England in the summer of l8l3, when she was deeply impressed by ‘the extent of the riches of a people who consent to what they give and consider public affairs as their own’,15 and which she ascribed to: Liberty, that is to the confidence of the nation in a government which makes the first principle of its finances consist in publicity; in a government enlightened by discussion and by liberty of the press … Thus everyone creates resources for himself, and no man endowed with any activity can be in England without finding the means of acquiring property by doing that, which contributes to the good of the state.16

Madam de Staël was not blind to the desirability for parliamentary reform although she embraced a gradualism in that sphere. Nevertheless, she had   G. de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution (ed.), Aurelian Craiutu (Indianapolis, 2008), p. 651. 16   de Staël, Considerations, pp. 652, 653. 15

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confidence in the English future because, as she explained: ‘That which is particularly characteristic of England is a mixture of chivalrous spirit with an enthusiasm for liberty, the two most noble sentiments of which the human heart is susceptible’.17 To this was added a respect for law over the authority of the state and ‘the political miracle of a respect for the rights of everyone founded on a sentiment of justice’, as well as ‘the union of equality under the law to the advantages arising from the separation of ranks’.18 Finally, she praised the liberty of the press and the general openness of English society and the manner that English institutions ‘favour every kind of intellectual progress’.19 This intellectual progress, however, was tied to and compatible with a widespread spirit of Christian morality of which she, along with other French liberals, firmly approved. The image of English liberal freedom drawn by Madam de Staël in l8l8 resembles the English polity at the height of Gladstonian liberalism. Over the course of his intellectual and political life, Gladstone moved toward policies and outlooks that very much resembled those ascribed to England by French liberals decades earlier. After abandoning his support for a confessional state in his early adulthood, Gladstone, like those French liberals, had come to understand the importance of religious freedom itself in creating loyalty. The policies that Gladstone had followed since the mid-1840s steadily and expansively embraced the ideals of religious toleration that de Staël associated with England. His Budget of l853 marked the commencement of that ‘culture of fiscal rectitude’ in public expenditure and taxation. Thus, Gladstone carried to their full fruition the Peelite initiatives of fiscal reform that brought both transparency and accountability to the national budget.20 Gladstonian finance also left much authority and initiative (not always taken) to local government in the manner de Staël and, later, Alexis de Tocqueville had praised. By emphasising the position of trust that possessors of property and the franchise must exercise on behalf of those with little or no property and lacking the vote, Gladstone realised the taxation policies that French liberals had seen already present in an earlier era of British history. Furthermore, Gladstone’s repeal of the Paper Duty in l861 helped to create a cheaper and thus more representative press. The other major reforms of Gladstone’s great first ministry also created a broader atmosphere of civic trust among and between the classes and opened the society to even greater     19   20   17

de Staël, Considerations, p. 671. de Staël, Considerations, p. 672. de Staël, Considerations, p. 678. M. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–1914 (Cambridge, 2001), p. 385. Daunton argues that the stability of Gladstonian liberalism was based on reality and not on false social assumptions or some mode of false consciousness. See pp. 375–90. 18

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possibilities of social mobility based on merit rather than birth or confessional affiliation. From the l850s onward, and with growing enthusiasm, Gladstone might well have declared along with Madam de Staël: ‘Nothing but liberty can arouse the soul to the interests of the social order’.21 This same sentiment informed his public interventions against what he understood as contemporary manifestations of arbitrary authority, whether in the policies of an increasingly centralised papacy or the Ottoman Empire. Nineteenth-century liberal politics became the object of remarkable intellectual contempt on the part of its enemies. Conservatives condemned liberalism from the beginning and along the way, even whilst adapting to its new structures and values. Radicals, whether of the philosophic or economic variety, thought liberals never went far enough in their reform. Socialists, and later the Labour Party, considered that they had failed to create a just distribution of goods and had evaded the fundamental problems of a class-ridden society. High Churchmen thought liberalism had fostered the secular. Roman Catholics set their face against liberalism from the time of Pius IX. In the twentieth century, the continental parties of the right heaped contempt on liberalism as ineffective in achieving great national goals. For all these groups, liberalism was a protean creature upon which they projected their fears or hatred. Liberal society was often the contemptible present against which cultural apostates and other Utopians turned their ire. Coming to grips with Gladstone requires that we understand Victorian liberalism on its own terms and not through the gaze of its enemies. In this respect, Gladstone and his career demand that we recognise the profound religious element, overwhelmingly Protestant, present in the Victorian liberal impulse. On the one hand, recognition of the religiosity of Victorian liberalism seems a commonplace; on the other, coming to grips seriously with this fact challenges much of the narrative of the emergence of modern Britain as the tale of the rise of secularism. From the early nineteenth century to the present, persons of liberal political disposition have had a hard time defending themselves against accusations of being irreligious. The radicalisation of the French Revolution forever associated even the principles of l789 with irreligion. High Churchmen and others accused the Whigs of the Reform Bill era of irreligion. By the twentieth century, many people of liberal political opinion were indeed often secular in outlook and disposition. But in the early nineteenth century, the Whigs and other liberals – including Peelite conservatives and (from mid-century) the liberal Nonconformists – were deeply religious no matter what conservative Anglicans and later Roman Catholics, such as Newman,   de Staël, Considerations, p. 754.

21

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may have said. It was both Gladstone’s own personal religiosity and that of his constituencies that in the long run seem to have made Gladstone comfortable (and on occasion enthusiastic) about the expansion of the circle of liberty. In this respect, Gladstone stands as the first major leader of a liberal democracy who made no bones about the importance of religion in his own life and in the culture of his nation. But the Gladstonian model would reappear, moreover, in the American context, though it has rarely been recognised as such. For example, Woodrow Wilson, like Gladstone, shared the sense of being providentially entrusted with great causes. The same outlook has touched other American presidents, most notably Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush and even Franklin Roosevelt, who personally penned and broadcast a prayer at the time of the Normandy invasion. The religiosity, mild or zealous, of American presidents has puzzled both American and foreign commentators. More particularly, the efforts of the Bush presidency to draw evangelical voters into its fold brought much criticism upon him. However, one must ask how much that action actually differs from Gladstone’s appeal to the Nonconformists who in his day were overwhelmingly evangelical and profoundly moralistic in their views of national and foreign policy? Moreover, from Gladstone’s day to the present, this religiosity, usually profoundly Protestant, has especially manifested itself through intervention in the regions of the former Ottoman Empire. The religiosity that Gladstone brought to political life was twofold. First, there was his personal, deep, ever-evolving and multi-faceted Anglican faith. Much of the religiosity of Gladstone’s liberal vision derived from Burke, but without his anger, hyperbole, fervent public emotionality and contempt and fear of Nonconformists. Gladstone, like Burke, demanded that political leaders and their followers among the broad populace actually think seriously about the character, foundations and presuppositions of freedom. Here, again, there appear many resonances in Gladstone’s mind with the moderate French liberals such as Benjamin Constant, Madame de Staël and Alexis de Tocqueville, who were themselves influenced by Burke. Politics for Gladstone – as for these French liberals – rides the crest of deep precognitive social and historical forces that predate politics and rational political analysis. Gladstone understood that practicable stable freedom must presuppose other factors at work: history, religion, established institutions, property, community, patriotism, family and that elusive quality that in his Homeric studies he termed ‘reverence’. In these sensibilities Gladstone would have grasped the powerful import of Tocqueville’s contention that: sometimes there comes a time in the life of nations when old customs are changed, mores destroyed, beliefs shaken, and the prestige of memories has vanished, but

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when none the less enlightenment has remained incomplete and political rights are ill-assured or restricted. Then men see their country only by a weak and doubtful light … they find their country nowhere, recognizing neither its own nor any borrowed features, and they retreat into a narrow and unenlightened egoism … amid confusion and misery.22

Gladstone was terrified that he and his contemporaries would – as a result of the forces of the age whether social, political, intellectual or scientific – ‘find their country nowhere’ and be overwhelmed with a chaotic egoism driven by blind passions ungoverned by religion, reverence or patriotism, working at one with religious faith. Gladstone, more than any other liberal of his day, understood the fundamental importance of executive leadership, hence his earlier emphasis on Homeric monarchy as setting the agenda of the ancient polity. Gladstone was not always good at it, but he understood that the new politics of an expanding franchise demanded leaders who could and would define the issues of the day. He had learned the lesson of executive party leadership from Peel,23 but he moved beyond his mentor to understand that a national political leader confronting an expanding electorate must set an agenda for the nation (or he might even have said with the nation). One might argue that one reason he was returned a further three times as Prime Minister after the fall of his first ministry was that he alone, of his political contemporaries, understood this truth. Gladstone’s American Legacy Liberal politics, separate from the particular policies of liberal governments, fell into contempt across Europe at the close of the nineteenth century because its enemies presented it as nothing more than government incapable of defining great issues. But the natural political successors of Gladstone and Gladstonianism were to be found in the United States. Woodrow Wilson directly transferred the Gladstonian model to America. The links between Gladstone and Wilson are clear. As a young adolescent in his pre-college years, Wilson hung a portrait of Gladstone over his desk. Later, as a young academic in l880, he wrote an admiring essay on Gladstone in which he declared:

  A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, J.P. Mayer (ed.), George Lawrence, tr. (Garden City, N.Y., 1969), p. 236. This quotation is from the first volume of de Tocqueville’s work. 23   See also Richard Gaunt’s chapter in this volume. 22

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And I do not know of any one among modern statesmen whose character is worthier of the study and the imitation of the young men of a free country than is Mr. Gladstone’s. His life has been one continuous advance not towards power only – fools may be powerful; knaves sometimes rule by the knack of their knavery – but towards truth also the whole.24

One cannot think of another model for Wilson’s mode of leadership other than Gladstone. Both were temperamentally conservative and religious figures who became liberals or progressives. Wilson believed the president must define the issues of the day and carry them to the people. He was the first president since Thomas Jefferson to appear personally before Congress to deliver his state of the union address. His interventionist internationalism, his ideal of self-determination for nations and his goal of international agencies to prevent war were clearly derivative of Gladstone. Moreover, he emulated Gladstone even in the last tragic months of his administration when he took the Treaty of Versailles and League of Nations to the American people by rail in a futile effort to gain their support as Gladstone had sought to carry Home Rule for Ireland. The Wilsonian model of the presidency and of American international relations largely determined the course of American Democratic Party foreign policy and congressional relations through the end of the Johnson administration. Conclusion Gladstone’s intellectual outlook and much of his personal temperament remained that of an early Victorian who survived almost to the close of the century. Had Gladstone actually retired, or had he died by the time he was sixty, the contours of the late Victorian and even European political world would have been enormously different. Gladstone’s ongoing presence kept political developments at the level of elite leadership in a state of near suspended animation. Few people expected either his political or physical longevity. Writing in 1880, Woodrow Wilson, then aged 26, stated of Gladstone: He is old now; he is turned of seventy … For his active life may reasonably be thought to be rapidly nearing its close. And it is because we thus stand near his grave that we may venture an estimate of his character. The few years that remain 24   W. Wilson, ‘Mr. Gladstone, a Character Sketch’ (April, l889), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, 1966), vol. 1, pp. 626–7. Wilson’s essay was originally published in the Virginia University Magazine.

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William Gladstone to him cannot materially change a character which has been a-making for seventy years of busy life.25

The longevity of Gladstone meant that he would matter not only to his own age but also into the next century. The last quarter of the nineteenth century should have been the era of Randolph Churchill, Joseph Chamberlain and Parnell. Instead, it remained the age of a very elderly figure who would not retire and whom a vast portion of the electorate did not want to do so.26 Gladstone, this old, old man, did for a time tame the disparate forces of his age. Max Weber caught some of it in linking Gladstone to his concept of charismatic leadership. But Gladstone represents more than the greatest charismatic British political leader of the late nineteenth century. Gladstone and Gladstonian liberalism at the end of the day represent a political path ultimately not taken beyond his own day and his own death. The remarkable combination of ideas and experience embodied in Gladstone: early pre-Victorian rearing and education; the mentorship of Peel; a deep and sincere Christian understanding of the world and history; periods of time out of office devoted to classical and historical reading, writing and thought of a serious character; a profound affection and admiration for the land and aristocracy; possession of real conviction about the monarchy; considerable wealth derived from commerce; a strong sense of patriotism in general separated from militarism; a surprising ecumenism in appreciation of religious sentiment; and a mid-life conversion to freedom. None of the British political leaders who succeeded Gladstone possessed those qualities or experiences. If anyone harbours doubts that Gladstone and Gladstonian liberalism, whatever their shortcomings, still do and should matter, the dismal record of the twentieth century should put those doubts to rest. The record of the twentieth century similarly serves to demonstrate the wisdom of embracing political reform while rejecting cultural apostasy.

25   Wilson, ‘Mr. Gladstone, A Character Sketch’ (April, 1880), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 1, p. 627. 26   The same might be said of Ronald Regan a century later who was 70 when he became president.

Chapter 2

Gladstone and Peel’s Mantle Richard A. Gaunt

From the current state of Gladstone scholarship, one would be forgiven for concluding that Gladstone was marked out, from an early age, as ‘Peel’s Inheritor’. This interpretation received its fullest modern rendition in Richard Shannon’s two-volume biography of Gladstone, completed in 1999.1 In redressing what Shannon regarded as the over-reverential attitude towards Gladstone displayed by previous biographers (notably, John Morley and Colin Matthew), Shannon sought to restore Gladstone’s Peelite heritage to prominence, regarding it as the key to his entire political career.2 For Shannon, Gladstone ‘became a Liberal … the better to be a Peelite’ and the better to put into action the lessons which he had learnt ‘from his great master Peel’. Principal amongst these lessons was: the potency and privilege of executive government against parliament; and within that frame of the instrumental role of party as the leverage of heroic politics … In the 1850s Gladstone constructed an image of Peel as the beau idéal of statesmanship in contrast to the deplorable and deleterious Palmerston (and his ultimate inheritor, Disraeli). That was the Peel that really mattered to Gladstone.3

For Shannon to pick this out as the principal lesson was telling, given the considerable criticisms levelled at Peel, in his own lifetime and subsequently, for his mishandling of party.4 Even more significant was Shannon’s openly stated admiration for ‘the shrewd insights of ... Walter Bagehot and Goldwin Smith about the adaptive character of Gladstone’s Liberalism’, for neither Bagehot nor   The first volume was initially titled Gladstone: 1809–1865 (London, 1982) but was given its significant sub-title on reissue; R. Shannon, Gladstone: Peel’s Inheritor, 1809–1865 (London, 1999) and Gladstone: Heroic Minister, 1865–1898 (London, 1999). 2   See R. Shannon, ‘Gladstone, Peel and Party’, Parliamentary History, 18/3 (1999), pp. 317–52 and ‘Matthew’s Gladstone’, Parliamentary History, 15/2 (1996), pp. 245–51. 3  Shannon, Heroic Minister, p. xv; R. Shannon, ‘Author’s response’ to E. Biagini, ‘Review of Gladstone: Heroic Minister, 1865–1898’ (Reviews in History, no. 89), http://www.history.ac.uk/ reviews/review/89 [accessed 05 February 2011]. 4   R.A. Gaunt, Sir Robert Peel. The Life and Legacy (London, 2010), pp. 81–102. 1

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Goldwin Smith (who had been Peel’s ‘official’ biographer during the 1850s and 1860s) were united in their admiration for Peel.5 Whilst the older Gladstone spoke reverentially about being ‘a survival from the time of Sir Robert Peel’, his admiration was not unequivocal; nevertheless, late in life, John Morley could ‘still detect in Gladstone’s methods of doing public business two unmistakable habits, even to the phrases, which Gladstone had learnt from Peel, and which Morley had first encountered when reading Peel’s letters’.6 If Shannon’s interpretation of Gladstone has had the effect of bringing its subject closer to Peel’s Conservatism, recent interpretations of Peel have, conversely, served to bring him closer to Gladstone’s mature liberalism. As Eugenio Biagini has noted, Shannon never addressed the question of ‘whether Peel himself was really a Liberal in disguise’, but Boyd Hilton, writing in 1979, was clear that Peel’s conduct during the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1845–46 made him ‘the progenitor of Gladstonian Liberalism’.7 In stating this, Hilton was restoring a ‘Liberal’ interpretation of Peel’s political career in the face of Norman Gash’s unashamedly Conservative reading of the statesman. Gash was markedly more sceptical about Gladstone’s claim to Peel’s mantle and far shrewder in realising that relations between the two men were never of such a nature as to make Gladstone’s succession to Peel either natural or inevitable.8 In marked contrast with Gladstone’s deep emotional attachment to Lord Aberdeen and Peel’s generous relations with the younger Peelites (notably Lincoln, Dalhousie and Sidney Herbert),9 relations between Gladstone and Peel were characterised by a series of misunderstandings and, occasionally, incomprehension on both sides. Whilst Gladstone was quickly fixed upon for junior office, in Peel’s first ministry of 1834–35, the appearance of Gladstone’s major foray into political theology, The State in its Relations with the Church (1838), marked a low point in relations between the two men. Dining with Peel, soon after the book’s publication, Gladstone detected ‘no change in manner’ but was mortified that he received no acknowledgement of the book or its contents. Privately, Peel is supposed to have dismissed the work as ‘trash’.10 In the run-up to the formation of Peel’s second ministry, in 1841, Gladstone convinced himself, 5   Shannon, ‘Author’s Response’ (Reviews in History, no. 89), http://www.history.ac.uk/ reviews/review/89/response. 6   Shannon, Heroic Minister, pp. 565–91; R. Jenkins, The Chancellors (London, 1998), p. 182. 7   Biagini, ‘Review’; B. Hilton, ‘Peel: A Reappraisal’, Historical Journal, 22/3 (1979), p. 614. 8   N. Gash, Sir Robert Peel (1972), pp. 708–9. 9   Gash, Peel, pp. 665–6. 10   The Gladstone Diaries (eds) M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew (14 vols, Oxford, 1968– 94), vol. 2, p. 580 and n. 3, 9 February 1839; also see J. Brooke and M. Sorensen (eds), Prime Ministers Papers: W.E. Gladstone (4 vols, London, 1971–81), vol. 1, p. 44; vol. 2, pp. 135–7.

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to the point of naivety, that he was a fit candidate for the office of Chief Secretary to Ireland (the post which Peel had obtained in 1812). This was politically impossible, given Gladstone’s published views on the supremacy of the Anglican establishment, and would have led to practical embarrassment, considering that the Chief Secretary was, by default, the government Visitor to the Catholic training seminary at Maynooth.11 Famously perturbed at being ‘sent to govern packages’, as Vice-President of the Board of Trade, Gladstone was, within six months, acting with all the zeal of a convert to free trade. He impetuously threatened resignation from office because of his belief that the government was not going far enough in its Corn Bill. Only some time-consuming (and clearly frustrating) persuasion, on Peel’s part, dissuaded Gladstone from this precipitous step: I fear Peel was much annoyed & displeased for he would not give me a word of help or of favourable supposition as to my own motives & belief … I wish I could have seen that he was at all soothed: he used nothing like an angry or unkind word, but the negative character of the conversation had a chilling effect on my feeble mind.12

Further contorted agonising, publicly laid before the Prime Minister, accompanied Gladstone’s acceptance of Cabinet Office as President of the Board of Trade in 1843.13 Final embarrassment ensued in 1845, when the government proceeded to increase (and entrench) the Maynooth Grant, making it a permanent charge on the Consolidated Fund. Gladstone was left in the anomalous position of resigning from Cabinet, in obeisance to his published views of 1838 opposing the endowment of non-Anglican establishments, whilst proceeding to vote for the measure from the backbenches. From the point of view of man-management, Gladstone must have been one of the most frustrating colleagues with whom Peel (a man not known for his reserves of patience) ever had to deal.14 As such, whilst Gladstone had ceded his reputation as the ‘rising hope of the stern unbending Tories’, by the autumn of 1845, he was no better placed than any of his ministerial colleagues to become Peel’s anointed heir apparent. Nothing had marked Gladstone out, at this point, as best suited to seize Peel’s mantle, in either a party-political or philosophical sense. This situation was to change dramatically over the course of the next decade as a result of three related developments: the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1845–46, the untimely death of Peel in July 1850   Brooke and Sorensen, Gladstone, vol. 2, pp. 158–63.   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 3, pp. 177–8, 5 February 1842; also see J. Brooke and M. Sorensen,

11 12

Gladstone, vol. 1, pp. 45–6, 234–5; vol. 2, pp. 166–72. 13   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 3, pp. 279–81, 13 and 15 May 1843. 14   Gladstone Diaries, pp. 424–5, 429, 9 and 28 January 1845.

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William Gladstone

and Gladstone’s subsequent astuteness in identifying (and capitalising upon) the extra-parliamentary constituency of support which Peel’s achievement of Repeal had helped to create. As this chapter argues, it was these factors, combined with the gradual falling away of Gladstone’s leading Peelite competitors, which ultimately secured Gladstone the inheritance. However, the nature of that inheritance was more complex than Shannon, for one, has appreciated, arising as it did from Gladstone’s interpretation of Peel’s later political career.15 Gladstone and Repeal, 1845–1846 On 22 December 1845, Gladstone joined Sir Robert Peel’s Cabinet for the second and, as it transpired, final time. For both men, it was a highly significant moment. At the beginning of the year, Gladstone had resigned over the Maynooth Grant. Now, before the year was out, he had returned to Cabinet, filling the office of Secretary of State for Colonies vacated by Lord Stanley, who had resigned from the government after Peel proposed first a temporary and then a permanent settlement of the Corn Laws. For Gladstone, it was an act of faith and commitment, ‘in opposition, [as he observed] to my leanings and desires: and with the most precarious prospects’.16 Its immediate practical consequence was the withdrawal of the Duke of Newcastle’s electoral patronage at Newark and Gladstone’s consequent absence from the House of Commons during the crucial debates on Repeal in 1846.17 Although he could not foresee it at the time, Gladstone’s acceptance of office proved to be one of the more crucial political decisions of his life. For Peel, the importance of Gladstone’s acceptance of office was of a different order. Having failed to carry his Cabinet with him unanimously on the Repeal question at the beginning of December 1845, Peel had passed the ‘poisoned chalice’ to Lord John Russell and the Whigs, confident, as Lord Lincoln told Gladstone on 19 December, ‘that the thing must be done and yet that he was not the man to do it’.18 Within a day of that conversation, the situation had been entirely transformed. Russell’s failure to form a viable administration meant the chalice was not only passed back to Peel but that, thereafter, he proceeded to drink 15   For a recent restatement of Shannon’s position, see his Gladstone: God and Politics (London, 2007), pp. xi–xxv. 16   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 3, p. 506, 22 December 1845. 17   R.A. Gaunt, ‘A Stern Unbending Tory and the Rising Young Hope: Gladstone, Newark

and the Fourth Duke of Newcastle, 1832–46’, in P. Francis (ed.), The Gladstone Umbrella (Hawarden, 2001), pp. 14–35. 18   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 3, p. 504, 19 December 1845.

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from it lustily. The Whigs’ failure in December 1845 effected a transformation in Peel’s conception of the Repeal of the Corn Laws, and its consequences, which raised it from a mere question of tariff scales and protective duties, or fidelity to the ties of party, in to one almost wholly centred around the Duke of Wellington’s famous question: ‘How is the Queen’s Government to be carried on?’. In his own mind, Peel’s offer to resign had redeemed the pledge to preserve the Corn Laws made by Conservative MPs at the General Election of 1841. The renewed commission to continue the government, in the absence of all realistic alternatives, released Peel from further restrictions and allowed him to impose his will on the Cabinet in a way which was remarkable, even for a man whose conception of the powers of a Prime Minister were as authoritarian as his were.19 Consequently, Peel took an uncharitable view of those Conservative MPs who voluntarily sought re-election on the basis of their newly declared support for Repeal. Other than in the case of MPs whose re-election was necessitated by their acceptance of ministerial office (such as Lord Lincoln), Peel remained an unwilling advocate of this interpretation of the representative principle.20 The wider transformation in Peel’s attitudes, at this time, was marked by his famous observation to Princess Lieven that he felt ‘like a man restored to life after his funeral service had been preached’.21 Boyd Hilton has noted the ‘messianic’ sense which seized Peel from this time forward; a sense which heightened and deepened as the severity of Conservative opposition unfolded in succeeding months. Peel increasingly invoked ‘the dispensations of Providence’ as the justification for his course of action, became less mindful of the Conservative Party’s fate and focused on securing his own historic reputation by associating his name with one last act of heroic political endeavour.22 In this respect, there are striking parallels in style, tone, language and rhetoric between Peel’s disruption of the Conservatives over Repeal in 1846 and Gladstone’s disruption of the Liberals over Irish Home Rule in 1886. However, for one well-placed contemporary, Lewis Harcourt, ‘the moral intoxication of present power’ outweighed ‘all considerations of posthumous fame’ in so far as Gladstone was concerned, on the latter occasion. To that extent, Gladstone’s priorities were different from Peel’s.23   Gaunt, Peel, pp. 123–30.   B. Kemp, ‘Reflections on the Repeal of the Corn Laws’, Victorian Studies, 6 (1962), pp.

19 20

189–204. 21   Lord Mahon and E. Cardwell (eds), Memoirs of Sir Robert Peel (2 vols, London, 1856–57), vol. 2, pp. 251–2. 22   Hilton, ‘Peel: A Reappraisal’, Historical Journal, vol. 22/3 (1979), pp. 585–614. 23   P. Jackson (ed.), Loulou: Selected Extracts from the Journals of Lewis Harcourt, 1880– 1895 (New Jersey, 2006), p. 74, 7 December 1884. For conflicting views on the 1846/86 analogy,

36

William Gladstone

To use a term later applied to Gladstone, Peel was ‘unmuzzled’ from past political obligations after December 1845 and pursued his prey with singleminded determination. As Edward Cardwell later informed Goldwin Smith, ‘the power of [the] cabinet was then limited to one single object, the Repeal of the Corn Laws. To that single object, every thing was subordinate, and when it was necessary to do so, every thing was sacrificed’.24 The process culminated in Peel’s assault on Tory monopolists who clamoured ‘for protection because it conduces to [their] own individual benefit’ and his panegyric to Richard Cobden, the leader of the Anti-Corn Law League, in the resignation speech which he delivered on 29 June 1846, four days after securing Repeal: The name which ought to be, and will be, associated with the success of [these] measures, is the name of one who, acting, I believe, from pure and disinterested motives, has, with untiring energy, made appeals to our reason, and has enforced those appeals with an eloquence the more to be admired because it was unaffected and unadorned: the name which ought to be chiefly associated with the success of [these] measures, is the name of RICHARD COBDEN.25

The speech appalled Gladstone. The declaration about Cobden was unjust because, ‘if his power of discussion has been great and his end good, his tone has been most harsh, and his imputation of bad and vile motives to honourable men incessant’. Passing such a eulogium reflected something unworthy in Peel’s mind, because it suggested that ‘like some smaller men’ he was ‘very sensible of the sweetness of the cheers of opponents’.26 To Sir James Graham, Gladstone ‘admitted the truth of every word that Peel had uttered – but complained of its omissions, of its spirit towards his own friends, of its false moral effect, as well as and much more than of its mere impolicy’.27 As such, the analogy which is sometimes drawn between Peel’s resignation of the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1846 and Gladstone’s resignation of the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1875 is a superficial one, for in Peel’s

see H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1875–1898 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 234, 307–8 and P. Ghosh, ‘Gladstone and Peel’, in P. Ghosh and L. Goldman (eds), Politics & Culture in Victorian Britain. Essays in Memory of Colin Matthew (Oxford, 2006), pp. 68–9. 24   Kew, The National Archives, PRO 30/48/53, fol. 85, Cardwell to Goldwin Smith, 4 October 1858. 25   The Speeches of the Late Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel, Bart (4 vols, London, 1853), vol. 4, pp. 716–17. 26   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 3, p. 547, 30 June 1846. 27   Brooke and Sorensen, Gladstone, vol. 3, pp. 19–25.

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case the manner of his resignation was intentionally disruptive.28 Having been, at the beginning of December 1845, in the position of Gladstone in respect of Maynooth – willing to support from the backbenches what he could not, in good conscience, execute from within government – Peel had become, by June 1846, the living embodiment of the Conservative Party schism and the standing impediment (whilst he lived) to its future recovery. There is, therefore, more than usual significance in Gladstone’s record of his meeting with Peel upon accepting Cabinet office at the end of 1845: ‘Peel was most kind, nay fatherly – we held hands instinctively and I could not but reciprocate with emphasis his “God Bless You”’.29 It was uncharacteristic of their relationship before this time and must largely be explained by the psychology of the circumstances in which it arose, as the embattled Prime Minister found practical (and seemingly willing) assistance from a junior colleague. It was probably the last great moment of intimacy between them.30 Before five years had elapsed, Peel was dead. Gladstone’s reaction to this event, as Lord Jenkins noted, strikes a modern eye as remarkably cool.31 On 2 July 1850, the day Peel died as the result of injuries sustained in a riding accident, Gladstone noted the death of the nation’s ‘greatest statesman’ and remembered ‘with joy with how pure, true and vigilant a conscience he always seemed to act’.32 The next day, Gladstone was unexpectedly called upon to second Joseph Hume’s motion to adjourn the House of Commons out of respect to Peel. During this speech, Gladstone was reported to be ‘deeply affected’ and ‘several times almost inaudible’. He observed that ‘every heart [was] much too full … to enter upon the consideration … of that calamity with which the country has been visited’ and quoted Sir Walter Scott’s lines on the death of the Younger Pitt: Now is the stately column broke, The beacon light is quenched in smoke; The trumpet’s silver voice is still; The warder silent on the hill.

    30   31   28

Shannon, Heroic Minister, pp. xiii–xiv. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 3, pp. 506–7, 22 December 1845, italics in the original. Compare Brooke and Sorensen, Gladstone, vol. 2, p. 43. R. Jenkins, Gladstone (London, 1995), pp. 63–5. For a contrary view, see E.J. Evans, ‘“The Strict Line of Political Succession”? Gladstone’s Relationship with Peel: An Apt Pupil?’, in D. Bebbington and R. Swift (eds), Gladstone Centenary Essays (Liverpool, 2000), p. 31. 32   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 4, p. 223, 2 July 1850. Also see A. Briggs (ed.), Gladstone’s Boswell. Late Victorian Conversations (Brighton, 1984), pp. 126–7. 29

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Subsequently, Gladstone busied himself correcting the report of these remarks for The Morning Chronicle.33 Likewise, at 3pm on 9 July, Gladstone found himself at Westminster Abbey, far from the scene of Peel’s funeral at Drayton Bassett church in Staffordshire: ‘About this hour Sir Robert Peel will have been interred. I mourn to be absent’. Though funerals in the country were not generally public occasions and Peel had specifically prohibited all forms of ceremony, Gladstone was a notable absentee from the internment, which was attended by Aberdeen, Bonham, Goulburn, Graham, Hardinge and Herbert.34 The relative paucity of Gladstone’s tribute to Peel stands in comparison with the more emotional reaction of Lord Lincoln, Gladstone’s leading competitor for supremacy amongst the younger Peelites and a close personal friend. Lincoln had gone on an overseas yachting trip to escape his domestic troubles during the summer of 1850, was in the throes of a difficult and controversial public divorce, plagued by family miseries, estranged from his father and troubled by the mounting debts under which the family estates were increasingly encumbered. Yet in writing to Gladstone, he expressed a more profound sense of the loss occasioned in him by Peel’s death: I cannot yet realize the sad, the awful event which has been announced to me here – the “death of Sir Robert Peel” seems yet to me like a horrid dream – a thing that cannot be. I can not help, though I feel keenly the national calamity, looking at it also in a selfish light and I really can hardly picture to myself any event except the loss of one of my children which would bring such poignant sorrow to my blighted heart ...35

It was not that Gladstone was incapable of empathising with Lincoln’s sentiments; the death of his five year old daughter Jessy, only three months before, undoubtedly put some of Lincoln’s comments into perspective. Both men faced significant personal and public crises during the 1840s and their experience of Peel’s ministry may be said to have effected important transformations in them both.36 Yet their different responses to Peel’s death seem more than usually marked, reflecting differences in the relative proximity of both men to Peel and to the defining issue of Repeal by which he ultimately came to be remembered.   The Morning Chronicle, 4 July 1850.   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 4, p. 224, 9 July 1850; N. Gash, p. 716. 35   Nottingham, Nottingham University Manuscripts Department, Ne C 11696/1–2, 33 34

Lincoln to Gladstone, 16 July 1850. 36   H.C.G Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 59–102; F.D. Munsell, The Unfortunate Duke. Henry Pelham, Fifth Duke of Newcastle, 1811–1864 (Columbia, 1985), pp. 38–119.

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To explain the difference between them, we need to go back to 1845. Lincoln entered the Cabinet at just the point that Gladstone left it over Maynooth. Subsequently, as he confessed to Gladstone on 6 December that year, he had become convinced of the inevitability of the Repeal of the Corn Laws. Whilst he would have preferred to await the outcome of the next general election, Lincoln told Gladstone darkly that 1846 was to be the year of ‘Nemesis’. The difference between the two men at this time was whether the existing Corn Law, which Peel’s government had introduced in 1842, with a sliding scale of protective duties, had enough utility to withstand the crisis precipitated by the Irish Potato Famine. Not unnaturally, given the role that he had played in formulating it, Gladstone felt that the act had not been fairly tested; indeed, it had been designed to operate in just such a crisis. By contrast, Lincoln believed that unfolding events in Ireland had provided an opportunity to ‘get rid’ of protective duties on corn, ‘not in a moment, but with safeguards’, and in such a way as to ‘disengage the Corn Laws if possible from the general interests of the aristocracy which were now most seriously compromised by it’.37 However, for Gladstone, the constitutional issue was equally significant. As he put it to Lincoln, for Peel’s ministry to pursue Repeal would administer a shock to ‘the due relation between the constituents and the representative body’, because Conservative MPs would be reneging on the pledges they had made at the general election barely five years before. Gladstone felt ‘that if such things were to be, I for one neither could again expect others to believe me nor could believe myself. All this, however, apart from the supposition of a given state of things in Ireland which if it existed might entirely alter the case’. The ‘if’ here was significant: Gladstone was not immediately predisposed to grant Repeal on the grounds of the reported failure of the potato crop in Ireland. News of this failure had begun to circulate in England during October and November 1845 but many politicians had misgivings as to the accuracy of the reports and the extent of the problem.38 Moreover, in privileging the constitutional issue above all others, Gladstone was beginning to evolve his view of the adverse political consequences of Repeal. This came to be expounded at length in subsequent years; first, in the 1855 manuscript on ‘Party as it was and as it is’ to which Peter Ghosh has drawn renewed attention;39 second, in two subsequent letters to Lord Aberdeen, of 13 March 1856 and 31 March 185740 and finally in Gladstone’s famous (though     39   40   37

38

Gladstone Diaries, vol. 3, pp. 500–1, 6 December 1845. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 3, p. 504, 20 December 1845, italics in the original. London, British Library, Gladstone Papers, Add. MS 44745, fols 173–222; Ghosh, pp. 61–7. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 5, pp. 112–14, 13 March 1856, pp. 210–11, 31 March 1857.

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putatively anonymous) article, ‘The Declining Efficiency of Parliament’, published in The Quarterly Review in September 1856.41 The timing and medium of the latter was particularly revealing. The same year, the tenth since Repeal had passed, saw the publication of the first volume of Peel’s Memoirs (covering the Catholic Emancipation Crisis) whilst the Quarterly Review was the leading Conservative periodical of its day and had broken spectacularly with Peel in 1846. It is far from coincidental that, amongst Gladstone’s reading at this time, was W.T. Haly’s The Opinions of Sir Robert Peel expressed in Parliament and in Public (1843) and Francois Guizot’s newly published (1857) memoir of the statesman. Equally significant was Gladstone’s refusal to review the latter for The Quarterly Review for fear of upsetting Lord Derby, the Conservative Party leader who had, as Lord Stanley, been Peel’s principal Cabinet opponent over Repeal.42 Rather than being a momentary ebullition of feeling, born of the frustrations of opposition, as Richard Shannon maintains, Gladstone’s manuscripts on party and Parliament, at this time, set out a vision of ‘parliamentary government’ to which he remained devoted for the rest of his life.43 Identifying the period 1835– 45 as the halcyon days of that system, Gladstone clearly regarded Peel’s manner of securing Repeal as dangerously destabilising. Thirty years later, Gladstone informed the Duke of Argyll that: A respectable Conservatism in my view was that of [the] Peel-Stanley-Graham Opposition and Government [of 1835–45]. There was in that party an enlightened spirit of progress in all administrative questions, a strong and determined anti-Jingo temper, and a firm adhesion to all elementary principles of Government.44

Therefore, as Gladstone admitted to his wife, he re-entered Peel’s government in December 1845 with ‘a heavy heart’,45 and in the face of two principal reservations. First was Gladstone’s sense that the existing Corn Law had not been sufficiently tested to render it useless. This was a position entirely consonant with the arguments of many Conservative backbenchers and the view taken by the Quarterly itself during 1846. It was an argument which Gladstone was willing to suspend in light of the evidence from Ireland, to which he became privy on   The Quarterly Review, 99, 3 (1856), pp. 521–70.   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 5, p. 207, n. 4. 43   Shannon, Peel’s Inheritor, pp. 307–10. Also see A. Hawkins, ‘“Parliamentary Government” 41 42

and Victorian Political Parties, c.1830–1880’, English Historical Review, 104/3 (1989), pp. 638–69. 44   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, p. 408. Also see Gladstone to G.W.E. Russell, 6 March 1894, in Gladstone Diaries, vol. 13, p. 395. 45   J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (3 vols, London, 1903), vol. 1, p. 285.

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21 December, the day before his return to government. Peel visited Gladstone at Lincoln’s house and unfolded the available intelligence before him, leaving it entirely to Gladstone to reach his own judgement. The material was sufficient to persuade Gladstone on his first point of concern.46 Gladstone’s second reservation, which (as future events demonstrated) was less easily overcome, regarded his doubts as to the impact which Repeal would have upon the representative principle in general and on political connections and parliamentary government in particular. Peel’s confidence in his own ability as a parliamentarian was enough to persuade Gladstone, but with what degree of sincerity is hard to tell. As Gladstone recalled, in 1851, Peel ‘spoke with a kind of glee and complacency in his tone when he said, making up his meaning by signs, “I have not lived near forty years in public life to find myself wholly without the power of foreseeing the course of events in the House of Commons”’. Gladstone must have remembered Peel’s mishandling of the Conservative Party, during the Sugar Duties crisis of 1844, when he observed that ‘a great man had committed a great error’, by treating his backbenchers with so little respect.47 Deprived of a parliamentary seat by his change of heart over Repeal, Gladstone was unable to exercise any sort of restraining influence over Peel, as the Bill made its way through the House of Commons during 1846. As the session unfolded, Peel appeared to have committed errors of judgement from which the system of parliamentary government was still reeling a decade later.48 Gladstone and Peel, 1846–1850 Gladstone’s autobiographical memoranda for the final four years of Peel’s life, from the time of the Repeal of the Corn Laws until his death in 1850, provide the most far-sighted and perceptive insider’s account of the anomalous position which Peel attempted to occupy in this period. Peel’s attempt to act as the semi-detached leader of a political group which lacked freedom of action in itself but possessed tremendous powers of mischief in respect of others was exactly the state of affairs which Gladstone had feared when pondering his return to government in December 1845 and one whose effects he still regretted a decade later.49 As Gladstone famously commented, ‘former Prime Ministers are like untethered rafts drifting around harbours – a menace to     48   49   46 47

Brooke and Sorensen, Gladstone, vol. 3, p. 79. Brooke and Sorensen, Gladstone, vol. 1, pp. 61–2; vol. 2, p. 265; vol. 3, p. 79. For Gladstone’s search for a seat, see N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel (1953), pp. 235–8. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 5, pp. 206–7, 13 and 17–20 March 1857.

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shipping’. This criticism is the more telling, in retrospect, precisely because it came from Gladstone.50 For Gladstone, Peel’s worst error in the period 1846–50, recorded as such at the time, had been in thinking that he could retain his seat in the House of Commons whilst simultaneously practising a self-denying ordnance in terms of party leadership and availability for high office. The analogy which Peel seems to have had in mind for his political position, after 1846, was that of Earl Spencer, formerly Viscount Althorp, who had made ‘rare appearances for serious purposes and without compromise generally to the independence of his personal habits’. However, as Gladstone unhelpfully pointed out, Spencer was a peer of the realm and this placed him in an entirely different political situation. It was the consequences of Peel’s thinking which, as Gladstone subsequently told Graham, were at fault: Do you conceive that men who have played a great part, who have swayed the great moving forces of the State, who have led the House of Commons and given the tone to public policy, can at their will say they will remain there but renounce the consequences of their remaining and refuse to fulfil what must fall to them in some contingency of public affairs [?]51

Gladstone felt it to be ‘false and in the abstract almost immoral’ that Peel sat ‘on the opposition side of the House professing thereby to be independent … but in every critical vote [was] governed by the intention to keep ministers in office and sacrifice every thing to that intention’.52 Gladstone later maintained that the ‘false position’ in which the Peelites found themselves was entirely ‘due to Peel himself ’ and the line he had ‘walked with such a set purpose’, in supporting Russell’s ministry to the exclusion of all potential political alternatives.53 Moreover, with the death of Lord George Bentinck, the leader of the Protectionist wing of the Conservative Party, in September 1848, Gladstone believed that there was no practical possibility that a government might be formed with a commitment to restore the Corn Laws. In any case, it was better for such a ministry to try (and fail) in the endeavour than to allow the groundswell of Protectionist opinion in the country to grow to dangerous levels (as it threatened to do in 1849–50). Gladstone was prescient in foreseeing that, when the time came (as it did in the brief Derby Ministry of 1852), the Protectionists would find it impossible to retrace their steps and restore protective duties on     52   53   50

51

Jenkins, The Chancellors, p. 187. Brooke and Sorensen, Gladstone, vol. 3 pp. 19–20, 23, 28–30. Brooke and Sorensen, Gladstone, p. 46. A. Ramm (ed.), The Gladstone-Granville Correspondence (Cambridge, 1998), p. 360.

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corn. It was Gladstone himself who demonstrated this, through his demolition of Disraeli’s budget. But whilst Peel lived, it proved impossible to convince him of this logic.54 After 1852, the incongruity of the Conservatism schism became even more apparent, as Derby’s Conservatives came to accept something of a ‘Peelite consensus’ on the subject. As Gladstone informed Lord Aberdeen, in March 1857: What can be worse for our characters than to have it said that, having professed to quarrel with our party in a particular question in 1846, we not only continued the quarrel after that question was disposed of, but we also consummated the rupture just when the Conservative Party had made it a main object to defend our principles and measures in finance, and the principles of foreign policy which are peculiarly yours? … What sort of light will this proceeding reflect upon the character of Sir Robert Peel, and upon his never recalled declarations that the course he took upon the Corn Law in 1846 was not a breach of his obligations rightly understood to those who had raised him to power?55

Gladstone’s formulation of the issue was significant. ‘The Character of Sir Robert Peel’ was then a matter of contemporary moment, having been dissected with forensic skill by Walter Bagehot in a famously unsympathetic essay in The National Review. Bagehot, who had recently helped to found the journal, and later became editor of The Economist, dismissed Peel’s cast of mind as commonplace and derivative: ‘No man has come so near our definition of a constitutional statesman – the powers of a first-rate man and the creed of a second-rate man’.56 Peel’s position between 1846 and 1850 would appear to reinforce Bagehot’s underlying thesis. Gladstone attempted to persuade Peel that, by striving so hard to prevent the circumstances in which he might be recalled to power, he was in fact stoking up a crisis in which exactly that contingency might arise.57 Thus, whilst the Peelites were frequently represented as exerting a moderating influence, in these years, the reality suggested otherwise, for their practical political alternatives were non-existent and their dependence on the Whigs all   Brooke and Sorensen, Gladstone, vol. 3, pp. 37, 75–6, 267–8.   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 5, p. 211, 31 March 1857. 56   The National Review, 3, 5 ( July 1856), pp. 146–74; N.S. Stevas (ed.), The Collected Works 54

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of Sir Walter Bagehot, Volume III, The Historical Essays (London, 1968), pp. 238–71. Ironically, Bagehot may have been influenced in this view by Disraeli’s disparaging opinion in his biography of Lord George Bentinck (1852) that Peel’s mind was incapable of originality but was a fertile field for the implantation of other peoples’ ideas. 57   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 4, p. 13, 25 February 1848.

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but total. As Gladstone shrewdly observed, ‘of all Members of Parliament’, Peel’s latitude for action was the most constrained of all.58 As such, whilst Peel’s political stock with the nation at large continued to rise, during this period, as a result of his role in Repeal, so his political options correspondingly narrowed to the point of irrelevance. In retrospect, as more than one contemporary recognised, it was better for Peel’s reputation that he was spared the political conflicts to which the 1850s gave rise. Conversely, his death removed a standing obstacle to ‘Conservative Reunion’ and to the relative free movement of a host of political heavyweights, including Gladstone, whose realm of action (so long as Peel lived) remained circumscribed.59 Gladstone After Peel On 12 October 1853, Gladstone unveiled the statue of Sir Robert Peel in Manchester’s Piccadilly, outside the Royal Infirmary, ‘before a great assemblage – of men almost exclusively, and working men. There I spoke, to the cracking of my voice’.60 In introducing Gladstone to the assembled throng, the Mayor of Manchester described him as Peel’s ‘most able and consistent supporter during his arduous struggle for commercial freedom’ whilst Gladstone described himself ‘as one who may call myself his pupil and his follower in politics’.61 Seven years later, the Liberal MP Sir John Trelawny was ‘struck forcibly’ by the impression that, in his parliamentary speeches, Gladstone ‘has made Peel his model as to manner, attitude, intonation and turn of sentences’.62 There is little doubt that there was a Peelite inheritance for the taking, after July 1850, and that, of the younger generation of Peel’s followers in the Repeal crisis, it was Gladstone who most successfully seized the moment in claiming it. In the closing stages of the Repeal crisis, Richard Cobden had informed Peel that he represented ‘the idea of the age’ and urged him to harness the power he had released in the country at large in a coalition of opinion directed to the interests of the middle class.63 Peel refused the invitation; indeed, he was entirely unfitted by temperament and character for the part. In any case, he would have found it impossible to do as Cobden desired. As Gladstone had feared at the time,     60   61   62   58

Brooke and Sorensen, Gladstone, vol. 3, pp. 38–9. Gaunt, pp. 134–5. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 4, p. 562, 12 October 1853, italics in the original. The Times, 13 October 1853. T.A. Jenkins (ed.), The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 1858–65, Royal Historical Society Camden 4th Series, 40 (Woodbridge, 1990), p. 95. 63   J. Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden (2 vols, London, 1908), vol. 1, pp. 418–30. 59

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and subsequently came to argue, the means by which Peel had achieved Repeal had disabled his future political prospects and left him unable to combine the parliamentary and the popular in one person, for it had shattered the political machinery through which he could govern effectively and left him isolated and effectively powerless in parliamentary terms. Nevertheless, Cobden’s vision of a politician uniting the power of executive action with the support of extra-parliamentary opinion remained a powerful stimulus for future action. It was a vision of which Gladstone became increasingly aware. After Peel’s death, a rash of statues, busts and china figurines gave material expression to it, explicitly evoking the part which the ‘heroic statesman’ had played in achieving Repeal.64 However, by the 1860s, it was Gladstone, ‘The People’s William’, who was beginning to supplant Peel in material culture and increasingly adorn the mantelpieces and wall space of mid-Victorian middle-class homes.65 The democratic capital which Peel had created through his part in Repeal was something he would never have seized or shaped but it was a constituency of extra-parliamentary support with which Gladstone increasingly identified. Later in his career, Gladstone began to harness the latent power of an audience of ‘men, almost exclusively, and working men’ and create an extra-parliamentary constituency of support to guide and sustain his own political journey.66 However, this outcome was by no means certain and Peel himself would probably have been surprised that it was Gladstone who became the recipient of his mantle. For all the commonalities between them, in respect of regional affiliation and social origin, which made Gladstone an apt choice for the Manchester ceremonies, Peel had (like Gladstone after him) an undoubted penchant for the political abilities and social grounding of men with wellestablished connections to the landed aristocracy. Peel’s father was a Lancashirebred Pittite Tory who was given a baronetcy by the Younger Pitt, whilst Gladstone’s father was a Liverpool-based Canningite Tory who was given a baronetcy by Sir Robert Peel, but, significantly, both Gladstone and Peel remained House of Commons men.67 Peel’s heroic reputation for far-sighted statesmanship in placing nation before party owed almost everything to his association with the Repeal of the Corn Laws and the apotheosis through which he passed as a result of it, after December 1845. His status was cemented, thereafter, by the tragic and unexpected circumstances   D. Read, Peel and the Victorians (Oxford, 1987).   See Mark Nixon’s chapter in this volume. 66   E. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone 64 65

1860–1880 (Cambridge, 1992). 67   For a transatlantic view on Gladstone’s aversion to taking a peerage, see The New York Times, 17 July 1881.

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of his death. Yet the practical political capital which this bequeathed was of a relatively fleeting nature. As such, there was an element of default as well as design in Gladstone’s succession to the Peelite inheritance. Lincoln’s elevation to the House of Lords, in January 1851, and his subsequent implication in the mismanagement of the Crimean conflict of 1854–56, indelibly tarred him with a reputation for administrative incompetence. This proved fatal to his ambitions and denied him the golden political inheritance for which he, and probably Peel, thought him entitled. After Lincoln’s death, in 1864, Gladstone ensured that his reputation was shrouded from the harsh light which a biography might cast upon it and, as a trustee of his estate, relocated some of the more sensitive personal correspondence from Clumber Park to Hawarden Castle.68 Likewise, Sidney Herbert was, at the time of Repeal, marked out, ‘as the leader of the younger Peelites, more reliable if also less able than his close contemporary, Gladstone’.69 Herbert’s diffident character and fellow implication in managing the Crimean conflict served, like Lincoln, to remove him from active contention.70 By contrast, Gladstone’s reputation emerged relatively unscathed from the Aberdeen Coalition of 1852–55, although his subsequent volte face on the war reduced his popularity significantly (not least, with the Peelites). Consequently, Gladstone became the principal target for overtures from Lord Derby’s Conservatives.71 Whilst fate had, according to Disraeli, continued to pursue the younger Peelites ‘like the House of Atreus’, given the succession of early deaths attending their number (Herbert in 1861, Lincoln in 1864), Gladstone had emerged triumphant from the unspoken battle for Peel’s mantle. In the absence of all viable alternatives, Gladstone became, for all practical purposes, Peel’s principal political legatee.72 Gladstone and Peel’s Historical Memory Securing historical validation for the apostolic succession to Peel was a different matter. Though it has often been remarked how crucial the Peel–Gladstone   On Lincoln’s troubles, in addition to Munsell, see A. Isba, Gladstone and Women (London, 2006), pp. 71–98. 69   H.C.G. Matthew, ‘Sidney Herbert’, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edition), http://www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 21 January 2011]. 70   For Gladstone’s mature reflections on Lincoln and Herbert, see Brooke and Sorensen, Gladstone, vol. 1, pp. 78–80. 71   N. Gash, ‘The Peelites after Peel’, in P. Catterall (ed.), Britain, 1815–1867 (London, 1994), pp. 83–90. 72   M.G. Wiebe, M.S. Millar, A.P. Robson and E.L. Hawman (eds), Benjamin Disraeli Letters: Volume VIII, 1860–1864 (Toronto, 2009), p. 146. 68

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relationship is to our understanding of Gladstone, it is less often recalled how many of our views of Peel (and the Peelites) have been shaped by Gladstone himself.73 In one sense, this is a natural consequence of Gladstone’s gigantic archival legacy to posterity; in another, it is indicative of his desire to be as much a historian of his own times (and his own role within them) as an active participant himself. For example, Gladstone not only influenced future historical treatments of Lincoln (through his role as executor of the Newcastle Trust) but exercised a decisive embargo over the publication of Lord Aberdeen’s papers.74 Gladstone’s impact upon Peel’s historical memory was rather different. Under the terms of Peel’s will, Philip Henry Mahon (afterwards Earl Stanhope) and Edward Cardwell were appointed executors of Peel’s literary remains. This included his enormous correspondence and the memoirs which he had prepared in retirement.75 Mahon had little doubt of the advisability of publishing Peel’s Memoirs separately and in advance of an edition of the generality of Peel’s papers, though there were political objections to publishing that on Repeal until ‘the hopes of re-enacting the Corn Law’ had ‘faded in the distance’.76 Nevertheless, Gladstone – who was invited to read the manuscript before publication – had little doubt of their importance: ‘For the vindication of [Peel’s] fame both memoirs are needless: yet the writer has by them done in a masterly manner for posterity what posterity would have done only later and more circuitously for itself ’.77 In the event, the publication of Peel’s Memoirs was badly timed, appearing at the nadir of Peelite fortunes, during 1856–57. It gave rise to a (generally unhelpful) raking over of Peel’s political conduct which coincided with Gladstone’s (thinly anonymous) intervention, ‘The Declining Efficiency of Parliament’. It is hardly coincidental that the Peelites, as a recognised political entity, did not long outlast the publication of the Memoirs or the formation of the Liberal Party (1859).78 Nor was the attempt to produce an ‘official’ biography of Peel and an edition of his papers pursued with anything like Peelite efficiency by Mahon and Cardwell. Having failed abysmally in their choice of official biographer, Goldwin Smith, who only managed to complete some 80 pages of biography down to Peel’s assumption 73   For some examples, see Briggs, p. 117; D.W.R. Bahlman (ed.), The Diary of Sir Edward Walter Hamilton, 1885–1906 (Hull, 1993), pp. 57–8, 20 March 1887; Gladstone Diaries, vol. 2, p. 217, 19 January 1836; Brooke and Sorensen, Gladstone, vol. 1, pp. 61–2; vol. 2, p. 265; vol. 3, p. 79. 74   M.E. Chamberlain, Lord Aberdeen (London, 1983), pp. 1–12. 75   See The Times, 17 August 1850; 31 August 1850. 76   Kew, The National Archives, PRO 30/48/53, fols 64–6, Mahon to Cardwell, 11 October 1851. 77   Brooke and Sorensen, Gladstone, vol. 3, p. 77. 78   Gaunt, pp. 152–3.

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of the Chief Secretaryship of Ireland (the period at which the mass of surviving papers commenced), the commission was abandoned without regret on either side.79 What remained of Peel’s literary legacy fell to Cardwell and his son-in-law and one-time private secretary, Charles Stuart Parker, to finesse in to shape. It was Parker who ultimately compiled the standard triple-decker edition of Peel’s papers and, thereafter, performed a similar service in respect of Sir James Graham.80 However, Parker’s election as Liberal MP for Perthshire and Perth (under Gladstone’s patronage) betrayed the political bias he brought to bear in relation to his work. Indeed, it was Parker (encouraged by Peel’s youngest son, Arthur Wellesley Peel, who became Speaker of the House of Commons) who did much to complete what Michael Bentley has called the ‘Liberal embalming’ of Peel during the 1890s. This ensured that the historical Peel was used to explain the contemporary Gladstone, eliding the distance which the latter had travelled on his journey towards the leadership of the Liberal Party.81 In turn, this ‘liberalized’ reading of Peel’s career affected all subsequent understandings of the statesman. The stillborn attempt to construct a satisfactory literary monument to Peel left his historical significance in an ambivalent place, suspended somewhere between both major political parties. This was perhaps appropriate, given Peel’s attitude towards party, but found an echo in Gladstone himself, who continued to describe himself as a ‘Liberal Conservative’ and retain his membership of the Carlton Club until long after a reunion with the Conservatives was rendered impractical. In many respects, the historical Peel was at a discount, by the end of Gladstone’s life, and continued to be a diminishing resource until his papers were opened up to public scrutiny in the 1920s. The effects of this were still being felt down to the point when Norman Gash completed his two-volume biography of Peel in 1972.82 Whilst Gladstone never appears to have been considered by Peel as a potential literary executor, the mismanagement of that task by Mahon and Cardwell and the corresponding rise in Gladstone’s success and celebrity yielded him an   For Smith’s articles on Peel, see Encyclopaedia Britannica, 17 (1859), p. 363b; Macmillan’s Magazine, 19 (1868), pp. 97–106; Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, 11/64 ( June 1882), pp. 869–89. 80   C.S. Parker, Sir Robert Peel from his Private Papers (3 vols, London, 1891–99); The Life and Letters of Sir James Graham, Second Baronet of Netherby, P.C., G.C.B., 1792–1861 (2 vols, London, 1907). 81   M. Bentley, Lord Salisbury’s World: Conservative Environments in Late-Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 309–10. Also see M. Bentley, ‘Victorian Prime Ministers: Changing Patterns of Commemoration’, in M. Taylor and M. Wolff (eds), The Victorians since 1901. Histories, Representations and Revisions (Manchester, 2004), pp. 44–58. 82   N. Gash, Mr Secretary Peel (1985 edn), pp. viii–ix. 79

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undeniable advantage in shaping the subsequent historical record to his advantage. Through this process, Gladstone helped to appropriate Peel’s mantle to himself and make the progression from Peelite Conservatism to Gladstonian liberalism look less incongruous than might otherwise have been the case. Consequently, late-Victorian biographers of Peel beat a path to Gladstone’s door in the hope of oral testimony and personal sanction for their work.83 Peel’s greatest late-Victorian champion was Lord Rosebery, Gladstone’s successor as Liberal leader and Prime Minister. Rosebery mistakenly believed that, with the final publication of Parker’s edition of Peel’s papers (a year after Gladstone’s death), ‘the historical monument to Sir Robert Peel [was] almost complete’. Rosebery’s opposite numbers in the Conservative Party, Salisbury and Balfour, were hardly as kind.84 So it was that, by the time that Gladstone became the ‘Grand Old Man’ of British politics, Peel had come to be regarded as the prototype for Gladstonian liberalism and his historical memory was appropriated for the purpose in the face of Conservative apathy, neglect and disgust. As Gladstone informed the Duke of Argyll, in September 1885, ‘I never speak in public, you will find, of Sir Robert Peel and his friends except in terms of respect. But what of the present Conservative Party ever speaks of them in such terms [?] I know of none’.85 Gladstone’s Peelite Inheritance Gladstone famously commented that there were two Peels – one before and one after Catholic Emancipation. Gladstone argued that the crisis of 1828–29 had helped ‘ripen’ Peel’s views. As Gladstone only came in to Parliament after 1832, he only claimed to have knowledge of the second, ‘ripened’ statesman. This disclaimer helpfully forestalled any sense of association with Peel’s ‘unripened’ Tory youth.86 However, it might be more accurate to say that there were three Peels, of whom Gladstone had knowledge of the last two. There was the ‘unripened’ Peel before 1829, the ‘ripened’ Peel from 1829 to the end of 1845 and a third, ‘unmuzzled’ Peel that emerged, stiffened, resolved and renewed, from the political crisis of December 1845.

83   For Gladstone and Parker, see Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, p. 635, 4 December 1886; vol. 12, pp. 194, 325, 381–3, 7 April 1889, 4 October 1890, 23 April 1891, 27 April, 4 May 1891. For Gladstone’s co-operation with another biographer, see J.R. Thursfield, Peel (1891), pp. 40–1. 84   Lord Rosebery, ‘Sir Robert Peel’, Anglo-Saxon Review, 1 (1891), pp. 97–123. 85   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, p. 408. 86   Brooke and Sorensen, Gladstone, vol. 3, p. 77.

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Consequently, we must distinguish between the two Peels of whom Gladstone had knowledge and from whom he drew different legacies.87 From the ‘ripened’ Peel (1829–45), Gladstone learned lessons about the honourable nature of party connection and parliamentary government based upon shared principles; a legacy which Gladstone believed Peel had destroyed, as a result of his tactics over Repeal. That is why, speaking to Lionel Tollemache in 1896, Gladstone ‘seemed to think that Peel’s reputation as a statesman [stood] somewhat too high’.88 From the ‘unmuzzled’ Peel, however, Gladstone realised the potential capital to be gained by a minister whose position was attuned with that of the political nation out of doors and the inevitable frustration which would arise if this could not be united with that system of parliamentary government upon which it relied for success. This was the lesson of the politician as evangelist, leading opinion inside Parliament upon the basis of discernible expressions of support in the country at large.89 Peel was constitutionally incapable of channelling the popular constituency of support to which his ‘unmuzzled’ self had given rise. Gladstone had fewer inhibitions and, whilst he was markedly reluctant to make platform speeches during the Reform Bill crisis of 1866–67, found himself increasingly directed towards an active engagement with opinion out of doors. Gladstone’s mature political career, therefore, may be read as an attempt to align the two parts of Peel’s mantle, by aligning its extra-parliamentary and parliamentary dimensions. Read in this way, Peelite politics were, for Gladstone, national politics and he conceived himself to be (with divine inspiration) their interpreter and guide. Consequently, whilst Peel spoke, inside Parliament, of those ‘whose lot it is to labour and earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow’, it was Gladstone who increasingly went outside Parliament to meet them.90

87   Seeing a duality in ‘Peel’s Mantle’ may serve to unite the positions outlined by Ghosh and Shannon: see above, n. 39 and n. 43. 88   Briggs, pp. 126–7. 89   Hence Gladstone’s claim to have been moved by his ‘striking gift’ on four subsequent occasions: Brooke and Sorensen, Gladstone, vol. 1, p. 136. 90   Speeches of Sir Robert Peel, p. 717.

Chapter 3

Gladstone and Labour Chris Wrigley Gladstone became the greatest popular leader of his age, though he never mastered or seriously studied great social problems on which their comfort largely depended, because he offered the working classes something that satisfied their self-respect. It has often been remarked about his Midlothian campaign that none of his speeches were addressed to the self-interest or the self-pride of his audiences. The secret of their power was not merely that they were eloquent and persuasive; it was that they made the most obscure man in the hall feel that he was contributing to the moral judgement of the world on great events … He stands or sits in a vast audience, not a miner or a boilermaker brooding over the hardships of his life, but a classless man whose mind is playing freely, able to give a disinterested study to a great issue. ( J.L. Hammond, 1938)1

The roots of Gladstone’s appeal to a large section of working people were in the moral seriousness of his politics, his perceived fairness between classes and his views of a widening electorate. For Gladstone, he discovered an audience which responded enthusiastically to his high-minded politics, at a time when the upper echelons of society increasingly denounced his endeavours. For many of the early twentieth-century Labour Party and trade union leaders, Gladstone was used as a gold standard of morality in politics. Mary Agnes Hamilton, a Labour MP in 1929–31, quoted the passage on Gladstone by J.L. Hammond at the head of this essay when commenting on the scale of the defeat of Labour in the 1931 general election. She explained, ‘The appeal of the National Government carried everything before it because it was felt to be an essentially non-material appeal. Voters believed that the country was in danger’. She added, ‘There is, in fact, no such thing as a “solid working class vote”; men and women vote as citizens’.2 The issue of whether the term ‘working class’ is appropriate for Victorian Britain has been debated by historians for half a century or more. The current 1 2

  J.L. Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation (London, 1938), p. 706.   M.A. Hamilton, Remembering My Good Friends (London, 1944). She had come to know

the Hammonds through working with Francis Hirst at The Economist, 1913–17, and then at Common Sense.

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consensus is that for much of the period ‘the People’ is more appropriate; indeed, Eugenio Biagini has written of ‘plebeian radicals’ who preferred to use this term ‘the People’ in France, Italy and the United States as well as in the UK for much of the nineteenth century.3 In favouring ‘the People’, Biagini follows, among others, Peter Clarke who judged Victorian politics to be ‘based on status and culture, rather than class’.4 This may well largely be so for the period of Biagini’s 1860–1880 study. Later in the nineteenth century there was a continuing sense of working class identity in politics, not necessarily independent as with the Lib-Labs, and in such a London area as Battersea this preceded the success of independent socialists and the Labour Party.5 In some areas in the 1880s and 1890s there was a growing sense of class in politics, with Lib-Lab politics deemed by some to be no longer sufficient. Gladstone himself often spoke of ‘the classes’ (by which he meant the upper and middle strata of society) and ‘the masses’ (the labouring people). With the coming of better established coal mining and unskilled trade unions from 1888, he also spoke of ‘class’, by which he meant an industrial group of working people. In October 1890, when addressing some 2,200 people, predominantly coal miners, in the People’s Hall, West Calder, in his constituency, Gladstone observed: … it is necessary occasionally to draw those distinctions between the classes and the masses because whenever there is a class, there grows up necessarily more or less, a disposition to prefer the interest of that class to the interest of the public. When we speak of the labouring people as a whole, of all descriptions of labour, we speak really in the name of the nation, and it is very fair to speak of the masses, and so distinguish them from the classes, but when we come to speak of particular cases, when labouring men, according to their employment, break themselves into this and that body and propose this or that in relation to themselves, why then labouring men may become a class and become to be enamoured more or less of separate interests of their own adverse to the interests of the public. Men must be content to have their class interests judged in the light of the public interests.6

Gladstone, by 1890, was well aware of the potential power of labouring people, and he hoped for restraint in the use of such power. 3   E.F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment And Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 11–12. 4   Biagini provides a concise and incisive survey, E. Biagini, Liberty, pp. 1–28, quotation at p. 2; P.F. Clarke, ‘The Sociology of Modern Britain’, History, 7/1 (1972), pp. 31–55. 5   For Battersea see C. Wrigley, ‘Liberals and Working Class Representatives in Battersea, 1886–1922’ in K.D. Brown (ed.), Essays in Anti-Labour History (London, 1974), pp. 126–58. 6   The Times, 24 October 1890.

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Occasionally, he did speak of the working class. On 26 October 1889 when he spoke at the opening of a Literary Institute in Saltney, a working class suburb of Chester, he commented on ‘our friends of what is termed the working class’ saying that they ‘have not the same means of providing themselves with the advantages of study and the precious fruits of knowledge that we have…’. He also spoke of ‘our fellow citizens who belong to that class we call the working man of the country’.7 Gladstone’s early appeal to a wide public stemmed initially from his financial policies when Chancellor of the Exchequer. He linked fiscal frugality with public morality. In his 1861 Budget he observed, ‘I am deeply convinced that all excess in the public expenditure beyond the legitimate wants of the country is not only a pecuniary waste … but a great political, and, above all, a great moral evil’.8 Throughout his later career such concerns were often close to the surface of his mind when dealing with the great political issues of the day. His diaries reveal this anxiety for frugal finance, whether over Egypt or over the financial settlement needed for a devolved Dublin Parliament. In 1859, he wrote to his brother Robertson, ‘Economy is the first and great article … in my financial creed’.9 Gladstone also prioritised fairness in finance. In response to a letter from A.B. Cochran of Stourbridge, Gladstone wrote after his first Budget in April 1853, ‘You speak of my financial statement in terms of great and I fear undeserved favour … I most thankfully acknowledge … the spirit in which you have judged of the measures proposed in it and discarded the imputation that they were framed under the influence of antipathy or partisanship’.10 That his financial measures should be devoid of ‘antipathy’ or ‘partisanship’ was highly important to Gladstone. He intended his taxes to be fair to all who were sufficiently wealthy to be taxed. His budgets went further than this. He set out to remedy injustices. In his 1860 Budget he tried, but failed, to remove the paper duty. He observed of the duty, ‘On dear books, which are published for the wealthy, it is a very light duty; on books brought out in large quantities by enterprising publishers for the middle and lower classes, it is a very heavy and oppressive duty’.11 Gladstone deplored the House of Lords’ rejection of his measure. He wrote to John Bright, ‘Nothing can in my eyes attenuate the magnitude of the event. Notwithstanding the [Cobden] Treaty, notwithstanding the progress towards freedom and peace   The Times, 28 October 1889.   Rt Hon. W.E. Gladstone, The Financial Statements of 1853, 1960–63 (London, 1863),

7 8

p. 257.

  Quoted in F.W. Hirst, Gladstone as Financier and Economist (London, 1931), p. 154.   Gladstone to A.B. Cochran, 18 May 1853; author’s collection. 11   Gladstone, Financial Statements, p. 169. 9

10

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in Italy, it has left, for us, a great black mark on the year 1860, and both the House of Commons and its members are smaller than they were’.12 In spite of Palmerston’s delight at the House of Lords’ action, Gladstone secured the repeal of the paper duties the next year by linking this and other financial measures in the one financial bill, so that the House of Lords would have to reject or accept all. For him, as he noted in his diary after its passage through the House of Commons, ‘One of the greatest nights in the whole of my recollection’.13 Morley, who quoted parts of Gladstone’s diaries on this success, observed that ‘there is little doubt that Mr Gladstone’s share in thus fostering the growth of the cheap press was one of the secrets of his rapid rise in popularity’. In a similar vein Samuel Maccoby, the historian of English Radicalism, later commented, ‘It was in this struggle that Gladstone’s possible future as a “Radical leader” began to be suspected’.14 While later in his career he continued to emphasise the importance to working people of freeing the press of taxes (‘Knowledge is untaxed’), he also emphasised free trade, which he deemed to be ‘the sum and substance, the Alpha and Omega, of our creed’. He told a mining audience, ‘The blessing of freedom of trade … has added, upon average, 50 per cent at least – with perhaps … some assistance from railways and from telegraphs – … of the available means, the available comfort of the working population’.15 Gladstone’s wider appeal was more than ‘suspected’ when he went to Manchester and the North-East in April and October 1862. To a large extent his impact was in being there as Chancellor of the Exchequer, rather than in saying something populist. On 23 April he addressed the Association of Lancashire and Cheshire Mechanics’ Institutes in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. At a time of widespread unemployment and poverty due to the cotton famine, brought about by the American Civil War, Gladstone expressed his sympathy for those unemployed and in poverty. He was clearly delighted to find that figures for Blackburn showed that crime and drunkenness had fallen by 27 and 18 per cent respectively when the first quarter of 1862 was compared with that of 1857. He was equally, or more, delighted that in a time of mass unemployment there had been a huge take-up of educational courses:   Gladstone to Bright, August 1860. G.M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London, 1913), p. 291. 13   M.R.D.Foot and H.C.G. Matthew (eds), The Gladstone Diaries (14 vols, Oxford, 1968– 1994), vol. 6, p. 36, 30 May 1861. 14   J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, vol. 2 (London, 1903), pp. 39–41; S. Maccoby, English Radicalism 1853–1886 (London, 1938), p. 75. 15   In Prince’s Palace, Piccadilly, 12 May 1890, and in the People’s Hall, West Calder, 23 October 1890; Times, 13 May and 24 October 1890. 12

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For here it is not leisure, wealth and ease, which come to disport themselves as athletes in intellectual games; it is the hard hand of the worker, with his yet stronger will has taught to wield the pen; it is Labour, gathering up with infinite care and sacrifice the fragments of time, stealing them, many a one, from rest and sleep, and offering them up like so many widows’ mites in the honest devotion of an effort at self improvement.

He commended Samuel Smiles, The Lives of the Engineers (3 volumes, 1861– 62), ‘a book that cannot be too widely brought into public notice’, and, characteristically, reflected that the Lancashire and Cheshire Mechanics’ Institutes were ‘one living proof of the progress made, without aid either from old endowment or from the public purse’.16 Gladstone clearly saw working men to be an important constituency, and mechanics’ institutes to be especially worthy bodies. In 1860, he twice wrote to George Dodgson Tomlinson concerning one such body. On 27 September 1860, he observed ‘that I am well aware of the claims of the Huddersfield Mechanics’ Institution but that I do not propose to take part during the present autumn, probably in any celebrations of the kind you describe … unless I have special and local ties’.17 Hence, for a while, his preference was for favouring Cheshire and Lancashire working men’s bodies. The response of working people to the cotton famine provided Gladstone and the employers in the textile areas with reassurance that they could be trusted by the propertied classes. Gladstone, speaking to the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, praised the ‘practical evidence of enlightened views’ shown by ‘the working men of Lancashire and Cheshire … in their patient endurance, in their mutual help, in their respect for order, in their sense of independence, in their desire to be a burden to no one, in the resignation with which they submit to positive and sharp privation!’18 Gladstone further praised the resilience of the unemployed cotton workers when he addressed the Saturday Evening Assembly of the Working Men of Chester at the end of the year. He commented that the ‘admirable conduct of the suffering workpeople cannot be sufficiently acknowledged by any passing tribute of mere words’, but he hoped ‘that, whenever again the time arrives for considering the question of the franchise that conduct will be favourably and liberally remembered’.19 He had been expressing himself in favour of expanding 16   On 23 April 1862. Rt Hon W.E. Gladstone, Address And Speeches Delivered At Manchester On The 23rd and 24th April 1862 (London, 1862), pp. 21–2, 31, 38, 20. 17   W.E. Gladstone to G.D. Tomlinson, 27 September 1860; author’s collection. 18   On 24 April 1862. Gladstone, Address, p. 64. 19   Rt Hon. W.E. Gladstone, An Address Delivered At The Saturday Evening Assembly Of The Working Men of Chester, 27 December 1862 (Chester, 1863), p. 12.

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the franchise from at least that March, and this view may have been due as much, or more, to positive feelings about textile workers during the cotton famine as to the suggested negative ones about Palmerston (over the paper duties) and the House of Lords.20 These 1862 views of working people were a long way from his views before the 1832 Reform Act. Then, as Colin Matthew put it, he held ‘a millenarian feeling that European society stood on the brink of revolution and moral disaster’.21 Gladstone later made improbable claims that he had originally had strong Liberal sentiments but had been frightened by the Reform Bill, which ‘drove me off my natural and previous bias’. He blamed Edmund Burke and George Canning for ‘misleading him’.22 Given this past, as well as his concerns over Chartism, when he volunteered to be a special constable, the patience and moderation of the cotton operatives had a big impact on Gladstone. It was notable that Gladstone chose to address such working class audiences. Roy Jenkins observed of his speech to the Association of Lancashire and Cheshire Mechanics’ Institutes that he was ‘paying high respect to what was essentially a working men’s organization’.23 In such speeches Gladstone was frank and often didactic. In his December 1862 Chester speech he recognised trade unionism but was explicit as to his view of the rights of non-union labour: It is right of the labouring man to get the best price he can for his labour. The State has long ago ceased to impose any restrictions on the exercise of that right. Each man is entitled to judge for himself, at what price he will sell his labour. Any number of persons, being independent, may, if they please, combine together to withhold their labour from the market at any price less than they choose to set upon it. But they can have no right to deny to others what they claim for themselves: they who think fit to sell labour dearer, can have no right to interfere with others that are disposed to sell it cheaper, any more than a butcher who sells meat in his shop at eight-pence, has a right to interfere with another who intends to sell at seven-pence half-penny.24

Gladstone’s views of labour in the labour market were notably orthodox at this time. However, he no longer shared the ruling elite’s fears. Palmerston, appearing still to share Lord Melbourne’s fears of the era of ‘Captain Swing’ and the Tolpuddle Martyrs when complaining of Gladstone’s views on extending     22   23   24   20 21

R. Shannon, Gladstone, Vol. 1: 1809–1865 (London, 1982), p. 455. H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1986), p. 25. A letter to a friend, 1865. J. Morley, The Life, vol. 1, p. 70. R. Jenkins, Gladstone (London, 1995), p. 236. Gladstone, An Address Delivered At Chester, p. 13.

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the franchise to working men, complained that this might ‘swamp the Classes above them’ and that ‘these working men are unfortunately under the Control of Trades Unions, which unions are directed by a small Number of directing Agitators’.25 Palmerston was not alone among leading politicians in being shocked by Gladstone’s observations on the franchise made in the House of Commons on 11 May 1864, in which he commented, ‘I venture to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger is morally entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution’. As Richard Shannon has observed, ‘The phrase that struck home was the one about moral entitlement. Undoubtedly it conveyed more than Gladstone intended it to convey’.26 The moral strength of a good portion of working people had been increasingly apparent to Gladstone, both emphatically in terms of the suffering of the cotton famine and in more general developments of a self-help kind. In Gladstone’s opinion, the cotton famine had brought down on ‘one of the wealthiest portions of the country, and perhaps the very wealthiest portion of the labouring population … a condition of unexampled prostration and grievous suffering’.27 For those of a religious mindset, such adversity could appear to be a trial designed by God, and mitigating the suffering was a blessed task for God’s servants. The Gladstones responded in a Christian paternalist manner, running a small-scale relief operation for some men and young women at Hawarden Castle. Catherine Gladstone also visited distressed Lancashire towns, helping to set up soup kitchens in Blackburn. In his diary, Gladstone praised her efforts: ‘she is a great part of the whole business with the people everywhere’.28 For much of his career Gladstone appears to have had an ideal of labouring people, urban or rural. He hoped for independent, thrifty people who resisted reliance on the state, and who were respectful of the efforts of enlightened politicians of the higher social orders. Gladstone found thrifty and self-help attitudes in several working class organisations of the mid-century onwards. One was the co-operative movement. For some of the movement’s early leaders it combined self-help with religious faith, a statement of these principles were published as a book which was approved at the 1879 Co-operative Congress. The first chapter of 25   Palmerston to Gladstone, 11 May 1864. P. Guedalla, Gladstone and Palmerston (London, 1928), p. 280. 26   Shannon, Gladstone, vol. 1, p. 509. 27   Gladstone, Financial Statements, p. 339. 28   T. Archer, Gladstone and His Contemporaries (4 vols, London 1890), vol. 4, p. 129; J. Marlow, The Oak and the Ivy (New York, 1977), pp. 110–12; Gladstone Diaries, vol. 6, p. 307, 9 October 1862.

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this volume, edited by Thomas Hughes and E.V. Neale, discussed ‘The Relation of Co-operation to Religious Faith’, a relationship likely to interest Gladstone. For many, co-operation was self-help in a collective form. Samuel Smiles had observed in Thrift that ‘the duty of helping one’s self in the highest sense involves the helping of one’s neighbours’.29 George Jacob Holyoake, a notable co-operator, but who often irritated some of the Liberal Party leadership, wrote of co-operation towards the end of his long association with it: It began in a desire for equality; but not by pulling down the rich to the pitiful level of the poor, but by teaching the poor how they might raise themselves to the level of the rich. The early co-operators sought equality through equity.30

In similar spirit he wrote in his history of the Derby Co-operative Society that it ‘was an act of principle to forbid credit in a co-operative society, which has honour because it inculcates thrift, teaches thrift, and seeks to deliver its members from the degradation of debt’. More than that, Holyoake believed that ‘co-operators learned to act like gentlemen … When stores attained the status of a commercial firm, they contributed to public charity and to the relief of public distress, like employers, and often did more than private employers’.31 Gladstone read two of Holyoake’s writings on co-operation, his The History of Co-operation (London, 1875) and Self-help by the people. History of Co-operation in Rochdale (London, 1858), and occasionally corresponded with Holyoake from 1875 until early 1897.32 He approved of consumer co-operatives as helping to bind ‘the class of labouring men’ (his choice of words being significant) to the rest of society. In a speech at Hawarden on 17 August 1876, when commenting on improving relations between Labour and Capital, Gladstone stated that: … one class of measures to which I look with the greatest interest for the purpose of helping in the attainment of that solution are the measures which, without   T. Hughes and E.V. Neale (eds), Foundations: A Study of the Ethics of the Co-operative Movement (Manchester, 1916), pp. 29–50; S. Smiles, Thrift (London, 1875), quoted in P.H.J.H. Gosden, Self-Help: Voluntary Associations in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1973), p. 2. 30   G.J. Holyoake, The Co-operative Movement Today (1891; Fifth edition, London, 1912), pp. 23–4. On friction with Liberal leaders, see P. Gurney, Co-operative Culture and the Politics of Consumption in England, 1870–1930 (Manchester, 1996), pp. 122–4. 31   G.J. Holyoake and A. Scotton, The Jubilee History of the Derby Co-operative Provident Society Limited, 1850–1900 (Manchester, 1900), pp. 62–4. 32   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, pp. 57, 337, 3 July 1875 and 10 August 1878; note on Cabinet memorandum, Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, p. 32, 12 March 1881; L.E. Grugel, George Jacob Holyoake: A Study in the Evolution of a Victorian Radical (Philadelphia, 1976), pp. 151–3. 29

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removing the labouring man from the class of labouring men, nevertheless give him some of the sentiments and some of the interests of the capitalist … I believe that the union of working men among themselves in Co-operative Societies may perhaps be highly beneficial as a check upon that more ordinary method of manufacture through great capitalists, and of distribution through wholesale and retail tradesmen; but that it will supplant these methods I, for one, wholly disbelieve … I am convinced that it is only in a very advanced state of the labour or wage-earning classes that co-operation can be at all possible or advantageous to them; and therefore, whenever I see it producing locally a good effect, I rejoice in it, mainly as a proof that in that particular neighbourhood the labouring class is greatly advanced.

In Gladstone’s view, thrifty working people, who were also usually the skilled, were those who were ready to enter the pale of the constitution. The signs of worthiness included membership of Friendly Societies as well as of consumer co-operatives, mechanics’ institutes and similar educational endeavours and skilled trade unions.33 In commenting on co-operatives, Gladstone aired his cautiousness in warning of the dangers of joint stock companies; his fears were based both on the concerns of the era from the South Sea Bubble to the 1826 banking legislation, as well to the mid-nineteenth century hazards of railway speculation. In his August 1876 speech in Hawarden he warned: … the risks and responsibilities of joint-stock enterprise are serious … I have never had that universal faith in the principle of joint-stock as distinguished from individual agency and enterprise which I believe has been established by many far greater authorities than myself. I hope, therefore, that the greatest caution will be ever exercised by the labouring classes with regard to the management of jointstock enterprise … But whenever joint-stock enterprise among workmen succeeds I heartily rejoice in it, and bid them ‘God speed’.34

Gladstone himself had run considerable risks with unlimited liability over the Glynne family interests in the coal mining and iron works at Oak Farm, near Stourbridge, withdrawing in 1845 before the business went bankrupt, but thereafter buying the assets and slowly paying off debts.35 33   For a summary of this position, see especially K. McClelland, ‘England’s greatness, the working man’, in C. Hall, K. McClelland and J .Rendall (eds), Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 71–118. 34   Quoted in Hirst, Gladstone as Financier, pp. 256–7. 35   S.G. Checkland, The Gladstones: A Family Biography, 1764–1851 (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 314–15, 353, 359–60.

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Gladstone depicted himself as the friend of the earnest working man and woman. He became very aware of a large Liberal constituency already existing in the various networks of friendly societies, educational bodies and the like. He made a point of encouraging them and bestowing on them his benediction. For instance, in October 1889, when addressing the Hawarden district of the Loyal Order of Ancient Shepherds, he stated: I think it is impossible that the principle on which they rest can be overvalued. They are of very great consequence in relieving the community at large from claims which must arise in a country where the working men did not stand shoulder to shoulder in the business of mutual help, but they have a still greater effect than that – namely the effect upon the character of the working men themselves, because the independent sentiment of the working man cannot be maintained without effort and self-sacrifice; and undoubtedly it is in these mutual combinations under various names all over the country that we see most conspicuous instances of those efforts and that self-sacrifice. I attach to them the very highest value, not only as a matter of general good feeling, but as essential constituents of the national welfare.36

Another example of his near ex cathedra blessings was a message he recorded in 1890 to the Mutual Building Association of New York in which he praised its purposes as ‘self help and thrift’, commenting: It is self-help that makes the man, and man-making is the aim which the Almighty has everywhere impressed upon creation. It is thrift by which self-help for the masses dependent upon labour is principally made effective. For them thrift is the symbol and instrument of independence and of liberty, indispensable conditions of all permanent human good.37

Co-operators into the twentieth century were overwhelmingly Liberal in their politics. For instance, Joseph Toyn, a pioneer co-operator in Cleveland, was an admirer of Gladstone, a believer in direct Labour representation but linked to the Liberal Party, a member of the Cleveland Board of Guardians and a JP. The well-to-do Liberals, Sir Arthur and Lady Alice Acland, were among the dedicated promoters of co-operation. He served on the central board of the Co-operative Union, promoted co-operative education and presided over part of the 1886 Co-operative Congress in Plymouth before serving in the Cabinet   The Times, 28 October 1889.   Gosden, Self-Help, p. 1.

36 37

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in Gladstone’s fourth government. Richard Haldane, when urging Acland’s appointment on Gladstone’s Chief Whip, observed, ‘Burt … is regarded with an approach to hostility by the Labour Party, and there is probably no man within their ranks whom their jealousies would permit to fill the most prominent position in the Labour sphere, witness the defeat of Tom Mann by Burns and others for the secretaryship of the Amalgamated Engineers’, whereas he stated Acland had the respect of Mann, Burns and ‘the great body of artisans of the northern and midland counties’. Alice Acland was a key figure in founding the Women’s Co-operative League in 1883, serving as its first secretary.38 It was worthiness in terms of thrift and provision for future rainy days that much interested Gladstone in trade unions. As Chancellor of the Exchequer he had received two trade union deputations in the first half of 1864 which sought to be allowed to use facilities at post offices: in one case to be allowed to purchase their low-cost government annuities, in the other, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, to be able to deposit its funds in the new Post Office Savings Banks. Gladstone readily acceded to their requests. He referred to these deputations in the House of Commons on 11 May 1864 when he was accepting the case for an extension of the franchise to ‘the working classes’.39 Gladstone’s fear of ‘the People’ out of control, as seemed the case to him before the 1832 Reform Act, had largely evaporated by the 1860s. In his triumphal tours of northern English cities and regions, Gladstone was drawing strength from mass audiences who appreciated his politics, especially important to him after the failures of support from the higher orders of society in 1872–74, and even more so in the 1880s. To seek popular adulation was for Gladstone a wicked temptation. It is as well that his self-flagellation was for carnal thoughts rather than courting popularity by managing the press and giving whistle-stop speeches. After the northern tours of 1864, he wrote in his diary: … so ended in peace an exhausting, flattering, I hope not intoxicating circuit. God knows I have not courted them: I hope I do not rely on them: I pray I may turn them to account for good. It is, however, impossible not to love the people from whom such manifestations come, as met me in every quarter.40   J. Bellamy, ‘Joseph Toyn (1838–1925)’ in J. Bellamy and J. Saville (eds), Dictionary of Labour Biography (London, 1974), vol. 2, pp. 368–70; J. Bellamy and H.F. Bing, ‘Alice Sophia Acland (1849–1935)’ and ‘Sir Arthur Herbert Dyke Acland (1847–1926)’ in Bellamy and Saville, Dictionary of Labour Biography, vol. 2, pp. 5–8; D. Sommer, Haldane of Cloan: His Life and Times, 1856–1928 (London, 1960), p. 88. 39   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 6, pp. 261, 275, 5 March and 10 May 1864; M. Curthoys, Governments, Labour and the Law in Mid Victorian Britain (Oxford, 2004), pp. 58–9. 40   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 6, p. 307, 14 October 1864. 38

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As a member of two entrepreneurial families, the Gladstones and the Glynnes, Gladstone had had more contacts with working people than had many aristocratic politicians. For instance, the young Winston Churchill, grandson of the Duke of Marlborough, later confused a Tory trade unionist with socialists and social democrats with bomb-throwing anarchists.41 Gladstone was more hard-headed, at least by the 1840s. In 1842–43, at the Board of Trade, he displayed much interest in the dire conditions of coal whippers in the London docks, as the men, if desiring work, had to spend a portion of their wages in the pub through which they were employed. He was convinced that this was such an abuse that it warranted legislation.42 He visited coal mines in the Hawarden area and elsewhere. He also was familiar with work in heavy industry. In 1889, when praising progress in the form of machinery, Gladstone contrasted the labour of men stripped to their waists, working in high temperatures making boiler plates – ‘a body of very muscular men’ who ‘wielded enormous hammers’ – when he was young, with some 5,000 men in a large Oldham tool works, none of whom were ‘undergoing violent exertion’, over half a century later. He and Catherine had considerable contact with the urban poor in their charitable work. Later, as the squire of Hawarden, Gladstone also liked to speak on self-improvement to the villagers. Simon Peaple and John Vincent observed of these addresses that for Gladstone the ‘way forward lay in the labourer becoming an artisan, the artisan becoming in Ruskin’s sense an artist, and in both becoming penny capitalists and in both reading the greatest products of the human mind’.43 Gladstone, however, was far more democratic in his outlook than Ruskin. Both had notably Conservative roots. Ruskin, at the start of his autobiography, declared, ‘I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school’.44 Canon Scott Holland contrasted Gladstone’s and Ruskin’s views: The one trusted in the democratic movement, however chaotic and vulgar might be some of its manifestations: the other had learnt from his master [Thomas Carlyle] … that the only hope of the great mass of mankind lay in the strong will

41   In Churchill’s comments on his partner in the Oldham by-election of 1899, in My Early Life (London, 1930) and in his novel, Savrola (London, 1900). 42   Viscount Gladstone, After Thirty Years (London, 1930), pp. 89–91. 43   S. Peaple and J. Vincent, ‘Gladstone and the Working Man’, in P.J. Jagger (ed.), Gladstone (London, 1998), pp. 71–84 (quotation at p. 72). Gladstone’s Hawarden addresses were earlier discussed by Francis Hirst: F. Hirst, Gladstone as Financier, pp. 257–61. 44   J. Ruskin, Praeterita (London, 1886), p. 1.

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of the strong man who would know so much better for them than they would themselves, what it was their true life needed.45

Gladstone, like Ruskin, was a major influence on many of the labour leaders of his day and of the early twentieth century. For many Victorian working people, who were Liberals or Lib-Labs, Gladstone was a hero. Joseph Arch recalled saying in about 1893, when unveiling a bust of Gladstone: I can say that as a working man, I think no man has stronger claims upon my sympathy, support and affection than Mr Gladstone. When the election of 1880 came we had placed him at the helm of affairs. Although I was twitted by weakkneed Liberals and Tories that he would never concede the franchise, my faith in his honesty, in his sense of justice to the people, and in his love for the people, was not in the slightest degree shaken by these jeers. I was perfectly certain that he would enfranchise my class.46

Perhaps Gladstone’s biggest contribution to the Liberal Party was not to do with Ireland, perhaps was not even in finance and promoting free trade, but was his part in widening the UK franchise. By bringing working people ‘within the pale of the constitution’ in stages he kept a large proportion loyal to the Liberal Party. The combination of a widening franchise, a Liberal state and slower industrialisation avoided the polarisations between socialism and reaction of Russia, Germany and the Habsburg Monarchy. In Britain, it was to take judicial decisions, notably the Taff Vale Judgement of 1902, and the First World War to make a sizeable independent labour party feasible and then to move it to a socialist agenda. In speaking up for a widening franchise in 1864 and achieving the addition of so many working male electors in 1884, Gladstone was steadily achieving parts of the aims of the Chartists. Several of the old Chartists were admirers of Gladstone and of his causes, such as his campaign against the Bulgarian massacres.47 Even in the late nineteenth century former Chartists and other Victorian working men sometimes paid dearly for their political enthusiasm. For instance, after the 1880 general election George Evans, his wife and five children were evicted by the Duke of Buccleuch, the Duke being displeased by 45   C.S. Holland, ‘Ruskin and Gladstone’ in John Ruskin, Letters to M.G. and H.G. (privately printed, 1903), pp. 113–14. 46   The Autobiography of Joseph Arch (London, 1966), p. 143. The first edition was entitled Joseph Arch: The Story of His Life (London, 1989). 47   D. Thompson, The Chartists (London, 1988), pp. 334–5.

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Evans’ enthusiasm for Gladstone at the time Gladstone defeated his son in the Midlothian seat.48 Gladstone’s appeal to working people was often to do with a belief in his fairness, as expounded by Joseph Arch. This, as we have seen, was to do with his record as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister. In October 1881, the Durham Miners’ Franchise Association, in urging Gladstone to support a further measure of reform, praised him in words that Gladstone might have chosen himself: ‘We admire the impartial character of your measures. You have had a regard for the welfare of the lower classes without unduly interfering with the legitimate rights of others’.49 Wilson, the organisation’s secretary, was a Lib-Lab MP for County Durham 1885–86 and 1890–1915. As John Shepherd has commented, although the Lib-Lab MPs ‘remained staunch opponents of independent labour representation’, they were a parliamentary group which termed themselves ‘the Labour Party’ and were the predecessors of the body of 1900 onwards. They were a Liberal constituency that Gladstone took pains to foster. His appeal to them went well beyond labour and franchise issues.50 Gladstone’s stance on national independence, as in Italy, and on ‘the devilish atrocities of the Unspeakable Turk in Bulgaria’, as the foremost LibLab MP, Henry Broadhurst, later put it, also won him much popular support. Broadhurst was a founder member of the Eastern Question Association and the lead figure in its Workmen’s Committee. Broadhurst, writing of the late 1870s, later expressed well the adulation Gladstone attracted from many: I shall not be guilty of exaggeration if I say that the Nonconformists of Great Britain to a man, ay, and a woman, had ranged themselves on his side. They looked upon him as the deliverer of nations, the inspired leader of peoples, as a giant of unsurpassed strength wrestling with and conquering the powers of injustice and oppression. His country was the world; mankind of every colour and creed were his brothers. Not once in many centuries does a nation possess a son who commands such universal and almost inexhaustible admiration as was lavished upon William Gladstone in those days. I have often felt that at this period many a man would have esteemed it an honour and counted it a happy martyrdom to die for the great Chieftain.51   George Evans later joined the SDF in Salford. N. Reid, ‘George Evans (1842–93)’ in Bellamy and Saville, Dictionary of Labour Biography (London, 1982), vol. 6, pp. 109–10. 49   J. Wilson, Memories of a Labour Leader (London, 1910), p. 244. 50   J. Shepherd, ‘Labour and Parliament: the Lib-Labs as first working-class MPs, 1885– 1906’ in E. Biagini and A. Reid (eds), Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 187–213. 51   Henry Broadhurst MP: The Story of his Life from a Stonemason’s Bench to the Treasury Bench, told by himself (London, 1901), pp. 79, 88. 48

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While Broadhurst did exaggerate, his recollections capture the immense popularity of Gladstone among a portion of the population, including many working people. However, he did include the qualification ‘at this period’. There was some falling away of enthusiasm among some radicals in 1880–85 over the invasion of Egypt, coercion in Ireland and the limited programme of reforms to appeal to inner city working people. Then there were the break-aways over Home Rule, which with the Radical Unionists was accompanied by substantial working class support, notably in Birmingham. Eugenio Biagini, in analysing the moves of the Chamberlainite radicals towards imperialism, has commented, ‘Radical Unionism was small and shrinking, its grass-root support was unstable and its ideas, far from being a unifying force, reproduced all the tensions and divergences which had bedevilled the pre-1886 Gladstonian Liberal Party’.52 Yet this was partly offset by some new enthusiasm, not least among Irish Nationalists living in Britain. With the 1886 split, Gladstone was even more pleased by the adulation he received from working people. Gladstone was increasingly moulding in the press and in his appearances a ‘Gladstone’ who was a greater than normal mortals, a figure of near legend. A notable 1886 example of this was by Irish Nationalist authors writing for Irish Americans: He started from London amidst a scene of the wildest enthusiasm … When he … reached Edinburgh, the demonstration received an appropriate climax in one of the most extraordinary manifestations of popular welcome ever accorded to him … He spoke at Manchester, and as he passed through the streets he had a reception an emperor might envy. In Liverpool, although, it has long been the favored home of the worst form of Toryism, he met with an overwhelming sense of assent and affection.53

Such adulation was underlined by the large sales of Gladstone memorabilia and by the pilgrimages to Hawarden made by train loads of supporters.54 The leaner, more focused Liberal Party of 1886 and after was alert to the Liberal supporting networks of Lib-Lab figures from the co-operatives, mechanics’ institutes, friendly societies and trade unions. Broadhurst recalled an early 1886 dinner given ‘as a compliment to the Labour Party’ by Lord Rosebery, with Gladstone, Morley and other leaders present. Gladstone appears to have been genuinely   E. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 276.   T.P. O’Connor and R.M. McWade, Gladstone, Parnell and the Great Irish Struggle (New

52

53

York, 1886), pp. 608–9. 54   See also Mark Nixon’s contribution to this volume below.

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warm in his relations with Broadhurst and other Lib-Lab MPs.55 This warmth was in contrast to Disraeli’s usual aloofness from his middle-class Conservative Cabinet colleagues. While Gladstone prioritised Home Rule above other issues, he was careful not to bolt the door on other issues dear to the hearts of his supporters. In the case of organised labour, his pronouncements often became less qualified and so more radical in his later years. He surprised, probably shocked, many middleclass supporters with his attitude towards the great 1889 London dock strike. Gladstone reflected at some length on the London dock strike at Hawarden when addressing the Hyde Reform Club: Strikes are not new in this country; but if I understand aright the strike which has just taken place, it has some important features which invest it with a social character that may be full of consequences for the future … the peculiarity of this strike, if I understand it rightly, has been that a great number of trades, which have nothing to do with one another, and are not dependent upon one another in all cases … have shown that they intend to make common cause. You may depend upon it that this is a social fact of the highest importance and of very great importance for the future.

After commenting on international support for the London dockers, Gladstone further observed: Now the competition of labour and capital is not to be considered as hostile. It is a balance of force, it is a fair adjustment between them, which must always determine in what degree the profits of industry ought to go and are to go with the man who works with his hands and in what degree they are to go to the capitalist, who is supposed to bring, and generally does bring, as his contribution to the work the use of his brains and the use of his capital already saved … It is quite plain that this strike indicates some turn of the balance in favour of labour.

He went on to say that if the strike had made the ‘division of the fruits of industry’ fairer, it should be regarded as a real social advance and ‘it is a result that is of the highest importance … and one that will tend to the ultimate strengthening of the bonds which unite the various portions of our society within and to the increased happiness and power of our country without’.56   Henry Broadhurst MP, pp. 301, 165.   M. Barker, Gladstone and Radicalism: The Reconstruction of Liberal Policy in Britain,

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1885–1894 (Hassocks, 1975), Times, 24 September 1889.

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Gladstone had noted the international dimensions of the 1889 London dock strike, which included support from dockers in Belgium and Australia, and was aware of the development of the German socialist party (SPD). In January 1885, he had followed reading a Contemporary Review article ‘Lasalle and German socialism’ with a biography of Karl Marx (which he found to be ‘incredibly dull’).57 With the first international red May Day in 1890, William and Catherine Gladstone walked by the returning May Day marchers. The Manchester Guardian, which had a reporter at hand, recorded, ‘The Liberal leader was cheered along the whole line of the procession’. Gladstone noted in his diary, ‘C. [Catherine] and I were swamped in a friendly crowd on its way home’.58 In being seen by the May Day crowds Gladstone was testing the strength of Lib-Lab views among the marchers. While the early 1890s May Day rallies were organised by socialists, the great bulk of demonstrators were Lib-Lab trade unionist supporters of the London Trades Council, who preferred to achieve an eight hour working day by collective bargaining not, as the socialists wished, by the state legislating. Gladstone took pains to argue the Lib-Lab viewpoint. In addressing his coal mining audience in West Calder in October 1890 Gladstone observed, ‘Gentlemen, I do not wish to be your flatterer. That is the worst service I could do to you, and that is the greatest disgrace I could inflict on myself ’. Nevertheless, he came near to Disraeli’s flattery of Queen Victoria in his praise of moderate trade unionism. After proclaiming the importance of the removal of the newspaper taxes and of free trade, he went on to say that ‘there was one thing … more important … than any of these, and it was the earliest of all triumphs on behalf of the working men’, being the repeal of laws hindering trade unionism in the 1820s and more recently. He did not totally reject Eight Hour legislation, but gave the impression of total opposition, saying that he would not give a general Eight Hours Bill, ‘however long I live, any consideration until I see the Bill, for I have grave doubts whether a man could put such a Bill into form’. However, as for a Miners’ Eight Hour Bill, he commented, ‘Though I am not a miner, I have been in a coal pit sufficient number of times to have the feeling which seems to me every man that has been in a mine must entertain – that eight hours out of every 24 are quite enough for any human being to labour under such conditions’. He called for miners to be unanimous on the matter – ‘those strong permanent convictions of the miners as a class should be declared … ’.   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, p. 289, 13 and 14 January 1885.   Manchester Guardian, 5 May 1890; Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, p. 289, 4 May 1890; C.

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Wrigley, ‘Gladstone and the London May Day Demonstrators, 1890’, The Historian, 109 (Spring 2010), pp. 6–10.

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Gladstone went on to praise the sagacity of working people. Looking back at controversial issues over 50 or 60 years, he said, ‘we find that upon most of those questions … the judgement of the labouring population of the country has been far more just, equitable and enlightened than the judgement of the educated classes’. Furthermore: I am the first to admit and to contend that labour has an interest distinct from capital, and that it is the duty of the labouring man, not only for his own sake, but for the sake of his wife and children, to see that in competition with capital labour gets nothing less than justice. I go so far as this, that down to the present time wherever that competition has existed, where it has gone to sharp issues, where there have been strikes on one side and lock-outs on the other, I believe that in the main and as a general rule, the labouring man has been in the right.

However, the key words were ‘down to the present time’. For Gladstone was concerned at the shift in balance of power in industrial relations. In making his celebrated comments on liberty, he was arguing for trade union restraint. He commented: I was educated and brought up not to know the value of liberty, and I have learned to love liberty. That is the great change, and I have learned to know that although liberty may be misused and abused like every other blessing of Providence, yet without liberty there is nothing that can move onwards on the face of the earth. As part of the love of liberty is to love it on behalf of every other man …

His moral was that labour, now enhanced in power, should not exercise it to the unfair detriment of others. He warned them, ‘You well have temptation … you the labouring people of the country … when you become supreme to such a degree that there is no other power to balance and counteract the power which you possess’.59 This was also the later message behind the Conservative Inns of Court Lawyers’ pamphlet, A Giant’s Strength (1958), which also urged trade union restraint in favour of the wider public interest.60 Gladstone appears to have been impressed by the New Unionism of 1888–90, the size of the May Day demonstrations of the early 1890s and developments in Germany, Austria-Hungary and other parts of Europe. He recognised the strong position of labour. At West Calder, he echoed Lord Salisbury in saying, ‘You are the masters now’, adding, ‘you are the majority of the voters of our country’.   The Times, 24 October 1890.   Inns of Court Conservative and Unionist Society, A Giant’s Strength (1958).

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Yet Gladstone was eager to promote industrial harmony. He spoke of ‘the instruments which labour possesses for the purpose of carrying forward its competition with capital, not its conflict … Labour and capital are, in some respects, opposed to one another – that is they are partially opposed to the division of the profit of production, but they are essentially and profoundly allied. I think it is very just to compare them to people rowing a boat in a boat which has an oar on each side’.61 Gladstone’s pronouncements in the later 1880s and 1890s were often surprisingly radical, but when analysed usually had the aim of fostering social cohesion. He was wilier than John Morley, avoiding total opposition on the Eight Hour Day, even if for a while in 1892 he refused to discuss the issue with the London Trades Council although taking pains to conciliate his coalmining constituents.62 He did not slam the door on labour issues or others such as Welsh Disestablishment, while he tried to alienate as few voters as possible while uniting the disparate forces of liberalism for a final opportunity to deliver his view of justice for Ireland, Home Rule. He was dismissive of such strands of newer radicalism such as land nationalisation, a cause which provided links with some early labour movement pioneers. In urging voters to support Mr Keay, the candidate for Elgin and Nairn, who favoured land nationalisation, Gladstone observed that if he was ‘a sound Liberal in general, if he is sound on the great Irish question’, then it did not matter if he had ‘here and there what Mr Bright … used to call a fad’. Gladstone was very clear that he opposed land nationalisation: If it means the simple plunder of the proprietors and sending them to the workhouse, that, I consider to be robbery. I think nationalisation of the land, with compensation … would be folly because the state is not qualified to exercise the function of a landlord … It would overburden and break down the state.63

Gladstone, in the last decade of his life, prioritised achieving Home Rule for Ireland. In the years leading to his final premiership he was alert to the greater strength of labour. He was willing to go some way in recognising labour’s claims. He made such comments to working people as, at Saltley, on wages: ‘I wish they were higher than they are, but they are a great deal higher than they were’. He was careful not to alienate a growing democratic power, seeking its support for the Liberal Party. In praising moderate trade unionism, he sought to encourage   The Times, 24 October 1890.   Barker, Gladstone and Radicalism, pp. 146–7, 195–6. 63   The Times, 24 September 1889. 61 62

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the trade unions to exercise restraint for the greater public good. Gladstone, in his final active decade of politics, took careful notice of the growing strength of labour in Britain and in continental Europe. As for his reception by working people, if anything this grew more rapturous in his last active 12 years, especially in northern English cities, Wales and Scotland. Gladstone polarised opinion. Derided in music halls and elsewhere he was a focus of Unionist hostility. Yet with his political longevity, he was a revered figure among most radical democrats and early Labour Party activists. As the ‘People’s William’, an image constructed by the Liberal Press and by himself, he provided a highly popular and a democratic and principled Liberal leadership for over three decades after the waning of Chartism.

PART II IMAGES

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Chapter 4

Gladstone’s Visage: Problem and Performance Joseph S. Meisel

Visual representation and iconography is a revealing, although comparatively little explored, area of Gladstone studies.1 Gladstone’s image featured prominently across the full range of Victorian media. Yet, in contrast to many of the era’s other major figures, Gladstone was a difficult subject. In person, his face captivated audiences both public and private; but the character of his expressions challenged artists seeking to produce a ‘true’ representation of the man’s essence. Colin Matthew observed that ‘Gladstone’s features posed problems for cartoonists’, but the difficulties were encountered by artists of all kinds.2 Exploring the relationships and tensions between Gladstone’s public images and public performance opens new perspectives on Gladstone as a figure in his times and, more generally, the operations of representation and personality in Victorian political culture. Features When Gladstone died, Mrs George Frederic Watts recalled how, ‘In our Gallery the quiet steadfast eyes looked out at us as they looked upon his painter half a century ago in the studio’.3 The Watts’s communing with the late statesman’s portrait was a private version of the way that, by choice or by chance, Gladstone’s contemporaries frequently found themselves in the company of his image. The   See A. Briggs, ‘Victorian Images of Gladstone’, in P.J. Jagger (ed.), Gladstone (London, 1998), pp. 33–49; H.C.G. Matthew, ‘Portraits of Men: Millais and Victorian Public Life’, in P. Funnell, et al., Millais: Portraits (London, 1999), pp. 137–61; and R.C. Windscheffel, ‘Politics, Portraiture and Power: Reassessing the Public Image of William Ewart Gladstone’, in M. McCormack (ed.), Public Men: Masculinity and Politics in Modern Britain (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 93–122. See also Mark Nixon’s contribution to this volume. 2   H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1986), caption to illustration no. 6. 3   M.S. Watts, George Frederic Watts: The Annals of An Artist’s Life (3 vols, London, 1912), vol. II, p. 273. 1

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Liberal journalist and writer T. Wemyss Reid observed in 1888 that, ‘For thirty years past no face in England has more frequently engaged the attention of the portrait-painter than that of Mr. Gladstone’.4 With rather less admiration, Lady Dorothy Nevill noted: ‘It would be curious to know how often the Grand Old Man sat for his portrait; no professional beauty surely was ever painted as many times as he’.5 In this early era of mass political celebrity, Gladstone has most often been understood as a man of words. But he also became a man of images. His diaries record sittings for no fewer than 45 individual portraits, but that was only the beginning. Portrait photographs circulated widely, in part thanks to Gladstone’s own canny insistence on cheap pricing.6 At least 366 commercial photographic images of Gladstone were registered under the Copyright Act between 1862 and 1901, putting him in the top tier (though behind Ellen Terry and some members of the Royal Family).7 Engravings based on both paintings and photographs were widely distributed on a commercial basis, and were regularly reproduced in illustrated weekly magazines as well as in numerous books and journals. Uncounted cartoons and caricatures appeared in periodicals, pamphlets and other publications. Finally, a vast quantity of material culture objects and political ephemera also carried Gladstone’s image.8 There is no way to document the full range or extent of people’s reactions to their encounter with the near ubiquity of Gladstone’s representations in their daily lives, but comments of individual observers evoke the more general fascination with his features. Victorians attached various kinds of importance to the characteristics of heads, and in general the record confirms the impression left on an admiring ‘American Lady’ who saw Gladstone in 1886: ‘It is a great head physically – massive, square, broad, angled sharply at the cheek bones and   T.W. Reid, ‘Mr. Gladstone and His Portraits’, The Magazine of Art, vol. 12 (1888), p. 82. It is interesting to note that the Magazine of Art’s editor, M.H. Spielmann, had selected the images and obtained the approval of the artists well before the person ‘to write the little article’ had been identified. Spielmann kept Gladstone informed of the choice of images, and also invited him to nominate an author for the surrounding text. M.H. Spielmann to Gladstone, 27 July 1888, BL Add. MSS 44501, ff. 158–9. See also Spielmann’s letter transmitting a copy of the article to its subject: M.H. Spielmann to Gladstone, 21 December 1888, BL Add. MSS 44505, ff. 232–3. It is not clear whether Gladstone had a hand in selecting Reid as the author. 5   R. Nevill, The Life and Letters of Lady Dorothy Nevill (New York, 1919), p. 161. 6   Windsheffel, ‘Politics, Portraiture and Power’, pp. 107–8. 7   J. Plunkett, ‘Celebrity and Community: The Poetics of the Carte-de-Visite’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 8/1 (2003), pp. 65–8. The Copyright Act that came into effect in 1862 required photographs to be registered at Stationer’s Hall (for a fee of one shilling) in order to qualify for protection. 8   Briggs, ‘Victorian Images of Gladstone’; and M. Nixon, ‘Material Gladstones’. 4

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ears’.9 After spending a week at Hawarden painting the Grand Old Man’s (GOM) portrait in 1888, Frank Holl (as his daughter recalled) ‘was greatly struck by the abnormal size of Mr Gladstone’s head, and how much more developed it was on the left side than on the right’.10 Another trained eye, the painter John McLure Hamilton, also recalled Gladstone’s ‘massive head’: ‘The forehead was not high and sloped back from the frontal bones that overhung the eye-sockets, where dark and piercing eyes were deep set. The head was very broad and full at the temples’.11 Gladstone’s head was measured in 1890 by Francis Galton at his South Kensington Anthropometric Laboratory.12 The statesman’s mental powers were so widely acknowledged that Galton, who linked head size to intelligence, compared Gladstone’s measurements to his own. Gladstone’s head was a full inch longer than Galton’s (8 1/16” versus 7 1/16”). But the width, temple to temple, of Galton’s head was greater by 9/16ths of an inch (6 15/16” versus Gladstone’s 6 6/16”).13 Rather different from Holl’s account of cranial asymmetry, Galton later wrote that Gladstone had ‘a beautifully shaped head, though rather low, but after all it was not so very large in circumference’.14 But measurements and perceptions are different things. Anthropometric facts notwithstanding, the idea of Gladstone’s large head was pervasive. Gladstone, for his part, was evidently quite taken with the largeness of his own head. According to Holl’s daughter, ‘Mr Gladstone was proud of the size of his cranium, and made my father feel his bumps!’15 Galton recalled that ‘Mr Gladstone was amusingly insistent about the size of his head, saying that hatters often told him that he had an Aberdeenshire head – “a fact [said Gladstone] which you may be sure I did not forget to tell my Scotch constituents”’.16 Similarly, Gladstone told the painter William Blake Richmond, for whom he sat in 1867 and 1882, ‘that Glasgow, the place of large heads, was the only city where he could purchase a ready-made hat. In every other city he found them

9   Quoted in T.W. Handford, William Ewart Gladstone: Life and Public Service (Chicago, 1898), p. 270. 10   A.M. Reynolds, The Life and Work of Frank Holl (London, 1912), p. 285. 11   J. M. Hamilton, Men I Have Painted (London, 1921), pp. 59, 61. 12   M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew (eds), The Gladstone Diaries (14 vols, Oxford, 1968– 94), vol. 12, p. 300, 14 June 1890. See F. Galton, Memories of My Life (London, 1909), pp. 249–50. 13   University College London Library Services, Special Collections, Galton 82. 14   Galton, Memories, pp. 249–50. The South Kensington measurements do not record circumference. 15   Reynolds, Holl, p. 285. 16   Galton, Memories, p. 249.

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too small for his capacious skull which, later, he assured me grew in size with the use of his brain after he was sixty’.17 That Gladstone made Holl ‘feel his bumps’ in 1888 evidences the vestiges of his youthful interest in phrenology, which had gained unusually widespread popularity in Britain in the decades following its introduction there in 1814.18 Phrenological analyses of great men’s heads were common, and Gladstone attracted his share of such attention. In 1875, for instance, the Birmingham phrenologist Stackpool Edward O’Dell published an analysis of Gladstone’s head, identifying the mental organ of approbativeness, or the desire for approval, as the leading feature of the statesman’s brain. While approbativeness could lead individuals on a quest for power, O’Dell was careful to indicate that in Gladstone’s case (unlike Napoleon’s) its influence was tempered by the reasoning organ.19 The partitioned brain common in phrenological illustration was adapted to popular political imagery. In Gladstone’s case, such cartoons juxtaposing myriad involvements and preoccupations were an especially effective way to comment on his character in relation to the diversity of attributes, issues and causes with which he was popularly associated. If Gladstone’s contemporaries attached significance of various kinds to the characteristics of his head, they focused even more attention on what they perceived to be his most distinguishing facial features. His ‘eye’ appears to have elicited the greatest volume of description and commentary. As the biographer and travel writer Augustus Hare recalled, ‘He was formidable to strangers, chiefly on account of “those demoniac eyes of his,” as Cardinal Alcander said of   A.M.W. Stirling, The Richmond Papers: From the Correspondence and Manuscripts of George Richmond, R.A., and His Son Sir William Richmond, R.A., K.C.B. (London, 1926), p. 236. 18   See J. van Wyhe, ‘The Diffusion of Phrenology Through Public Lecturing’, in A. Fyfe and B. Lightman (eds), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago, 2007), pp. 60–96. For Gladstone’s interest in phrenology, see Gladstone Diaries, vol. 1, p. 66, 11 August 1826; p. 167, 1 March 1828; vol. 2, p. 213, 23 December 1835. On the latter occasion, he referred to ‘the particular dogmata of phrenology’, which might be read to indicate some critical tempering of his youthful curiosity. The published diaries also include reference to Gladstone, at Oxford, giving a paper on phrenology to the Essay Society, which he judged a failure. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 1, p. 284, 13 February 1830. This is, however, evidently a transcription error. The manuscript referenced (BL Add MSS 44720, f. 34) is, in fact, on the comparative merits of poetry and philosophy. In 1852, Gladstone visited the phrenologist and mesmerist Théodore Leger, but seems to have been primarily interested in his work on animal magnetism. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 4, p. 415, 27 March 1852. 19   S.E. O’Dell to G., 16 February 1875, and undated newspaper clipping (from Courier and Advertiser), BL Add. MSS 44446, ff. 198–200. The area indicating love of approbation is on the rear, upper right-hand side of the head (see the 1853 phrenological diagram reproduced in van Wyhe, ‘Diffusion of Phrenology’, p. 88). 17

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Luther’.20 The poet Arthur Munby, after seeing Gladstone walking alone in Pall Mall in 1864, described ‘his brilliant flashing eyes and the stern and somewhat cynical melancholy of his mouth. At once, one said to oneself “That is by far the most powerful face I have seen today”’.21 The golfing author Horace Hutchinson (who, during a brief stint as an aspiring sculptor, had worked in Watts’s studio) saw the effect of the ‘eagle-like glance of his widely open eyes’ in relation to the whole head: ‘As the head was large and striking in comparison with the whole figure, so the eyes were disproportionately large and effective in comparison with the whole face, and thus the total expression became one of force and massiveness rather than of anything on the small scale. It was very singular’.22 There was also, as Holl noted, ‘the curiously large and well-formed ear, set back unusually far in the head’.23 To artists, at least, ear position was a matter of some significance and Holl was not the only painter impressed by Gladstone’s ears. When he sat behind the statesman in 1851, George Richmond thought the position of Gladstone’s ears exceptional: ‘low down, away from the face, near the back of the neck, exhibiting an unusual height of head above them’. It was an arrangement he claimed was shared by Newman, Blake and Henry Hallam. Of Gladstone’s mouth and nose, George W.E. Russell wrote: ‘His features were strongly marked; the nose trenchant and hawk-like, and the mouth severely lined’.24 Hamilton recalled that ‘Gladstone’s nose was large and masterful, the mouth firm, and the chin broad, and not prominent’.25 As a point of geography, ‘Gladstone’s Nose’ appears in at least two places. One, in Ashover, Derbyshire, stands out prominently from general outline of Cocking Tor, the name apparently coming into common use shortly after Gladstone’s death.26 The other is in the Golden Gate Highlands National Park in South Africa’s Free State   A.J.C. Hare (ed.), In My Solitary Life: Being an Abridgement of the Last Three Volumes of The Story of My Life, Malcolm Barnes (London, 1953), p. 285. 21   D. Hudson, Munby, Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur J. Munby, 1828– 1910 (London, 1972), p. 200. 22   H.G. Hutchinson, Portraits of the Eighties (London, 1920), p. 16. 23   Reynolds, Holl, p. 285. 24   G.W.E. Russell, ‘Gladstone, William Ewart’, Encyclopedia Britannica (Cambridge, 1910), vol. 12, p. 72. 25   Hamilton, Men I Have Painted, p. 61. 26   ‘The name of Cocking Tor, by the way, seems to be dying out through the unhappy mischance that the outline of a portion of the hill is supposed to resemble Mr. Gladstone’s nose’. J.B. Firth, Highways and Byways in Derbyshire (London, 1905), p. 456. I am informed by local sources, however, that Gladstone’s Nose is no longer visible as it is now overgrown with rhododendrons. Lucy Brand, Derbyshire Cultural and Community Services, e-mail correspondence, 2 October 2008. 20

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province (this ‘Gladstone’s Nose’ forming one side of the Golden Gate itself ).27 The Boers regarded Gladstone as friendly to their interests and the first trekkers into this area named this promontory after him.28 Where the phrenology that interested young Gladstone was a system of signs intended to measure the quantity of particular attributes in the contours of individual heads, the older concept of physiognomy was premised on the idea that outer form of the face indicated inner qualities.29 Interestingly, Lionel Tollemache linked the old science of faces and the new technology for recording them in his ambition to produce, as he wrote, ‘an ethograph of Mr. Gladstone – a photograph of his moral and social physiognomy’. This moral and social physiognomy, he wrote, ‘like his natural face, had its harsh and untoward aspects, but which was all the more truly venerable for its wrinkled and, at first sight, repellent grandeur’.30 For the purposes of examining the effect of Gladstone’s face, however, the distinctions between phrenology and physiognomy are less important than those between the fixity of physiognomy and the mobility of expression. Expression According to E.H. Gombrich, ‘Expression is hard to analyze and harder to describe unequivocally. It is a curious fact, moreover, that our immediate reaction results in firm convictions, but convictions which are rarely shared by all’.31 Some accounts describe the beguiling qualities of Gladstone’s expression. For example, the Liverpool newspaper editor Edward Russell related an account by the MP Henry Cowper of one of Gladstone’s more familiar expressions in Parliament:

  S. Taljaard and D. Pienaar, SANParks, e-mail correspondence, 11 November 2008.   A.P.J. van Rensburg, ‘Golden Gate: Die geskiedenis van twee plase wat ‘n nasionale park

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bewordet het’, Koedoe, 11 (1958), p. 113. I am grateful to Prof. Jane Carruthers, University of South Africa, for this reference. 29   Physiognomy – the study of facial characteristics as a means of understanding individual and collective human nature – had roots going back to Aristotle and was developed on the Continent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Britain, physiognomy’s influence began with the English translation of J.C. Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy published between 1789 and 1793. J. Graham, ‘Lavater’s ‘Physiognomy in England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 22 (1961), pp. 561–72. 30   L.A. Tollemache, Talks with Mr. Gladstone (New York, 1898), pp. 11–12. 31   E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton, 1972), p. 334.

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He [Cowper] was one day describing an interview with Mr. Gladstone, and he said, ‘He had on that expression – oh, you know – his expression when he is wanting a friend to withdraw an inconvenient amendment’. These words brought the expression at once to the minds of those who heard them – the crinkling up of the face about the eyes; the persuasive smile, as if there was no possibility of a refusal; the odd suggestion of all sorts of latent humour in a very simple matter.32

Other contemporaries found in Gladstone’s expression a touch of evil, as reflected in music hall lyrics offering guidance on how to become like Gladstone: ‘Take a dose of bile and “colic” / Let your features be symbolic / Of what’s sage and sinister’.33 In 1868, enraged by Disraeli’s clinging to office, Gladstone was described as being ‘in a white heat with an almost diabolical expression of countenance’.34 Lady Knightley of Fawsley confirms that this association was not confined to popular imagery or parliamentary extremity. She recorded that Gladstone’s ‘most agreeable manners’ notwithstanding, ‘I still think [he has] a very sinister expression’ – and this following a conversation with Gladstone about tea!35 For artists, depicting Gladstone’s expression was a great challenge. Indeed, according to Holl’s daughter, the effort ‘sounded the first stroke of my father’s death-knell, for beyond a shadow of a doubt it hastened my poor father’s end’.36 Portraits are an inherently difficult genre. According to the twentieth-century American artist and connoisseur Maurice Grosser, ‘the portrait is not like any other sort of picture. It is not a simple representation of the sitter, nor does the simple act of painting a man, however well it may be done, necessarily produce a portrait of him’. A portrait, he argues, is like a caricature in that ‘it is a picture whose unique subject matter is a resemblance. This resemblance is not in any way the complete image of a man. It is obtained, like caricature, by looking at the man from a special point of view’, with the key to a successful portrait depending on ‘a peculiar state of sympathy of a mysterious and almost magical nature’ between painter and sitter. ‘If it exists, the portrait will look like the sitter whether it is painted well or ill’.37   E. Russell, That Reminds Me (London, 1899), p. 125.   F. Morris, Artist of Wonderland: The Life, Political Cartoons, and Illustrations of Tenniel

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(Charlottesville, 2005), p. 257. 34   N.E. Johnson (ed.), The Diary of Gathorne Hardy, Later Lord Cranbrook, 1866–1892: Political Selections (Oxford, 1981), p. 72. 35   J. Cartwright (ed.), The Journals of Lady Knightley of Fawsley 1856–1884 (London, 1915), p. 229. 36   Reynolds, Holl, p. 271. 37   M. Grosser, The Painter’s Eye (1951; New York, 1955), p. 15.

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What the portrait achieves, according to Grosser, depends on whether the painter or the sitter has the greater ‘mana’ (in the anthropological sense, the sum of an individual’s magical powers). If the painter has the greater mana, the portrait will show the sitter’s character, or how he is viewed from the outside. If, however, the sitter is stronger, the painter will be ‘forced to see the sitter through his own eyes and to paint the sitter’s soul’. But if the painter is thus overwhelmed, ‘he loses his technical freedom, and however much the sitter may be pleased with the result, such a portrait is likely to be badly painted. As a characterization, it will certainly be weak’.38 Watts, who painted (or attempted to paint) Gladstone three times, certainly found Gladstone’s mana to be a challenge. Commissioned by Dean Liddell of Christ Church, in the first of several efforts by Gladstone’s old Oxford college to obtain a portrait, Watts worked on the picture (his third) between 1874 and 1879.39 The number of sittings and slow progress became an irritation to Gladstone. After the portrait was rejected, Watts painted out the face and later gave up on the project entirely when Gladstone would only agree to give sittings at Hawarden.40 Perhaps it was this experience that led Gladstone to remark on the inherent difficulty of capturing his image. In 1882, he recorded in his diary that ‘Mr [William Blake] Richmond came: to repeat the hard task of painting me’ for the second Christ Church commission.41 Richmond, for his part, had written in connection with his 1867 portrait of Gladstone: ‘He is difficult, but too splendid and too inspired-looking not to make something of ’.42 Ultimately, Richmond’s 1882 portrait was also rejected. Liddell complained about the ‘prophetic and visionary character of the face and attitude’ which newspaper reports likened to both Jeremiah and Mephistopheles. And where Mrs. Gladstone wondered what had happened to William’s ‘dear olive tint’, The Times thought the colouring resembled a man who was ‘first scorched severely, and then partially skinned’.43 A decade later, Richmond declined Gladstone’s request for another portrait, stating that he had previously ‘failed in a mission

  Grosser, Painter’s Eye, p. 23.   For the saga of the Christ Church portrait, see H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1875–1898

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(Oxford, 1995), pp. 267–9. 40   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, p. 126, n. 7. The picture was not well received when it was displayed at the annual Gaudy feast (‘not the best moment for aesthetic judgment’ as Matthew notes). 41   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, p. 196, 16 January 1882. Emphasis added. 42   Stirling, Richmond Papers, p. 230. 43   S. Reynolds, William Blake Richmond: An Artist’s Life, 1842–1921 (Norwich, 1995), pp. 146–8.

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of the same nature’.44 Possibly he was just trying to avoid a task he thought uncongenial. But if we take Richmond at his word, he lacked confidence that he could paint Gladstone ‘worthily’. Richmond noted that Gladstone’s animated conversation during sittings had enabled him ‘to examine the great points of expression’.45 Watts, on the other hand, seems to have found conversation a problem when painting the failed portrait for Christ Church. The letters exchanged between artist and sitter were full of admonitions and pledges to refrain from talking.46 Yet, as with Richmond, conversation could conduce to artistic realisation. According to one of Watts’ early biographers (presumably referring to one of the earlier, surviving portraits): ‘he has painted the portrait of Mr. Gladstone, in the full vigour of his manhood, and in the height of his political career, the eager, subtle expression in whose face he [Watts] brought out by the interesting talk he had with him’.47 Following Grosser, the problems these artists encountered may have reflected the power dynamics between artist and sitter: Gladstone had more ‘mana’ and the painters were overmastered by it. But there was also a particular representational difficulty with which they had to contend: the mobility of his face. Action In his review of Gladstone’s portraits, Wemyss Reid wrote that ‘there are few men of distinction whose likeness is more difficult to fix upon canvas. For the expression – which alone can give life to the portrait – varies in the case of Mr. Gladstone from hour to hour, almost, one might say from moment to moment’.48 The historian W.E.H. Lecky was one of the many contemporaries who wrote about the extraordinary variability of Gladstone’s expressions:   W.B. Richmond to Gladstone, 16 July 1891, BL Add. MSS 44513, ff. 67–8. Emphasis in original. 45   Stirling, Richmond Papers, p. 230. 46   As Watts was desperately attempting to finish off the Oxford portrait before the deadline, his postscript on a note to Gladstone about arranging a sitting cautioned ‘Not a word to be spoken from the beginning of the sitting to the end!!’ (G.F. Watts to Gladstone, 24 May 1878, NPG Heinz Archive and Library, G.F. Watts Letters, 18-A-5, vol. 1, f. 28). Later, Gladstone promised ‘that you shall not be distracted by my yielding to the temptations which the chance of a talk with you always offers’ (Gladstone to G.F. Watts, 23 May 1879, NPG Heinz Archive and Library, G.F. Watts Correspondence, 17-F-8, Box 1, f. 32). But Gladstone’s account of the sittings, related to the painter by Dean Liddell, was that it was Watts ‘who inveigled him into the conversations which caused so much difficulty’ (Watts, George Frederic Watts, vol. 1, pp. 305–6). 47   H. Macmillan, The Life-Work of George Frederick Watts R.A. (London, 1903), p. 84. 48   Reid, ‘Gladstone and His Portraits’, p. 83. 44

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[T]he greatest painter could only represent one of the many moods of that everchanging and most expressive countenance. Few men have had so many faces, and the wonderful play of his features contributed very largely to the effectiveness of his speaking. It was a countenance eminently fitted to express enthusiasm, pathos, profound melancholy, commanding power and lofty disdain; there were moments when it could take an expression of intense cunning, and it often darkened into a scowl of passionate anger.49

Such comments can be contrasted with Disraeli’s reputation for Sphinxlike impassiveness. More importantly, they indicate that Gladstone’s rapidly changing expression was not simply a personality quirk; it was a performative asset that helped the famously complex thinker communicate both mood and meaning to his audiences. As the Irish journalist and politician T.P. O’Connor wrote, Gladstone’s ‘inner emotions were represented on his face as rapidly and as faithfully as though his countenance was the mirror of his soul’.50 Similarly, the ‘American Lady’ who saw Gladstone in 1886 thought that ‘No man’s face could mirror more truly the deeps and shallows of his consciousness’.51 For Hamilton: ‘The mobility of his features and his comprehensive range of expression seconded, in the most extraordinary degree, a voice as resonant as a bell, clanging in command or appealing in rhythmic and silvery tones. No tragedian that I have seen, from the young American Booth to the English Irving, or among the Italians, headed by Salvini, had a tithe of his facial play’.52 The actor and producer Edward Gordon Craig also likened Gladstone to Tomasso Salvini, who first appeared in London as Othello in 1875 and left audiences shocked by his violent intensity (and further disconcerted by his delivering the Moor’s lines in Italian): ‘Gladstone and Salvini roll their words out, they stride, they glare very grandly and are spacious’.53 For artists attempting to produce an image that is a ‘true’ representation of their subject, fixing mood and meaning is a challenge under the best of circumstances. As Grosser described, ‘the personality never remains still, but is fluid and in constant change. The painter by observing the sitter over a certain length of time, is able to extract out of the flux of personality an average, and can present this average as a convincing enough resemblance’.54 In Gladstone’s case, the artists’ problems were compounded, for associated with the exceptional     51   52   53   54   49

50

W.E.H.Lecky, Democracy and Liberty (2 vols, London, 1899), vol. 1, p. xxi. Quoted in Handford, William Ewart Gladstone, pp. 405–6. Quoted in Handford, William Ewart Gladstone, pp. 269–70. Hamilton, Men I Have Painted, pp. 59–60. E.G. Craig, Henry Irving (London, 1938), p. 84. Grosser, Painter’s Eye, p. 27.

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mutability of his face were his bursts of transformative, age-defying energy. Where he might at one moment look like an elderly man, this could change in an instant: The eyes flash forth the fires of youth, the head is raised as though in defiance not merely of the crowded benches opposite, but of Time himself, whilst as the feeling of the moment dictates, the mobile lips express anger, triumph, scorn, or a certain subtle persuasiveness which is peculiar to Mr. Gladstone. It is impossible for the artist, however great may be his mastery of his art, to combine in a single portrait all these varying phases of the statesman’s face.55

Holl consciously set out to capture the statesman’s energy by painting him standing. On commencing the portrait in 1887, the artist wrote in his diary that ‘His (especially now) is a restless life, still retaining all the ambition of youth, even I should think, more than youthful restlessness’.56 In order ‘to drag the vitality on to the canvas’, Holl also attempted to paint ‘instantaneous expression’ while Gladstone talked to visiting Cabinet colleagues.57 Around the same time that Reid was taking stock of Gladstone’s portraits and Holl was working himself to death painting one, the cartoonist Harry Furniss delivered a Birkbeck Institute lecture on ‘Portraits and Portrait Painting’ in which he discussed ‘The Unpaintability of Mr. Gladstone’: Like a Japanese impressionist artist studies a flower, so I have myself studied Mr. Gladstone. I have frequently sat for many, many hours, watching every gesture, every change of expression. ... All must agree that a man like this, who can electrify a crammed House of Commons, is too mercurial, too impressionist, for the nerves of a modest portrait-painter alone in the studio, and a portrait of the orator at his best has yet to be painted.58

This face of Gladstone – the mercurial, impressionistic object of fascination – is, for the most part, the face of the Grand Old Man. It was the face for performing in the great public dramas of his later years. Yet, the drama of his countenance was not simply a function of age. Rather, the face operated, developed and was appreciated along with the public role that Gladstone created for himself. As George W.E. Russell noted: ‘To us who knew Gladstone only in the second     57   58   55 56

Reid, ‘Gladstone and His Portraits’, p. 84. Reynolds, Holl, p. 279. Reynolds, Holl, p. 287. Pall Mall Budget, 11 October 1888, p. 13.

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half of his life, it is odd to think that he was once considered delicate’.59 Take, for example, the observations of the newspaper editor and author James Grant from 1838: ‘His countenance is mild and pleasant, and has a highly intellectual expression. His eyes are clear and quick’.60 In the mid-1840s, another witness took due note of Gladstone’s ‘striking eye’, but wrote that the rising young orator was characterised primarily by his somber and ‘highly intellectual expression’ and the ‘abstracted character of his disposition’.61 In this intellectual, almost priestly, incarnation, there were few signs of the colossal and domineering public figure to come. Even the ‘striking eye’ was in the earlier years perhaps more of a window into an agitated soul rather than the high-beam of his vehemence and intensity that it subsequently became. Indeed, knowing what came later, it is instructive to read that the 37-year-old Gladstone might have the stuff of a first-rate orator if only he had ‘a more commanding presence, a stronger voice, and a more combative spirit’.62 Even by 1860, when Walter Bagehot was willing to declare Gladstone ‘the greatest Orator in the House of Commons’, he nevertheless thought that ‘Mr. Gladstone’s energy seems to be strictly intellectual. Nothing in his outward appearance indicates the iron physique that often carries inferior men through heavy tasks’.63 The animated visage of later accounts was closely tied to the increasing physical dynamism Gladstone exhibited in Parliament and out-of-doors following his first premiership. For instance, writing in 1878, as Gladstone was in the process of staging his political comeback, Henry Lucy noted the ‘evil habit’ recently acquired by the ex-Liberal leader of ‘smiting with his hand any resonant substance that may be near’. For his higher flights of vehemence, Lucy continued, Gladstone would lean across the table (with considerable effort) to strike a large black box in the middle: ‘With concentrated rage, with flashing eyes, with dilated frame that trembles in every nerve, and with an absolute disregard of physical pain, he leans across and brings down his hand on the lid of the inoffensive and astounded box’.64 In The Humours of Parliament, his popular magic lantern entertainment of 1891–92, Furniss regaled his audiences at length with descriptions of Gladstone’s energetic behaviour, illustrated with   G.W.E. Russell, Portraits of the Seventies (London, 1916), p. 50.   J. Grant, The British Senate in 1838. Forming a Second Series of Random Recollections of

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the Lords and Commons, 2 vols (London, 1838), vol. 2, p. 55. 61   G.H. Francis, ‘Contemporary Orators, No. XVI. Sir Robert Inglis, Mr. W.E. Gladstone, Mr. Christie’, Frasier’s Magazine, 34/204 (1846), p. 660. 62   Francis, ‘Contemporary Orators’, p. 660. 63   W. Bagehot, ‘Mr. Gladstone’, National Review, 2/21 (1860), pp. 220, 230. 64   H.W. Lucy, A Diary of Two Parliaments: The Disraeli Parliament, 1874–1880 (London, 1885), pp. 453–4.

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depictions of the statesman in all phases of his oratorical exertions: waiting to spring, indignant, excited, attacking, eloquent, and delivering a peroration.65 The prescriptions for performing the passions embedded in classical, Renaissance and early modern theories of rhetoric required actors to experience the emotions of their role while simultaneously keeping their bodily powers in check. In light of Gladstone’s own habits, it is especially interesting to note that, in his 1612 treatise Apology for Actors, Thomas Heywood even argued that the principal goal of actio in academic rhetoric was to insure that in the heat of the moment, the scholar did not ‘buffet his deske like a mad man’.66 Gladstone had been a dedicated student of rhetoric at Eton and Oxford.67 His manner as a young MP reveals the strong influence of eighteenth-century rhetoricians’ efforts to systemise theatrical gesture: Mr. Gladstone’s gesture is varied but not violent. When he rises he generally puts both hands behind his back; and having there suffered them to embrace each other for a short time, he unclasps them, and allows them to drop on either side. They are not permitted to remain long in that locality before you see them again closed together and hanging down before him. Their re-union is not suffered to last for any length of time. Again a separation takes place, and now the right hand is seen moving up and down before him. Having thus exercised it a little, he thrusts it into the pocket of his coat, and then orders the left hand to follow its example. Having granted them a momentary repose there, they are again put into gentle motion; and in a few seconds are seen reposing vis-à-vis on his breast. He moves his face and body from one direction to another, not forgetting to bestow a liberal share of his attention on his own party.68

As British society and politics changed from what they had been in Gladstone’s youth, new styles of oratorical address were required. The alternative to Blair’s   See G. Cordery and J.S. Meisel, Harry Furniss: ‘The Humours of Parliament’: A View of Late Victorian Political Culture (High Wycombe, 2011). 66   Quoted in J.R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark, 1985), p. 52. 67   G. Wickham, ‘Gladstone, Oratory, and Theatre’, in P.J. Jagger (ed.), Gladstone (London, 1998), esp. pp. 4–17. Gladstone’s early rhetorical instruction centered on the standard resources for schoolboys envisioning a future in the pulpit, at the bar or in the House: Aristotle’s Rhetoric, H. Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric (c.1784) and the Elements of Gesture by J. Walker (1788), not to mention mastery of dramatic literature in several languages. For less junior readers, Walker had also produced A Complete System of the Passions (1787), which can be seen as the high-water mark of eighteenth-century elocutionists’ efforts to systematise theatrical gesture (Roach, Player’s Passion, p. 76). 68   Grant, British Senate, vol. 2, pp. 55–6. 65

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Rhetoric and similar works was ‘pioneered, not by sophisticated academics, but by ... those histrionic rhetoricians brought up in the populist, but tightly controlled, school of melodramatic theatrical techniques’.69 Certainly, Gladstone was a regular theatre-goer as well as a theatrical politician.70 Melodrama appealed to him, as Florence Arnold-Foster described after an encounter in 1881: ‘He was pale but wonderfully animated and genial, and his dark eyes looked bright and eager as he discoursed pleasantly, chiefly about plays and actors, and conjuring us with fervour to go see Charles Warner, whom Mr. Coquelin of the Comédie Française has pronounced the finest actor we had’.71 In connection with Gladstone’s own penchant for histrionic display by that time, it is relevant to recall Warner’s propensity for the violent excesses of his performances, which both alarmed his fellow actors and is said to have impaired his control of voice and gesture.72 Denis Diderot’s influential treatise Paradoxe sur le comédien, first published in 1830, argued against the rhetorical approach in favour of a mechanical, externalised performance of emotional states that was wholly separated from internal feeling. Extreme sensibility, he thought, made for middling actors, while actors’ absence of sensibility made persuasive performance possible.73 Purported stage avatars of Diderot’s theories like Garrick notwithstanding, Britain’s nineteenth-century actors drew upon both feeling and form.74 The great theatre critics from this period, William Hazlitt and George Henry Lewes, propounded a theory of ‘natural acting’ that combined actors’ own feelings with self-awareness in performance and thus forged a stronger connection with audiences.75 In the context of a Victorian theatricality that could accommodate both authenticity and artifice, to what extent was Gladstone’s protean dynamism the true outward manifestation of his natural inner feelings, a persuasive performance of a constructed public version of himself, or both?

  Wickham, ‘Gladstone, Oratory, and the Theatre’, p. 20.   See A. Heinrich, ‘William Gladstone and the Theater’, Theatre Survey, 52/1 (2011),

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forthcoming. Gladstone’s theatrical, at times histrionic, approach to politics is a significant leitmotif in R. Shannon, Gladstone: God and Politics (London, 2007). 71   T.W. Moody, R. Hawkins and M. Moody (eds), Florence Arnold-Foster’s Irish Journey (Oxford, 1988), pp. 99–100. 72   J. Parker, ‘Warner, Charles (1846–1909)’, rev. N. Banerji, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), online edn: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36747. 73   Roach, Player’s Passion, p. 117. 74   W. Archer, Masks or Faces? A Study in the Psychology of Acting (London, 1888). 75   L.M. Voskuil, Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity (Charlottesville, 2004), esp. ch. 1.

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Images The triangular relationship between expression, performance and representation is highly complex. At one time, actors were encouraged to study historical portraits in order to mold their face into the character of their heroes.76 In 1698, the French painter Charles LeBrun codified the graphic representation of idealised types of expressions to guide painters in conveying various emotional states. Though later derided by Hazlitt as a ‘receipt book for the passions’, LeBrun’s principles became the basis for illustrated acting manuals well into the nineteenth century.77 The problem, as Joseph Roach has observed, is that ‘This suited the needs of history painters well enough, but it offered the actors only static images of dynamic events’.78 In the series of portraits taken in a single 1890 sitting by the amateur photographer Eveleen Myers (Figures 4.1–4.6), each image reveals a markedly different look to Gladstone’s face.79 Because of the composed nature of nineteenth-century photographs, these do not capture the same kind of moment-by-moment changes in the way that would later become possible with fast film and rapid auto-shutters. Further, a portrait sitting would not reveal the full dynamic range of expressions that Gladstone used in his parliamentary or platform performances. But this may be the best visual record of his protean facial qualities, and demonstrates something of why artists found him so difficult to render. Percy Bigland left a detailed account of his efforts to paint Gladstone’s portrait in 1890.80 By that time, evidently as a result of his more gruelling portrait experiences (such as 40 sittings for the portrait Watts ended up destroying), the GOM would only allow artists to paint him while he worked.81 This was fine for Bigland while Gladstone was reading, but when he began to write, the artist had only ‘the top view of the great head’. Luckily, a visitor from Western Australia arrived:   Roach, Player’s Passion, p. 43. For further details, see also S. West, The Image of the Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble (New York, 1991). 77   M. Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1983), p. 5 and n. 2. 78   Roach, Player’s Passion, p. 72. 79   See Gladstone Diaries, vol. 12, p. 287, 25 April 1890. I am indebted to Patricia Hardy of the National Portrait Gallery for bringing these images to my attention, facilitating my access to them, and engaging in a rich and informative discussion about their history and qualities. 80   ‘The Last Oil Portrait of Mr. Gladstone’, The Magazine of Art, 15 (1891–92). pp. ix–x. All subsequent discussion of the Bigland portrait relies upon this first-hand source. 81   M. Drew, forward to Hamilton, Men I Have Painted, p. 8. 76

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Figure 4.1

Image of Gladstone, Eveleen Myers, platinum prints, 1890

Figure 4.2

Image of Gladstone, Eveleen Myers, platinum prints, 1890

Gladstone’s Visage: Problem and Performance

Figure 4.3

Image of Gladstone, Eveleen Myers, platinum prints, 1890

Figure 4.4

Image of Gladstone, Eveleen Myers, platinum prints, 1890

89

90

William Gladstone

Figure 4.5

Image of Gladstone, Eveleen Myers, platinum prints, 1890

Figure 4.6

Image of Gladstone, Eveleen Myers, platinum prints, 1890

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Now was my opportunity to catch quickly as much as possible of this face, so full of animation, the eye so bright, the mouth so thin and compressed. Every line seemed in motion; even the eyebrows, sometimes knit close over the eyes, making them still more piercing in their extraordinary brilliancy, and sometimes raised high up along the forehead, where they would often remain after that particular expression had passed into another phase on the rest of his face …

Gladstone invited Bigland back when there would be more visitors, and thus the artist was able to build up an image from observing and sketching of Gladstone’s face in motion. Hamilton also provides an account of how, around the same time, he put in time at the Temple of Peace (Gladstone’s study at Hawarden Castle), sketching the statesman at work. In Hamilton’s case, Gladstone didn’t have visitors, but also wrote less, which gave the artist his opportunity. Initially, he thought his first portrait of Gladstone to be an ‘irredeemable failure’, and his memoirs include a detailed account of the technical and artistic means by which he sought to redeem the picture.82 Mary Drew wrote that Hamilton’s portrait of her father reading ‘was the man exactly as we knew him – exactly as day after day we saw him’. It was ‘no fancy picture, but one of familiar everyday use’.83 But what family members thought a pleasing likeness met with a more hostile critical reception in the press and among artists.84 Hamilton had succeeded in rendering the private, domestic Gladstone – ‘intent – unconscious’ – but not the public, performing Gladstone that Bigland was able to observe at close hand. While attempting to finish up his first portrait, poor Hamilton was (as he later recounted) interrupted and upbraided by Lady Phillimore: ‘“Mr. Hamilton,” she began, “I only wanted to expostulate with you for wasting Mr. Gladstone’s time, and yours for that matter. Don’t you know that Sir John Millais has painted Mr. Gladstone and that is enough? You cannot expect to succeed where so many other men have failed.”’85 Millais was certainly regarded by   Hamilton, Men I Have Painted, pp. 45–6.   From Drew’s forward to Hamilton, Men I Have Painted, p. 8. That the Gladstone family

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paid careful attention to the images of the patriarch is further demonstrated by an annotated version of an etching after an 1889 photograph published in the Pall Mall Gazette, a copy of which is in the Sitters Boxes for Gladstone at the NPG’s Heinz Archive and Library. The notes, believed to be by Herbert Gladstone, criticise the excessive prominence of the line running from the nose to the corner of the mouth, indicate that the upper lip needs refining and state that the eye and eye cavity are too dark. Herbert also noted that, with the exception of the upper lip, his mother thinks the picture excellent. 84   S. Walden, Whistler and His Mother: An Unexpected Relationship (Lincoln, 2003), p. 148. See also Hamilton, Men I Have Painted, p. 51. 85   Hamilton, Men I Have Painted, p. 47.

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contemporaries as having surpassed all others in capturing Gladstone on canvas. When his first portrait (now in the National Portrait Gallery) was displayed at the Royal Academy in 1879, Gathorne Hardy recorded that ‘Gladstone’s portrait by Millais is a fine work & makes him look his best’.86 Lady Knightley recorded that ‘Mr. Gladstone by Millais is undoubtedly the picture of the year. It lives and is a worthy representation of the ablest man of the day and the most incomprehensible of this or any other day’.87 Gladstone himself thought Millais’s portrait ‘surely a very fine work’, and even displayed the picture on an easel at an evening party.88 Millais’ 1885 portrait for Christ Church (the college finally getting its picture) is rightly noted for its attempt to capture Gladstone’s eyes (Figure 4.8).89 But the effect still does not equal that of the eyes in Rupert Potter’s photographic portrait in the same pose from the previous year (Figure 4.7), or, indeed, the vehement aspect for which Gladstone was so well known. Millais angled the head forward and (compared to Potter) moderated the appearance of the old statesman – particularly the set of the mouth – with something of the intellectual look of his younger days. This can be contrasted with Franz von Lenbach’s vastly less flattering portrait from the following year (Figure 4.9). Gladstone thought Lenbach a ‘very remarkable painter’ and wrote of the 1886 portrait that the artist ‘was so mightily pleased with me as a sitter that you would have really thought I was a beauty’.90 Although beauty is hardly the word that comes to mind with this image, in many respects it comes closer to Potter’s photograph than does Millais’ more celebrated portrait. In both the Potter and Lenbach images, there is more of Tollemache’s ‘repellent grandeur’ than Millais allowed. But, as with Millais, Lenbach still could not quite render the burning eye that Potter managed to record on film. Ultimately, however, such comparisons lead back to the same problem raised by illustrated acting manuals. Which was the truer likeness: the instant captured   Diary of Gathorne Hardy, p. 409.   Journals of Lady Knightley of Fawsley, p. 331. 88   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, p. 335, 3 August 1878. One observer noted that Gladstone 86

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‘looked much happier than his picture’. Whether this was on account of the happy work of contemplating a pleasing likeness or a satisfactory session in the House on the Irish Land Bill is unknown. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, p. 85, n. 3. 89   P. Funnell, ‘Introduction’, in P. Funnell, et al., Millais Portraits, p. 32. 90   A.T. Bassett (ed.), Gladstone to His Wife (London, 1936), pp. 205, 250. On Lenbach’s portraits of Gladstone, see also the informative essay on the website of the art dealer Philip Mould Fine Paintings, http://www.philipmould.com/catalogue.php?sid=2445. In his two earlier portraits from 1874 and 1879, Lenbach’s Gladstone looks not priestly, but rather more like a Northern European Lutheran clergyman.

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Figure 4.7

Gladstone, Rupert Potter, albumen print, 1884

Figure 4.8

Gladstone, John Everett Millais, oil on canvas, 1885

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Figure 4.9

Gladstone, Franz Seraph von Lenbach, oil on canvas, 1886

photographically, or the portraitist’s composite rendering based on intensive observation of changing expressions over time? Harry Furniss argued that, for the essence of the Grand Old Man, posterity would look neither to portraits, the mass of which are ‘idealised, perfunctory, stereotyped and worthless’,91 nor to photographs, where ‘the pose is the pose the sitter takes before the camera’. Rather, ‘it will be the caricatures, or, to be correct, the character sketches, that will leave the best impression of Mr. Gladstone’s extraordinary individuality’.92 Henry Lucy, who worked with a number of the great Punch artists, observed: ‘Mr. Gladstone, first in most things, fulfilled in the largest degree the by no means immaterial qualification of a public man that his personal appearance should be capable of striking reproduction in the pages of Punch. His mobile face, his nervous figure, his unique personality throb through the pages of that periodical for more than a quarter of a century’.93 This was not always the case. For example, it was only after Disraeli’s death in 1881 that ‘a new Gladstone emerged in Tenniel’s cartoons’. In contrast to the dour, frowning countenance and stolid renderings of earlier years, Tenniel’s Gladstone now became sly, jaunty, mercurial and ‘enjoying himself, is no longer   H. Furniss, Confessions of a Caricaturist (2 vols, London, 1901), vol. 1, p. 164.   Furniss, Confessions, vol. 1, pp. 166–7. 93   H. Lucy, Peeps at Parliament: Taken from Behind the Speaker’s Chair (London, 1903), p. 91 92

226.

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dull’.94 Furniss, however, was widely regarded as the most successful of Gladstone’s cartoonists.95 Many cartoonists became closely linked with particular public figures, as Tenniel was with Disraeli and Francis Carruthers Gould with Joseph Chamberlian. According to Furniss, ‘A caricature, a real cruel satire, really biting and often repeated, and widely known, can only be done by a caricaturist who dislikes and has a contempt for his subject. Sir John Tenniel had a contempt for “Dizzy,” and how he reveled in his caricatures of him!’ For his own part, Furniss (who joined Punch in 1880) claimed that, while he had not spared others, he never sought to depict Gladstone – as Tenniel had done for Disraeli or Gould for Chamberlain – as a charlatan and a scoundrel. A strong supporter of union and empire, and contemptuous of all things Irish, Furniss wrote: ‘I was not a Gladstonian, any more than Gould was a follower of Chamberlain, but I was able to see the good in the man, and find quite enough to point to the ridiculous without doing any injustice’.96 This is, of course, one instance of the symbiosis between media and politics that emerged in the nineteenth century. Being regularly and prominently caricatured was both a sign of Gladstone’s public significance and one of the means that kept him constantly in the public eye. Furniss, for his own professional reasons, had a vested interest in keeping up Gladstone’s stock as a figure of public interest. It may also be that Furniss was temperamentally well-suited to depict the GOM for precisely the reasons that David Low, the great cartoonist of another era and another prime minister, criticised him: ‘He [Furniss] had too much energy, and he imparted it to his material. His figures have too little repose’.97 With respect to the GOM, however, this lack of repose is significant, for Furniss was virtually unique in his ability to convey the energy that Gladstone sought to project in his public persona.98 Furniss had two kinds of solutions to the problem of Gladstone’s visage. First, he partially obscured it with the famous exaggerated collars, which made their first appearance in Punch in 1882 (Figure 4.10). Although Low thought the collars a good example of Furniss’s pleasing but superficial invention, he noted   Morris, Artist of Wonderland, p. 239.   Reid, ‘Gladstone and His Portraits’, pp. 87–8. See also the quotations from reviews in The

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Times, the Illustrated London News, and other papers reproduced in a lengthy advertisement for Furniss’s memorial exhibition of Gladstone cartoons in his own publication, Fair Game, August 1898, p. 16. 96   H. Furniss, Some Victorian Men (London, 1924), p. 202. 97   D. Low, British Cartoonists, Caricaturists and Comic Artists (London, 1942), p. 34. 98   See also Windscheffel, ‘Politics, Portraiture and Power: Reassessing the Public Image of William Ewart Gladstone’, in McCormack (ed.), Public Men: Political Masculinities in Modern Britain (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 93–122.

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that this particular ‘piece of caricature … became so celebrated that it passed into history with the statesman’.99 According to Punch’s nineteenth-century historian, M.H. Spielmann: ‘It is generally recognised that Mr. Gladstone wore no such collars. Nevertheless, his favourite sitting attitude in the House was one very low down, his chin buried in his chest; and the more tired or depressed he was – the more weary or dejected at the course of the debate – the more his head would sink within his collar, and the more the linen rose’.100 This was said to be Furniss’s inspiration, though the cartoonist claimed to have invented the collars purely for ‘grotesque effect’.101 Gladstone is reported to have wearied of the collars. According to Lucy, a family member conveyed to the Punch staff that Gladstone had been ‘a constant

Figure 4.10 Harry Furniss, ‘Getting Gladstone’s Collar Up’, Punch, 8 April 1882 student of the journal, the issue of whose first number he remembered. He had figured in all its pages in all its guises, represented under all circumstances, and knew no occasion upon which he was not able to join in the genial merriment of the public. But hadn’t there been enough about the fabulous collars?’102 The London charivari was ready to comply, and some measure of Gladstone’s satisfaction may be inferred from his pasting into his diary the cartoon in which Furniss announced his intention to retire the collars.103 Yet, the collars were very popular and soon reappeared. Indeed, Furniss reported that when he toured   Low, British Cartoonists, p. 35.   M.H. Spielmann, The History of ‘Punch’ (New York, 1895), p. 551. 101   Furniss, Confessions, vol. 1, p. 163. 102   Lucy, Peeps at Parliament, pp. 225–6. 103   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11 (plate). 99

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Figure 4.11 Gladstone, pen and ink sketch by Phil May, 1893 with his magic lantern show The Humours of Parliament in the 1890s, ‘the laugh always came with the collars’.104 The collars graphically represented a full head of Gladstonian steam. Hence, the pun in the title of the first cartoon with this device, in which ‘Getting Gladstone’s Collar Up’ is getting his choler up – the bilious humour indicating anger, heat of temper, wrath and irascibility. But it is also true that by obscuring partially or fully the nose, mouth and chin, the collars focus visual attention on the eyes and eyebrows – the epicenter of his outward intensity. It is instructive to compare Phil May’s famous drawing of Gladstone from 1893 (Figure 4.11). Usually a very clear delineator of faces and features, May here rendered Gladstone’s face in sketchy shadow. The focus of the whole drawing is the eye, cocked and looking straight at the viewer. As a visual device and shorthand, Furniss’s big collars stripped away nearly all but the eyes and eyebrows. But unlike May’s sketchy face, Furniss could convey Gladstone’s expression with two black dots surmounted by arched lines, supported by the simple arc of a bald pate and some squiggles for wild hair. Furniss drew Gladstone from life in all manner of ways over many years, and thus knew his subject’s face so well that the collars can be understood as part of a successful experiment at stripping the face down to its barest essentials and conveying the most with the least. But the stripped-down face was not a face in repose; it was the face of action. And this leads to Furniss’s second solution to the problem of Gladstone’s face. Beyond the signature collars, Furniss proved better able than other cartoonists to employ the simplifications and repetitions inherent in caricature to capture   Furniss, Confessions, vol. 1, p. 164.

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Gladstone’s characteristic energy and mobility. As he wrote of cartoons, ‘The facial expression must not be merely a mask, but express the essence of the man’.105 Furniss’s long-term study of Gladstone’s essence from the Press Gallery was, in fact, a study of motion, which the cartoonist, far better than others, managed to render in visual terms. Conclusion The visual record of Gladstone’s face, along with contemporary commentary from artists, colleagues and various other witnesses, shows the GOM to be an especially notable case for exploring the operation of public personae in the nineteenth-century media age that he was instrumental in encouraging. As with the spoken word, Gladstone was a pioneer of the performance and reception, production and reproduction of the image within a larger culture of political celebrity in an increasingly visual era. To understand the varieties of significance attached to Gladstone’s face as an unavoidable landmark of Victorian public culture is to appreciate from a new perspective the extent to which his projection of a public self – in image and performance as much as in voice and print – loomed so large within the political imagination of the late nineteenth century. Beyond that, the effort to unpack the problem of representing Gladstone’s face reveals something of the wider tension in public life between the performative demands of the era and the role of imagery and iconography in a period of media transition. Thus, the very nature of Gladstone’s face makes him, paradoxically, both a test case for the wider culture, and sui generis. Unlike all other contemporaries with comparable political celebrity, Gladstone was the most difficult to encapsulate visually. Yet, he was also the greatest popular success. The mere prevalence of his likeness (good, bad or indifferent) is not a sufficient explanation. Disraeli may have been derided as a conjuror. For Gladstone, however, the very difficulty of achieving an adequate likeness may well be the ultimate sign of his anthropological mana – his magic power.

  Quoted in Cordery and Meisel, Harry Furniss.

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Chapter 5

Material Gladstones Mark Nixon

One of the most significant developments in Victorian studies during the past decade has been a growing scholarly interest in the material culture of the period.1 This interest was initially inspired by the publication, in 1988, of Asa Briggs’s pioneering study, Victorian Things, which, in delineating the Victorian fascination with ‘things’ and objects, not only explored the relationships between various categories of ‘artefacts’ but also emphasised their importance in exploring Victorian culture.2 Moreover, some ten years later, in a seminal essay which examined ceramic souvenirs and photographic and cartoon images of William Ewart Gladstone, Briggs pleaded for ‘finding a place in Gladstone studies for what at present may seem to be communications – or popular culture – studies beyond the fringe’.3 Recent studies of Gladstone suggest that this plea is now being answered, most obviously in the work of Ruth Clayton Windscheffel, who has produced notable studies of Gladstone’s reading and book collecting,4 and of Gladstonian portraiture,5 and Detlev Mares, who has examined visual representations of Gladstone in the illustrated Victorian press.6 1   See, for example, L. Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in 19th-century London (New Haven, 2000); G. Nash, ‘Pomp and Circumstance: archaeology, modernity and the corporatisation of death’, in P.M. Graves-Brown (ed.), Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture (London, 2000); L. Pykett, ‘The Material Turn in Victorian Studies’, Literary Compass, 1 (2004), pp. 1–5; I. Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 (Oxford, 2008), which explicitly draws on a phenomenological methodology, and the related roundtable discussion in Journal of Victorian Culture, 14/1 (2009). 2   A. Briggs, Victorian Things (London, 1988), especially Chapter 1, ‘Things as Emissaries’, pp. 11–51. 3   A. Briggs, ‘Victorian Images of Gladstone’, in P.J. Jagger (ed.), Gladstone (London, 1998), pp. 33–49, at p. 48. 4   R.C. Windscheffel, Reading Gladstone (Houndmills, 2008). 5   R.C. Windscheffel, ‘Politics, Portraiture and Power: Reassessing the Public Image of William Ewart Gladstone’, in M. McCormack,(ed.), Public Men: Political Masculinities in Modern Britain (Houndmills, 2007), pp. 93–122. 6   D. Mares, ‘Die visuelle Inszenierung des modernen Politikers. William Ewart Gladstone in der “Illustrated London News”’ [‘The Visual Representation of the Modern Politician. William

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Gladstone-related objects – ‘Gladstonian things’ – came in many shapes and sizes, ranging from large and expensive fixed monuments – such as public statues – to small personal items – such as those worn by his supporters during political demonstrations. This chapter focuses on two public statues of Gladstone and on Gladstone-related objects associated with the Franchise Bill demonstrations in Scotland in 1884. These diverse objects illustrate how material culture enhances our understanding of Gladstonian politics. In Coates Crescent Gardens, Edinburgh and George Square, Glasgow, stand two statues memorialising Gladstone. The projects to erect them both began after his death in 1898, but there the similarities end. In many ways, their differences point us towards a more general account of late Victorian and Edwardian memorial culture. The Edinburgh memorial was one of the three to be erected as official national memorials following a vote in Parliament, along with ones planned for London and Dublin. The Glasgow memorial was a result of a private effort in that city, with funding drawn from wealthy benefactors, trades unions and other workers’ societies, political organisations and other individuals and corporate bodies with affection for Gladstone. The Edinburgh memorial suffered a tortuous history, including delays in commissioning, designing, sculpting and erecting it. When it was finally erected, in 1917, it was placed not in the situation it was intended due to the objection of Tory residents, but in St Andrew Square; it was eventually removed to its intended first site, Coates Crescent Gardens, in 1955, where it still stands. The Glasgow memorial was unveiled in 1902, by Lord Rosebery, in a prime spot, in George Square and right in front of the town chambers. It was later moved – after some debate – to the north side of the square in 1923 in order to accommodate the cenotaph. Detailed archives survive of both projects, giving information about their costs, the commissioning process, the locations chosen and the materials used, which provide the raw material for a focused study.7 Political historians may note that the two statues offer very different representations of Gladstone. The Edinburgh statue has Gladstone dressed in the robes of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, marking high political office and a particular role with which he was associated, and thus perhaps also Edinburgh’s self-identity as a financial city. The plinth is richly decorated. Included are four figures representing faith (holding a bible), vitality (holding a lamp), measure (holding scales) and fortitude (holding a shield), four attributes of Gladstone Ewart Gladstone in the “Illustrated London News”’] in Ute Schneider et al. (eds), Dimensionen der Moderne: Festschrift für Christof Dipper (Frankfurt; Berlin, 2008), pp. 311–32. 7   For the Glasgow statue, see Mitchell Library, Glasgow City Archives, Minutes of the Gladstone Memorial Statue Committee, G4/1. For the Edinburgh statue, see National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, Pittendreigh Macgillivray Papers, Dep. 349, pp. 83–89.

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which perhaps even his enemies could grant to his memory. Two larger figures are given the names Eloquentia and Historia, the former reaching forward, the latter hooded and holding papers. The various messages these six figures offer are further supported by the words which appear on the ribbons held by two boys, although each is provided in Greek and thus not accessible to those without a training in the classics. Both are from the Iliad: ‘And speech that was sweeter than honey flowed from his tongue’ (I, 249), and ‘His is a very eager heart and a bold spirit’ (X, 244). The quotations from the Iliad allude to Gladstone’s many Homeric studies and also present him as a man of reason, of learning and of great eloquence. The final figures, those of three birds of prey, seem a little more abstract, unless one knows that they are kites, that the old Scots word for a kite is ‘gled’ and that the name Gladstone came from the older Scots name ‘Gledstanes’. Thus, although it is only really accessible to local antiquarians, we have another message: Gladstone is of solid old Scottish stock. The Glasgow statue has Gladstone in the robes of the Rector of Glasgow University, thus claiming the man not so much for the country but for the city. He holds a book, and more books as well as papers are by his feet, indicating his learning but also underlining the relationship to the University. The plinth is a far plainer affair, with no attributes or abstract elements. Instead, it has two bronze reliefs, one of Gladstone speaking in a packed chamber of the House of Commons – apparently modelled on prints of him introducing one of the Home Rule bills – and one of him flanked by members of his family, with sleeves rolled up, leaning on an axe and a recently felled tree behind him. This is a man of work: of political work, in Parliament, and of physical work, on his estate. He is also a family man. It may be said that this is a statue of Glasgow, in which the city fathers speak to the city and its people; and the same may be said of the Edinburgh memorial. This can be seen, however, as the two cities finding in Gladstone what they want to find in him, what they appreciate about him and how he reflects Edinburgh and Glasgow: indeed, we may say more than that, for the differences between the two statues represent two different Gladstones as envisioned by Gladstonians. Public monuments such as these are part of the material culture of Gladstone, and indeed of late-Victorian politics in the wider sense. It is an assumption of this chapter that material culture matters and that it should be considered an essential part of the practice of history. At its simplest, advocacy for material culture studies in history rests on the claim that objects mattered to the people who made them, bought them, wore them, carried them or hung them up on their walls, and thus if these people matter to us as historians, so should these things. Or we can say that the people we are interested in (in the context of this study, Gladstonians) chose to represent (or construct) themselves, their views,

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their worlds through things. To borrow a term from anthropology, they chose to ‘think through things’ and, since material culture refers not to the things of culture but the culture of which the things are a part, all cultural historians, including historians of political culture, must refer to the things of the culture with which they are concerned.8 The heavily parsed environment of the museum raises a number of problems for the historian, not least in finding appropriate objects of interest, for the overdetermining nature of object classification and museum catalogues might cause a historian looking for Victorian political material culture to miss covenanting banners carried in subsequent political campaigns, or political jugs which, rather than being in the care of curators of social history, are often in the care of curators of decorative arts. Instead, it is necessary to underdetermine ‘the thing’. This applies to individual objects, both in terms of underdetermining their possible meanings as well as their nature, but it also involves being open to what is a ‘Gladstonian thing’. This might include, for example, a consideration of the ‘Gladstone Rock’ on the Watkin Path, Snowdon, or even of ‘Gladstone’s Finger’, a rocky promontory in the Langdale Pikes, Cumbria. Buildings may also have to be considered, and not just those which bear Gladstone’s name such as the recently demolished Gladstone Institute in Govan, Glasgow, but also any Liberal Club, at least from his time as leader of the party and perhaps at any time when association with or adherence to Gladstonian principles might affect architecture or decoration (see Figure 5.1). Indeed, Gladstonian decoration could turn up on any type of building, as it does in the form of a roundel portrait (flanked by similar roundels of Bright and Cobden) which appears on the Nottingham Daily Express Building and – in the form of a gargoyle – on an outer wall of Chester Cathedral. Moreover, ‘Gladstonian things’ as traditionally conceived and as discussed by Asa Briggs,9 that is mass-produced items, particularly ceramics, which were presumably marketed to his supporters, provide a narrow picture of what historians may view as Gladstonian objects. Other objects which have attracted a little interest from historians have been the gifts sent to Gladstone by his admirers, in particular on behalf of workers’ organisations as a physical token to accompany an address, such as the axes which still adorn the fireplace in the Temple of Peace, Gladstone’s library-study in Hawarden Castle. There are also anti-Gladstone items, such as a chamber pot with Gladstone’s portrait

  For more on this anthropological methodology, see A. Henare, M. Holbraad and S. Wastell (eds) Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (London; New York, 2007). 9   Briggs, ‘Images of Gladstone’, in Jagger (ed.), Gladstone, pp. 33–50. 8

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Figure 5.1

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Portrait roundel above the front door of the Orton Liberal Club, Cumbria. Photograph by Bethan Benwell

inside.10 Not all objects relate to the later ‘People’s William’. At Newark, there is a collection of banners produced in support of (in the words of one of them) ‘Gladstone and the Conservative cause’, which relate to the electoral campaigns of the 1830s and 1840s.11 Unsurprisingly, objects from his early political career, when he was a Tory, are much rarer than the later Liberal and ‘People’s William’ 10   For an illustration of one such item, see illustration 21 (c) in H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone: 1809–1898 (Oxford, 1997), between pp. 466–7. 11   Newark & Sherwood Museum Service, 97.1, 98.1, 99.1, 100.1, T10858, T12826 & T12827. Newark Museums hold other material from that period, including poster addresses to electors, printing blocks of election notices, a number of early portraits and reproductions

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material, but if more were to be found they would offer an interesting companion study to the Liberal material.12 Politically ambiguous objects can be particularly intriguing. Leeds Museums have a boxed wooden block puzzle, with a portrait of Gladstone on one side and the words ‘The Premier Puzzle’ on the other, dated to around 1880.13 The box label states ‘The Premier’, ‘The Prince of Puzzles’, ‘Two Puzzles in One’. Moreover, many representations of Gladstone might be perceived to be apolitical. What are historians to make of the commonly found Oldacre medallion featuring Gladstone on one side and Salisbury on the other? Glasgow Museums holds a pair of cast iron hearth decorations, one of Disraeli facing left and one of Gladstone facing right.14 They could be placed facing each other over a roaring fire, which brings to mind a wonderful sense of political rivalry, but over whose fire would they have hung? It may, of course, have been possible to buy the irons separately, in which case ownership would ascribe Gladstonian or Disraelian meaning which, as historians, we would be able to identify only if we could locate them in use. These mysteries over the political uses to which objects might be put, or the meanings which may be ascribed to them in use, may arise as a result of partial survival. For example, the author owns an undated and incomplete set of cribbage pins, featuring Gladstone, Chamberlain and (probably) Salisbury. As cribbage pins are paired, we have to recognise that if the missing fourth pin had been a leading Conservative, then the set presumably dated to before 1886 and represented a Liberal/Conservative opposition. If the fourth pin was a leading Liberal, however, are we to presume that this is a post1886 set, representing a Home Rule/Unionist opposition? There is no maker’s mark on the pins, and no box or other way to discover who made it and thus try to chase down archival or advertising records for the company, so without that fourth pin we remain in the dark. In February 1884, Gladstone’s Liberal government introduced a Franchise Bill to equalise the property qualifications of borough and county seats. After safe passage through the Commons in June, the Tory-dominated House of Lords rejected the Bill in July. In response to their obstruction, a large-scale protest movement developed throughout Britain, and in Scotland alone there were more than 200 public meetings and demonstrations. Gladstone refused to accept defeat and, in December, reintroduced the measure, which the of portraits and even Gladstone’s local library ticket, although they also hold a large amount of material from Gladstone’s post-Newark political career. 12   For a discussion of the differences between representations of Gladstone as a young Tory and mature Liberal, see Windscheffel, Reading Gladstone, Chapter 7, pp. 193–233. 13   Leeds Museums, LEEDM.E.1969.0036.00078. 14   Glasgow Museums, PP. 1982.143.1–2.

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Conservative members of the Lords agreed to pass on condition that it would be followed by a Redistribution Bill, a compromise that Gladstone accepted. These measures were subsequently enacted in the summer of 1885.15 The 1884 demonstrations have been poorly served by historians, perhaps inspired by Andrew Jones, whose The Politics of Reform 1884 (1972) stressed high political machination and party electoral calculations and dismissed the demonstrations as little more than ‘a form of active entertainment’ suited to ‘the silly season’.16 Yet the material record of the 1884 Franchise Bill demonstrations is notably rich. An enormous number of objects were produced either for the events themselves, or later to commemorate them. They include banners, ribbons and other textile items, badges and medallions and trades models. Of further interest are older objects which were brought out to be carried in 1884, including banners and badges from earlier reform demonstrations, swords and other weapons relating to more violent events and objects which belonged to unions, political societies, bands and other organisations which would have been carried on many marches, including annual events. The survival of the 1884 objects is itself instructive for students of material culture. Certainly, the greater preponderance of local museums from the late Victorian period has helped the building up of public collections, as has an apparently greater appreciation of ideas around heritage, in particular of ‘the people’s’ heritage. However, there are interesting patterns in the survival of the material record, not least the comparatively large numbers of objects to be found in Scotland, and these are matters which need to be studied further. Nevertheless, the large amount of material relating to 1884, wide-ranging in type and nature, provides a particularly valuable case study of the material culture of Gladstone, and the rest of this chapter will be devoted to a consideration of these objects and what we may learn from them. Research into the material culture of 1884 is greatly enhanced by the photographs, prints and other visual records which were produced at the time. For example, there are a number of photographs which have survived of the Aberdeen, Birmingham, Dundee, Glasgow and Wishaw demonstrations, which depict banners, models and badges in use. Artists were also in attendance at the demonstrations, as attested to by the pencil sketch held by Dundee Central Library, depicting that city’s demonstration at a junction, fittingly, of a bunting  For Gladstone and the Third Reform Bill, see R. Jenkins, Gladstone (London, 1995), pp. 485–99; Matthew, Gladstone (1997), pp. 425–37; R. Shannon, Gladstone, Heroic Minister, 1865– 1898 (London, 1999), pp. 339–44. For Gladstone and the broader question of parliamentary reform, see especially R. Quinault, ‘Gladstone and Parliamentary Reform’, in D. Bebbington and R. Swift (eds), Gladstone Centenary Essays (Liverpool, 2000), pp. 75–93. 16   A. Jones, The Politics of Reform 1884 (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 161–2. 15

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decorated Reform Street, with participants carrying banners, bannerettes, trade models and other items. For example, a small boat can be seen on a truck – a common feature of many of the demonstrations, representing the House of Lords as the Ship of Fools. Perhaps one of the richest artistic representations of the events was published in the Glasgow magazine Quiz (12 September 1884) of the demonstration held in that city six days earlier (see Figure 5.2).17

Figure 5.2

Double-page spread from the Glasgow magazine Quiz, 12 September 1884, depicting scenes from the previous Saturday’s ‘Grand Reform Demonstration’ in that city. Composite image by Kevin Kerrigan

In it can be seen several banners, many produced for the event (for instance, ‘Tobacco and the Lords are equal, they are all weeds’) as well as more generic material (for example, ‘Dumbarton Liberal Association’).18 Of particular interest is the Kilsyth miners’ banner (‘We come from the bowels of the earth to demand our rights’), as that banner has survived and is now held by North Lanarkshire   Quiz, 12 September 1884.   This banner was, however, first carried at this demonstration: Lennox Herald, 6 September

17 18

1884, 2a.

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Museums Service.19 Special models can be seen, such as Gladstone as a ship’s pilot at the wheel of state (presumably being carried by the shipwrights, dockers or a related trade), Gladstone as a woodsman felling a tree decorated with crowns (a ‘pear’ or ‘peer’ tree)20 and a death-bed for the Lords probably carried by the furniture-makers or carpenters. In many of the representations of Gladstone, the famous prominent high collar – frequently depicted in images of Gladstone by the celebrated cartoonist Henry Furniss21 – may be discerned, although these were perhaps added as a flourish by Quiz’s caricaturist. In the upper right can be seen a dressed bullock. This may be the bullock depicted in a surviving photograph being led through the streets of Glasgow by butchers, ridden by a boy dressed in the costume of a laird. And, of course, there are the people, including the carriage of ‘prood, prood men’, the ‘veterans of 1819 and 1832’ as well as the chief marshal on his horse, caricatured in Ottoman finery. In addition to the demonstrators are the spectators, from women leaning out of windows and waving their handkerchiefs, to the more reserved members of the Western Club on their veranda. We can also see that the streets are decorated with bunting and bannerettes. Indeed, with the crowds and the street decorations, there is a real sense of a carnival atmosphere, as might be expected on a day when many of the works in the city and in outlying districts declared a holiday for their workers. The Quiz sketch, then, starts to give us a feel for the day. One of the richest distributed collections of material is that of the banners produced for and carried on the demonstrations.22 Notable local collections have survived in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Hawick and Perth. They include works and union or society banners which newspaper reports help us to identify as being carried on the day, such as the banners of Pullar’s Dye Works of Perth and the Kinross Brotherly Society.23 Some may have been specific to the events or may have been more general, such as the banner of the Milnathort Spinning Company with roundel portraits of Gladstone and Bright and the words ‘The Peopee’s [sic] Rights by William’ and ‘Free Trade by John’24 and a number, which appear general, may have been produced for the occasion, such as the banners of the Hawick Framework Knitters, the Hawick Stocking Makers and the workers of Dickson & Laings Wilton Mills, all of which have been described in the     21   22   19

North Lanarkshire Museums, CUKDM1977/070.2. See also Peter Sewter’s chapter in this volume. Briggs, ‘Images of Gladstone’, in Jagger, Gladstone, pp. 41–2. For one account of the value of banners as an historical source, see D. Wray, ‘The Place of Imagery in the Transmission of Culture: The Banners of the Durham Coalfield’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 76 (2009), pp. 147–63. 23   Perth Museum & Art Gallery, CNN226, K1972.470. 24   Perth Museum & Art Gallery, K1972.22. 20

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accession record as ‘reform banners’, although none have any direct or apparent reference to politics.25 However, many were certainly produced at the time. A particularly attractive example is the Glasgow Shipwrights’ Society banner, at the time of writing kept in Glasgow Museum’s social history store.26 Nearly six feet high and nine feet wide, this banner shows three figures on a landscape background: in the centre stands Britannia holding a set of scales, with the ‘Franchise Bill’ on the one side tipping the scales against ‘The House of Lords’. To the left stands Mr Punch saying ‘Billy you must pass this bill’, and on the right stands Gladstone holding up a scroll with the words ‘The Whole Bill’. Along the bottom runs the motto ‘United together in freedoms great cause we are determined and must have equal rights & equal laws’. The William/Bill/bill pun is a common one. For example, the small but important collection of four Kilsyth franchise banners, held by North Lanarkshire Museums Service, includes one with a portrait of Gladstone with the words ‘The Franchise “Bill”’ above and ‘The People’s “Bill”’ below.27 The language of the 1884 banners, however, often shows distinctly unGladstonian language. In the collections at Hawick are banners with the words ‘We’ll smuik oot the drones’, ‘Ready for the Autumn felling’ and ‘Our legislators should be chosen by the people from the people’,28 all implying a far more democratic message than Gladstone or the wider Liberal Party leadership would have espoused. One banner carried by the workers at the factory of Samuel Fingland & Co, hosiery and glove makers of Hawick, has the motto ‘Tho Salisbury say “Nae vote ye’ll hae”/It’s comin’ yet for a’ that/When ilka man thro’ a’ the lan’/Shall hae a vote for a’ that’. The direct message, that of universal manhood suffrage, is underlined and perhaps made sharper through the rewriting of words from Robert Burns’s ‘Is there for honest poverty’, perhaps the national bard’s most levelling poem. The Kilsyth weavers’ banner read ‘We’re here, away from loom and shuttle/To force the Lords their house to scuttle’. Similar messages are found throughout the demonstrations, not least in the hearse and the bullock being led off to slaughter shown in the Quiz sketch.   Scottish Borders Council Museum & Gallery Service, Banner 1, Banner 3 and Banner 2. The latter has the words ‘A Jardine Hawick 20th September/84’ painted in one corner. The ‘Grand Franchise Demonstration for the Borders Districts’ took place at Hawick on that day. Although it is not possible to make a definite attribution, the Post Office Directory for that year does record a painter in Hawick by the name of A. Jardine. 26   Glasgow Museums, PP. 1979.8.[2]. 27   North Lanarkshire Museums, CUKDM1977/070.1. 28   Scottish Borders Council Museum & Gallery Service, HAKMG:2004.3, HAKMG:2004.4, HAKMG:2004.1. 25

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Trades models often carried the most overt and democratic political messages of the demonstrations. Although contemporary newspaper reports give examples of hundreds of such items, including working sawmills on trucks being used to cut up tree trunks with the words ‘The House of Lords’ painted on them (the pieces were then thrown out to the cheering crowds, to be used as firewood), only a very few survive. They include a remarkable working model of a waulking (or fulling) mill currently on display at Hawick Museum, which perhaps deserves its own study, featuring as it does a complex set of allusions and references to the Lords and the Commons, public opinion and the franchise, as well as Gladstone, Chamberlain, Hartington and Salisbury which can only be understood through the thing itself, or rather the thing of which it is a model.29 Other surviving banners include the two-sided example carried by the Associated Carpenters and Joiners of Scotland with, on the one side: We’ll teach the hordes in the House of Lords Who assay to try our nerves, To respect the demand of the Grand Old Man, And the Nation he faithfully serves.

and on the other: Since the House of Lords has thrown out this Bill, And refused to bend to the People’s Will, These proud dictators soon shall know That the death knell’s rung for their overthrow.30

The message of these banners and models is strongly anti-House of Lords and goes well beyond the more limited demands being made by Gladstone and the rest of the Liberal Party leadership at this time. Other messages were being less directly communicated by the demonstrators through their objects. A high proportion of the banners refer to other political movements and other demonstrations. By far the larger number of these relate to the reform struggle of 1831–32. They include the Perth banner with the words ‘For a nation to be free it is sufficient that the people will’s [sic] it. 1832’;31 although there is nothing on the object itself to relate it to 1884, the information 29   Scottish Borders Council Museum & Gallery Service, HAK6274. Other examples include a steam hammer tableau in the collection of McManus Galleries & Museum, Dundee, 1984–371.2. 30   City of Edinburgh Museums and Galleries, HH5806/1/98. 31   Perth Museum & Art Gallery, 12/1939.

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that it was carried in the Perth franchise demonstration of that year is recorded in the accession register and was presumably collected from the donor. The Edinburgh plumbers’ reform banner which depicts Christopher North, a popular Edinburgh Tory journalist of the 1820s and 1830s ‘Under the Reform Pump’, is over-painted with the words ‘Carried in 1832’, suggesting subsequent reuse; research at Edinburgh City Museums has confirmed it was carried in both 1866 and 1884.32 Glasgow Museums have two banners which make explicit reference to both 1832 and 1884, the cork-cutters banner, currently on display at the People’s Palace in Glasgow, and a franchise banner which may have come from Saltcoats, Ayrshire.33 The former reads: This Flag Was Out in “32” The Reform Bill to Demand Our Fathers to Support it Came And Bravely Took their Stand Again it’s here in “84” Though Tattered, Torn & Old To Do Battle for the Franchise Bill And the “Grand Old Man[“] so Bold

and the latter reads: The Nation and the Queen are at your back The few must bow to the many Willie; As they did before in days of yore In 1832 Willie. You’ll get your name cut out in stane In honour of your fame Willie’ t’ll make the Tories a’ think shame Of 1884 Willie. (this pole carried a banner in 1832)

The fight for reform in 1831–2 was indexed in other ways, most markedly with the almost ubiquitous carriages of ‘veterans’ of 1832, who were given the honour of leading the marchers. At Wishaw, the demonstrators obtained 32   City of Edinburgh Museums and Galleries, HH2980/66. Edinburgh’s collection also has a United Operative Plumbers’ Association banner [HH2982/66] using the same basic motif but this time featuring Robert Lowe ‘Under the Reform Shower’, made for the 1866 reform demonstration and brought out to be carried again in 1884. 33   Glasgow Museums, PP. 1987.219 [2], PP. 1982.199.

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special permission to meet on the same land which had hosted the 1832 reform meeting. However, 1832 was not the only date or series of events to which the demonstrators appealed. The Dundee demonstration was led by a carriage of veterans of 1832, followed by a carriage of Chartist veterans. At Lesmahagow, the United Free Church hosted an indoor meeting at which the church was decorated with covenanting memorabilia, harking back to the seventeenthcentury fight for religious freedom. The weavers of Strathaven carried objects associated with James Wilson, who was hanged for his involvement in the ‘Radical War’ of 1820; they did so at least three times, at the Hamilton demonstration (28 August), at the Glasgow demonstration (6 September) and at their own demonstration (21 October). The banner of the Associated Carpenters and Joiners of Scotland discussed above was stitched onto a ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ banner, dated to 1832 and subsequently carried also in 1866.34 It should be further noted that not only are these objects being used for their inscribing of the past onto or into the present, they are also being reinscribed as objects of 1884, as part of a process of communication across time. Clearly, then, the franchise demonstrators of 1884 were seeking to write themselves into a heritage of political reform, and they did so with their own objects and with objects relating to earlier campaigns.35 At Perth, this included ‘relics’ (and probably members) of the Pomeranian Band, who had marched in 1832. One of those relics was a clarinet which had been played at the earlier demonstration. It had been kept in the community since then, but in 1888 was donated to Perth Museum.36 A number of the badges and medallions discussed below were also donated in the years immediately following the 1884 demonstrations, as was much of the earlier material which had been reused. At Perth, Edinburgh and Glasgow this was aided by the existence of potential repositories, whereas most towns and cities did not yet boast a museum. Nevertheless, these donations open up the possibility that the demonstrators sought to use their objects not just to write themselves back into a heritage of reform, but also to write themselves forward, either into forthcoming further campaigns, or to assert their importance and seek to be remembered by future generations. Again, they could and did do this through their objects. Where there was no repository, many of the objects were kept in the community, just like the earlier reform, covenanting and other material which had been brought out in 1884.   City of Edinburgh Museums and Galleries, HH5827/98.   For a discussion of the heritage of the vocabulary of ‘reform’ in modern English culture

34 35

and of reform terminology, see J. Innes, ‘“Reform” in English public life: The fortunes of a word’, in A. Burns and J. Innes (eds), Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1850 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 71–97. 36   Perth Museum & Art Gallery, 368.

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The ongoing construction of a heritage of political demonstration and of political reform, then, seems to have been an important role played by these objects. This in turn reminds us of the importance of material culture to the demonstrators of 1884, not just in contemporary events or in signalling their part in a greater struggle, but as a significant part of their political culture in the wider sense. Although these banners and trades models are particularly striking and appear particularly interesting, they only make up a small proportion of the 1884 material which has survived. Hundreds of smaller items, those of personal adornment, are to be found in private and personal collections throughout the United Kingdom and although individually they may appear to tell us very little, treated as a distributed collection they have the potential to get us closer to the demonstrators themselves, and to provide deeper insight into the political culture of the 1884 demonstrations, the meanings ascribed to objects and the meanings those objects can ascribe to the demonstrations and the demonstrators. Some of these objects are unique items, such as the apron and sash worn by one John Martin, presumably an officer of one of the trades societies, the tanner beamsman’s apron ‘worn by the donor’s father’, and the baton presented by the Associated Iron Moulders of Scotland to J.M. Jack, the head marshal of the trades section of the demonstration, all in the collections of Glasgow Museums.37 Also in the Glasgow collections is a badge, identical in design to the main Glasgow franchise demonstration badge which was worn by many of the demonstrators, but made of silver and housed in a box, presented to Lt Col. William Clark of the 8th Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteers [LRV], the head marshal of the demonstration, by his friend John Wilson of the 3rd LRV. Many of the cheaper versions of this badge have survived, including variants such as one with a small star hanging from it with the word ‘Marshal’ inscribed,38 and one in which the central Glasgow coat of arms and the letters ‘GLA’ (for Glasgow Liberal Association) have been replaced by a star inscribed ‘Executive’.39 This latter item is attached to a red cloth backing, and one of the Glasgow badges is attached to a red and cream ribbon (the official colours of late-Victorian liberalism were crimson and buff ).40 It should, therefore, be remembered that many of the badges and other personal jewellery which have survived were probably worn in this way, adding a great deal of colour to the carriers which would have emphasised the wearing of the badge. A few decorative ribbons have also survived, including ones from     39   40   37 38

Glasgow Museums, OG.1951.417.be, OG.1951.417.bf, PP. 1989.51.[1]. Glasgow Museums, PP. 1978.70 (worn by J.O. Bousie, engineer). Private collection. Glasgow Museums, PP. 1983.63.

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the Halifax and Leeds demonstrations.41 These items allowed for a personal identification with the demonstration and with the movement for franchise reform, and indeed could have been worn afterwards, either on a daily basis or for special occasions such as other marches and demonstrations. Perhaps of greater interest are the many hundreds of medallions which are to be found. Medallions were a hugely popular aspect of commemorative and souvenir culture in the nineteenth century, and political medallions were perhaps the most popular. Other than members of the Royal family, surviving collections suggest that Gladstone was the single most popular subject, certainly so in the period from the 1870s. Dozens of designs featured him, including, as noted above, ones without clear Gladstonian association. Nearly all carried his head on the obverse and a motif design or motto on the reverse. Although it should be noted that this was a standard pattern for commemorative medallions, whether of politicians, artists, writers or religious figures, the meanings which accrete to such objects should be considered. Their resemblance to coinage, sometimes accentuated by milling on the edges and other aspects of coin design, brings with it the notion which lie behind coinage and in particular coins featuring monarchs and other leaders. As it is not materially worth the value ascribed to it, a coin has to assert its guaranteed exchange value and it does so through the authority of the state, specifically through the use of a portrait of the head of state by which it is guaranteed. Although not coinage, medallions modelled on coins carry with them an association of authority, in particular an authority which guarantees the value ascribed to it. A political or religious medallion with an individual’s head on the obverse and a motto (incorporating values) on the reverse brings into association those meanings and values and the person depicted, but also does more than that, for it asserts the authority of the individual (to guarantee the principle), and ensures the value of that principle (through the invested person). Moreover, Victorians with knowledge of the heritage of medallions and tokens may have associated such items with late-eighteenth and nineteenthcentury political organisations which used them as part of their propaganda and practices, including the London Corresponding Society and the Anti-Corn Law League. Medallions such as those which depicted Gladstone, then, as well as being simple souvenirs are freighted with associations denoting authority, value and political radicalism.42 Many Gladstone medallions are what we might consider to be general Gladstonian items, suitable to many occasions or just to mark political allegiance   Calderdale Museums, 2000.440, Leeds Museums LEEDM.E.Y.5581.   For further details of the history of medallions, see the relevant sections of H. Osborne

41 42

(ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Decorative Arts (Oxford, 1975).

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Figure 5.3a Reverse of medallion which on the obverse features a bust of Gladstone in profile facing left, with the words ‘William Ewart Gladstone’ and ‘Born 1809’. Private Collection to the Liberal Party and its leader, or to that part of liberalism most closely associated with Gladstone. Some carried mottoes such as ‘Peace, Retrenchment, Reform’ and used familiar motifs such as the axe (see Figure 5.3a). Many were created for specific events, such as Gladstone’s visits to Midlothian,43 Port Sunlight44 or Leeds.45 The largest number, however, relate   McManus Galleries & Museum, Dundee Temp. 6434.   Author’s collection; featuring William and Catherine, it celebrates Gladstone’s opening

43 44

of the Dining & Recreation Hall at the Port Sunlight Works, 28 September 1891. 45   McManus Galleries & Museum, Dundee Temp. 6436.

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Figure 5.3b ‘Gladstone and the franchise for the two millions’ commemorative medallion, 1884 obverse. Except for these words, the medallion is identical to an 1865 Reform League medallion. Note the attached ribbon bar. Private Collection to the 1884 franchise reform campaign. Some designs have a general message such as ‘Gladstone and the franchise for two millions/The constitution in all its fullness for the people of the United Kingdom’ (see Figure 5.3b). This design, which uses a lion rather than the head of Gladstone, has a complicated history, for it is in nearly all respects a copy of the Reform League medallion of 1865, differing only in replacing the name of the President of the Reform League, Edmund Beales (1803–81), who had been a long-standing campaigner for working-class representation in Parliament, with the phrase ‘Gladstone and the franchise for two millions’. The maker was presumably being

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Figure 5.4a Commemorative medallion, 1884 obverse. Private Collection thrifty by re-using patterns and moulds, but many people would have recognised the design, and perhaps still owned one of the originals. Here, we can see aspects of the heritage use to which objects can be put which have already been discussed, but in this case appearing in a mass-produced item. The most common 1884 design appears to be a generic commemorative design which could be used to refer to any specific demonstration or to the wider series of demonstrations (see Figures 5.4a and 5.4b). Very few of these 1884 medallions include a maker’s mark, although two in the collections of the McManus, Dundee and one in the collections of Glasgow Museums are identical to the standard design apart from the name ‘Baird,

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Figure 5.4b Commemorative medallion, 1884 reverse. Private Collection Lenzie’.46 A few of the surviving examples keep to the general design, only adding the name of the specific demonstration they commemorate.47 A rarer design appears to be associated only with the Glasgow demonstration (see Figures 5.5a and 5.5b). Nevertheless, interesting as these medallions might be in their designs, both in terms of similarities and differences, they appear at first glance to tell us little beyond the fact that there was a thriving souvenir and commemorative culture relating to Gladstone generally and the 1884 demonstrations in particular. 46   McManus Galleries & Museum, Dundee 1965–184–6–1, 1965–184–6–2; Glasgow Museums PP. 1980.35.2. 47   For example, Dundee (McManus Galleries & Museum, Dundee 1965–184–7–1, 1965– 184–7–2; Perth Museum & Art Gallery, MESENN69) and Edinburgh (author’s collection).

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Figure 5.5a Commemorative medallion, Glasgow, 1884 obverse. Private Collection What unites all of these examples from 1884, and indeed almost all of the extant Gladstone medallions, is a drilled hole near the top which is clearly not part of the original design. Many private collections and most large museums have hundreds of Victorian medallions, and any researcher or collector who has looked at these collections is aware that most are not holed, but that many religious and most (especially radical or reform) political medallions are. The author has studied more than a hundred Gladstone medallions and only found one that is not holed. Interestingly, none of the examples seen of the common Oldacre medallion, depicting both Gladstone and Salisbury, have been holed. It would appear that holing of political medallions is involved in the assertion of political allegiance or the construction of political identity. The hole allows for

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Figure 5.5b Commemorative medallion, Glasgow, 1884 reverse. Private Collection the medallion to be worn, with either a pin or a ribbon. Many of these medallions may have been worn as part of the events with which they are associated. Some may only have been produced after the events with which they are associated, as commemorative items. But all could have, and many were, worn afterwards. They may have been worn every day, similar to a modern pin badge; they may have been worn at regular events such as party meetings, annual trades processions or elections hustings; they may only have been worn for special events such as later political demonstrations. But all were worn, and all played a part in the wearer’s construction of his or her identity, while also playing a role in the construction of a wider social and political identity, particularly through carrying the message of the history or heritage of the fight for the vote.

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Figure 5.6

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Commemorative medallion, Dundee, 1884 reverse. Note the attached metal pin in a ribbon design, of a different colour and alloy to the medallion itself. Perth Museum and Art Gallery

Moreover, it is also necessary to consider how these wearers of holed medallions may have been encountered by their contemporaries. Most of the medallions

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have only the hole; some have pins attached to them through the hole, a number of which incorporate a ribbon or similar design (see Figure 5.6). Many have actual ribbons, and this may have been the most common way of wearing them. The immediate impression is of a medallion holed not just to be worn, but also to resemble a military medal, in particular those with ribbon bars although a simple ring was also used to attach a ribbon.48 This would only be accentuated by the appearance of another head – that of Gladstone – in the usual place of the monarch. One remarkable survival is of an 1832 commemorative medallion holed and worn with a ribbon, to which are attached two metal bars with the words ‘Liberal Demonstration’ and the date ‘1884’. This is a campaign medal with a bar, ‘awarded’ for two engagements or actions.49 Recognition of this visual or material style modelled on military imagery can lead us to revisit other objects. For example, although banners have a long tradition of being used in nonmilitary ways, they may have looked military when being borne by individuals wearing medallions with ribbons. Again, the appearance of Gladstone at the centre, where the regimental or royal arms would have otherwise appeared, accentuates the metaphor as well as placing him as a leader for whom the battle is waged and to which allegiance is held, as does a radical political message in place of a regimental motto. We should certainly reconsider the small Union Flag which often appears in the top corner of many nineteenth-century reform flags, which historians have often assumed were painted in order to assert the relatively conservative constitutionalism of reform demonstrators, but which bears a clear resemblance to many regimental colours which also carried a Union Flag in the top corner. Although no surviving 1884 banners have this flag, it was a common feature of nineteenth-century reform banners and is likely to have appeared on some contemporary banners as well as very probably on some older and reused ones, in 1884. This is not to say that the intention of the demonstrators was to look like a military organisation on the march or on parade, although that may have been the impression given. The late nineteenth century was a period during which the volunteer movement was very popular, and many of the volunteer regiments had annual and special musters in public parks and major thoroughfares, particularly   Another leading politician of the day who attracted the wearing of medallions in the same way was John Bright. The author knows of four privately-owned examples dated to 1857 and 1866, all of which are holed and two of which have a ribbon attached by means of a bar. The practice was also commonplace with Robert Raikes medallions commemorating the centenary of Sunday Schools in 1880. 49   Glasgow Museums, OG1899.96.b. 48

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to mark national events such as royal visits, weddings or other celebrations.50 Therefore, the 1884 demonstrators might have been influenced by one major available visual or material style, recognisable by both themselves and their audiences. It is worth remembering, however, that the grand marshal of the Glasgow demonstration, William Clark, was not only a leading Liberal in the city, but also the commanding officer of the 7th LRV, and that the demonstrators were carefully organised – it may be said – with military precision. Recognising the visual and material metaphors of the demonstrations must also lead us to revisit the linguistic metaphors of the events, which contemporary newspaper reports tended to call a ‘campaign’, with ‘veterans’ of the ‘battle’ or ‘fight’ for the vote present, and all of the demonstrators organised into ‘cohorts’ and ‘contingents’. This language suggests that audiences encountered the demonstrations in military terms, an encounter which must have been mediated in large part by the objects being carried. Nowhere is this clearer than in the carrying of weapons. A number of swords associated with Covenanting times were carried at the head of processions, as was the ‘weapon’ – little more than a broken stick – associated with the legendary Scots Covenanter, James Wilson, and carried by the Strathaven weavers. Indeed, these objects are notable for carrying both a military message and a heritage message. Moreover, the 1832 medallion with 1884 bar/ribbon attached does a lot of the work of the material culture of 1884, as its accession number (OG.1899.96.b) tells us it was donated in or before 1899 and thus speaks to the desire to record the 1884 demonstrations for the future as well as carrying both military and heritage associations. Three issues, then, arise from the material culture of the 1884 franchise demonstrations which might not be so easily identified from the archival record: the strength of the opposition to the House of Lords as an institution and of support for a more radical vision of democracy than we associate with Gladstone and the Liberal Party; the construction of a heritage of reform both backward-facing to past events and forward-facing to future generations; and a sense of what the demonstrations felt like to contemporaries encountering them, in particular through the visual and material resemblance to military objects. While this kind of study tells us much about the objects themselves, it also raises the question of their value to historians of the reform politics of 1884 beyond providing contemporary colour to events. We might then turn to the idea of the ethnographic ‘encounter’, whereby we, as historians, view a different culture to our own, a political culture of the past, through material   For further details, see especially I.F.W.Beckett, Riflemen Form: A Study of the Rifle Volunteer Movement, 1859–1908 (Tunbridge Wells, 2007). 50

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culture. However, we might also take an historicist sense of the encounter to the material, for these very large and very numerous demonstrations would have been encountered by millions of contemporary people – the ‘masses’ – and thus contributed to the political culture of the 1880s. It has already been shown how they were encountered by contemporary reporters, through their visual and material military metaphors. They would also have been encountered by the political elites, and thereby also contributed to political events. Certainly in Scotland, even the smallest demonstrations were witnessed by leading Liberals, in particular by the local MPs, campaigning in their constituencies for the forthcoming elections. These included the highly active MP for the county of Perth, Sir Donald Currie, wealthy shipping magnate and a friend of Gladstone,51 and indeed some government ministers: the local MP who was the main platform speaker at the Alloa demonstration was the Lord Advocate, John Balfour,52 and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Childers (a guest of Colonel Hamilton at Dalzell House, near Motherwell), who was present at the Glasgow demonstration and who was met by a large group of demonstrators on his arrival at Wishaw railway station.53 Four Liberal MPs spoke at the demonstration for the county of Renfrew at Paisley,54 and three spoke at the principal demonstration for the county of Lanark at Hamilton.55 It was at this demonstration that the Strathaven weavers appeared with 1820 ‘Radical War’ memorabilia and many ‘contingents’ marched with Covenanting banners and weapons. Two MPs and G.O. Trevelyan were present at the Hawick demonstration at which the radical anti-House of Lords banners discussed above were carried.56 Thus, MPs, ministers and other leading Liberals saw thousands of working men, marching in military array, carrying objects made to resemble military material including banners and models calling for the abolition of the House of Lords, and harking back to previous battles and reform demonstrations, riots and movements.   Currie was present at the large Perth demonstration as well as speaking at a number of smaller ‘reform meetings’ at Auchterarder, Callendar, Dunblane, Gartmore, Killin, Lochearnhead and Port of Menteith: Perthshire Advertiser, 20 October 1884, 3a. For further details of his life, see especially A. Porter, ‘Currie, Sir Donald (1825–1909)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), online edn, January 2008. 52   Perthshire Advertiser, 15 September 1884, 2a. 53   Hamilton Advertiser, 6 September 1884, 6a; for Childers, see W. Carr, ‘Childers, Hugh Culling Eardley (1827–1896)’, ODNB (2004), online edn, January 2008. 54   Prof . Rogers, Dr Cameron, S. Clarke and D. Peddie: Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette, 4 October 1884, 2a–4d. 55   Sir T.E. Colbrooke, Col. Hamilton and Mr Ramsay: Hamilton Advertiser, 30 August 1884, 5a–f. 56   A. Elliot and Sir W. Lawson: Southern Reporter, 25 September 1884. 51

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Gladstone had intended to speak to none but his own constituents during his visit to Scotland, and he kept to his intentions despite calls to do otherwise on his journey north in August and early September. The enthusiasm with which he was subsequently received, coupled with the radical nature of the protests appears to have led him to breaking those intentions and he noted in his diary that the visit was ‘of utmost interest: which grew into an importance far beyond anything I had dreamt of ’.57 He spoke at length to many groups later in September and on his way back home to Hawarden: aware that popular opinion was strongly against not only the actions of the House of Lords but also, at least in large part, against the institution, he defended the integrity of the Lords and of the hereditary principle in parliamentary politics more generally. In doing so, he spoke against the views of many of his and his party’s supporters. To Grosvenor, he noted that ‘In every place I have gone just as far for the Lords as I could without provoking hostile demonstration’, and to Argyll that ‘I can assure you that in speaking for the House of Lords I have sailed very near to the wind with all the audiences I have addressed’.58 On many of these occasions he must have seen the material culture of the franchise movement. Indeed, he was a direct witness of the demonstration at Brechin on 17 September, and on 22 September local processionists saw off their hero at the railway station in Coupar Angus before they left for the demonstration at Ladybank.59 Moreover, the rapid resolution of the whole franchise crisis must have been facilitated by newspaper reports of events such as the burning of Salisbury in effigy in front of Kilbarchan town hall by franchise demonstrators (who were also pictured in the Quiz sketches),60, and Salisbury’s own experiences at Dumfries, from which place he was escorted by the authorities, fearful of the hostility and violence of local demonstrators who had attacked the carriages of prominent Tories in the town and the hotel at which they were staying.61 The franchise demonstrators of August, September and October 1884 influenced Gladstone and other political leaders, and had an impact on events; and their messages, direct and indirect, were transmitted to their audiences, including the political elites, by the things they carried.62 57   M.R.D. Foot, and H.C.G. Matthew (eds), The Gladstone Diaries (14 vols, Oxford, 1968– 1994), vol. 11, 26 September 1884. 58   BL, Gladstone Papers, Add MS 44547, f. 115, 116, cited in Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, July 1883–December 1886. 59   Perthshire Advertiser, 24 September 1884, 3a. 60   Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette, 26 July 1884, 6a. 61   Perthshire Advertiser, 22 October 1884, 2d. 62   For the significance of banners in Victorian working-class movements, see Wray, ‘Place of Imagery in the Transmission of Culture’ (2009), pp. 147–63; J. Gorman, Banner Bright:

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The objects that have been discussed mattered to the demonstrators of 1884, and consequently they should matter to us. The demonstrations of 1884 have been ill-served by the historiography, largely because of the relative invisibility of the participants in the archival record. But as this analysis has shown, the material record provides insights denied to us by the limited nature of the archive. Moreover, by accepting the position of anthropologists who have noted the inseparability of the material and the cultural – that material culture is culture – historians may note that the material record is the stuff of cultural history.63 Close attention to the material culture of Gladstonianism can help place Gladstone in his cultural context, for example, in the study of his place in Victorian and subsequent popular culture. Furthermore, through the appreciation of shared visual repertoires, for example, the study of the interdependence of political and other ‘cultures’ in Victorian Britain is opened up to new possibilities; indeed, it underlines the problems of dealing with political culture as a phenomenon separate from a more widely conceived ‘culture’, and also of treating political culture as a part of, rather than the essence of, political history. Material culture was an integral and indispensable element of Victorian politics, and it should be an integral part of the historiography of Victorian politics.

An Illustrated History of Trade Union Banners (Essex, 1986); H. Clark, Raise the Banners High (Edinburgh, 2001). 63   For a recent exploration of the connections between the two disciplines of history and anthropology, see A.C. Willford and E. Tagliacozzo (eds), Clio/Anthropos: Exploring the Boundaries between History and Anthropology (Stanford: 2009).

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PART III PERSONAL QUESTIONS

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Chapter 6

Gladstone as Friend1 Denis Paz

On the last but one day of the year 1870, William Gladstone wrote in his diary: ‘Sir F[rancis] Doyle came: a friend of near 50 years: I believe now my oldest in the world. And a right good one’.2 This entry raises a general question: how were Gladstone’s friendships forged, what were those friendships like and what did it take to sever them? Gladstone’s oldest friendships were those formed at Eton and solidified at Christ Church, and also those newly made at ‘the House’. There were, however, other early friends, including both Arthur Henry Hallam, ‘[t] he chief love of Gladstone’s schooldays’,3 and Joseph Anstice, ‘[t]he friend who seems most to have affected him in the deepest things’.4 It is commonplace that friendships made at public school or Oxbridge colleges were close, often intense, and sometimes lasted a lifetime. Doyle evoked the golden days at Eton in ‘The Poetaster’s Plea: A Familiar Epistle to W.E. Gladstone, Esq., M.P’.:

  I wish to thank David Bebbington of Stirling University, Lucy Brown, sometime Senior Lecturer in History at the London School of Economics, the late Professor Colin Matthew, my colleague Marilyn Morris, and Roland Quinault of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, for helpful conversations. I also wish to thank Sir William Gladstone for granting me access to the Temple of Peace at Hawarden. A grant from the American Philosophical Society and a Faculty Research Grant and sabbatical leave from the University of North Texas supported research for the project of which this paper is a part. I also thank Ms Louise Forsyth for her comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 2   M.R.D. Foot and H.G.C. Matthew (eds), The Gladstone Diaries (14 vols, Oxford, 1968– 1994), vol. 7, p. 30, December 1870. 3   H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1898 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 11–12. Matthew asserts (without explanation) that the relationship ‘was certainly not the usual “crush”’, for the two lived in different houses. ‘None the less the relationship was intense, though not directly sexual, and prefigured several such relationships, with both sexes, in Gladstone’s later life’. The friendship had its periodical ups and downs (its best year was 1827), not least because the rather manipulative Hallam liked ‘to run the changes’ on his friends, but it survived the parting of ways between Oxford and Cambridge. 4   J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (3 vols, New York, 1903), vol. 1, p. 55. 1

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Not to the man or statesman, now I speak; Another, who is yet the same, I seek, – One of a joyous company, who hied Through the green fields along the river side, Those laughing fields, which wear for you and me A garment of perpetual youth and glee, Where voices call us, that are heard no more, And our ‘lost Pleiad’5 brightens as before.6

These friendships demanded the most unreserved honesty, according to a passage in Tom Brown’s Schooldays: [Y]ou’ll all find, if you haven’t found it out already, that a time comes in every human friendship, when you must go down into the depths of yourself, and lay bare what is there to your friend, and wait in fear for his answer. A few moments may do it; and, it may be (most likely will be, as you are English boys) that you will never do it but once. But done it must be, if the friendship is to be worth the name. You must find what is there, at the very root and bottom of one another’s hearts; and if you are at one there, nothing on earth can, or at least ought to sunder you.7

However, this model flies in the face of what Gladstone, Doyle and his Eton and Christ Church friends were learning about friendship from Aristotle. He had argued that friendship grew from three elements: mutual utility, pleasure in one another’s company or respect for one another’s virtues, and that the prerequisite for the development of philia was the passage of time, during which friends work together, share difficulties and successes and mature.8 A group of Victorian friends, the Cambridge Apostles, provided another possible model for Gladstone’s friendships. The Apostles shared with Gladstone and his circle, a classical education that taught them the public values of intellectual discipline, exercise in abstract and analytical thought and a point of view from which to make sense of their experiences. Friendship was ‘an abiding value’ for the Apostles because their claims to gentility were based on merit rather than birth, wealth and patronage. Friendship also allowed the Apostles to associate themselves with free-thinking and enlightenment. It helped them cope

    7   8   5 6

A.H. Hallam. Sir F.H. Doyle, Miscellaneous Verses (London, 1841), pp. 41–2. T. Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857. London and New York, 1949), pp. 298–9. D. Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 15–18.

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with loss of faith and loss of faith strengthened their friendship.9 That, however, was clearly not the case for Gladstone, who suffered no loss of faith. Of Gladstone’s Etonian friends who also went to Christ Church, James Milnes Gaskell and Sir Francis Hastings Doyle were the closest. The three belonged to the Eton debating society and met with others in Gaskell’s room to discuss politics. They continued their close association at Christ Church as original members of the Essay Society. Doyle was Gladstone’s best man at his marriage to Catherine Glynne, thereby cementing the friendship at the altar. Gladstone’s other Eton and Christ Church friends were James Bruce, Charles Canning and Henry Pelham-Clinton, styled Lord Lincoln from birth. Those schoolboy friendships were more intense than those with his new good friends at Christ Church: Thomas Dyke Acland, Walter Kerr Hamilton, Robert Phillimore and Martin Tupper.10 Gaskell had been a special influence on Gladstone at Eton. An enthusiast for the minutiæ of parliamentary politics, Gaskell shared his knowledge with Gladstone, who used it to good effect in later years. The son of a career politician, Gaskell was MP for the close borough of Wenlock from 1832 to 1868. He held no office save that of Junior Treasury Lord, 1841–46, in Sir Robert Peel’s second ministry. However, he does not seem to have wanted for money. Indeed, Doyle, who was his brother-in-law, thought that he was ‘too rich and too indolent for a hard-working life’, intellectually as well as physically.11 Bruce, Canning and Lincoln were heirs to the noble titles of Earl of Elgin, Viscount Canning and Duke of Newcastle, respectively, and enjoyed glittering careers.12   W.C. Lubenow, The Cambridge Apostles, 1820–1914: Liberalism, Imagination, and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 5–6, 21–2, 25–6, 71–2. 10   I draw Gladstone’s friends at Eton and Christ Church from Morley, Gladstone, vol. 1, pp. 34, 39, 48, 54–5, based on early correspondence in the Glynne-Gladstone Papers, St. Deiniol’s Library. 11   Sir F.H. Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions (London, 1886), pp. 35–7; Matthew, Gladstone, pp. 10–11, 21; F. Boase, Modern English Biography (6 vols, London, 1965), vol. 1, p. 1128; J.C. Sainty, Treasury Officials, 1660–1870 (London, 1972), pp. 23–4. 12   Bruce was Governor of Jamaica, 1842–46, Governor-General of Canada, 1846–54, envoy to China in connection with the Arrow War, 1857–61, and died in office as Viceroy of India, 1862–63: Dictionary of National Biography, III, pp. 104–6. Canning, the youngest son of Prime Minister George Canning, was briefly MP for Warwick, but succeeded to the viscountcy on his mother’s death in 1837. Peel made him a junior minister in the Foreign Office in 1841 and First Commissioner of Woods and Forests in 1846. Aberdeen made him Postmaster General, 1853–55. He was the last Governor-General of India, 1855–58, and died in office as the first Viceroy of India, 1858–62: Boase, vol. 1, pp. 536–7. Lincoln moved directly from Christ Church to the House of Commons in 1832, where he remained until he succeeded his father as Duke of Newcastle in 1851. He was a Junior Treasury Lord in Peel’s first ministry, in Peel’s second cabinet 9

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Heir to an ancient Devonshire baronetcy, Acland was an original member of the Essay Society. An active parliamentarian, he worked closely with Gladstone in the cause of working class education.13 Hamilton and Phillimore carved out successful professional careers in the Church and the Bar.14 None of these men needed Gladstone’s helping hand. He was their peer rather than their patron. Of Gladstone’s friends, Sir Francis Hastings Doyle and Martin Tupper offer interesting comparative case studies. Doyle and Gladstone had been school friends; both Doyle and Tupper were at Christ Church with Gladstone. Both were poets. Both, as will be seen, had private embarrassments. Doyle tried to deal with his on his own, while Tupper appealed to his friend. Both needed, sought and obtained Gladstone’s patronage. Doyle remained a Low-Church Tory and Tupper, a semi-Evangelical Tory, while Gladstone moved towards Anglo-Catholicism and liberalism. Both broke with Gladstone at the end, each publishing memoirs in 1886 that publicly attacked the prime minister. An examination of the relationships between Gladstone and the two has relevance for several reasons. First, it shows how friendships forged in Christ Church’s Tory-Anglican atmosphere survived Gladstone’s political turn to liberalism. Secondly, the relationships throw light on Gladstone’s exercise of patronage. Thirdly, they open windows into Gladstone’s character and fourthly, they illustrate what it took for Gladstone to be willing to break a friendship. Little is known of Doyle’s life. The only published study of the man is his entry in the old DNB, three and a half columns by the hack-writer Edward Irving Carlyle.15 The sources for Doyle’s life are sparse. He kept no papers, and

as First Commissioner of Woods and Forests, Aberdeen’s Colonial Secretary and Secretary for War, and finished his career as Colonial Secretary in Palmerston’s second ministry: F. Darrell Munsell, The Unfortunate Duke: Henry Pelham, Fifth Duke of Newcastle, 1811–1864 (Columbia, 1985); Boase, vol. 2, pp. 1116–7. 13   MP for West Somerset, 1837–47, and North Devon, 1865–85, he was an improving landlord and a patron of Devonshire agricultural, educational, and antiquarian societies: Bose, vol. 4, pp. 23–4. For his educational activities, see J.L. Alexander, ‘Collegiate Teacher-training in England and Wales: A Study in the Historical Determinants of Educational Provision and Practice in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1977); D.G. Paz, The Politics of Working-Class Education in Britain, 1830–50 (Manchester, 1980). 14   The former took holy orders and was a fellow of Merton College. He was made a Canon of Salisbury Cathedral in 1841, and was Bishop of Salisbury from 1854 until his death in 1869. The latter, a great friend of Gladstone’s in later years, became one of the most eminent jurists of the nineteenth century: Boase, vol. 1, p. 1305; vol. 2, pp. 1498–9. 15   Edward Irving Carlyle, ‘Doyle, Sir Francis Hastings Charles’, DNB, XXII, pp. 577–9; revised by Charles Brayne for the ODNB.

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his correspondence is scattered in several collections.16 His published works also provide not unhelpful sources. Doyle collected his early verse in 1834, with expanded editions following in 1840 and 1841. Several long poems appeared as pamphlets during the 1840s: The Two Destinies, a ‘two-nations’ contrast between a rich girl and a poor one; Œdipus, King of Thebes, intended to open the classics to working men who had no Greek; and The Duke’s Funeral, marking the death of the Duke of Wellington. Doyle continued to write during the 1850s and 1860s, but did not publish again until he decided to stand for Professor of Poetry at Oxford and needed to bolster his qualifications. The Return of the Guards and Other Poems (1866) included ‘The Duke’s Funeral’ and ‘The Two Destinies’, but it owed its popularity to its horse-racing ballads and patriotic ditties, above all ‘The Private of the Buffs’.17 In addition, Doyle published two volumes of his lectures delivered as Professor of Poetry, in 1869 and 1877. Gladstone read all of Doyle’s œuvre,18 respected Doyle’s views on Tennyson and called him ‘essentially a poet though an unwrought one’.19 Doyle’s family, Anglo-Irish by origin, was well connected, but was neither affluent nor landed. His great-great grandfather spent the family patrimony and was given a place, a mastership in the Irish Court of Chancery, as a reward for   Warden Anson Papers, All Souls College, Oxford; Blackwood Papers, National Library of Scotland, MSS. 4317, 4358, 4374, 4443; Gladstone Papers, British Library, Add. MS 44150 (and additional letters scattered in other volumes); J.R. Hope-Scott Letters, National Library of Scotland, MSS 3667–3669, 3671; Lysdinam Collection, Department of Manuscripts and Records, National Library of Wales, B 725, B2160-2170; Lytton (Knebworth) Papers, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, D/EK/C22; Taylor Family Letters, Department of Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. d13–d16, d18, d21; Henry H. Vaughan Papers, Department of Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. d. 439. Letters from Doyle can also be found at the Beinecke Library, Yale University; the Berg Collection, New York Public Library; the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies; the Hampshire Record Office; and the Tennyson Research Centre, Lincoln Central Library. 17   This book made a good gift to young army officers. A copy of the 1883 edition, now in the Liverpool Central Library, was a Christmas present to Lieut. Christopher M. Randle from ‘E.R’. – perhaps his mother – in 1895. Sir Francis Hastings Doyle, The Return of the Guards and Other Poems (London, 1883), Liverpool Central Library, Catalogue Reference M1007, title page recto top. 18   Only The Duke’s Funeral does not appear; but as a copy can be found in the volume of pamphlets entitled ‘The Duke of Wellington’ at St. Deiniol’s, we may take it that Gladstone read that work as well. Some of Doyle’s books – the two series of Lectures on Poetry as well as The Duke’s Funeral – have migrated to St. Deiniol’s. Others – the 1840 and 1841 editions of Miscellaneous Verses – are in the Temple of Peace. Still others – Œdipus, King of Thebes and the 1834 edition of Miscellaneous Verses – have a Temple of Peace pressmark, but cannot be found on the shelves. 19   Gladstone to the Duchess of Sutherland, 30 August 1859, quoted in Morley, Gladstone, vol. 2, p. 184. 16

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being a wit and a good dinner guest. His grandfather held place as Governor of Ceylon. His father was a captain in the Army, served in the Netherlands campaign of 1793–94, and then was posted to India before turning 14. He retired from the military in poor health and became chairman of the Excise Board. After Eton, Doyle earned mediocre tutors’ marks at Christ Church, but after two terms of cramming with Mr. Patch, a brilliant but disgraced former maths tutor at Wadham College, he managed to pull off a first (undergraduates flocked to hear his viva). He secured a fellowship of All Souls’ College from 1835 to 1845, simultaneously being called to the bar from the Inner Temple in 1837. However, neither the law nor the pleasures of the Senior Common Room were to be his lot. His marriage required him to find a real job. When Sir Robert Peel came to power, he appealed to Gladstone for help;20 the prime minister appointed him assistant solicitor of the Excise in 1845 and receiver general of Customs in the following year, partly to pay ‘tribute’ to his father, partly to discharge a debt owed to his father-in-law. When that office was abolished in 1869, Gladstone, then prime minister, made him a commissioner of Customs, where he remained until he retired in 1883. In his spare time he wrote poetry, was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1867 to 1877 and resumed his All Souls’ fellowship from 1872 to 1877.21 Martin Tupper, in contrast to Doyle, was a very public figure indeed, for, in his day, he was to poetry what Dickens was to prose, as measured by sales of their works in Britain and in the United States. Proverbial Philosophy, Tupper’s best-known work, was in print from 1838 to the 1880s in Britain and for a good score of years beyond in the United States. Proverbial Philosophy is subtitled ‘A Book of Thoughts and Arguments, Originally Treated’, and original it is. Written in the style of the Book of Proverbs, Authorised Version, Proverbial Philosophy is a collection of poetic meditations on a variety of moral topics, including ‘Truth in Things False’, ‘Memory’, ‘Showing Humility’, Estimating Character’, ‘Hatred and Anger’, ‘Recreation’, ‘Reading’, ‘Writing’, ‘Friendship’, ‘Love’ and ‘Marriage’. He hoped to succeed Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850, but the honour went to another. Undaunted, he wrote verse for national occasions including the opening of the Crystal Palace, Wellington’s funeral, the marriages of Victoria and Albert’s children and the Golden Jubilee. He rose to the challenge at times of national crisis, penning anti-Catholic and anti-Anglo-Catholic works, as well as patriotic ballads calling for riflemen to   Doyle to Gladstone, 2 December 1841, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44150, f. 94; Doyle to Gladstone, 10 June 1842, ibid., ff. 95–6. 21   Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions, pp. 135, 282; Boase, vol. 1, p. 911; Collection Book, 1810–1839, Christ Church Archives, Oxford, p. 318; Diary of James Ramsay, Later First Marquess of Dalhousie, while at Christ Church, 1829–1833, Christ Church Archives, Oxford, 4 June 1832, f. 157. 20

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form a militia to repel French invasion. He made two triumphal tours to the United States and Canada – in 1851 and 1876 – and he felt a special calling to promote Anglo-American amity. Wits began to mock Tupper in the 1860s and after with parodies called Proverbial Platitudes by Muffer or Dupper.22 Nor was the twentieth century kind to his reputation. Critics between the wars dismissed him as an exemplar of lowermiddle-class taste.23 The Second World War provoked a momentary interest in Tupper. Written under the Nazi shadow in 1941, Ralf Buchmann’s Zurich doctoral thesis argued that the bad middle-class values that Tupper proclaimed – jingoistic nationalism, militarism, xenophobia – must be destroyed, and the good middle-class values that Tupper also proclaimed – internationalism, free trade, self-government, honest work – must be encouraged, if liberal democracy is to withstand totalitarianism.24 At the end of the Second World War, the journalist and biographer Derek Hudson wrote the first and only biography of Tupper.25 Hudson showed how Tupper used his popularity to bring together Great Britain and the United States. Since then, Tupper has returned to obscurity. Asa Briggs quoted two of Tupper’s poems, but passed over the chance to study a significant ‘Victorian person’.26 W.L. Burn mentions his ‘retailing fairly simple aphorisms’ to an apparently avid public.27 Margaret Stonyk finds only ‘leaden metrics and philistine pomposity’.28 Margaret Drabble judges that Tupper ‘became the favourite of millions who knew nothing about poetry’.29   E.g., [G.F.P.], Hoyle’s Games Modernised (London, 1863), pp. 110, 145; see also W. Hamilton (ed.), Parodies of the Works of English and American Authors (6 vols, London, 1884–89), vol. 6, pp. 88–90; W.S. Gilbert, ‘Ferdinando and Elvira; or, the Gentle Pieman’, The Bab Ballads (London, 1953), p. 60. 23   G. Saintsbury, ‘Lesser Poets of the Middle and Later Nineteenth Century’, in Sir A.W. Ward and P.A.Waller (eds), The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. XIII, The Nineteenth Century (II) (Cambridge, 1917), pp. 164–249; John Drinkwater, ‘Martin Tupper’, in W.r de la Mare (ed.), The Eighteen Eighties: Essays by Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature (Cambridge, 1930), pp. 197–217; G.M. Young, Victorian England, Portrait of an Age (Oxford, 1953), pp. 14–15; E.Wingfield-Stratford, Those Earnest Victorians (New York, 1930), p. 118; Sir Llewellyn Woodward, The Age of Reform, 1815–1870 (Oxford, 1962), pp. 533, 534. 24   R. Buchmann, Martin F. Tupper and the Victorian Middle-Class Mind, Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten/Swiss Studies in English, Bd. 10 (Bern, 1941). 25   D. Hudson, Martin Tupper, His Rise and Fall (London, 1949). 26   A. Briggs, Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes, 1851–67 (New York and Evanston, 1963), pp. 15, 127. 27   W.L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation (New York, 1965), p. 49. 28   M. Stonyk, Nineteenth-Century English Literature (New York and London, 1983), p. 202. 29   M. Drabble (ed.), Oxford Companion to English Literature (Oxford, 1985), p. 1005. 22

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It is striking that Gladstone’s biographers say little about his friendship with either Tupper or Doyle. Morley mentions Tupper only to sneer: In the account of intimates is the unexpected name of Tupper, who, in days to come, acquired for a time a grander reputation than he deserved by his Proverbial Philosophy, and on whom the public by and by avenged its own foolishness by severer doses of mockery than he had earned.30

Tupper’s name does not appear in the indices of Gladstone’s later biographers, with two exceptions: Richard Shannon, who gives Tupper five passing mentions in the first volume of his biography, but none in the second;31 and Colin Matthew.32 Similarly, the biographers allot Doyle a walk-on part, mostly as spear-carrier, or should I say ring-bearer? But John Morley and Richard Shannon show that Doyle convinced Gladstone that Tennyson was a great poet, and David Bebbington uses Doyle’s story of the young Gladstone mastering a skittish chestnut mare to illustrate the future statesman’s character.33 Tupper was not one of Gladstone’s most intimate Christ-Church friends; his stutter kept him from the intense political discussions in rooms, the Essay Society and the Oxford Union.34 Nor was he on the committee that circulated a petition against parliamentary reform in 1831 (a seminal event in Gladstone’s early political development), but then neither were Gladstone’s more active friends Acland and Doyle.35 What drew Gladstone to Tupper was the latter’s religiosity; Gladstone noticed his regular attendance at chapel, and especially his regularly taking the Sacrament.36 Tupper belonged to the small subset of those Christ Church undergraduates who regularly approached the altar to take Holy Communion:

    32   33   30

Morley, Gladstone, vol. 1, p. 55. R. Shannon, Gladstone, 2 vols (London, 1982–1999), vol. 1, pp. 32, 97, 255, 267, 471. Matthew, Gladstone, p. 22. Morley, Gladstone, vol. 1, pp. 34, 39, 42–3, 54, 59, 135, 581; vol. 2, pp, 184, 631; P. Magnus, Gladstone: A Biography (London, 1954), pp. 6, 10, 19, 46; Shannon, Gladstone, vol. 1, pp. 12, 13, 26, 29, 62, 88; Shannon, Gladstone, vol. 2, pp. 226, 286, 469; R. Jenkins, Gladstone: A Biography (New York, 1997), pp. 15, 20; Matthew, Gladstone, pp. 10, 13, 21, 52, 257; D. Bebbington, William Ewart Gladstone: Faith and Politics in Victorian Britain (Grand Rapids, 1993), pp. 28, 33, 35–6, 45, 263. 34   See minutes of meeting, 27 November 1830, Gladstone Papers, British Library [hereinafter BL], Add. MS 44720, ff. 91–101. 35   Anti-Reform Petition, 30 May 1831, BL, Add. MS. 44721, ff. 43–5. 36   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 1, 1 November 1829 and 6 December 1829. 31

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My first acquaintance with Gladstone ... was a memorable event ... It was at that time not a common thing for undergraduates to go to the communion at Christchurch Cathedral – that holy celebration being supposed to be for the particular benefit of Dean and Canons, and Masters of Arts. So when two undergraduates went out of the chancel together after communion, which they had both attended, it is small wonder that they addressed each other genially, in defiance of Oxford etiquette, nor that a friendship so well begun has continued to this hour.37

Religion also played a role in Gladstone’s friendship with Doyle. The two had increasingly serious discussions about religion during the period March 1829 to April 1831.38 Sometimes the conversations were ‘not very direct’39; occasionally, they were ‘more satisfactory than usual thank God’.40 Matters grew more intense at the beginning of 1831, when Gladstone wrote a long letter to him, ‘chiefly on the difficult subject of his to me: God only knows whether I pursued at all the right course, for I don’t’.41 (This refers to the mental lassitude of an acquaintance, and to Doyle’s poor health for which Gladstone recommended the fashionable physician Dr. Henry Jephson of Leamington Spa).42 Simultaneously, both his cousin and close childhood friend and his sister suddenly died: ‘got a letter from him from which he seemed to feel it much, and may God in his mercy make it the means of bringing him to a true and consistent religion – wrote a long letter but I fear a bad one to him in reply’.43 Doyle’s serving as Gladstone’s best man, standing before the altar, was public acknowledgement of the close bonds between the two. Gladstone developed a high view of the Holy Communion during this period. He was most concerned with the sacrament as a rite of cleansing the recipient’s soul and of communing with the Christian god, as his domestic sermons show,44   M.F. Tupper, My Life as an Author (London, 1886), p. 54.   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 1, pp. 230, 233, 235, 321, 8 March 1829, 25 March 1829, 15 May

37 38

1829, 12 September1830. 39   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 1, 3 April 1829. 40   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 1, p. 320, 30 August 1830. 41   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 1, p. 342, 4 February 1831. 42   Doyle to Gladstone, 2 February 1831, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44150, ff. 22–23. For Jephson, see Boase, vol. 2, col. 84. 43   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 1, p. 355, 25 April 1831. For the cousin, see Doyle to Gladstone, January 1831, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44150, ff. 20–21. 44   See ‘Requisites for attending the Holy Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper’, Wednesday before Easter, 9 April 1843; Add. MS. 44779, ff. 5–6, 8; ‘Public Worship’, 22 January 1843; Add. MS. 44780, f. 1.

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but he implicitly linked the sacrament with Christian brotherhood. Christian brotherhood differs from Christian friendship. The latter is the unity of men in the world, men of different and unequal abilities, talents, character, intelligence and even luck. The former is a spiritual, otherworldly relationship of men who together deploy their abilities in the Christian god’s service. Their relationship transcends worldly social status and nationality, deriving directly from Jesus’s claims to create a universal kingdom of grace for all.45 The Holy Communion unites all partakers, of course, in a sacred unity. However, implied is a special unity for brothers in Christ.46 Tupper was quickly impressed by Gladstone’s abilities. ‘I regard you, Gladstone, and have regarded you for years, as a man who will rise to the highest eminence’.47 Tupper, however, was a conservative Churchman: I suspect I am what is called ultra Protestant & Low Church: that is to say I am no Tractarian, & desire to be evangelical at heart: at the same time, I never went into a dissenting place of worship in my life.48

In more purely secular political matters, Tupper had started out as a Tory. However, his first visit to the United States in 1851 ‘helped to ripen my narrower and cruder thoughts into a wider & franker liberality’.49 Tupper believed that the British public was fed up with: the half dozen great governing families, and heartily sick of quasi-oligarchy; we think it an indignity thus to be pitched from Palmerston to Derby, & from Derby to Russell, & so back again, perpetually ringing the changes on Greys, Elliotts, Berkeleys, & Russells.50

Rather, what was wanted was a man of the people as prime minister – a man who took leaves out of John Bright’s and J.A. Roebuck’s books. (Though Tupper admitted that he disliked both men!) For Tupper, Gladstone filled this bill: We are perpetually expanding Magna Carta … and all our reform bills & reforms are but the expression of our hatred against tyrannies & of our love of popular   ‘Christian Equality’, February 1841; Add. MS. 44779, ff. 90–3.   ‘Holy Eucharist’, 19 March 1848; Add. MS. 44780, ff. 250–1; ‘For none of us liveth to

45 46

himself, and no man dieth to himself ’, 16 March 1856; Add. MS. 44781, ff. 105–6. 47   Tupper to Gladstone, 24 September 1841, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, f. 28. 48   Tupper to Gladstone, 29 May 1847, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, f. 45. 49   Tupper to Gladstone, 30 December 1852, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, f. 169. 50   Tupper to Gladstone, 26 February 1858, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, f. 222.

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liberty. Therefore do we want as our great popular leader the man who ... is rather for the many than for the few: and one openly resolved to destroy all proved abuses in spite of aristocratic influences.51

Yet Tupper did not quite grasp where Gladstone was headed: O noble Gladstone, I wish I could cut your painter clear of such types as Graham, Bp. Exeter, and (well, I don’t know exactly the names, but I mean) all sorts of cut & dried Parliamentaryism – (let me thrust it out) Puseyism, Officialism. We want honest English Action, not oratory – Religion, not mere churchism – Duty, not routine.52

Nevertheless, Tupper rejoiced when Gladstone at last became prime minister in 1868. However, there were limits to Tupper’s support – limits defined by religion. Yes, Tupper supported Gladstone’s commitment to religious liberty, but not when it came to abolishing church rates, or admitting Jews and atheists to Parliament or disestablishing the Church of Ireland. In company with so many of his fellow middle-class Victorians, Tupper was an anti-Catholic on both religious and political grounds. For him, Roman Catholicism was unScriptural and idolatrous, for its fundamental beliefs and practices owed more to Graeco-Roman mystery religion than to the simple faith of Jesus and his disciples. Moreover, he believed that the Roman Catholic Church was persecutory, dominated by scheming priests, and bent on oppressing the laity. But, providentially, the Protestant Reformation had liberated men’s minds from the chains of Romish superstition and had established the preconditions for English freedoms and liberal political institutions.53 This did not mean that Tupper was confident, for in the ultramontane nineteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church was on the march. And worse, the Anglo-Catholic movement threatened the internal integrity of the Church of England itself. So concerned was Tupper that he bombarded Gladstone with advice about religious questions of the day, advice that was the diametrical opposite of Gladstone’s own views. But Gladstone was becoming increasingly suspect in the ultra-Tories’ eyes from the 1840s as a Puseyite, a Jesuit in disguise, a closet Papist. Naturally, this concerned the anti-Catholic Tupper, especially when a Tory newspaper, the Morning Herald, published a chart in 1852 comparing the votes of Gladstone and Sir Robert Harry Inglis   Tupper to Gladstone, 1 March 1858, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, f. 227.   Tupper to Gladstone, 1 March 1858, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, f. 228. 53   I place Tupper in the context of ‘middle-brow’ literature in Popular Anti-Catholicism in 51 52

Mid-Victorian England (Stanford, 1992), pp. 56–66.

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(Gladstone’s fellow MP for Oxford University) on Roman Catholic Relief and Jewish Disabilities Bills. Gladstone voted for them, and Inglis against. Tupper wrote to Gladstone: surely, there must be some mistakes here, – or some things to be explained or extenuated; by, e.g., some other list of good service on Church and Protestant Questions.54

Faced with private and public allegations about his friend, Tupper put it directly to Gladstone: ‘it is now my privilege & duty to draw from you a free & plain reply to this question, Are you a hearty friend of the Protestant Reformation?’55 Well, Gladstone rarely gave plain replies to questions of any sort, and this was no exception; Tupper’s reaction suggests that Gladstone’s reply was gnomic: if I may put it so, you have said ‘Yes’ to my question in a form so little clearly & by reference, that I fear I could not shew the answer to your advantage ... as you really do say ‘Yes’, why not put it in its plain categorical intensity?56

Despite his doubts, Tupper supported Gladstone in the Oxford University elections from 1847 to 1865. He hadn’t kept up the annual fees, and consequently had no vote in Convocation, so he qualified for the DCL degree (which carried with it the franchise).57 He issued a pamphlet, ‘Is it Right to Vote for Mr. Gladstone?’ in 1853, and a poem, ‘Oxford’s Representative’, in 1864.58 Why did Tupper stick with Gladstone to the end? The short, but probably oversimplified, answer is that he had nowhere else to go. The alternative was to follow Disraeli – but he did not like Disraeli, whom he regarded as an exotic, cynical, cosmopolitan, duplicitous Jew. Above all, he had a personal connection with Gladstone: he had dined with him, worshipped with him, lived in ‘the House’ with him and glimpsed the promise of his greatness: For you personally I am always breaking a lance, though I will not, with my own good conscience honoured, go with you always blindly as to politics ... I have lived long enough to be able to love & honour an upright man, without attempting to     56   57   54

Tupper to Gladstone, 11 June 1852, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, f. 147. Tupper to Gladstone, 22 June 1847, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, f. 51. Tupper to Gladstone, 24 June 1847, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, f. 52. Tupper to P. Bliss, 10 July 1847, Correspondence of the Rev. Philip Bliss, BL, Add. MS 34576, f. 454. 58   The pamphlet is enclosed in Tupper to Gladstone, 7 January 1853, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS. 44336, ff. 176–177; the poem is in f. 251. 55

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stand sponsor to all he thinks & does: to his own Master he standith or falleth. I love him for his own sake: & do my best always to fight his battles with gainsayers who doubt him, as I never can do.59

Yet Tupper never did understand his friend Gladstone, and always felt that a transparent but palpable wall separated them: ‘I wish I could raise the battle cry of Gladstone & No Popery – for I always want your success – but never Rome’s’.60 So personal admiration was enough to transcend religious disagreement. Doyle also had admired Gladstone when they were young men. He visited Fasque after taking his degree. There, he says, he came to admire Gladstone’s father, John Gladstone: Under his influence, apparently, nothing was ever taken for granted between him and his sons. A succession of arguments on great topics and small topics alike, arguments conducted with perfect good humour, but also with the most implacable logic, formed the staple of the family conversation. Hence it is easy to see from what foundations Mr. Gladstone’s skill as a debater has been built up.61

Doyle relates two anecdotes about this visit to illustrate ‘the energy and pertinacity of Mr. Gladstone’s character’. The first is about archery. The target was set against long grass, which hid the arrows that went astray. Doyle, indolent, wanted to leave them be. ‘But no – Mr. Gladstone was made of sterner stuff, and not to be persuaded’, and insisted that they search until the errant arrows were found. The second anecdote was about horses. One day they went riding. Doyle’s mount was docile, but Gladstone’s was skittish and would not let him open a gate. Doyle offered to do it, but Gladstone was determined to master the horse. It took forty minutes of rearing, sidling and plunging before the horse capitulated, and Gladstone opened the gate.62 I related the second story to an undergraduate student of mine who raises horses. She observed that many more riders have tried to master their mounts than have succeeded. In his memoirs, Doyle remembered the ‘depth and genuineness of sympathy’ at Gladstone’s wedding, sentiments that Doyle attempted to express in his verses, ‘To Two Sister Brides, Who were Married on the Same Day’. At the time, both Doyle and Gladstone thought that Catherine Glynn’s     61   62   59 60

Tupper to Gladstone, 15 May 1868, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS. 44336, f. 300. Tupper to Gladstone, [28] June 1868, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS. 44336, f. 303. Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions, p. 138. Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions, pp. 138–9.

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special destiny was to be the young statesman’s helpmeet. Gladstone marked these two stanzas: High hopes are thine, oh! eldest flower, Great duties to be greatly done; To soothe, in many a toil-worn hour, The noble heart which thou hast won. Covet not then the rest of those, Who sleep through life unknown to fame; Fate grants not passionless repose To her, who weds a glorious name.63

While the young statesman ‘presses on through calm and storm/Unshaken’, Catherine had ‘an office to perform, / To be his answering spirit bride’. And again Gladstone marked a verse: Be thou a balmy breeze to him, A fountain singing at his side; A star, whose light is never dim, A pillar, to uphold and guide.64

Gradually, however, Doyle began to question the direction that Gladstone was following. His first rebarbative comments on Gladstone’s politics appeared in the second volume of his lectures on modern English poetry. Gladstone marked this passage: Successive governments seem equally ready – equally eager, I might almost say – to throw overboard all the treasures, all the heirlooms of our English past. We are to put off our whole armour, simply because it is armour, without much enquiring whether it be the armour of God or not. Such phrases as, fighting the good fight, quitting ourselves like men, holding fast the sword of the spirit – such appeals as that of Demosthenes to the immortal shadows that glorify Marathon – are now quite out of fashion.65

His index entry referring to this passage reads ‘Jingo’.   Doyle, Miscellaneous Verses (London, 1840), p. 123.   Doyle, Miscellaneous Verses, p. 124. 65   Sir F.H. Doyle, Lectures on Poetry Delivered Before the University of Oxford (London, 63 64

1877), p. 147.

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Doyle’s second attack on Gladstone came in 1883. The Duke’s Funeral was addressed not to the great British public, but to his small, eldest son: Child, with fresh cheek upon thy velvet palm, O bright-haired child, that sleep is sweet and calm Through all those youthful pulses breathing balm; But yet I say, Arise!66

The poem, then, is an exhortation to his son to accept the ‘solemn trust/That England, great as yet, and free’, commits ‘to thee, and such as thee’.67 Doyle added a poignant quatrain to the 1883 edition: Alas! In vain all rosy from his cot The child of hope was roused upon that morn, He died, when England called him, pausing not; And left us here with broken hearts forlorn.68

Doyle’s son, who had made the Army his career, died during the Egyptian campaign of 1882–83. Doyle blamed his son’s death on poor organisation and scandalously bad rations, the result of the misguided economies by cheese-paring politicians.69 That was surely a reference to Gladstone, who had authorised the Egyptian campaign and a champion of economy in public spending. Doyle believed that Gladstone’s entire political course had proven to be a declension from his early Christ Church ideals, which had culminated in the prime minister’s responsibility for both the killing of his son and the attempted killings of the union between Britain and Ireland and of the British Empire. He claimed to be aware of ‘the many terrible aspects of modern life’, especially the rapid population growth, which, though it may have increased trade and enriched capitalists, also produced: our great cities, with their swarms of miserable men, women, and children, festering in poverty, vice, and wretchedness.. I am not a Tory, alas, because I look upon the present state of things with approval, or even with hope, but because I think our Government worse than it was sixty years ago, and because I think that

    68   69   66

67

Sir F.H. Doyle, The Duke’s Funeral: A Poem (N.P., [1852]), p. 1. Doyle, The Duke’s Funeral: A Poem, pp. 1–2. Doyle, Return of the Guards (1883), p. 193. Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions, p. 322.

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if something be not done to arrest the growth of our ever-increasing population, it will be worse sixty years hence than it is now.70

Unfortunately, Doyle offered no positive solution to this problem. Aristotle had taught ‘his own, and all future ages’, of the evils of democracy. Perhaps the best thing to be done was to ‘adjourn free government for a time, and hand over the management of affairs, after the Roman fashion, to some firm, vigorous, and patriotic dictator, if we could find him, than encourage a huge eyeless Samson to drag down the pillars which sustain what is left of our social edifice, on the chance of his rebuilding the temple of human life out of its ruins, with more consummate skill, and on a nobler plan’.71 Doyle also reassessed his poem celebrating Gladstone’s marriage: My anticipations of Mr. Gladstone’s remarkable career, hazarded in them, have not been falsified, though perhaps it was just as well for the verses that I did not foresee the exact course it would take. Nay, had a prophet on that morning pointed out to Mr. Gladstone himself, that he was intended, in after years, to threaten, if not to destroy the House of Lords, and to become the idol of the mob, in the hope of breaking up the British Empire, we might have had something like a repetition of Hazael’s vehement protest against the solemn warnings of Elisha; but che sarà sarà, and I do not pretend, seeing that my youthful opinions, then identical with Mr. Gladstone’s, have no doubt fossilised themselves in the Civil Service, to say more than I can help about a change of feeling that I do not understand.72

He objected to the short-sighted economies that had led to unpreparedness for wars in Afghanistan, Zululand, the Transvaal, Egypt and the Sudan. He faulted the statesman for having forgotten the warnings against democracy of Thucydides, Aristotle and Plato.73 He found himself feeling: a continually increasing dislike to Mr. Gladstone as a statesman, and a continually deepening distrust of his character as a man … Old associations and old recollections fight hard against my present instinct, so that my heart is filled with mixed feelings of angry amazement and of genuine sorrow. If, indeed, Mr. Gladstone should turn out to be what many think him, a really great statesman, and not what I now consider him, a parliamentary rhetorician, liable to be tossed about from one side to the other by every gust of impulse; ... I will read my     72   73   70 71

Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions, pp. 34–5. Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions, pp. 34–5. Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions, p. 280. Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions, pp. 118–19, 329–31.

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recantation, not only with readiness, but with real pleasure. The renewal of our old affection, before I die, would be as welcome to me, as the freshness of some unexpected fountain to a solitary traveler toiling through the desert, but such a fountain I do not now hope to light upon.74

Finally, Doyle published his autobiography, Reminiscences and Opinions, in 1886. He made no claims that his memoirs were ‘literature in any high sense of the word’ or filled, like those of Lord Malmesbury or John Wilson Croker, with important material. His reminiscences were a gossiping volume, more ‘a spirit distilled from the vin ordinaire of a life-talk, and bottled for future use, than a literary production’.75 Doyle claimed to have written his book from memory, for he did not keep a diary. If he had, many interesting things might have appeared in his book, ‘but then I am not the sort of man who keeps a diary, and hence the reader must take what he can get’.76 However, Doyle really believed that his book was the better for having been written from memory: ‘what is produced comes back, because it has remained in my mind by its own strength, not merely because it was once noted down in a diary. And its survival is, one may say, something like “the survival of the fittest”’.77 Doyle certainly had a sense of ironic humour. His relaxed, easy-going manner of writing, however, concealed pride and a deeply felt sense of personal injury. Hence, Doyle’s comment that his memoirs, although ‘inferior stuff may be worth something for special purposes’, should not be taken at face value.78 The special purpose of this autobiography was to attack Gladstone’s policies and character. Another thread can be traced in the relationship between Tupper, Doyle and Gladstone besides those of personal admiration and religious and political disagreement. This third thread has to do with family disasters, skeletons in cupboards and patronage. Patronage still was a necessity in the mid-Victorian generation for gentlemen who wished to pursue a literary life. But what sort of patronage could Gladstone’s friends expect from a patron who, to paraphrase Theodore Hoppen, considered retrenchment transcendently important and worshipped at the shrine of balanced budgets?79 Tupper’s finances were in excellent shape. He had wanted to enter the church and had qualified for the Bar from Lincoln’s Inn, but his speech impediment kept him from following those professions. So, his father gave him £10,000 in 1833.     76   77   78   79   74 75

Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions, p. 404. Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions, p. 2. Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions, pp. 277–8. Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions, p. 3. Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions, p. 2. K.T. Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation (Oxford, 1998), p. 206.

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Tupper talked about using his capital to buy a share in a city bank or mercantile house, but nothing came of it; he lived off the income of his patrimony (£400 p.a.), gifts from his father and royalties from his books. But his family was growing and his father must some time die. Hence, when Gladstone took office in 1841, Tupper asked his friend to remember him. Gladstone recommended that Tupper buy Liverpool & Manchester Railway shares, then available at a good price, but he did not.80 Then, disaster struck in 1847: I never speculated (as I thought) in my life: would not have one railway share, though sore beset by tempting friend-directors: however my Uncle Selwyn caught me at last for his ‘Patent Galvanized Iron’, & hinc illae lacrymae.81

For the moment, though, sales of Proverbial Philosophy and his other works brought in enough to live on. Patronage remained a hope. When the possibility of becoming editor of Sharpe’s London Magazine arose in 1848 – a possibility that failed to materialise – Tupper worried that having held an editorship might count against him if a patronage job ever came through.82 It was not until the 1850s, however, that his search for patronage became more determined and more desperate. On 8 February 1853, Tupper unburdened himself to his friend. His wife’s behaviour had become such that he had to keep a nurse in the house to control her:83 That morbid affections, continually illustrated by frantic temper, frenzied jealousy, & perpetual worry by night & by day, have ... made [me] the very martyr of marriage – is a most unhappy truth ... Moreover, except when under the evil influence (which is too often excited by stimulants when she can get at them) no one would suspect the poor persistent creature of such wicked capabilities ...84

And: ... let me add to the bad idea contained in that bad word ‘jealousy’, one plain fact: Not only is there no ... shadow of excuse for it, but from my birth to this hour

80   Tupper to Gladstone, 18 December 1833, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, f. 12; Tupper to Gladstone, 11 September 1841, ff. 22–3; Tupper to Gladstone, 24 September 1841, ff. 27–28; Tupper to Gladstone, 11 February 1845, ff. 40–1. 81   Tupper to Gladstone, 25 December 1847, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, ff. 66–7. 82   Tupper to Gladstone, 26 December 1848, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, ff. 97–9. 83   Tupper to Gladstone, 8 February 1853, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, ff. 178–9. 84   Tupper to Gladstone, 11 February 1853, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, f. 182.

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there never has been one. I was engaged at 15, married at 25, & never have fallen into that sin. There has been for me just one woman in the world.85

Gladstone sprang to action, suggesting that Tupper prepare a case and asking the prime minister, Lord Aberdeen, to give Tupper a Civil List Pension. It is interesting to see how Gladstone presented the case.86 First, the personal connection: ‘He was my contemporary at Oxford where he took his degree, and his personal character has ever been of the highest and purest kind’. Secondly, Tupper’s personal needs: Proverbial Philosophy was the main source of his livelihood, for a relative’s iron company had destroyed most of his ‘very moderate’ patrimony; he had eight children and ‘a severe domestic visitation has subjected him to heavy & I fear standing medical expenses’. Thirdly, the public good: Proverbial Philosophy was popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and his writings and American tour promoted Anglo-American amity: it has seemed to me that such a cementing of the 2 countries by literary productions, when they are also works most praiseworthy in themselves, & owe their favour not to fleeting but to permanent causes, is so beneficial in a public view, as to ... offer an excellent opportunity of so rewarding English merit by a small grant of money, and an honour outweighing it, as at the same time to pay a marked compliment to the people of the United States.87

Aberdeen, who had read and admired Proverbial Philosophy, thought Tupper worthy of a pension, but had none to give out.88 Tupper managed to live off his literary sales for another dozen years, and even to launch the careers of his older children, but domestic tribulations re-emerged in 1866. His eldest son, an army officer, yielded himself to ‘the normal army temptations’. Twice before, Tupper had come to his son’s rescue, paying off gambling debts totalling £1,100, but the ‘wretched youth’ had run up £1,000 more.89 Worse was to follow. In June 1867, his son was taken, raving with drink, to an asylum in Saint John’s Wood.90 Released by the Lunacy Commission in October:   Tupper to Gladstone, 12 February 1853, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, ff. 184–5.   Gladstone to the Earl of Aberdeen, 20 February 1853, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS

85

86

44528, ff. 99–100. 87   Gladstone to the Earl of Aberdeen, 20 February 1853, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44528, ff. 99–100. 88   Aberdeen to Gladstone 22 February 1853, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44088, f. 155. 89   Tupper to Gladstone, 2 July 1866, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, ff. 277–8. 90   Tupper to Gladstone, 23 June 1867, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, f. 281.

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the first use my wretched son has made of freedom ... was to run off with the bad woman from whose bed he was taken mad & dying a few weeks ago, & to have her in keeping somewhere near London!91

Eventually, Tupper packed off his son to Rio de Janeiro – a place where, in all probability, both drink and bad women flourished like bay trees.92 The expenses of his domestic disasters combined with declining sales of his books meant that he needed patronage more than ever. Could a place be found for him at the British Museum, or a sub-commissionership, or a secretaryship? He could do as good a job as Sir Francis Hastings Doyle. Could he have a Civil List Pension? William Harrison Ainsworth had one.93 Gladstone eventually was able to come through, obtaining £400 from the Royal Bounty in 1870, a Civil List Pension of £120 in 1873 and another £100 from the Royal Bounty in 1882. What did Gladstone think of Tupper? D.C. Lathbury, in his Correspondence on Church and Religion of William Ewart Gladstone quoted a letter Gladstone wrote to his daughter, Mary, in 1886: Tupper’s was a hard case, for the public had practised on and developed his bump of vanity, which, according to my recollection, was not very marked at Oxford, where he was a good youth spotted as a ‘saint’ and little known or heeded. The life is an epic, though a very, very small one … He is a good man, and must have suffered in many ways.94

Lathbury suppressed the final sentence of this letter, perhaps to protect the Grand Old Man’s reputation for seriousness. It reads: ‘The “best” thing I have read of his was, I think, an almost ribald poem on the Holy Eucharist’.95 Gladstone was referring to Tupper’s Directorium of 1868, which mocks the doctrine of the Real Presence of Jesus in the bread and wine of the Eucharist:96   Tupper to Gladstone, 8 October 1867, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, f. 292.   Tupper to Gladstone, 18 September 1868, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, f. 309. 93   Tupper to Gladstone,12 February 1853, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, f. 185; 91 92

Tupper to Gladstone, 2 July 1866, f. 278; Tupper to Gladstone, 27 August 1867, ff. 287–288; Tupper to Gladstone, 31 August 1867, f. 290; Tupper to Gladstone, 9 December 1868, f. 312. 94   Gladstone to Mary Gladstone Drew, 17 May 1886, D.C. Lathbury (ed.), Correspondence on Church and Religion of William Ewart Gladstone (2 vols, New York, 1910), vol. 2, pp. 189–90. 95   Gladstone to Mary Gladstone Drew, 17 May 1886, Mary Gladstone Drew Papers, BL, Add. MS 46221, f. 102. 96   M.F. Tupper, The Anti-Ritualistic Satire: Tupper’s Protestant Directorium, or Plan of the Ritualistic Campaign, Being Secret Instructions to our Anglican Clergy (London, 1868), originating in a poem, ‘Plan of the Ritualistic Campaign’, issued as a four-page pamphlet.

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Bread? – it is flesh! not wine – it is the blood! The priest’s bare word creates a present God! Not reverence only – superstitious care Must watch and worship every morsel there. Incense and vestments, noonday-flaring lights, And early Papal, earlier pagan, rites.97

Tupper goes on to mock vestments, ceremonies and the high doctrine of apostolic succession. He ends by mocking women, whose hearts and minds, filled with needlework, can be led astray by sewing altar-cloths, and by sneering at fashionable Belgravians who flock to ritualist parishes.98 Perhaps Gladstone had a sense of humour after all, even when it came to matters of the highest seriousness.99 The narrative shows that Gladstone was true to his principles when it came to patronage. ‘My business’, he told Tupper: is to stand as a witness in the face of all functionaries of the state, for they are all spenders of p[ubli]c money, as a witness for rule, order, & economy. You may judge of the effect of the discharge on this my daily duty if I became a solicitor with o[the] rs, asking them on the ground of influence to depart from rules which may indeed be technical or formal only, but may likewise be for all I know of great consequence.100

However, once Gladstone was convinced – or convinced himself – that the applicant was worthy on grounds of both private merit and public good, he was willing to do all in his power to help. This did not, however, mean that Gladstone would do anything for his friends. When it came time to retire and to fix his pension in 1883, Doyle determined to cut the best possible deal. He pointed out that the shift in jobs had cost him £70 in stamp duties. Worse, while the Receiver Generalship had required no work, the commissionership demanded daily attendance at the office. Doyle hoped that these hardships would be taken into account. After an investigation revealed that Doyle had received a lump sum of £660 when the Receiver Generalship was abolished, Gladstone replied that he ‘has read & will bear in mind; but can hardly see how statements can improve Sir F. Doyle’s   Tupper, The Anti-Ritualistic Satire, pp. 11–12.   Tupper, The Anti-Ritualistic Satire, pp. 26–7. 99   Joseph S. Meisel, ‘The Importance of Being Serious: The Unexplored Connection 97 98

between Gladstone and Humour’, History, 84 (1999): pp. 278–300, argues that Gladstone was ‘one of history’s most famous humourless men’ (p. 279). 100   Gladstone to Tupper, 14 November 1865, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS. 44535, f. 146.

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case’.101 Doyle believed that the ‘obligation’ that had led Prime Minister Peel to give him place in 1845 had ‘devolved’ upon Prime Minister Gladstone 38 years later. He thought it most unfair ‘that your most intimate friend, if he happen to be a Minister bent upon economy, may find it his duty to fling you down into practical ruin at a time of life when it is hopeless to think … of looking out for a new employment’.102 Similarly, when Tupper convinced himself – and tried to convince Gladstone – that his £400 Royal Bounty grant actually was the first instalment of a £400 Civil List Pension, Gladstone firmly disabused him: I think if you will refer to the correspondence between us at the time, you will find nothing to support, but rather some evidence to contradict the supposition that the sum which you received was intended only to adjourn the question of a pension from the Civil List. It is very painful to me to repeat an announcement which it was painful enough to make.103

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the narrative is that it reveals Gladstone’s patience. We have seen that Gladstone was willing to give both Tupper and Doyle what he deemed their due, despite their importuning and even wilful distorting. More surprising was Gladstone’s patience at being lectured to. Writing in November 1855, after Gladstone had declared for peace in the Crimean War, Tupper questioned Gladstone’s views: I side with those who are at war with Russia and Rome, with earthly and spiritual despotisms; and who stand for the liberty of enslaved nations & consciences: in fact, I am ‘developing’ one way, and you I suppose another.104

Gladstone’s response is both a testimony to his respect for Tupper’s friendship and a lesson in diplomacy and logical thinking: There is no person from whom I have received in the contests raised against me at Oxford more truly & emphatically generous support than yourself: & my acknowledgments of it will never I trust be weakened, nor my sense of it effaced, by anything that may happen hereafter.105   Doyle to Gladstone, 11 August 1883, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS. 44150, ff. 266– 270, with docketing by Gladstone and his private secretaries. 102   Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions, pp. 282–3. 103   Gladstone to Tupper, 23 January 1871, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44539, f. 142. 104   Tupper to Gladstone, 26 November 1855, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, f. 205. 105   Gladstone to Tupper, 28 November 1855, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, f. 206. 101

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But, Gladstone continued, when Tupper says that he is against Russia and Rome, he implies that Gladstone is for them: I think I may truly say that though not by musket & cannon, & I admit with the feeblest possible result, ... I have with earnestness & sincerity done something for ‘enslaved nations’ & I feel it rather keenly, that my reward from you should be to be told that I am on the side of Russia and of Rome ... I believe that I am as much so as, & no more than, the opponents of the American War seventy years ago were on the side of America.106

Moreover, Gladstone argued that Tupper was mistaken if he thought that Russia and Rome were allied. To which temporal power was the Pope most indebted for his existence? It was to Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s Second Empire in France. Which spiritual power was the Pope’s greatest foe? It was Russian Orthodoxy. Gladstone ended his letter by thanking Tupper for his former support and for framing his disagreement ‘into the most kindly as well as most friendly shape it would bear’. Tupper had always been an anti-Catholic, but he grew more concerned with religion and less good-humoured in the last 15 years of his life. He discovered, and recommended to Gladstone as a useful source for the latter’s Vatican Decrees pamphlets, The Two Babylons by the Scots Presbyterian Alexander Hislop. This classic Victorian anti-Catholic work sought to prove that all Roman Catholic ceremonies, images and dress had their origins in Graeco-Roman religion.107 Tupper’s poetic output reflects this heightened interest: Rome, the Most Holy! Adulterous Queen, Thou art old Babylon’s Ashtaroth here; Harlot and sorceress, cruel, unclean, Tainting the heart through the eye and the ear: In thy confessionals poisoning the young, Bribing by money-bought pardons the old; Lying, with Jesuit slime on the tongue, Shearing the flock, while infecting the fold!108

He produced a spate of similar poems in the early 1880s, which to his joy provoked attacks from the Universe, a penny weekly Roman Catholic newspaper   Gladstone to Tupper, 28 November 1855, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, f. 207.   Tupper to Gladstone, 7 April 1875, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44336, ff. 319–20. 108   ‘Rome’, flysheet reprinted from the Hampshire Post, 11 March 1881, Tupperiana, 106

107

Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Eng. 601.50, vol. 2.

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that was stridently ultramontane. In addition, he became involved with Lord Alfred S. Churchill in distributing the poems and in promoting the claims of Edith O’Gorman, an ‘escaped nun’ who had allegedly fled a convent in New Jersey, USA.109 Early in 1883, Tupper took aim at the Affirmation Bill, which modified the parliamentary oath to allow avowed Freethinkers to sit in Parliament. In ‘So Help Me God’, Tupper criticised the government of which his friend Gladstone was head. Their friendship had survived many political differences, and this difference was no exception, at least not in Gladstone’s mind. But their friendship did come to an end, in May 1883. The cause of the break was neither politics, nor foreign policy nor religion, but patronage. George Hawkes, a friend of Tupper who lived in Liverpool and Chester, organised a testimonial for the poet, and approached Gladstone for support. Gladstone had obtained £100 for Tupper from the Royal Bounty not six months before. Moreover, he remembered that he had subscribed to a testimonial for his friend in 1867. Still, he offered to pay now if his memory was faulty.110 Hawkes, however, took this for support: ‘May I fix the amount at Fifty Guineas?’111 ‘Presumptuous of him’, snorted one of Gladstone’s private secretaries. ‘Remind him of the Queen’s Bounty money’, suggested another.112 Gladstone replied that what he wanted was information about the earlier testimonial. Hawkes apologised for his zeal, pled that the information had been lost, but persisted in asking for money and, worse, kept Gladstone’s name on the list of subscribers (with a space to fill in the amount). Gladstone still refused to participate.113 Would Gladstone at least lend the use of his name, Tupper begged.114 ‘I saved you from being blinded by an Edison incandescent lamp at the Crystal Palace Electrical Exhibition’, Hawkes claimed.115 Gladstone declined to participate. Despairing, Tupper asked Horace Seymour, one of Gladstone’s secretaries, to convey a message. Tupper was sorry that he had suffered the consequences of   Tupper to Thomas Gibbons, 14 November 1882, with enclosures, Tupperiana, MS Eng. 601.50, vol. 2; Lord Alfred S. Churchill to Tupper, 11 October 1880, Correspondence Deposited by Horniman’s Museum, Sydenham, Department of Local Studies, Lewisham Library, A59/22/17. 110   George Hawkes to Gladstone, 17 May 1883, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS. 44481, ff. 23–4. 111   George Hawkes to Gladstone, 30 May 1883, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS. 44481, f. 96. 112   Docketing on George Hawkes to Gladstone, 30 May 1883, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS. 44481, f. 97. 113   Hawkes to Gladstone, 2 June 1883, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS. 44481, ff. 110–11. 114   Tupper to Gladstone, 6 June 1883, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS. 44336, f. 334. 115   Hawkes to Gladstone, 18 June 1883, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS. 44481, ff. 258–9. 109

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Hawkes’ fault: ‘... I must humbly acquiesce: only adding that, for my own part, I will not allow a momentary cloud of any ill will to obscure the happy and grateful memories of a Friendship of more than fifty years standing’. Gladstone’s comment on this was ‘Nil’.116 Tupper had crossed the line – he had taken his friend’s name in vain. Hawkes had placed Gladstone at the head of a list of patrons and allowed a newspaper to publish the list, without securing the prime minister’s permission. He had, moreover, given Sir Francis Doyle the list ten days after his exchange of correspondence with Gladstone, knowing full well that Gladstone had chosen not to participate in the testimonial.117 But worst of all, Tupper himself demonstrated the ill will that he claimed not to feel. He convinced himself that the rupture between Gladstone and himself had happened because his old friend resented his public opposition to Gladstone’s policy favouring the admission of freethinkers to Parliament,118 and he let other friends know that he thought Gladstone’s supposed resentment to be shameful: It is a fact – disgraceful to Gladstone – that he resents my faithful ‘So help me’ – & withdraws his name accordingly: we will do better without him.119

Gladstone’s friendships were grounded on his religious sensibilities, but what were those sensibilities? Was Gladstone a Protestant? Yes, so far as ‘Protestant’ goes – but perhaps it is better to label him a ‘Churchman’. His friendships with Doyle and Tupper draw our attention to the altar, to the consecration of a homo-social union, in a quasi-sacramental and quasi-public way. Such sensibilities were foreign to evangelical nonconformity, and difficult for evangelical Anglicans to explain away. Doyle wore his religion lightly (no doubt to Gladstone’s regret), and took the dignity of his family very seriously indeed. For him, organised horse-racing was as important as organised religion. Yet regularised religious conversations, sometimes alone, sometimes in company, characterised their early friendship. Tupper spent part of his childhood under the ministrations of the Rev. Hugh McNeile, one of the most extreme Anglican   Tupper to Horace Seymour, 16 June 1883, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS. 44336, ff.

116

342–3.

  The Rock, 15 June 1883; Doyle to Gladstone, 28 June 1883, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44150, f. 264. 118   Annotation accusing Gladstone of ‘Jesuitical’ reasoning on Gladstone to Tupper, 2 April 1883, Guard-book of Letters, 19th–20th Centuries, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, MS. Eng. lett.e.1, f. 181. 119   Tupper to Thomas Gibbons, 25 June 1883, Tupperiana, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS. Eng. 601.50, vol. 2. 117

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Evangelicals. Yet the altar and the sacrament were central to his and Gladstone’s friendship. Both Doyle and Tupper were conventional churchmen, each in his own way. Gladstone, however, was anything but conventional; as he underwent his spiritual evolution, Doyle and, even more, Tupper (who underwent his own spiritual evolution into a hard anti-Catholic), became uneasy. For them, Gladstone’s private spiritual errors engendered his public political errors. In their memoirs, both framed their break with Gladstone in both political and religious terms. A friendship sealed at the altar must be sacrificed at the altar. Thus, the loss of old friends was not the least part of the price that Gladstone paid for his long career in public life.

Chapter 7

Gladstone as Woodsman Peter Sewter The forest laments so that Mr. Gladstone may perspire.1

Lord Randolph Churchill (1884)

Lord Randolph Churchill’s comment is probably the most quoted remark on the subject of Gladstone’s hobby of wood-cutting. The context was political and compared Gladstone’s policies with an alleged destruction of his woods. More recently Roy Jenkins referred to the wood-cutting as an ‘arboreal assault’, ‘arboreal slaughter’ and ‘in the 1870s an almost obsessive form of recreation’.2 A more sympathetic verdict was that of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who compared Gladstone among his oaks with the Roman Emperor Diocletian, at home with his cabbages.3 Likewise, when John Ruskin was invited to Hawarden he warmed to Gladstone as they walked around the estate and he saw how much his host loved his trees.4 What brought Gladstone in his middle age to take up this strenuous hobby, which he continued well beyond pensionable age? For all his scholarship, his copious writing and voluminous reading he rarely allowed a day to pass without some form of outdoor activity. For in his youth he spent afternoons sculling, riding and shooting and throughout his life he enjoyed walking. A picture of his interest in wood-cutting gradually emerges from a number of sources, most importantly the diaries that he kept daily from the age of 15 for over 70 years. These give, in brief, details of family life, engagements, daily church attendance and leisure activities, including his tree-felling exploits. Perhaps an early stimulus towards Gladstone’s interest in the value and potential of wood was provided by a colleague during his few months at a tutor’s establishment between leaving Eton and commencing his studies at Christchurch, Oxford. He was shown how to carve and ‘turn’ wood and enjoyed developing his   R. Jenkins, Gladstone (London, 1995), p. 190.   Jenkins, Gladstone, p. 396. 3   Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in a letter to Mrs Gladstone, 12 November 1876, in Mary Drew, 1

2

Catherine Gladstone (London, 1919, reprint 1930), p. 159. 4   Some Hawarden letters 1878–1913 Written to Mary Drew, arranged and chosen by L. Marck-Phillips and B. Christian (London, 1917), p. 5F.

156

Figure 7.1

William Gladstone

‘Cabinet-Making’, Punch, 8 May 1880

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skill at it. He later remarked when he was admitted to the Worshipful Order of Turners in 1876, ‘as a young man I was exceedingly fond of the practice of turning and at the present moment I am in possession of some articles executed by myself ’.5 That may have inspired a cartoon in Punch (8th May 1880) which depicted Gladstone displaying his cabinet-making skills to the Queen as he formulated his new Cabinet following victory in the General Election. Gladstone’s interest in trees was evident when he visited Italy on a European tour in the 1830s. His diary mentions forests of larch and pine, ilexes, beeches, broom and cultivated trees – oranges, mulberries, vines, figs and olives.6 He records his visits to the continent with an eye not only to places and buildings of historic interest but also with an appreciation of the trees and gardens and trees that he encountered. These included a famous magnolia of unusual girth near Capodimonte7 and a garden near Cannes that Gladstone described as ‘a wonderful garden, a fairyland indeed’.8 The diaries also suggest that Gladstone was just as interested to see specimens of trees in this country when opportunities occurred. One such occasion was a drive to see Barfreston Church near Dover and the noble old Fredville Oak in Fredville Park which had a girth of 36 feet and was reputedly planted before 1066 AD.9 The King Fir of Guisachan, Invernessshire also caught his attention, but his visits were many all over the country and included Longleat, Woburn, Arley Hall and Keele Hall. At Woburn Abbey he cut down a Deodar Cedar, assisted by the Duke.10 Catherine also shared his interest and frequently accompanied him – the diaries accounting for no less than 38 such visits to view trees, and on one occasion they drove 14 miles in the New Forest whilst staying at Lyndhurst with Sir William Harcourt.11 A very different journey four years earlier was a visit to Bettishanger in Kent to examine the 30 acres of Mr. Long’s fruit farm and garden.12 Gladstone’s interest in fruit farming may have been sparked by the heritage of fruit trees and bushes that had been introduced to Hawarden back in 1815. These included several varieties of apples as well as more tender plants such as peaches and apricots.13 Gladstone   H.J. Leech (ed.), The Life of Mr Gladstone as Told by Himself (London, 1893), p. 261.   M.R.D.Foot and H.G.C.Matthew, The Gladstone Diaries (14 vols, Oxford 1968–94), 18

5 6

September 1838; 30 October 1838; 1 November 1838. 7   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 12, p. 178, 15 January 1889. 8   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, p. 398, 21 January 1883. 9   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 4, p. 648, 16 September 1854. 10   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, p. 355, 22 October 1878. 11   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 12, p. 209, 11 June 1889. 12   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, p. 452F, 22 October 1879. 13   Flintshire County Records Office, Glynne-Gladstone manuscripts, 2201, Trees and Plants, 1793–1818.

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Table 7.1

Graph to show the frequency of axe work by William Gladstone and his family

was an advocate of cottage gardening and fruit growing and would have approved of modern ‘grow your own’ movements. He spoke not infrequently along such lines – an example was a speech of an hour he gave to the annual Horticultural Society show at Hawarden in which he also urged the keeping of bees and poultry.14 In fact, the very last speech he ever made was not a political one, but on gardening to the Hawarden Horticultural Society.15 The picture that emerges thus far gives much evidence of Gladstone’s love of nature, and more particularly of trees. But there was an air of neglect about the estate at Hawarden when the Gladstones arrived. Many of the trees needed thinning and some were diseased and dying. Gladstone’s interest was stirred and his first lesson in wood-cutting (around the lawn and Old Castle) took place on 31st July 1858, followed up by six more afternoons with the axe during August.16 As Table 1 below illustrates, this marked the birth of a hobby that continued until December 1891. During this period, although he was only resident at Hawarden during the summer, Christmas and Easter recesses, Gladstone refers in his diaries to no less than 1,071 days when he was engaged in wood-cutting. From time to time, bad weather, the occasional illness or family crisis, and later the priority to establish Gladstone’s library in St Deiniol’s Lane Hawarden, restricted Gladstone’s wood-cutting activities and the diaries reflect certain   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 12, p. 316, 21 August 1890.   Jenkins, Gladstone, p. 628, 2 August 1897. 16   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 5, p. 315, 31 July 1858. 14

15

Gladstone as Woodsman

Figure 7.2

159

‘Oh, Woodman, Pare that Tree’, Comic News, 23 April 1864

periods of inactivity. For example there is a four year gap between 30th August 1858 and the next entry on 4th September 1862 while the five entries of September 1862 are followed by another gap of five years to November 1867, so almost a decade without woodcraft occurred. Of course it is possible that wood-

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cutting had taken place but had not been recorded. Yet well within that period his penchant for wood-cutting had become well known nationally and political cartoons depicting him with axe in hand reflected this, as the illustration from The Comic News of 23rd April 1864 indicated (Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer at this time). By the time Gladstone was in his seventies he had acquired – and been gifted – a range of axes to choose from. Not surprisingly, he built up much experience of their uses on various types of wood and trees. At a tree-felling experiment in February 1878 he shared some of that experience: Oak, though very hard, is not a bad tree to cut, for the grain breaks off easily and does not cling to the axe. Beech is far tougher; that and ash being the two most difficult to fell of our English trees on account of their bending to the axe. Ash is subject to fracture in felling, and I have a splinter of ash ... two feet eight inches in length. The pleasantest to fell is Spanish Chestnut because it comes away so freely, the grain breaking easily. Yew is the most horrible to cut of all the forest trees.17

About a dozen of Gladstone’s collection of over 30 axes are on display at the ‘Temple of Peace’ at Hawarden Castle. Some were for the purpose of lopping small branches, to ‘kibble’ and to cut smaller saplings with one hand. They include a wicked-looking machete, with Gladstone’s initials on the handle, useful again for ‘woodcraft’ or pruning for firewood, and an array of larger axes, mostly with handles of at least three feet in length and axe-heads as heavy as the weight of a sledge-hammer. Any doubts about the strength of Gladstone are instantly dispelled. One axe takes considerable effort to lift, let alone for a man in his sixties or seventies to use repeatedly for over an hour or more at a time on a tree some feet in girth. One axe was fashioned locally by J. Griffiths of Caergwrle; another was presented to him, inscribed Mustad, Osovik Norway and dated 20th February 1889, presumably by friends that he visited in Scandinavia four years earlier. When Gladstone visited the construction of the great Forth Bridge at Queensferry, just two miles from Dalmeny in 1884, the workmen presented him with an axe, and on his return to Hawarden he sent them ‘entertaining and improving volumes’.18 The axe had a silver head and was a favourite of Gladstone as was the one with an American wedge-shaped blade. While staying with Sir Charles Tennant during a Midlothian campaign, Gladstone was nowhere to be seen until he was discovered at the bottom of the garden in earnest discussion   Leech, The Life of Mr Gladstone, p. 261.   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, p. 200, n. 1, 28 August 1884.

17 18

Gladstone as Woodsman

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with the head gardener on the particular merits of a new kind of American axe.19 Another favourite was an amusing gift from the Prince and Princess of Wales in the form of a silver pencil, shaped like an axe, presented ‘for axing questions’.20 At Gladstone’s Library (formerly St Deiniol’s Library), in a show case, is the axe presented by a Birmingham blacksmith, Simon Shorter, who went to Hawarden in person to present it. He made the axe himself and accompanied a couplet he had composed: Twas Vulcan wrought an axe of solid steel, For wise Minerva’s cautious arm to wield.

The reference to Vulcan (the Roman blacksmith god) who fashioned weapons and tools and Minerva (goddess of craftsmen) no doubt pleased Gladstone. The axe had an oak handle and a head of solid steel, engraved with the Gladstone Arms and the Staffordshire Knot on the reverse side to the couplet.21 Shorter made his journey not only to offer the axe as a token of his respect and an example of British workingman’s craftmanship, but also as a symbol to be used metaphorically against the upas tree of society – intoxicating drink.22 He compared the spread of drink-related social problems to the poison of the upas tree. The upas tree (Antiaris Toxicaria), mentioned indirectly in Gladstone’s Wigan speech on 23rd October 1868, became a byword for issues that had farreaching consequences requiring the Gladstone axe to chop down. The upas tree is found in India, Borneo, Myanmar, Malaysia, Fiji and the Philippines – it can attain 250 feet with dome-shape canopy and a buttressed trunk; its fruits are edible but the leaves contain white poisonous latex. Little can grow beneath its dense foliage and it accrued an undeserved reputation for killing anyone falling asleep underneath it.23 Colin Matthew alludes to Gladstone’s Wigan speech with the subtitles ‘The Upas Tree – the Irish Church, The Upas Tree – Irish Land, The Upas Tree – Irish Education, highlighting the three main strands of reform for Ireland that Gladstone had in his sights assuming a projected Liberal victory in the 1868 election.24 Glasdstone then spoke of the opposition as: 19   G.L. Gower, ‘Mr Gladstone: A picture of the man himself, 1934’, in P.J.Jagger (ed.), Mr Gladstone (Hawarden, 2001), p. 63. 20   J.E. Ritchie, The Real Gladstone: An Anecdotal Biography (London, 1898), p. 200. 21   The Strand Magazine (London, 1898), vol. xv1, p. 506. 22   The Strand Magazine (1898), vol. xv1, p. 506. 23   T. Russell and C. Cutler, Trees: An Illustrated Identifier and Encyclopedia (London, 2003), p. 178. 24   H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1986), p. 168.

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like some tall tree of noxious growth, lifting its head to heaven and darkening and poisoning the atmosphere ... but the day has come when, as we hope, the axe has been laid to the root ... but one stroke more, the stroke of these elections, it will once for all topple to its fall.25

Another reference in Gladstone’s Wigan speech is worthy of comment, ‘the axe is laid to the root’ – a quotation from Luke’s gospel (ch. 3 v. 9). Gladstone chose this reference carefully. Cutting a tree and leaving the stump would, with certain trees like willow, merely encourage fresh growth – Gladstone wished for the ‘upas tree’ of the Irish questions to be tackled once and for all. In April 1868, the diary records Gladstone stump-cutting with Harry and Stephen – one of many such occasions. Herbert recalled that his father was: quite irritated when in a Punch cartoon he was drawn as cutting trees a foot or two from the ground. For economy and sightliness the rule was to cut to ground level whenever possible. It meant additional labour, for the girth of a large tree which is say 12 feet at 3 feet from the ground may easily be 18 feet or more at ground level. But this did not matter, as we were out for exercise.26

When news of the Liberal victory duly arrived by telegram Gladstone was felling a tree at Hawarden. Lord Shaftesbury’s son was also present and recorded 30 years later that Gladstone read the telegram with the words ‘very significant’ and continued to hack at the tree. When he paused he commented, ‘my mission is to pacify Ireland’.27 His first premiership was about to begin. Ten years later on his 69th birthday (29th December 1878) Gladstone received a silver axe, with a handle of ebony enclosed in a polished, ornamental oak case. Another new axe proved to be the last he used. Although the last record of axe work in the diaries was in 1891, this axe, which was lighter than his usual ones, was used by Gladstone on a beech in the North Garden in 1895. It was later stored in a cupboard in Herbert Gladstone’s room in the castle with a label stuck on its handle.28 Only occasionally was a cross saw used by Gladstone in his tree-felling, but he was intrigued by reports of the invention of a steam saw. In February 1878, he went with his son, William, to Ransome’s Works and from there to Rosefull Park Estate to see the invention in action. The Times reported     27   28   25 26

Gladstone’s Speeches and Writings (Liverpool, 1868), vol. 4, p. 74. Ritchie, The Real Gladstone, p. 281. Jenkins, Gladstone, p. 290. Viscount Gladstone, After Thirty Years (London, 1928), p. 60.

Gladstone as Woodsman

Figure 7.3

163

‘Tree-Felling by Machinery – Mr Gladstone watching a trial of the New Patent Steam Feller near Tulse Hill’, The Graphic, 16 February 1878

William Gladstone

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the demonstration on 4th February29 and The Graphic recorded the event a fortnight later.30 Gladstone praised the saw but made no move to purchase one and resumed work with the axe.31 When in London, whilst stationed in Downing Street or Carlton Gardens, the Gladstones were invited on many occasions to various comfortable homes of colleagues or friends for weekend breaks. At certain of these Gladstone was invariably asked to fell a tree. Mention has been made of the deodara cedar he cut down, assisted by the Duke, at Woburn on 22nd October 1878; on June 4th 1870 he cut down a tree at Walmer Castle in Kent for Lord Granville, and on a visit to Sir John Lubbock’s estate at High Elms, Down also in Kent, on 12th March 1877, he rose early and went out at 8am to cut down an oak before returning to London at 11.15am. Three weeks later he was staying at Holmbury in Surrey and cut down three larches, though he complained that the steel axe failed him with a large chip. One wonders whether his hosts had a stock of axes at the ready or if the Gladstones packed one or two in their suitcases for the weekend! On 17th December 1883 he visited Saighton Hall near Northop and initiated Lord Aberdeen (who was staying there) in the art of axe work and commented that Aberdeen was a very good workman.32 Further afield, at Dalmeny in Scotland, Lord Rosebery made a strong request – the diary records ‘cut down a Spanish Chestnut: by order’.33 Moreover, when visiting Wellington College in Berkshire at the invitation of his son-in-law and Headmaster Edward Wickham, Gladstone talked to the boys for 40 minutes and then demonstrated his skills by cutting down three small birches.34 Family connections with the Lytteltons often drew the Gladstones to Hagley in Worcestershire and the Christmas period following the advent of his first premiership saw him cutting trees there, and on New Year’s Day, 1869 he felled an enormous poplar.35 Seven years later he attacked a great dead Elm that was 15– 16 feet in diameter.36 It took two days’ work to reach this point. Indeed it once took three days to fell a huge beech at Hawarden (17th–19th January 1870). A professional forester had calculated that it would take 27 hours (or 3 axe-men at 9 hours each) to fell it – Gladstone achieved the felling in 26.5 hours.37     31   32   33   34   35   36   37   29 30

The Times, 4 February 1878. The Graphic, 16 February 1878. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, p. 350, 2 February 1878. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, p. 78, 17 December 1883. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, p. 197, 2 April 1880. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, p. 455, 3 November 1879. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 7, p. 1, 1 January 1869. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, p. 98, 17 & 18 January 1876. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 7, p. 222f., 19 January 1870.

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If this list of some of the fellings outside Hawarden rather labours the point, it does suggest that not only was Gladstone’s prowess well known, but also appreciated – and further that even ‘relaxing’ on holiday he was eager to be outside and energetic. It was unlikely that his hosts would have encouraged him in his activity if they had had little faith in his making a sound job of it or if they had the slightest concern that he might suffer (or cause) an injury. Certain modern biographies have argued or inferred that he was not very skilled at wood-felling and that he was injury-prone. Gladstone freely admitted even the slightest mishaps in his diaries; for instance, he mentions the occasion one October when he was stung on the eyelid by a wasp and another time (23rd December 1867) when he got struck in the eye by a splinter while felling a tree with Willy and this caused some inflammation. Early in the following year he suffered a bruised finger. Between these two incidents came the narrow squeak to Harry, who was fifteen, up a huge lime to attach a rope to an upper bough to ensure direction of the fall. Harry’s version of the incident reads: Mr. Gladstone and my eldest brother (Willy) were at the tree with the axe ... the time came for fixing the rope to guide the falling tree ... my services were accepted. The tree (a large, dying lime bordering the Old Castle) was easily climbed and I was about to tie the rope round the trunk when ominous cracks sounded. ‘Look out!’ was the cry from below in anxious tones. I was in no way perturbed. It was instinct not courage which came to the rescue. I happened to be standing on an arm of the tree on the under or falling side, and as the tree fell in the direction intended, though still unroped, I moved round the trunk and when the tree crashed to the ground the bough on which I had been standing being broken and deeply embedded in the ground, I found myself lying comfortable and unshaken on the upperside of the trunk, the branches of the underside of the tree breaking its fall. I was in no way affected but my father was considerably disturbed ... insisted on carrying me back about a quarter of a mile on his back to the castle and made me rest on the sofa for a time thinking I must have suffered some shock from the fall.38

Gladstone duly reported the incident in his diary: ‘today a tree we were cutting fell with Harry in it. He showed perfect courage and by God’s mercy was not hurt’.39 Together with another occasion when a bough scratched the arm of a bystander, this near miss represents the exception that proves the rule. It is not a bad achievement in well over one thousand days of woodcraft, and that in a preHealth and Safety era which permitted axe work without wearing any special   I. Thomas, Gladstone of Hawarden: A Memoir of Henry Neville (London, 1936), p. 16.   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 6, p. 565, 27 December 1867.

38 39

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protective clothing, or helmet or goggles. The evidence points to an excellent overall record for safety and skill in Gladstone’s wood-cutting activities. It may well have helped that for more than two-thirds of his tree work Gladstone was accompanied by one or more members of the family. An analysis of the diaries reveals that he worked alone in the grounds for over 300 times, over one hundred of which were before 1871 and reflect a period when his two elder sons were establishing their own careers and the two younger sons were being educated away from home. His most frequent partner was his eldest son, William, who worked with him on no less than 400 occasions: he was a useful cricketer and his well-co-ordinated skills evoked the praise of Herbert, ‘his work was always beautifully neat’.40 It is not always clear from the diaries whether it was Harry or Herbert that accompanied Gladstone as he sometimes abbreviated both names to ‘H’: occasionally a reasonable guess can be made because of their known activities – for instance when Harry was abroad on family business in India. Stephen’s help with his father was more confined to playing whist or backgammon in the evenings, but he did work with him on 57 recorded occasions, many of which took place at the Rectory, which was generously surrounded by trees. On a further 100 instances the diaries indicate that cutting took place ‘with my sons’ or by the use of the simple plural ‘we’, and this will distort the precise number of times each son helped him and leave us only with the certainty of days when he had the support of one or more of them. He employed different words for wood-cutting: sometimes it is a clear felling with a successive ‘kibbling’ (chopping into small pieces) occurring the next day. An example of this is the record of Friday 14th November 1879 when Gladstone worked on a large beech; the next day he actually completed the felling of it, and on Monday he kibbled it. In earlier entries in the diary, he used the word ‘lopping’ which would imply pruning a tree perhaps to shape it or restrict its growth or cut out any die-back. Later, he used the word ‘woodcraft’ which would seem likely to mean much the same thing. ‘Wood-cutting’ was frequently another word for ‘felling’ and was used often for the clearance of smaller trees or groups of trees as well as a first stage in felling. Many of the trees that Gladstone worked upon remain anonymous, for the diary will specify – if a name is given at all – ‘oak’ and fail to inform what type of oak it was of the many species available, and the same goes for other trees. Nevertheless, in the context of keeping a daily diary that included correspondence and contacts with other prominent figures, it is in itself remarkable that he mentions his trees at all, as exemplified by the delightful entry for Tuesday 5th   Viscount Gladstone, After Thirty Years, p. 61.

40

Gladstone as Woodsman

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December 1871 – ‘Wrote to the Queen and Archbishop of Canterbury ... and cut a Walnut with Willy’ – with its brevity for the correspondence and detail of the tree-felling. Of the 291 occasions that Gladstone gives a name to a tree that he cut (or planted), 28 different specimens are mentioned. Oaks lead the table with 60 mentions, closely followed by ash (52) and alder (47). Beech follows (29) and sycamore (23); Spanish chestnut and elms come next and with less than ten mentions each walnut, birch, lime, poplar, holly, fir, hornbeam, yew, pear, larch, copper beech, porcupine beech, cherry, horse chestnut and deodara cedar. Gladstone does not appear to have wished to plant any of the more exotic varieties which were becoming available and had resulted from the endeavours of early plant-hunters or landscape architects like Capability Brown. Nevertheless, a memorandum of Archdeacon Howson, recalling a conversation with Gladstone 40 years earlier in 1853, commented upon Gladstone’s desire to know which trees were indigenous and which had been imported by successive immigrants. The Romans, he averred, had brought the elm and beech with them; the chestnut and sycamore came through the Crusades and most of the conifers could be attributed to the Vikings. Only the oak, ash, holly, ivy and thorn were native.41 In fact the elm probably predated the Romans who introduced the walnut, medlar and cherry. The diaries indicate many walks through the park, and in early days at Hawarden, the clearing of some trees and bushes to provide a private path that he could use unobserved en route to church every morning. Many walks saw him accompanied by Catherine, whose opinion he respected not least because the estate had always been her home. She had her own opinions too and on one occasion he records ‘cut down a Holly by Catherine’s orders’.42 Gladstone, either alone or with members of the family, was also fond of measuring trees in the park or further afield. Thirty of the largest trees at Hawarden were measured43 and, more selectively, the oaks44 and some larger trees just before Christmas 1884. He cites tree measuring on a visit to the Minster at York45 and certain varieties when driven to Bagot Park.46 On a stop at Mold he commented: ‘conversation with the Prince of Wales ... found an Ash 11½ feet

    43   44   45   46   41 42

GGMS, 2158, Dictated at Hawarden Castle by Archdeacon Howson, 23 October 1893. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 8, p. 32, 9 September 1871. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 6, p. 575, 12 February 1868. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, p. 425, 31 March 1883. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 12, p. 73, 27 October 1887. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, p. 142, 10 October 1881.

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round, and also a Larch (with a girth) of 7½ feet’.47 Two days after the funeral of Jessie at Fasque he ‘measured the principal trees’ with brother Tom.48 Gladstone was clearly fascinated by trees, commenting on the aesthetic pleasure they provided and, more pragmatically, on their potential commercial value. He employed a forester, who assisted in marking some oaks with Stephen,49 and who was consulted about various trees to be taken down.50 Gladstone was also interested in deer forests and consulted a Dr Roberts on the subject in 1871.51 Eighteen years later he read Stewart’s articles on deer forests.52 He even spoke on forestry himself.53 His knowledge of the subject had commenced in 1864 when his friend the fifth Duke of Newcastle died and, as a trustee of the estate, he was committed to oversee the management of a large woodland property at Clumber Park. Rather than trusting the agents, Gladstone, with characteristic thoroughness, applied himself to the theory and practice of forestry.54 During the previous year he had familiarised himself with the estate, on one occasion rising before breakfast to cut down a Siberian elm and commenting that although the axe was bad, the tree (4 feet 6 inches in circumference at 4 feet from the ground) was soft and took 50 minutes to fell.55 The diaries also suggest that Gladstone gradually acquired valuable experience of the market for, and worth of, forest broadleaf and coniferous trees. In 1875, he cut down a large sycamore which he stated was ‘now valued at 2/6 per foot’.56 Nineteen years later, on Christmas Eve in 1894, a gale felled three of the great beeches near the house, including ‘one of the most perfect in development I ever saw, which I used to say was worth £500’.57 Indeed, Gladstone knew enough about the trees on the Hawarden estate to estimate their current market value; in 1877 he felled a cherry ‘which is to be sold at (blanked out!) per foot over the market price’.58 Cherry and beech would have value in furniture making and elm in manufacture of coffins. Barnett Smith reported an article from the Wrexham Guardian (19th May 1876) in which:     49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   47

48

Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, p. 387, 28 August 1885. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 8, p. 508, 3 July 1874. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 6, p. 589, 7 April 1868. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 8, p. 36, 15 September 1871. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 8, p. 41, 29 September 1871. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 12, p. 225, 19 August 1889. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, p. 340, 15 May 1885. Leech, Life of Mr Gladstone, p. 261. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, p. 37, 11 May 1875. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, p. 60, 17 August 1875. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 13, p. 422, 24 December 1894. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, p. 249, 11 September 1877.

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an enormous Beech tree was lately drawn from Hawarden Park by seven horses belonging to Messrs Bracegirdle and Sons, timber merchants, Northwich, to the Wrexham goods station of the Connah’s Quay Railway, for transit to Manchester.

The article continued: It was felled by Mr. Gladstone, who notwithstanding that it measured 13 feet in circumference, accomplished his laborious but agreeable task in less than 6 hours. The tree contained over 200 cubic feet and weighed nearly 9 tons. Experienced ‘fellers’ tell us that the ex-Premier did his work in a thorough business-like manner and quite to the satisfaction of the purchasers.59

Gladstone’s prowess as a woodsman, doubted by some modern biographies and dismissed as irrelevant by others, would seem well corroborated by firsthand witnesses. In 1874, a Liverpool newspaper published a brief account of Gladstone as a woodsman shortly after he lost the General Election: 2 hours before a meeting at Hawarden on the evening of September 14th, he was busy – as he had been for some of the previous two days – wielding the axe upon a large tree in a lane on the outskirts of the village, and he succeeded in bringing it down to the ground late yesterday afternoon. Those who saw him say that he went to work in true woodman fashion, with his braces, thrown off behind him and his shirt collar unfastened. After completing his task, he walked home with his axe slung over his shoulder, and two hours later was at the meeting, looking not tired or weary but quite refreshed.60

Here we have an iconic picture of the politician, statesman, scholar and national figure choosing as recreation what many people would have seen as menial work.61 Gladstone did, of course, have his critics, one of whom – hiding behind the signature ‘Credo’ – wrote to the Manchester Courier suggesting Gladstone’s mental health was suspect for cutting trees in August when the sap was still alive (Some practitioners still advocate pruning birches in August).62 Political opponents like Lord Randolph Churchill poured scorn on his hobby and even some allies had their reservations; his friend, the Duke of Argyll, is said to have 59   G.B. Smith, Life of the Rt. Hon. W.E. Gladstone (London, Paris and New York, nd), vol. iv, p. 483. 60   Leech, Life of Mr Gladstone, p. 262. 61   See also R.C. Windscheffel, ‘Politics, Portraiture and Power: Reassessing the Public Image of William Ewart Gladstone’, in McCormack (ed.), Public Men (2007), pp. 93–122. 62   GGMS 432, 23 August 1877.

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disapproved strongly.63 One biographer bemoaned ‘the tale of the trees cut down would have sufficed for the afforestation of a considerable area’,64 although in fact, over the period under consideration and over the estate as a whole, the scale of deforestation was less extensive. Indeed, some American visitors expected to find nothing but tree stumps when visiting Hawarden and were surprised by the lack of evidence of ‘deforestation’.65 Gladstone was challenged when a group of 500 Liberals from Leigh and Tyldesley visited the park on an excursion: he was pointing out an oak and a beech that he said the family particularly prized. A voice from the crowd asked why if he loved trees so much he was always cutting them down. Gladstone replied that by cutting those that were rotten, the sound trees got more air and light: he inferred that Liberals would do the same in politics to what they considered to be rotten.66 This remark gives credence to the view that one reason for ‘combining conservation with physical exercise’67 was ‘the very practical motive of realising the assets of the Park’.68 Indeed, when the Gladstones initially took up residence at Hawarden, the estate required improvements in regard to thinning, draining and planting, much of which Gladstone oversaw.69 Herbert claimed that Gladstone loved trees, but said he had little knowledge of them though he had a sound forester’s eye. ‘He disliked decaying or unsightly trees and hated to see trees spoiling each other’s opportunities. In 30 years’ time, though we had cut down thousands there seemed to be more trees than ever. No important tree was condemned without serious debate. Ruskin and Millais delivered verdicts against trees which had long been under consideration’.70 Frank Holl, who also painted Gladstone at Hawarden, actually helped to fell a tree.71 Excursions became commonplace in the 1870s onwards as pilgrims from Liberal Associations (mainly) came to Hawarden in their hundreds and thousands to witness a tree-felling or in later years simply to catch a glimpse of Mr and Mrs Gladstone.72 They came from as far afield as Skipton and 63   R. Shannon, Gladstone, 1809–1865 (London, 1982), vol. 1, p. 310. ‘Gladstone was too destructive in the management of woodlands partly due to his eagerness in the personal handling of his axe’. 64   D.C. Somervell, Disraeli and Gladstone (New York, 1926), p. 259. 65   Ritchie, The Real Gladstone, p. 281. 66   Chester Chronicle, 8 September 1877. 67   E.F. Biagini, Gladstone (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 65. 68   Shannon, Gladstone, p. 249. 69   M.W. Lucy, Gladstone (London, 1895), p. 33. 70   Viscount Gladstone, After Thirty Years, p. 60. 71   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 12, p. 413, n. 1, 31 October 1887. 72   GGMS, 2384, 27 July 1889.

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Doncaster, from Leicester and Nottingham, as well as from North Wales and nearby Lancashire and Cheshire. Herbert acted as secretary and dealt with correspondence regarding bookings; 1889 saw a very full diary and letters were received requesting visits from Sowerby Bridge, Halifax, Monmouth, Middlesborough, Gloucester, Mansfield and Wellingborough, amongst others. An example was a telegram from the Grimsby Liberal Club on 27th July wanting to bring some thousand, but anxious to glimpse Mr and Mrs Gladstone.73 In the 1870s visitors often brought gifts and went away clutching chips from the woodcuttings as souvenirs. Eventually chips were given through eldest son, William, for a donation towards Mrs Gladstone’s orphanage. On 16th July 1889, Herbert received a ‘pushy’ letter from Stockton Liberals asking for a visit so that they could make a small memento of their occasion to Mr Gladstone in person (sic) – pointing out that a majority had dwindled at the last election from 3,000 to a mere 395!74 Some biographers have suggested that Disraeli planted trees but Gladstone chopped them down.75 A truer record would be that Disraeli left any felling to his staff though he loved his trees too – and that Gladstone not only felled and kibbled and lopped, but planted as well. M.R.D. Foot stresses that Gladstone was a ‘great planter of trees’76 and we discover many instances of his planting both in his diaries and from other sources. Particularly in the 1880s we see an increase in requested plantings as representing a more lasting souvenir of a visit from the Gladstones than mere chips. Planting continued in the 1870s and throughout the 1880s, many of them beyond the boundaries of Hawarden. At home some were planted with a view to providing pit props at the colliery but only occasionally is a specific planting at Hawarden mentioned in the diary – an example was on the 18th October 1872 when he reported ‘planting a tree on the lawn’ and then he omitted to give it a name. Gladstone, however, was presented with an oak by Bismarck77 and a beech was named after John Ruskin. Information about Gladstone’s planting activities outside Hawarden fall into two categories – those that were commemorative for a public occasion and those planted for friends and colleagues. For example, in the first category, on a visit to Ireland in the autumn of 1877, Gladstone planted trees at the Royal Fitzwilliam Hotel at Rathdrum and at Enniskerry and Maynooth before visiting Dublin.78 The unspecified plantings should not lead us to believe he was indifferent to     75   76   77   78   73 74

GGMS, 2384, 16 July 1889. GGMS, 2384, 16 July 1889. D.C. Somervell, Disraeli and Gladstone, p. 259. M.R.D. Foot, in a conversation with the author at the University of Chester, 8 July 2009. P. Magnus, Gladstone (London, 1954), p. 429. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, p. 604, 12 August 1877.

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the species he was planting nor that he regarded the ceremonies as a chore, but perhaps as a duty performed with a measure of humility and reluctance. Similarly, on the campaign trail north a year earlier his party stopped at various points where he was greeted by enthusiastic crowds – at Alnwick Castle he said ‘then I had to plant some trees’ and adds ‘early in the day I had to receive the deputation ... then I had to speak a little’, and awed by his reception reported ‘at every point on the road there were keen expressions of the public feeling which was inescapable’. He had, three days earlier on the 29th September 1876, been at Ford Castle, Coldstream, where he had planted a tree and cut down part of one; ‘with a considerable and very hearty concourse of labouring men’.79 The secondary category of planting presents a picture of a wide circle of admirers amongst colleagues and friends and an increasing number of requests to mark visits in this way. Recorded in the diaries are plantings at Dunster Castle, Haddo House and Brechin Castle where he not only planted trees, but also visited the park and admired its cedars and copper beeches. Further south at Dalmeny, home of Lord Rosebery (who was to succeed him as Premier on his final retirement), he planted five limes, three of which continue to flourish 130 years later. Gladstone also planted at Rossie Priory, Sudbury Kell, Aston Clinton (home of Lord Rothschild), Bingley Hall, Studley Royal (accompanied by Catherine) and his doctor’s (Sir A. West) home at Wanborough near Guildford. On the 31st January 1887, also accompanied by Catherine, he planted a tree at Newnham College, Cambridge, where his daughter Helen was a Fellow.80 Alas, the tree (unnamed) was subsequently soon stolen but Gladstone, undeterred, replaced it with an oak from Hawarden which still flourishes. Almost exactly a year later, free from office, Gladstone planted a tree after a lunch party at Bello Sguardo near Florence where he was holidaying.81 In a letter to Catherine after Gladstone’s death in 1898, Sir William Harcourt wrote, ‘I watch daily in my garden the growth of the walnut he planted here 10 years ago, and the young ash too, which will be historical monuments’.82 The first hint that Gladstone did not feel strong enough physically to fell trees had come in 1881 when he was almost 72. He wrote ‘ventured on a little woodcutting – but I am no longer equal to the true woodmans work’.83 He was still feeling the effects a fortnight later when he recorded ‘felled a beech with Willy. But, ‘non sum qualis eram’ (I’m not the person I was). Perhaps a bout of lumbago was responsible at the time, mentioned four days later in the diary. However, a week     81   82   83   79 80

Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, p. 159, 29 September 1876. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 12, p. 8, n. 8, 31 January 1887. Gladstone Diaries, p. 93, 21 January 1888. Drew, Catherine Gladstone, p. 198. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, p. 129, 22 September 1881.

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later, a storm on 15th October 1881 required attention to damage and, with William and Stephen, the next few weeks saw Gladstone in action with the axe most days – a large elm, mutilated by the storm, was felled in mid November followed by a great oak a week later and further fellings for the rest of the year. Perhaps the blip in September reflected concerns over the pressures of office and a recurring desire for retirement as well as the incipient lumbago.84 Axe work continued throughout the 1880s with just an occasional hint of increasing frailty. One occurred in October 1884, reported in the diary, ‘walk with Mr Millais; a little woodcraft; my sons felled an oak’.85 Next May we read ‘cut down a holly, which impeded the view. One of my last falls?’86 There are no other hints in over 300 recorded wood-cutting and crafting days until the end of the decade and approach of his 80th birthday. A month before that landmark, he wrote ‘woodcraft with Herbert. I played second fiddle’.87 Even then he was not ‘retiring’ from wood-cutting, merely remarking on the unusual situation of allowing one of his sons to take the dominant role. Woodcraft continued throughout the following year; in October he felled a walnut at Hawarden. A year later we have the last recorded felling in the diary, ‘a touch of axework’.88 No doubt Gladstone was beginning to feel his age by the early 1890s; although as alert as ever, his eyesight and hearing were gradually deteriorating, lumbago and bouts of diarrhoea became more frequent and in 1892 he was elected Premier for the fourth time. Harry commented that ‘he continued to work with intensity and this was becoming more risky, and we had various manoeuvres to make him take a rest’. Moreover, Gladstone was also concerned with his collection of books and finding a site for a library to house his collection of some 25,000 volumes, so there was much to rival the place of tree felling. Yet Gladstone remarked that ‘in chopping down a tree you have not time to think of anything except in where your next stroke will fall’, and claimed the hobby helped him deal with stress and ‘rest his brain’.89 This comment reflects a singleminded concentration that was necessary to make a good job of the tree-felling, but it is as well to remember that Gladstone was accompanied by one or more members of his family in at least 746 occasions of the 1,071 or more tree-felling episodes. Indeed, the broad picture of Gladstone that emerges – and which is well illustrated in the family photograph taken in 1886 (see Figure 7.4) – is of a     86   87   88   89   84 85

See also Jenny West’s chapter in this volume below. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, p. 226, 15 October 1884. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, p. 346, 28 May 1885. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 12, p. 246, 21 November 1889. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 12, p. 422, 2 December 1891. W.T. Stead, Gladstone: A Character Sketch (London, 1898), p. 52ff.

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Figure 7.4

A Family Gathering at Hawarden, 1886

man who was never so happy as when he was at home on the Hawarden estate, surrounded by his family, books and trees. Relaxing between strokes with the axe to thrash out matters of the estate with Willy, to debate family interests abroad with Harry, to discuss his university and, later, his political career with Herbert and church matters with Stephen, all point to the importance of family life to the Gladstones. This is underlined by a remark of Herbert, who recalled ‘We were all pretty good at the work. On one gigantic ash Mr Gladstone and all four sons were cutting at the same time, which at any rate shows confidence in one another. It was grand exercise and we had great fun over it’.90 Nevertheless, what had begun as a private hobby also became a very public pastime. If his tree-felling was only one aspect of Gladstone’s interest in all things arboreal, it was probably the most important as far as his public image was concerned and it would be a mistake to underestimate the role played – at first unwittingly – by his practice of wood-cutting in gaining national popularity   Viscount Gladstone, After Thirty Years, p. 62.

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among the working classes. This identification with the working man, popularly expressed by his sobriquet ‘The People’s William’, may also have been stimulated by Gladstone’s role, as Chancellor and Premier, towards the increasing democratisation of the country through measures affecting cheaper newspapers and educational reforms and a zeal for justice (contemporary cartoons frequently depicted Gladstone using his axe to right wrongs and seek justice). Nevertheless, thousands came to Hawarden on excursion to witness the woodsman at work and newspapers and periodicals latched onto the activity, turning his axe work into an almost national possession. Gladstone’s tree-felling recognised and upheld the value of honest physical toil and it helped the ordinary working man to regard Gladstone as one of them. Shortly after Gladstone’s death, a fitting tribute was paid to him by Hunt Jackson in the Brighton Herald on 19th May 1898: He moved among the forest trees, the trusty axe within his hand, his fame was known across the seas, the Woodman of our England’s strand.91

  Cited in Bebbington, William Ewart Gladstone, p. 240.

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Chapter 8

The Health of a Prime Minister: Gladstone, 1868–85 Jenny West

Gladstone’s health presents something of a conundrum. On the one hand, he was physically active during most of his political career – taking long walks, sea bathing and felling trees on the Hawarden estate. On the other, he was not infrequently confined to bed unwell and missed cabinet meetings, sessions of the House of Commons and other significant events. During his first two administrations, 1868–74 and 1880–85, Gladstone recorded in his diaries many short bouts of illness. Occasionally he was seriously ill. His next administration of 1886 presented him with episodes of exhaustion rather than physical illness and in his final administration of 1892–94 he experienced increasingly poor eyesight, tiredness and ‘... the weakness of old age unfitting me for parliamentary effort’.1 The subject of Gladstone’s health between 1868 and 1885 has received insufficient attention. References to the subject place more emphasis on illness linked to political pressure than to pathological causes. Although acknowledging that Gladstone, at 65, ‘... was fit, spare and sprightly’, H.C.G. Matthew suggests that many short illnesses, and particularly those of the first two administrations, were due to a combination of political pressure, a nervous disposition and extreme fatigue.2 While Richard Shannon provides little detail on the subject, Roy Jenkins observes that despite vigour and longevity, Gladstone did not always have robust health.3 Matthew, on the other hand, states that he was never seriously ill.4 This is questionable because there were occasions when illness caused concern not only to his family, but also to his doctors, colleagues and the nation. 1   M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew (eds), The Gladstone Diaries (14 vols, Oxford 1968– 1994), vol. 13, 18 December 1893, p. 341. 2   H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1898 (Oxford, 1997), p. 233. 3   R. Shannon, Gladstone: Heroic Minister (London, 1999); R. Jenkins, Gladstone (London, 1995), p. 180. 4   H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (60 vols, Oxford 2004), vol. 11, p. 786.

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This study examines the effect of both political pressure and pathological illness on Gladstone, both in office and in opposition. It also notes times of intense pressure with no illness. The subject is complex because ‘understanding the history of medicine presents many challenges’.5 During Gladstone’s four premierships his personal physician was Dr, later Sir, Andrew Clark. He was attended by Clark for 24 years, from 1869 until a few months before Clark’s death, aged 67, in November 1893. The relationship, highly valued by Gladstone, was both professional and personal. The two met via Mrs Catherine Gladstone during the cholera epidemic of 1866. Catherine, a volunteer on the cholera wards of the London Hospital (later Royal London) and Clark, one of the hospital’s physicians, established a committee to raise funds for the former’s convalescent homes for cholera survivors. This committee included Catherine’s Glynne family relatives: brother Sir Stephen, brotherin-law Lord Lyttelton, Lyttelton’s daughter Lucy and Lucy’s husband Lord Frederick Cavendish.6 Committee meetings, chaired by Gladstone, took place at his London residence, 11, Carlton House Terrace. Clark had already been consulted about the young Herbert Gladstone when he was at Eton. That event was later recalled by Gladstone to Lady Clark: ‘When I look at this precious son I often think how much I owe to your husband when he [Herbert] was so delicate’.7 The first of many known consultations concerning Gladstone himself was in July 1869. Clark was trained in Dundee and Edinburgh, with an MD from Aberdeen. He was appointed physician to the London Hospital in 1854 but retired from the post in 1886 to concentrate on his private practice, retaining the hospital title of consulting physician.8 His private practice expanded during the 1870s, largely due to having Gladstone as a patient, when he took on such figures as Granville, Tennyson, Darwin and George Eliot. Gladstone wrote to Granville: ‘Glad to find that you too have sought refuge within the all embracing arms of Andrew Clark’.9 Clark was also consulted by Catherine, most of the Gladstone family, Lucy Cavendish and certain Hawarden staff. Catherine became godmother to one of his sons, Andrew Gladstone Clark, born in 1870.10 Clark 5   R. Porter, ‘What is Disease?’, in R. Porter (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medicine (Cambridge ,2006), p. 71. 6   The Times, 25 March 1867, p. 9. 7   Royal College of Physicians, London (RCP), Allchin MS 711/144. 8   G.H. Brown (ed.), Munk’s Roll (14 vols, London, 1861–2005), vol. 4, pp. 93–4. 9   A. Ramm (ed.), The Political Correspondence of Mr Gladstone and Lord Granville (2 vols, Oxford 1962), vol. 1, p. 23. 10   Flintshire Record Office, Glynne-Gladstone Papers, MS 812, Clark to Catherine Gladstone, 15 October 1892.

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was undoubtedly honoured to attend the Prime Minister and told an old medical school colleague in 1892 that one of the most important things for him was his introduction to ‘Mr Gladstone’.11 He attended Gladstone not only in London but at Hawarden, at the country houses of politicians and on speech tours and cruise ships. Consequently, it is likely that Clark came to understand Gladstone’s concerns and requirements at a deep level. Reynolds, who succeeded Clark as President of the Royal College of Physicians, stated that theirs was a long and valued friendship; not only was Clark’s professional devotion untiring, but his strong religion made him a rock to lean upon in all times of anxiety and strain.12 He shared with Gladstone an interest in theology, philosophy, poetry, the Greek testament and, when the two families holidayed at Penmaenmawr, backgammon. Clark gained in turn. He was awarded a baronetcy in 1883 and, independently, appointed President of the Royal College of Physicians in 1888. Certain of Clark’s obituaries questioned whether his attention to private practice was at the expense of his hospital career and further scientific research and writing. However, Gladstone’s respect for Clark’s knowledge, judgment and prompt medical attention never faltered. Gladstone’s main legislative undertaking on commencing his first administration was the Irish Church (Disestablishment) Bill, introduced to the Commons in March 1869. Although increasingly tired during its progress through Parliament, he remained generally well. Even a ‘bowel complaint’ one night did not stop him from keeping an appointment with the Queen in the morning.13 Nevertheless, he increased the pressure on himself by detailed simultaneous consideration of an Irish Land Bill. He believed that ‘If we succeed with the Church, & fail with the land, we shall have done less than half our work’.14 On 7 June he started a cold and after a Commons session went directly to bed. It is difficult to assess whether his condition was influenced by his intense friendship with Mrs Laura Thistlethwayte, which was near its height during this first administration.15 Gladstone welcomed an assurance of prayers for the Irish Church Bill from the nonconformist minister Spurgeon and attributed to them ‘... the secret of the strength of body... during this very trying year’.16 The Lords’ amendments to the Bill were discussed at length in Cabinet and by 19 July he considered that every     13   14   15   11

RCP, Allchin MS 711/82, 1892. RCP, Allchin 713/126 Obituary. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 7, p. 52, 10 April 1869. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 7, p. 73, 22 May 1869, Gladstone to Bright. J. West, ‘Gladstone and Laura Thistlethwayte’, Historical Research, 80/209 (August 2007): pp. 368–92. 16   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 7, p. 96, 15 July 1869. 12

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reasonable concession had been made. By then he was exhausted and unable to attend the final meeting on the subject on 22 July. As he lay on a sofa he was consulted by Granville who finalised negotiations with the Lords on his behalf. Still unwell, he missed the next Cabinet meeting and went with Catherine to stay with his close friend Lord Richard Cavendish at Chislehurst. Clark attended him there from the 26–29 July and liaised with Chislehurst’s Dr Alfrey before returning to London.17 The length of Clark’s attendance on Gladstone was striking given his commitments in both hospital and private practice. After seeing Clark in London several times during the weekend of 7 August and attending Mr Saunders his dentist at George Street, Hanover Square, Gladstone went to stay with Granville at Walmer to convalesce.18 Accompanied by Catherine, son Willie and two daughters, he was received by the town corporation who hoped that he would be invigorated by the pure air.19 On his return to London, Gladstone found the problems relating to the Irish Land Bill assuming ‘formidable proportions’ and he devoted much of the remainder of the year to that Bill. He still found time to enjoy the company of Laura Thistlethwayte but after a weekend as her guest in Dorset he developed a cough, forcing him to bed in London on 15 December, when he missed another Cabinet meeting. He probably caught the cough from Laura; he wrote to her: ‘After a stiff battle my cough is as I hope your’s is, nearly gone’.20 This persisted into the New Year and was undoubtedly the reason for Clark visiting him at Hawarden Castle on New Year’s Eve. The pair walked in the grounds and conversed on theology and philosophy. Full recovery was not until 12 January 1870 when he resumed political duties. Gladstone introduced the Irish Land Bill to the Commons on 15 February 1870. It proved more difficult than the Irish Church Bill due to reservations by some landowners, including Cabinet members, and expectations in Ireland which the Bill could not meet. He was forced to accompany it with a Coercion Bill. He informed Archbishop Manning that the strain was extreme and that it was swallowing his ‘whole personal existence’. At the Easter service at Hawarden Church it was the Irish Land question that he presented before God ‘... more than ought else living or dead’.21 The Bill was eventually passed in both Houses but much of his frustration was because it did not succeed in settling the Irish   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 7, pp. 107–8, 24, 26–29 July 1869.   Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 49, p. 37. Edwin Saunders, knighted in

17 18

1883, dental surgeon to Queen Victoria. 19   The Times, 24 August 1869, p. 6. 20   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 8, Appendix, p. 581, 18 December 1869. 21   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 7, pp. 278–9, 16–17 April 1870.

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agrarian issue and came near to breaking up the Cabinet. However, in spite of marked political pressure he remained well. Gladstone recorded lying on his back with ‘threatenings’ on two occasions in July and lying up for a ‘slight attack’ in early August, likely in each case to have been in anticipation of diarrhoea. He remained well during the autumn apart from sudden nausea and feeling ‘the head weak’ on 5 November, on the same evening as dining with Granville. The terms ‘threatenings’, ‘bowel complaint’, ‘slight attack’ and ‘diarrhoea’ feature frequently in the diaries, often following politically stressful events, but by no means always so. Acute diarrhoea was sometimes linked to his use of laxatives – in his case castor oil. This was a common practice of the day. Other causes included gastro-intestinal infection and dietary change. Gladstone was known to enjoy eating more fruit than was ‘good for him’ and was once found ‘vigorously attacking’ Leveson-Gower’s gooseberry bushes at Holmbury.22 For much of 1871 he remained reasonably well, partly due to good fortune and partly to less self-imposed political pressure. Among diary entries concerning pre-speech nerves was one regarding ‘fear and trembling’ when speaking in the Commons in February on the Franco-Prussian War; another recorded nausea prior to speaking on the Ballot Bill at Whitby in September. Although previously unsupportive of this Bill, he denounced the Lords for rejecting it; it was not passed until 1872. Gladstone was physically unwell on two occasions in 1871. On 1 February he went to bed with a ‘growing cold’, remained there for several days and saw only son Willie, secretary West and Clark. Clark’s prescription for a feverish cold was bed rest, warm covering or warm room to encourage sweating, sloppy food three to four hourly and medication until the fever subsided and the cough loosened.23 Clark visited him during four days until he recovered. At that time, sweating was still used to rid the body of ‘poisons’ – believed to be causing the illness – by ‘drawing them out through the skin’.24 Matters were more serious at Whitsun when Gladstone stayed at Lord Cowper’s residence, Panshanger, in Hertfordshire. He had already had a ‘slight dysenteric attack’ in London on 19th May, but on the 28th, after three days at Panshanger, he was ‘seized at night with shivering & a sharp attack of bowelcomplaint’ with a fever.25 This was no laxative-linked event, but what can now be seen as an infection of the gastro-intestinal tract, likely to have been bacterial in origin from contaminated food or water. Too ill to read or conduct business, he     24   25   22 23

F. Leveson-Gower, Bygone Years (London 1905), p. 295. RCP, 711/50, No. 7. E. Shorter, ‘Primary Care’, in Porter, Cambridge History of Medicine, p. 104. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 7, p. 502, 28–31 May 1871.

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was nursed by Catherine. Once again, Clark travelled from London immediately to stay with his patient, until the 30th. He returned the following morning and forbade activity due to persistent fever. Secretary West assisted with political business and Gladstone left ‘this most kind refuge’ a week later. Whether such responsibility for the Prime Minister’s welfare presented horror or honour for a host can only be guessed at, but for Gladstone, aged 61, away from home, illness must have been a continual dread. On a more positive note he followed his week’s visit to Balmoral in October by walking in Glen Muick and Ballater: ‘Nothing sets me up in mind & body like a mountain solitude’.26 Politically, 1872 brought a settlement with the United States of the long dispute regarding the vessel Alabama and further work on the Ballot Bill, passed in July. Although unwell on several occasions during 1872, Gladstone was not seriously ill. When writing to Laura Thistlethwayte, in early January, he referred to ‘lumbago’ and ‘rheumatism’ but he attributed no cause to his ‘slight attacks’ on 5 and 20 March: two days later he had ‘a severe bronchial attack’ and laryngitis. This was ‘met by physick and strong perspiration’ – probably by a hot room and bedding plus poultices on his back, as on other occasions, to increase sweating. He managed to transact business via his son Willie, West, Granville and others who conveyed information from the Cabinet meeting downstairs at 10 Downing Street. To everyone he whispered with difficulty. He was well enough by the 26th to attend the House of Commons debate on the University Tests Bill. Gladstone was further troubled with neuralgia in April for which he went to bed and took quinine. In June, he recorded ‘Heat, headache and exhaustion’ and, when walking to scenic waterfalls at Guisachan, Inverness, in September, he was ‘Plagued’ with his head on both days, ‘... which makes me a plague to others’.27 Roy Porter describes neuralgia, headache and fatigue as discreet sensory complaints of the nineteenth century.28 Nevertheless, it is possible that Gladstone’s symptoms of ‘neuralgia’ and ‘headache’ were indicative of a more serious condition: Trigeminal Neuralgia. The trigeminal or fifth cranial nerve provides the sensory supply to the face, most of the scalp, the teeth and the oral and nasal cavities. The most common cause is now known to be pressure on this nerve by a pulsating blood vessel. This gives intense, paroxysmal pain, usually unilaterally, in any part of face or forehead and may account for Gladstone’s frequent difficulty in describing it. It can be triggered by chewing, teeth cleaning, shaving or cold air. He displayed characteristic symptoms: intermittent pain at   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 8, p. 43, 4 October 1871.   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 8, pp. 146, 167 and 217, 30 April, 19 June, 28, 29 September 1872. 28   Porter, ‘What is Disease’, p. 97. 26 27

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varying intervals, triggers which included wind or cold and occurrence usually during the day. Intervals, as with Gladstone, could extend for months or be so short that the episodes appear continuous.29 Occasionally, the cause is pressure from a tumour, but it is unlikely that this possibility would have been linked with the cancer believed to have caused his death over 20 years later. Invariably, Gladstone blamed pressure of work for neuralgia and there is no evidence to suggest that Clark discussed the possibility of trigeminal neuralgia with him. Yet that condition had been known medically long before Gladstone’s time and first adequately described in 1671. Gladstone is known to have had much dental work during this period. He may also have had facial pain from toothache. Alternatively, dental pain can occasionally be mistakenly diagnosed in the case of trigeminal neuralgia. It is highly possible that Gladstone experienced both. Gladstone started 1873 at Hawarden with painful gums. The pain in his upper jaw increased and after a difficult night a gumboil burst with the release of pressure providing relief.30 For this he was under the care of Hawarden’s Dr Moffatt in what was, before the advent of antibiotics, an inevitable watch and wait policy. Once healed, he attended several Cabinet meetings prior to the opening of Parliament on 6 February. Politically, he was disappointed at the failure to pass the Irish University Bill, the intended third of his Irish Bills. The Bill, introduced on 13 February, highlighted the need for a new enlarged and non-sectarian University of Dublin, with Protestants and Catholics taught side by side.31 At 2am on 12 March it was defeated by a narrow margin mainly due to the opposition of Irish MPs. Undoubtedly linked to defeat, Gladstone arranged to see Clark at 11.30am, but the visit was brief for it was followed at 12.15pm by an audience with the Queen. The following morning, at Cavendish Square, he saw Clark again who examined him and gave ‘his careful judgment’. In a Cabinet note of the same date Gladstone wrote: ‘I am strongly advised a temporary rest’.32 Although he resigned that afternoon he was compelled to resume office when Disraeli declined to form a government. He also took on the additional task of Chancellor of the Exchequer. 29   S.C. Bagheri, F. Farhidvash, V.J. Perciaccante, ‘Diagnosis and treatment of patients with trigeminal neuralgia’, in Journal of the American Dental Association, 135 (2004): pp. 1713–14. My thanks are due to Professor G.H. Whitehouse, Emeritus Professor, University of Liverpool for drawing my attention to this possibility and to the chapter above. 30   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 8, pp. 266, 270–1, 3 January and 13–14 January 1873. 31   The Times, 14 February 1873, p. 7; 18 February 1873, p. 9. 32   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 8, p. 300, 13 March 1873.

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It has been stated that Gladstone reacted to the strain by ‘physical breakdown’.33 However, he recorded no immediate ill health, his diary showing only that he had further ‘face-ache’ at the end of March and mid-April, and what appears to have been a brief ‘bronchial’ infection in between.34 The symptoms he described in the summer were specifically linked to the shock experienced at the traumatic death, in a riding accident, of his close friend, Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Winchester.35 His 64th birthday contemplations in December dwelt again on the subject of retirement. He recorded ‘a hope of release, recollection, and penitence’.36 On 15th January1874 Gladstone noted that finishing the path at Hawarden, with son Herbert, strained his chest. There is no suggestion that this was cardiac in origin. It is likely that he was experiencing either direct muscular strain from physical work or signs of the forthcoming respiratory infection, accompanied by further tightness of the chest. Clark visited him morning and evening for two days and ordered ‘much physicking’.37 The year 1874 was one of change for Gladstone. He began in early January to consider the dissolution of Parliament as the government’s signs of weakness multiplied; there were also possible legal difficulties with his post as Chancellor of the Exchequer. An election was called and Parliament was dissolved on 26 January. He was re-elected for Greenwich but the Liberal government lost power. On 16th February he experienced an ‘overwrought brain’, but believed that at such times ‘... we are alone with God: and no medicine can at this time be better’.38 Subsequently, Gladstone announced his intention to retire from the leadership of the party, although he continued as nominal leader until the new session of 1875. He spent much of the remainder of 1874 with what can only be termed an air of melancholy, interspersed with nostalgia at leaving both Downing Street and Hamilton, his secretary. He was also concerned about his family finances, and thoughts about Laura Thistlethwayte. The only difficulties with health were several bouts of diarrhoea, for which he blamed overwork. But he definitely enjoyed a three-week family holiday in August at Penmaenmawr, North Wales, where the Gladstones were joined by the Clarks.   R. Aldous, The Lion and the Unicorn (London 2006), pp. 236–7.   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 8, p. 310, 30 March 1873; p. 316, 15–17 April 1873. 35   For further details of this friendship, see especially G. Whitehouse, ‘The Relationship 33 34

between Samuel Wilberforce and William Ewart Gladstone, 1835–73, with special reference to contemporary religious issues’, unpublished M.Phil thesis, University of Liverpool, 2011. 36   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 8, p. 431, 29 December 1873. 37   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 8, pp. 442–4, 19–20 January 1874. 38   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 8, p. 462, 16 February 1874.

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Officially replaced by Hartington as leader of the Liberal Party in 1875, Gladstone’s aim, ‘excluding exceptional circumstances’, was to write on such subjects as theology and Homer, rather than focus on parliamentary activity. However, his stance changed from the summer of 1876 when ‘exceptional circumstances’ arose in the form of the Eastern Question, when a revolt by Christian Bulgarians was brutally suppressed by Turkish irregular forces. The Tory government minimised the issue in order to remain on good terms with Turkey. But Gladstone was moved by the plight of the Bulgarians. He was possibly influenced by the fervour of Darlington journalist W.T. Stead, who was supported by Northern Liberals. He also felt compelled to protest as the only exminister in the Commons with personal responsibility for upholding the treaty obligations agreed by the European Powers at the Peace of Paris, ending the Crimean War in 1856.39 Obligations included those on Turkey, which Disraeli’s government ignored. The atrocities fired Gladstone with adrenaline. He spoke in Parliament on 31 July against the government’s Turkish policy and on 28th August commenced writing his first pamphlet on the subject. During several days of intensive writing he was in pain. This was from lumbago, from which he had previously suffered in December 1875. It was now caused by two days of hard physical work on the ‘new walk’ round Hawarden’s old castle walls, which would have been an extension of the walk which strained him when excavating it in January 1874. Lumbago now made not only walking, but sitting painful. Hot baths and rubbing of his back gave limited relief but the only comfortable position in which to write was to recline in bed with the manuscript propped against his knees, which he did until its completion. He travelled to London on 4th September to finalise research at the British Museum.40 Published as Bulgarian Horrors and Questions of the East, this pamphlet was to be the most significant of his articles on the Eastern Question. He not only provoked controversy but put himself under pressure in meeting self-imposed deadlines. He later described himself as an ‘Agitator’. At no point during this period out of office, 1875–80, was Gladstone seriously ill although, intermittently, he experienced diarrhoea, a tight chest and gumboils. He also suffered for three days in September 1876 from ‘strong neuralgia’. He remained well while writing two further articles in November and December but with ‘Lessons in Massacre’, from 27th February 1877, he experienced what he termed ‘exhausting influenza’. This disappeared when he sent the final copy to the printer. He referred to influenza again on 24th July when finalising, under ‘high pressure’, his pamphlet ‘Aggression in Egypt and Freedom in the East’, but   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, p. 356, 24 October 1882, Gladstone to Spencer.   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, pp. 149–51, 22 August–2 September 1876.

39 40

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as previously he improved once pressure ended. Catherine and their son Henry had also had ‘tedious influenza’, in 1875, but what the term meant is uncertain. With Gladstone it is unlikely to have been serious as he recovered quickly. This is supported by his comment on another occasion: ‘Kept my bed for influenza until 6. Then got up and went to dine at Mr Parker’s’.41 Gladstone had several bouts of diarrhoea during 1877. One was prior to his placing of five resolutions concerning the Eastern Question before the Commons and another, for which he blamed ‘over head work’, was while writing an article on the county franchise in October. Nausea and diarrhoea occurred during the rapid completion, in three days in February 1878, of the article ‘The Paths of Honour and Shame’. As stated, diarrhoea had other possible causes. When finalising a further article in January he wrote: ‘I do not get rid of my face-ache. The times are enough for it. Would they did no worse’.42 In London, he visited Laura Thistlethwayte and also Sir Robert Phillimore, who wrote, ‘G in state of some neuralgia’.43. This suggests more incidences of the condition than Gladstone recorded. A ‘tight chest’ in early February was made worse by having to attend Parliament during the height of the Eastern crisis. This may have signalled some minor breathing difficulty or a mild fever for he had to ‘boil himself down’ – again, to cause sweating. In July Gladstone experienced a painful gumboil. This occurred a few days after the last of five visits to his dentist between the 2 and 22 July and caused ‘depressing and sharp pain’, with his face ‘completely distorted’. At the second visit he ‘... sat long under the hands of Mr Saunders’. The treatment is not recorded but may have made him more vulnerable to infection of the mouth at this time and may possibly have triggered neuralgia. This all left him much below par when speaking in the Commons on 30 July, for he later noted ‘... the daily hurry and almost tempest of the last seven months leave such a confusion’. When writing ‘England’s Mission’ soon after, he had yet another gumboil.44 Apart from some minor illness Gladstone remained well during 1879. He had announced in March 1878 that he would not be standing again for Greenwich, where his relationship with constituents had been uneasy, and he accepted a nomination for Midlothian in January. His successful Midlothian Campaign, commencing later that year, presented an opportunity to establish   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, p. 44, 18 June 1875.   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, p. 285, 25 January 1878. 43   Christ Church Library, official extracts, Sir Robert Phillimore’s Diary, p. 21, 26 January 41

42

1878.

  Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, pp. 329, 333 and 336–7, 9 July, 26 July, 6 August and 11 August

44

1878.

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‘... Gladstonianism as the dominant force in Liberal politics ...’ with a new electorate...’.45 Gladstone started 1880 with a low face ache which he attributed to ‘… reaction under heavy pressure’, but after submitting an article on economics on 5 January he rose, ‘greatly relieved’. However, by early February he was in pain again but was uncertain from which part of his head. He appears by now to have used neuralgia as a warning sign of over action, by the use of terms ‘monitor’, ‘tool’ or ‘instrument’. He also referred to trouble from his ‘early and kind monitor of excess, the toothache’ although, soon after, he was unsure whether this was tooth or face ache. He could not manage the morning air due to pain in his head. ‘My poor head, which is my tool, requires me to soothe and spare it’. The pain cannot have been helped by having to bring his sister Helen’s body back from Cologne at this time for burial in the family plot at Fasque in Scotland. When, in March, he referred to ‘Severe neuralgia pain at night’, his reaction was somewhat philosophical: ‘My share of bodily pain in life has been small. It is a great instrument of assimilation, hard to dispense with’.46 He remained well during his Midlothian speeches in March and April and was subsequently elected. However, he considered the journey to London a few days later ‘... a plunge out of an atmosphere of peace into an element of disturbance’. This included a visit to his dentist on 20 April who ‘operated a good deal’. His second administration and return to the leadership of the Liberal Party began on 28 April. The demands on him, particularly during the first two and a half years, took a heavy toll of his energies.47 On 30 July he became seriously ill with what was clearly pneumonia. He felt chilled and nauseated after the morning session in the Commons and, while dining with Frederick Cavendish that evening, he had a rigor with severe shivering. A further rigor on Saturday morning caused ‘shaking like a house shaken by an earthquake’, and he was unable to gain warmth from either his great coat or the fire in his room. Consequently, Catherine sought Clark at his Cavendish Square rooms. In a retrospective resume of four days Gladstone noted a temperature of 103 degrees and looking ‘exceedingly ill’. He received strong and prolonged poulticing, hot drinks and medicine in the form of ‘stimulants’. Clark diagnosed congestion at the base of the left lung and forbade all business. So ill was he that on Sunday he ‘thought of the end’.48 Bulletins prepared by Clark were sent to the Queen, the press and the Reform Club. Clark stayed at   Matthew, Gladstone, pp. 291, 299.   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, pp. 473, 481–2, 488, 3–4 January, 4 February, 7 February, 3

45 46

March 1880. 47   Jenkins, p. 444–5. 48   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, p. 564, 31 July–3 August 1880.

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Downing Street for the first four nights. So great was the number of visitors to the area that, to ensure peace, he stipulated that no one use the door bell and no transport come near.49 On 2 August Clark called in Sir William Jenner, physician and professor of pathological anatomy at University College Hospital, London and physician to Queen Victoria; Jenner visited twice.50 This was indicative of the increasing consultation at this time of figures developing specialist medical knowledge – in this case, fever.51 Although still weak, the lung congestion and fever gradually disappeared following ‘drenching perspiration’. Only then were visitors allowed. Catherine, who read prayers daily, nursed him herself until the 6 August when a Mrs Hampton was installed under her. The concern of the public continued throughout with 500 cards left on one day alone. Those calling to leave messages included MPs, ambassadors, artists, priests and doctors.52 Jenkins considers that, politically, Gladstone had strained himself to and beyond the limit of his capacity.53 However, political strain was not the cause of all of this prime minister’s ill health. Exhaustion may at times have rendered him more open to infection but, first and foremost, this was a serious infection which, at age 70, could easily have proved fatal. Bacterial pneumonia was, and still is, associated with significant morbidity and mortality.54 Gladstone convalesced for 10 days from 14 August at Leveson-Gower’s country house at Holmbury near Dorking, where he was joined by Granville, Argyll and Grosvenor. This was followed by a week’s cruise round Britain from 26 August on Donald Currie’s ship the Grantully Castle, accompanied among others by Catherine, Henry, Stephen and Helen Gladstone and Dr and Mrs Clark. It took some time to reacclimatise to business. A long speech in the Commons on the Eastern Question on 4 September delivered in great heat left him tired; yet, between 6 and 9 September he managed to dine at Rosebery’s and the Russian Embassy, stay a night at Mentmore and travel to Hawarden. Neuralgia then appears to have been activated by sudden cold; for this he used quinine and an unspecified appliance in his ear.55 Between a continuation of a somewhat delicate state of health in early October and a bout of lumbago in December he returned to the ‘tangled wilderness of the Irish Land Question’. He     51   52   53   54   49

The Times, 2–3 August 1880, pp. 5, 9, 11. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 30, pp. 10–12. Shorter, ‘Primary Care’, p. 127. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, p. 565, 4–6 August, 1880; The Times, 3–5 August 1880, pp. 11, 5. Jenkins, p. 454. S. Chapman, G. Robinson, J. Stradling and S. West, Oxford Handbook of Respiratory Medicine (Oxford 2005), p. 176. 55   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, p. 580, 14 September 1880. 50

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recorded on New Year’s Eve that he had been unable to extricate his mind from the heavy cares of government, and Ireland in particular. The year 1881 was marked initially by the defeat of British forces in the first Boer War and further work on the Irish Land Bill. Gladstone had not reached full health since the pneumonia of the previous summer and the combination now of several days of tonsillitis and a deputation of MPs on the Bill proved tiring. Clark ordered further rest but, after a Commons session on 1 February, Gladstone recorded: ‘The weary strain continues: it is the sameness of the tug which makes it tell upon the brain’.56 Superimposed on his low state of health at this time was an accident on 23 February in melting snow. On reaching Downing Street by carriage from Marlborough House at midnight he fell backwards and struck his head heavily on the garden step. The resulting wound, of one and three-quarter inches, bled profusely. It was dressed by a Dr Blake, of Princes Street, Westminster. Clark arrived soon after and was accompanied the following day by Sir James Paget, surgeon and pathologist of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and surgeon to Queen Victoria.57 Although the profuse external bleeding would have been due to the highly vascular nature of the scalp, such an accident was, potentially, extremely serious. It raised the risk of intra-cranial haemorrhage, pressure on the brain and loss of consciousness. When put to bed Gladstone himself was worried about ‘... very uncomfortable feelings inside the skull ...’.58 What instruction Clark gave for his patient’s condition to be observed closely is not recorded. Both doctors were relieved that Gladstone had not been stunned and Paget remarked that his physical powers were proportionate to those intellectual.59 The importance of anti-sepsis had already been recognised by Lister and in 1880 the subject was further emphasised by MacCormac at St Thomas’s Hospital for the treatment of head injuries: by thorough cleansing of the wound, shaving the immediate area, observation for skull fracture and application of sutures.60 Whether Dr Blake applied this protocol with Gladstone is unknown, but Clark and Paget were pleased with the healing and absence of fever. Bulletins were prepared for the press by Clark until 28 February. Gladstone was justified in

  Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, p. 15, 1 February 1881.   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, p. 24, 23–4 February 1881; The Times 25 February 1881, p.

56 57

10; Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), p. 359–60. 58   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, p. 24, 23 February 1881. 59   D.W.R. Bahlman (ed.), The Diary of Sir Edward Walter Hamilton, 1880–1885 (2 vols, Oxford 1972), vol. 1, 25 February 1881, p. 110. 60   W. MacCormac, Antiseptic Surgery (London 1880), pp. 220–1.

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recording ‘How good God is to me ...’ and Hamilton observed that except that his head was all bandaged up he looked much himself.61 Gladstone appears to have made a good recovery. Nevertheless, the fact that he referred again to the inside of his head on 25 February in imagining the outside ‘better than in’ he may have continued to wonder about the possible effect of injury on his brain and possibly, therefore, on his physical or intellectual ability. He appears to have recorded more concern about the condition of his brain subsequently than before: for example, in connection with his insomnia of 1883.62 Disraeli’s death, soon after, prompted Gladstone to express, to his son Henry, thoughts of his own vulnerability and the need to seize some retirement before the grave. Gladstone was determined to pass the Irish Land Bill in 1881. ‘The long battle over the bill in Committee ... was a formidable physical effort ...’.63After the Bill’s second reading on 19 May he rested at Lady Russell’s Pembroke Lodge for the weekend, before considering in committee the ‘enormous’ list of Lords’ amendments. The Bill was finally passed in mid-August, enabling him to enjoy a few weeks holiday, visiting Deal and Walmer Castles. Between 16–19 October Gladstone was unwell at Hawarden with what appears to have been bronchitis. Symptoms characteristic of the condition were those, now known to be the viral infection of a common cold, affecting head and throat before spreading to his chest as a secondary, bacterial, infection. Gladstone informed Clark, on 22 October, that the cough ‘... hard and sore for one day broke more quickly than ever before’. He stated that he was taking a reduced diet, wine and barley water and, as previously, ‘... masses of covering to produce more profuse perspirations. I only remain rather weak’.64 What would have been an initial irritating, unproductive cough, possibly accompanied by tightness in the chest and shortness of breath, then became productive, more effectively ridding the bronchus of sputum and making breathing easier.65 He believed it had started when straining his voice during a speech at Leeds Cloth Hall eight days earlier; this may have made him more vulnerable but the infection probably started after his return. By November he was in ‘tremendous force’. Hamilton had never seen him looking more cheery.66 The main political events of 1882 involved the assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Burke, in Phoenix Park on 6 May, the passing of     63   64   65   66   61 62

Bahlman, vol. 1, 27 February 1881, p. 111. Gladstone Diaries vol. 10, p. 24, 25 February, 1881. Matthew, Gladstone, p. 448. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, p. 150, 22 October 1881, Gladstone to Clark. P. Kumar and M. Clark (eds), Clinical Medicine (2009), p. 835. Bahlman, vol. 1, 11 November 1881, p. 185.

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the Crimes Prevention Bill and the invasion by Britain of Egypt in August. Although Gladstone had agreed with Granville in November 1881 not to resign from office unless there was a serious failure of health, he continued to think about retirement. A cough, not previously mentioned in his diary, was ‘worse’ on 18 April and after seeing Clark he spent much of the next two days in bed. There, according to Clark’s wishes, he was ‘under appliances’, again one or more of his usual methods for sweating: a hot room, extra clothes or blankets. He was then well enough to enter the Downing Street garden for the ‘air’ prescribed by Clark and, finally, to travel to Rosebery’s house, the Durdans at Epsom in Surrey. Gladstone was involved in lengthy discussions on Egypt, but despite the government’s decision to intervene in the summer of 1882, with the political pressure this created, it did not in any obvious way undermine his physical health. However, he was worried about the effect of recent ‘hard brain work’ which he thought reduced his ability not only to resist sea-sickness on a sailing holiday with Lord Wolverton, but also to bear pain during dental treatment.67 He may still have been worried about possible long-term effects of the head injury on his brain. Apart from lumbago after kibbling felled trees at Hawarden he remained physically well for the remainder of the year. The effect of political responsibilities on his brain continued as a fear into 1883. Thoughts during January and February were dominated by the problem of insomnia and, therefore, the consequent need to reconsider his visit to Midlothian. He thought that the long uninterrupted pressure of work had somewhat ‘deranged’ him. In his search for sleep, and possibly spiritual guidance, he resorted to visiting the Vicar of nearby Buckley ‘in preparation for the night’. The following evening his daughter Mary played him to sleep, presumably on the piano.68 Clark travelled from London the following day. Gladstone voiced concerns about his health from the autumn session, including demands on the brain, neuralgia from overwork and increasing sleep disturbance. Bodily health and function were unaffected but with the brain there had been slight confusion and a great sense of weakness during the day, though not sleepiness in day or evening.69 After a medical examination, Clark agreed the condition was due to the strain of work. He forbade Midlothian and ordered rest; Gladstone, relieved, described his physician as ‘... overflowing with kindness’. Sleep for Gladstone had, through his long political life, been a ‘mainstay’ and it was the failure of it that led to the need for rest at Wolverton’s villa at Cannes for five weeks. This

  Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, pp. 315 and 320, 19 August and 28 August 1882.   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, p. 392, 4–6 January 1883. 69   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, p. 393, 7 January 1883. 67 68

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brought sleep, invigoration and what he described as less sense of weakness in the brain. Quinine was prescribed for neuralgia which reappeared at the end of April, but his health held well during June when speaking in the Commons on Irish Land and in July and August, with his 44th wedding anniversary, Suez Canal business, three readings of the Bankruptcy Bill and several meetings with Laura Thistlethwayte. A week’s cruise with Catherine, Clark, Tennyson and others in September off the West Highlands and Norway on Donald Currie’s ship Pembroke Castle brought welcome relaxation. Apart from further neuralgia on the evening of 15 December when he retired early to bed, again with quinine, he ended the year clear of insomnia and in good health. Nevertheless, thoughts of retirement continued: ‘A strong man in me wrestles for retirement: a stronger one stands at the gate of exit and forbids’.70 Politically, Gladstone’s main issues in 1884 were Egypt, the Sudan and parliamentary reform. Mounting tension in the Sudan led to the dispatch of General Gordon to evacuate Khartoum where he was soon under siege. Health wise, on 4 February, after conclaves on political reform and Egypt, a speech dinner and large evening party, Gladstone again experienced ‘sharp’ neuralgia. In addition, a week after the introduction of the Franchise Bill in the Commons on 28 February a cold which he tried to manage by bed and strong perspirations became worse. Morley, his first official biographer, describes this simply: ‘10–19 March. Confined to his room, by a chill’.71 It soon developed into a more serious illness, which can now be diagnosed as laryngitis and bronchitis. Clark, visiting daily, forbade attendance at Cabinet meetings and prescribed for the larynx, silence, inhalations, potash drafts and lozenges.72 The condition proved to be more persistent than usual and took longer ‘to clear out the chest’. It was believed by colleagues to have resulted directly from strenuous work on the Franchise Bill. That may have been the precursor, but the illness can now be seen to have been caused by bronchitis following a common cold. Gladstone convalesced initially at the house of banker Bertram Currie at Coombe Warren, near Kingston, until 7 April. Clark travelled to his patient daily for the next five days from Cavendish Square, again, a considerable commitment.73 A Cabinet meeting was held there on 29th March attended by Granville, Harcourt and Hamilton and Gladstone was driven to the House of Commons, the following week, for sessions of the Cabinet and the House of Commons. On 7 April he spoke on the second reading of the Franchise Bill. Considered off the     72   73   70 71

Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, p. 88, 31 December 1883. J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (2 vols, London, 1905–6), vol. 2, p. 868. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, pp. 124–5, 11–18 March 1884; The Times, 18 March 1884, p. 5. The Times. 21–22, 24–25 March, 1884, pp. 10, 11, 9, 10.

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‘sick list’ the next day, he went to convalesce at Rosebery’s Durdans, at Epsom, and to Leveson-Gower at Holmbury, near Dorking, a week later. Despite his recovery, Gladstone warned Rosebery, in September 1884, before speaking on reform in Scotland, that due to diminution in the power of his lungs and voice he felt unable to make successive speeches as he had when campaigning in 1879 and 1880. Nevertheless, his first speech, in Edinburgh on 1 September, lasted well ‘beyond expectation’, aided by egg-flip.74 The Franchise Bill was eventually passed in November, which included an agreement for a radical redistribution of seats. It came into operation, therefore, with the passing of the Redistribution Bill in May 1885. Insomnia in December was crowned by only one and a half hours sleep on the 30th after writing on Egyptian finance. Lumbago, which had prevented him from attending the House of Commons in July 1884, was again troublesome at the beginning of 1885, but both this and his ability to sleep were improved by an unspecified medicine prescribed by Clark, combined with walking and a passage from the psalms. While visiting the Duke of Devonshire at Holker Hall on 5 February 1885, Gladstone heard of the fall of Khartoum and Gordon’s presumed death. Although outwardly calm, he was privately exhausted by the entire catastrophic affair. He remained in bed on 12 February, ‘... the disturbance which has had so many forms having at last taken the form of over action of the bowels’. The disturbance appears to have centred itself on his gastro-intestinal tract and, presumably in an attempt to reduce the symptoms, he reduced his intake of food; but this made him feel weak when walking. Also, a symptom, not previously mentioned, returned at this time – irritation of his hands.75 The government survived a vote of censure on 23 February but suffered a marked fall in its majority with many of the Cabinet in favour of resignation. Gladstone found, at the end of March, that escape from London, in this case to the Durdans, improved his bodily condition. However, with the entire first half of 1885 filled with concerns over Irish affairs, including coercion, land reform and Chamberlain’s scheme for an Irish settlement based on a Central Board, together with a Russian attack on the Afghan border in April he soon felt he had never known political anxieties more complicated and he did not have strength for the day.76 The Central Board plan was narrowly defeated in May. The Cabinet continued to disagree on the renewal of coercion and on 8 June the government was defeated on matters concerning the budget. Ministers offered their resignations and 24 June marked the end of his second administration.77     76   77   74

75

Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, p. 201, 1 September 1884. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, p. 295, 12 February 1885. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, p. 326, 20 April 1885. Matthew, pp. 460–1

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Although Gladstone enjoyed periods of good health during his first two administrations, he also recorded many short bouts of illness including coughs, colds, diarrhoea, lumbago and neuralgia. More serious illness included bronchitis and pneumonia. There may also have been certain implications with his head injury of 1881 and with recurrent neuralgia. His assiduous recording of such information may give an exaggerated impression of how often he was afflicted in comparison to others. Precise comparison is difficult due not only to the subjective nature of such recording, but to the lack of equally detailed comparative evidence about the health of other leading politicians of his era. Gladstone does appear to have given an exaggerated view of the role of political pressure as a factor in his health. In his diaries he regularly blames overwork and a taxed brain for being unwell. Biographers consider that he generally functioned well as prime minister, but they support his view that short bouts of illness often arose at times of intense political pressure due to strain and fatigue. Certainly, such pressure affected his health at times. Examples include his debilitating exhaustion connected with the Irish Church Bill in July 1869, feeling unwell prior to speeches on the Franco-Prussian war and on the Ballot Bill in 1871 and, often, diarrhoea during anxiety. The effect of pressure was also noticeable occasionally out of office: for example, when writing on the Eastern Question. There were, however, other, essentially medical causes of his ill health. The most common was infection, sometimes affecting the gastro-intestinal, but more often the respiratory tract. Intense political strain as prime minister may have made Gladstone more susceptible to coughs, laryngitis, bronchitis and even pneumonia but, invariably, the cause of illness and particularly serious illness and the consequent need for medical care was, first and foremost, the infection itself. It must also be borne in mind that Clark, as well as Gladstone, had limited medical knowledge. At that time, medicine was at a cross roads between traditional practice and scientific discovery. Bloodletting had been replaced by an understanding of disease mechanisms and Clark would now have benefited from the thermometer and the stethoscope. The latter, before the discovery of X-rays, undoubtedly facilitated Clark’s diagnosis of Gladstone’s congested lung in pneumonia. Nevertheless, the understanding of fever still needed to be put on a scientific basis and the identification of specific microbes causing individual infectious diseases was, largely still, awaited.78 The anthrax bacillus was identified by Koch in 1876, but although the symptoms of pneumonia had been described long before, the identification of the pneumococcus bacillus was not until about

  Shorter, ‘Primary Care’, p. 113.

78

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two years after Gladstone’s bout of pneumonia of 1880. Also, ‘It would be easy to exaggerate the real impact of laboratory discoveries on daily practice’.79 No biographer discusses Gladstone’s head injury in detail, but it is possible that it may have had longer term implications for Gladstone – not physically, but psychologically. It may have sapped some of his confidence. As shown, he was worried both at the time and, subsequently, about the condition of his head ‘inside’. This may have extended to concern about the longer term effect of injury on his brain and, consequently, on his physical or intellectual ability. Although intermittently concerned about the effects of exhaustion on his brain before the accident, he appears to have recorded more on the subject after it. One example was the possible effect of the autumn parliamentary session of 1882; even Hamilton noticed a lack of his usual confidence.80 It is also possible that one of his short-term illnesses may have been part of a more serious longer term problem. Gladstone suffered frequently from neuralgia. He linked neuralgia mainly with overwork and occasionally his teeth, but the severe and debilitating nature of the pain, with no warning, which varied in length of occurrence, frequency and precise location between face and head suggests the possibility of a more serious pathological condition: trigeminal neuralgia. If that was so, Gladstone may, at times, have been more physically debilitated than has previously been recognised. Political pressure had an effect on Gladstone’s health but so did pathological illness.

79   W.F. Bynum, Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge 1994), p. 221. 80   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, p. 393, 7 January 1883; Bahlman, vol. 2, 8 January 1883, p. 384.

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PART IV GLADSTONE AS AN OFFICIAL

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Chapter 9

Gladstone, Finance and the Problems of Ireland, 1853–661 Allen Warren

If Gladstone had died in 1866, he would still justify consideration as a significant Victorian politician and intellectual. Necessarily, the political focus would centre on his career as the longest serving Chancellor of the Exchequer of the reign and as a reformer of the institutions of the state. Of course, the most dramatic elements in Gladstone’s career came in the 30 years after 1866, and not surprisingly historical attention has been devoted to that second half of his career, much of which was dominated by the problems of Ireland. Consequently, Gladstone’s career as a Treasury minister remains one of the less explored aspects of his life, which is paradoxical because it could be argued to frame much of his later administrative politics. For the purposes of this chapter, it was Gladstone’s experience as Chancellor in Aberdeen’s coalition and throughout the later Palmerston and Russell ministries that was to be his introduction to the conditions of Ireland and the challenges of its government within the framework of the Union. Rather than seeing it as a preliminary to the main engagement, it will be argued that it provided the context and some of the critical operating parameters for his later attitudes and policies. Gladstone’s financial principles were, in fact, the footprint on which the later ‘mission to pacify Ireland’ was built.2 In any discussion of Gladstone and Ireland, it is important to remember, as John Vincent pointed out over 30 years ago, that Ireland was not one of

  The author would like to thank the British Library, London and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for permission to consult manuscript collections in their custody, and to the Hon. Simon Howard and the Castle Howard Trustees for allowing access to the Castle Howard archives, and especially to the Curator at Castle Howard, Dr Christopher Ridgway and his assistants. 2   See, H.C.G. Matthew, ‘Disraeli, Gladstone and the Politics of Mid Victorian Budgets’, Historical Journal, 22 (1979): pp. 615–43, F.W. Hirst, Gladstone as Financier and Economist (London, 1933). 1

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Gladstone’s persistent preoccupations at least before 1885.3 Ireland was much more a matter of immediate politics and policies and, when not high on the current agenda, it moved out of Gladstone’s mind as reflected in his reading, correspondence and writing. In this respect it differed from issues, for instance, of ecclesiology, revelation or doctrines of the state. It was in short a matter to be handled through the political processes and policies available. Consequently, the dilemmas posed by the condition of Ireland before 1853 were of little concern to Gladstone. In the early 1840s the question of Irish university education and the increased grant proposed for the college at Maynooth did not lead Gladstone into any wider reflections on the Irish education system more generally, or about the status and endowments of the Church of Ireland. Nor did the worsening economic and social condition of Ireland, from late 1845, prompt extended reading, reflection or response from Gladstone. It is hard to work out what were his views about the famine and how, if at all, the government might respond. Out of office until 1852, he only intervened on the question of encouraging the growth of an Irish yeoman class, and then in terms that 30 years later were to characterise his extremely cautious support for peasant proprietorship. In theory, Gladstone’s railway legislation could have provided a basis for Irish economic structural improvement, employment and relief. But it did not, possibly because it was too close to the schemes of Lord George Bentinck, leader of the Protectionists. Gladstone also played little part in the party manoeuvring following the Papal Aggression and Russell’s Durham letter in November 1850. At that time Gladstone was more concerned with the admission of Jews to Parliament than with the status and role of Roman Catholics within the United Kingdom.4 On the formation of the Aberdeen coalition in December 1852 Gladstone returned to office as Chancellor of the Exchequer with financial responsibility for the United Kingdom as a whole, including Ireland.5 The settlement of the famine debts (the consolidated annuities), the equalising of taxation across the kingdom, the elimination of Irish inefficiency and waste and the establishing   J. Vincent, ‘Gladstone and Ireland’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 63 (1977): pp. 193–238. 4   See Gladstone on the Farmers Estates Society [Ireland] Bill, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 28 July 1847, c, 978; for Bentinck and Irish railways, A. Macintyre, ‘Lord George Bentinck’, in H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), vol. 5, pp. 241–64; for Peelite reactions to Bentinck’s scheme for Irish railways, Sir John Young to Gladstone, 15 January 1850, B.L. Add.MS 44237 f. 188. 5   Matthew, ‘Disraeli, Gladstone and the Politics of Mid Victorian Budgets’, Historical Journal, 22 (1979): pp. 615–43. 3

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of a unified system of general accountability were all issues to be resolved. These were not new questions; a select committee had already reported on the consolidated annuities, Disraeli’s earlier and discredited 1852 Budget had included the extension of the income tax to Ireland, and the mechanics of Treasury integration and the costs of the Irish government had been debated since the 1820s. Gladstone included much of this in his first budget; the income tax was to be applied equally to Ireland for seven years and in compensation the consolidated annuities were to be remitted, the excise and spirit duties were to be equalised between the two countries and Irish administrative costs reduced through police reform, improved revenue collection and the defeat of smuggling.6 Not surprisingly, these changes provoked vigorous argument. Seemingly a simple rationalising measure, they contained important issues of principle and detail. They affected, for example, the production, bonding and distribution systems of the spirits industry in both Britain and Ireland. If the taxation systems were to be equalised, how was the future financial relationship between the two countries to be assessed? Attempts to raise this question, notably by the self-describing ‘very liberal conservative’ member for Waterford, Colonel Dunne, largely failed in the 1850s, partly because the income tax was still seen by Gladstone as a temporary measure. But they were to return 10 years later, requiring him to outline for the first time more fully what he thought those financial relationships should be.7 After 1853 Ireland did not generally feature prominently among Gladstone’s concerns. He had sympathetic relations with his fellow Peelite, Sir John Young, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, while the party politics of the ministry and relations with the Irish members were handled by others. Nevertheless, Gladstone showed an almost obsessive interest in the costs of Irish policing and the justice system more generally. He believed that the merging of the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Revenue Police should secure economies, given that the Irish population was declining, and also that the Irish judicial establishment was inefficient and extravagant. Sustained or informed argument or special pleading from landlords, the police or the judges themselves did not   See Gladstone’s 1853 Budget speech, Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 18 April 1853, cxxv, 1350, for Disraeli’s 1852 Budget speech, Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 3 December 1852, cxxiii, 836, for the Select Committee on the Irish Annuities, Parliamentary Papers, H.C. 1852 (1463), xlvii. 7   For an important critique of Gladstone’s financial approach to Ireland, see I. Butt, Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 2 May 1853, cxxvi, 938, for Gladstone’s rejection of Dunne proposal for a Select Committee into the financial relations between the two countries, Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 23 May 1853, cxxvii, 515. 6

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change Gladstone’s opinion. The Dublin Castle system remained unnecessarily expensive in his view, and on coming into office 25 years later in 1880 as prime minster, and facing unparalleled challenges in the Irish countryside, Gladstone’s first advice to W.E. Forster, his Chief Secretary, was that he must try to reduce the costs of administrative expenditure in Ireland.8 After leaving office, on the fall of Aberdeen’s coalition in January 1855, Gladstone displayed no sustained interest in Ireland either in public or through his reading. That reflected the placid state of the Irish countryside and the chaotic condition of its parliamentary representation. Nevertheless, given Gladstone’s other interests, it is slightly surprising that the changes to the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland under Archbishop Cullen, following the Synod of Thurles in August 1850, made so little impression. Similarly, the popular Protestant reaction to the ‘papal aggression’ seems to have had little impact on him. It is perplexing that Gladstone showed almost no interest in the Irish university question, although he was the member for Oxford University and had been so exercised, 10 years earlier, by the increase in the Maynooth Grant.9 Gladstone’s decision to join Palmerston’s government in 1859 may have been the most significant turning point in his political career, but it did not affect his views on Ireland. Returning to the Treasury, he saw his financial mission in much the same way as he had done in 1853. His seven-year tenure of the Exchequer had two Irish phases. The first lasted from 1859 until 1862, during which Gladstone was largely preoccupied in furthering the reforming work initiated under Aberdeen. But from 1862, and particularly following the traumatic defeat of the ministry’s candidate in a by-election in County Longford in March 1862, the foundation blocks of party attitudes both within Ireland and between the two countries began to shift. As a result, Gladstone’s approach to Irish financial issues was increasingly challenged, albeit unsuccessfully, both from the Irish members, and also to a lesser extent from an invigorated Dublin 8   For the history of the Aberdeen Coalition, J.B. Conacher, The Aberdeen Coalition 1852–1855:A Study in Nineteenth Century Party Politics (London, 1968); J.H. Whyte, The Irish Parliamentary Party 1850–59 (Oxford, 1958); for Gladstone’s persistent attempts to reduce the costs of Irish administration and especially those of policing, Gladstone to Sir John Young, 28 March, 5April, 18 October, 9 November 1853, 5 January, 25 January 7 March, 15 April 1854, B.L. Add. MS 44528 ff. 122,126,189, 199, 236, 44529 f.42, Gladstone to Sir Charles Trevelyan, 27 October 1853 B.L. Add. MS 44528 f.193; for Young’s rendering account to Gladstone on leaving office, 1 March 1855, B.L. Add. Ms 44237 f.259; for Gladstone’s financial assessment on taking office in 1880, Gladstone to Forster, 8 May 1880, M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew (eds), The Gladstone Diaries (14 vols, Oxford, 1968–1994), vol. 9, January 1875–December 1880, p. 518. 9   A detailed day to day account of political and other concerns in Dublin and London can be found in the correspondence between the Chief Secretary, Horsman, and the Viceroy, Lord Carlisle, in the Castle Howard MS J19/1/56–73.

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Castle under Lord Wodehouse, following his appointment as Lord Lieutenant in late 1864. Gladstone, however, remained largely unmoved about Treasury policy as it affected Ireland. As a result it became clear that if the Whig/Liberal party was to regain the initiative in Irish constituency politics, which had been lost in the 1859 election, a range of policy options would have to be found outside the Treasury. Therefore, as the dissolution drew near, the debate on future Liberal policy centred more on reforms of university education, land tenure or changes to the Church of Ireland than on major schemes to improve the socio-economic infrastructure of the country to meet the challenge of any future famine.10 Historians have seen the formation of Palmerston’s second administration in 1859 as particularly important in the creation of the late Victorian Liberal Party.11 It was not, however, so regarded at the time; indeed, the ministry constantly feared defeat and few people saw the unstable pattern of the previous decade as coming to an end and, in many ways, they were right. Gladstone was at the centre of much of this uncertainty from 1859, not simply as an individual senior minister, but because of the interrelationship between domestic British financial politics, international relations and the constituency politics of Ireland. Within this complex web were elements of trade policy, particularly the commercial treaty with France and the associated tensions between the European powers over Italy, a situation compounded by the Liberal Cabinet’s support for Italian nationalism with its implications for future Vatican influence. These policies were fashioned and presented to Parliament in an electoral context in which the Tories were the dominant Irish party and in a climate in which the ultramontane Irish bishops were exercising a growing influence on Irish voters. The ministry’s dilemmas between 1859 and 1862 was the first occasion on which Gladstone as a leading minister was to experience directly the complexities of Irish policies, politics and government – relationships that were to dominate the second half of his ministerial career.

  For the definitive study of Irish electoral politics of the period, K.T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland, 1832–1885 (Oxford, 1984); for the highly complex world of Irish ecclesiastical politics, see E. Larkin, The Consolidation of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1860–1870 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1987) and E.R. Norman, The Catholic Church in the Age of Rebellion, 1859–1873 (London, 1965); for Palmerston’s Irish policy, A. Warren, ‘Palmerston, the Whigs and the Government of Ireland, 1855–1866’, in D. Brown and M. Taylor (eds), Palmerston Studies I (Hartley Institute, University of Southampton, 2007), pp. 95–126. 11   For background to the emergence of the Liberal party, see J.R. Vincent, The Formation of the Liberal Party, 1857–1868 (London, 1966); A. Hawkins, British Party Politics 1852–1886 (Basingstoke, 1998). 10

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None of this was immediately obvious in Gladstone’s early reactions to Irish issues, which were mainly left to the Chief Secretary, again a former Peelite, Edward Cardwell. Gladstone’s principal Irish involvements before 1863 related to two long forgotten issues, one of which generated an enormous amount of political activity relating to the so-called Galway mail contract, the other being an arcane aspect of ecclesiastical legal practice in relation to appeals within the Church of Ireland. The question of the Galway packet was the more significant because in the jungle of party politics and argument were key issues at the core of the emerging Victorian state. These centred on how the national economic infrastructure might be developed and whether the government had a responsibility to provide the legal framework within which enterprise was to operate. National and international mail transportation, like company and banking legislation and the railway network, were examples which tested Victorians’ opinions about the role of the state. Firstly, if the government was to retain some element of control in this case, either through the contracting process or the satisfactory performance of the successful operator, how should that control be exercised and monitored? Secondly, if some more general public benefits were seen as being secured by a reliable and affordable mail service, what should be the role, if any, of a continuing public subsidy, either recurrently or to meet capital costs? Thirdly, what role should local interests and members of Parliament play in lobbying for the placing of the contract as, in this instance, between Galway and Liverpool. On coming into office, Gladstone inherited some uncertainty and confusion about what the previous Derby administration had agreed, whether the contract was capable of delivery by the favoured company from Galway, what was the future direction of the project to be and what was its most desirable outcome. For the next four years, the issue went to and fro across the Irish Sea, remaining a running sore for the government politically, until finally the Commons agreed a new Galway contract with modified conditions and subsidies in March 1863.12 Gladstone’s general mood on taking the Exchequer was well expressed in a letter to Cardwell whilst on holiday in North Wales in September 1859: The state of things in connexion with my department makes me weary and sick of heart. New demands will come up in the service of such an Empire: but we have nothing else than new demands. The old business of reduction which occupied the Treasury for so many years seems to have been disapproved altogether.13 12   For the best summary of the history of the question up to 1861, Report of the Select Committee on the Royal Atlantic Steam Navigation Company, Parliamentary Papers, 463 (1861), p. xii. 13   Gladstone to Cardwell, 29 September 1859, B.L. Add.MS 44118 f.89.

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Suspicious of the outgoing Derby government, Gladstone set up a select committee. The issue of the contract was mired in confusion from the beginning; politically as a bid for Irish members’ electoral support, financially in respect to the level of government subsidy, diplomatically in relation to rival Canadian packet companies and operationally in the light of poor performance from the company itself – the Atlantic Royal Mail Company. For the next two years, the issue of the Galway contract remained central to the passage of the Budget both in 1860 and 1861. The posturing of the Irish members combined with English members’ suspicion of ministerial collusion with them led to fears of defeat through a high Conservative turnout and abstentions from more conservative Whigs. In the event, Gladstone’s budget speeches were seen as parliamentary triumphs and the government survived with the result that a new select committee on the Galway packet was set up in June 1861 at the same time as the existing contract was not renewed. By the following parliamentary session, the electoral fragility of the Irish Liberal members’ position had been exposed through the triumph of the clerical candidate at the Longford by-election in March 1862 and the defeat of a long established Liberal family interest. Pressure to make some gesture to satisfy the electoral concerns of the remaining Irish Liberal members remained intense, although Gladstone was very sceptical that the company would be able to deliver on its commitments in any renewed contract. At this stage, Palmerston seems to have taken personal charge, announcing on 9 March 1863 that he now had confidence in the company and that the government would renew the contract along with its subsidy. The whole affair had done nothing to reassure Gladstone that financial affairs in Ireland were now under better control than they had been in 1859.14 Gladstone’s second preoccupation before 1863 showed his continuing scholasticism in church affairs, as well as his less than robust attachment to the established status of the Church of Ireland. Apparently prompted by Cardwell, a government bill had been introduced into the House of Lords to modify the final court of appeal in ecclesiastical cases involving the Church of Ireland. Unlike the Church of England, where the law had been changed in 1832, the court for the Church of Ireland remained the Court of Delegates rather than the Privy Council. Under the terms of the Lords’ proposal, the Privy Council would become the court for both churches. Gladstone was outraged that such a proposal had not been brought to the Cabinet, believing it had dangerous implications for the doctrine of the church more generally, and as it applied 14   For Palmerston’s announcement, Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 9 February 1863, clxix.187, for Gladstone’s continuing frustration, Gladstone to Palmerston, 11 May 1863, B.L. Add.MS 44533 f.127.

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differentially to the Churches of England, Ireland and among the colonial churches. In making the Privy Council the final court of appeal for both, it would be necessary to appoint representative Church of Ireland bishops to the Privy Council, thereby in Gladstone’s mind significantly increasing the temporal status of the Church of Ireland within the overall juridical structures of the state. In long and complicated letters to both Granville and Cardwell, Gladstone expressed himself in the characteristically dramatic tones, declaring the bill to be potentially, ‘one of the most important Ecclesiastical Statutes since the Reformation’. To Granville he stated: I am opposed to all legislation intended to fortify the temporal position of the Irish Church Establishment by tying it around the neck of the Church Establishment of England. But such is the distinct effect, and I think intention, of this Bill’, concluding that this would be ‘tying the living to the dead, and on the part of the great body of the English clergy whom I represent, I must say it deserves the most uncompromising resistance.

Faced with this kind of opposition, Cardwell dropped the offending provision.15 For the Irish government in Dublin, however, these Gladstonian concerns were not the main priority. The Lord Lieutenant, Lord Carlisle, and his Chief Secretary, Edward Cardwell, wanted moderate reforms and improvements which built on earlier Whig achievements in the 1830s, when Carlisle had himself been Chief Secretary as Lord Morpeth. Generally, this meant extending the assumed improvements in the national educational system, making leading administrative and legal appointments on an equal basis as between Catholics and Protestants, and trying to do something to mitigate the increasingly sectarian politics of Ulster. For Cardwell in particular, this meant modest reforms in the land law and the franchise, along with modifications to the Queen’s Colleges and to the model schools. But the timing was not propitious. In Europe, the movement for Italian unification with its implications for papal territorial power had the effect of stirring up the Irish Catholic Church as the defender of papal authority, while Liberal ministers seemingly took the opposite view, giving scope for Disraeli to present the Tories as the religious friends of Ireland. Liberal Irish members were caught in the middle, squeezed locally by the increasingly powerful local Catholic bishops and their priests: at the same time they had to provide loyal support for a Whig/Liberal ministry only lightly united in the House of Commons. With Gladstone critically involved with the 15   See Gladstone to Granville, 26 June 1860, to Cardwell, 23 July 1860, B.L. Add.MS 44531 ff. 20, 32; for Gladstone’s later summary of the affair, see Gladstone to Keble, 15 November 1864, B.L. Add.MS 44534 f.18.

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government’s policies both at home and abroad, and with his known public sympathy for Italian nationalism, the stability of the ministry seemed constantly under threat as demonstrated in the detailed accounts of the parliamentary situation provided on an almost daily basis by Cardwell for Carlisle.16 Palmerston, never a man happy in his Irish dealings, became increasingly irritated, seeing attempts to mollify Irish Catholic sensibilities as pointless. With Cardwell’s appointment as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the autumn of 1861, he sought a change in personnel and direction by appointing Sir Robert Peel as his replacement to provide a robust and less emollient presence in the Commons. This was combined with a reaffirmation of the principles of the ‘godless’ colleges and a clear endorsement of the Protestant gentry of Ireland as the backbone of the country’s administration. He was apparently confirmed in his analysis in the Longford by-election, so future Liberal electoral prospects in Ireland looked bleak unless something could be done before the end of the Parliament.17 The by-election began a process of political and policy redefinition in relation to Ireland that involved both parties and which would continue throughout the Reform crisis of 1866–67, only reaching a conclusion in December 1868 with Gladstone’s electoral victory on the question of the Irish church.18 Historians have tended to present these changes in Irish strategies as they affected Gladstone as two parallel, if connected, strands in his developing views about parliamentary reform and the position of the Church of Ireland. But there is a third strand, reflected in his continuing Treasury responsibility for Ireland until 1866. Gladstone’s financial principles led him to exclude certain Irish policies whilst in office, choices which continued to frame his Irish thinking during the confusing politics of the years 1866 to 1868, and in the decades that followed. Of course, none of this was obvious in early 1863, with Carlisle noting that no Irish measures were proposed for the session, and Gladstone apparently more interested in the success of the French treaty, while the young Lord   As during Palmerston’s first ministry, a valuable account of the political events and mood in London is to be found in the daily letters from the Chief Secretary to the Viceroy, Castle Howard MS, J19/1/83–101 (1859–1862), as well as in Carlisle’s daily journal, Castle Howard MS, J 19/8/37–40 (1859–1864). 17   Described as a disaster by Carlisle, Brand estimated that were a general election to take place later in the year, the Liberal Party would only retain some 10 seats in the south of Ireland. See, Castle Howard MS, Carlisle Journal, 5 March 1862, J19/8/39, Brand to Carlisle, 24 May 1862, J19/1/106/18. 18   See A. Warren, ‘Disraeli, the Conservatives and the government of Ireland: Part I, 1837– 1868’. Parliamentary History, 18 (1999): pp. 45–64. 16

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Wodehouse noted that politics had never been duller.19 In the Budget statement, Gladstone did devote a section to Ireland, but one which largely concentrated on the details of revenue and expenditure, although he did acknowledge that the value of Irish agricultural production had fallen by one-third since 1859. For Gladstone, as in 1846, the current economic distress in Ireland was largely a matter of providence, not a call to action by the government.20 In this placid environment, it was nevertheless a parliamentary move that prompted Gladstone’s re-engagement with Ireland. As in 1853, it was the Irish Conservative member for Waterford, Colonel Dunne, who again proposed a select committee into the financial relations between Britain and Ireland. On the earlier occasion Gladstone had treated the move as a wrecking amendment to his budget as a whole, and had rebutted Dunne’s arguments robustly. Now, the issue was more complicated, largely because the keystone of the 1853 settlement, the temporary renewal of the income tax for seven years only, had not been realised. In 1853 one of the most lucid and financially sophisticated arguments had come from the young Isaac Butt, in which he had concentrated not on the principle of tax equalisation itself – for Gladstone the critical element at that time – but on the Chancellor’s assumption that the income tax would be a temporary expedient, with the result that central government expenditure would only be funded in the longer term by taxation on a small number of items of popular consumption. If the Chancellor was correct in his analysis, Butt had asked, would such a system be fair to the respective British and Irish economies, whose demographic, production and consumption patterns were diverging rapidly and where such taxes on consumption would affect the poor more than equivalent taxes on land or income. On the other hand, if income tax was in fact being introduced permanently into Ireland, a more detailed and authoritative enquiry into the financial relations between the two countries would be required, taking into account the past and present economic circumstances in each country and the financial relations between them.21 By 1861 it was obvious that these questions now were far more insistent, something, rather surprisingly, Gladstone acknowledged at that time in a private letter to Butt.22   See, A. Hawkins and J. Powell (eds), The Journals of John Wodehouse: First Earl of Kimberley for 1862–1902, Camden Fifth Series, 9 (London, 1997), p. 81. 20   See Gladstone, Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 12 June 1863, clxxi, 816. 21   For Butt, see especially the relevant sections in D.G. Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (London, 1982); A. O’Day, Irish Home Rule, 1867–1921 (Manchester, 1998); A. Jackson, Home Rule: An Irish History (London, 2003). See also P. Bull, ‘Isaac Butt, British Liberalism and an alternative nationalist tradition’ in D.G. Boyce and R. Swift (eds), Problems and Perspectives in Irish History since 1800 (Dublin, 2004), pp. 147–63. 22   See Gladstone to Butt, 22 January 1861, B.L. Add. MS 44531 f.110. 19

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In mid-1863, knowing that Dunne would raise again the question, Gladstone asked for a detailed briefing from Sir William Stephenson, Chairman of the Commissioners of the Inland Revenue, enquiring also of Carlisle whether he could refer reliably for agricultural statistics to the lawyer and political economist, W.N. Hancock. Dunne’s motion was finally moved on 12 June. In his reply, Gladstone laid out the first of what were to be a series of private and parliamentary statements over the next three years that would represent his most sustained treatment of the question of Irish finances as a whole before 1886.23 In these commentaries Gladstone laid down the three principles that guided his response to the national public finances and the condition of the country, and as they applied to Ireland. The first was the principle of equality in taxation within the United Kingdom as a whole. Gladstone made it very clear how fundamental this was in relation to his overall mission at the Treasury: I am profoundly convinced that equality of taxation lies at the very root of full political equality and that it is vain without equality of taxation to attempt to claim the exercise of full political equality.24

As one of the foundations of his Treasury thinking, he went on to illustrate how it affected current social and economic issues in Ireland: that of absentee landlords and of agricultural distress. Central taxation, in Gladstone’s view, had to be limited simply to funding the costs of central government because ‘tax which is unnecessary for the real purposes of Government is an entire waste of money’; it should not be used for what now would be called socio-economic engineering. As a result any finance minister was powerless to act upon: … what I admit to be a great evil – namely the general or extensive non-residence of the proprietary body, not only whose expenditure but whose social and moral influences we must look upon as absolutely essential to the welfare of the country.25

On agricultural conditions and public distress, Gladstone also stated his hostility to central expenditure ‘on what I may call the geographical principle’. Drawing on his experience in the Ionian Islands, in which a single island requested help regardless of the principle of equality, he continued: 23   For briefing paper on Irish finances, Sir William Stephenson, 13 February 1863, B.L. Add.MS 443243, f.250, for Gladstone’s reply to Dunne’s motion see, Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 12 June 1863, clxxi, 825–836 from which the quotations below are taken. 24   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 12 June 1863. 25   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 12 June 1863.

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I cannot assent to the general proposition that the taxation of a country is to be like a local shower, drawn for a while from the whole surface of the earth by evaporation and then descending on it again with a fertilising effect on the very spot from which it first rose.26

Gladstone’s second general principle was that of economy of administration in both government spending and taxation. We have already seen that Gladstone thought the Irish system was extravagant and inefficient. In 1863 and 1864, he tackled the issue more circumspectly, in public at least. He now knew that income tax was likely to remain an element in the state’s finances, that there was data on the financial and social consequences of equalising the Irish spirit duties and that some of the damaging social consequences of relying on taxing a small number of consumables were becoming clear. He therefore addressed the general question of Ireland’s unfair financial treatment from a different angle, concentrating less on general principle and more on the comparative levels of present expenditure and taxation across the three kingdoms.27 On spending, Gladstone declared, the government did not treat Ireland unfairly. In fact, expenditure was significantly higher proportionately in Ireland than the rest of the United Kingdom, presently totalling £1.5million in comparison to the £2.2million for England, Wales and Scotland together. Gladstone pointedly drew attention to the thrifty Scots who had cost the Exchequer a mere £360k in 1861, in contrast to Ireland where a combination of the costs of policing, education and charges in respect of public buildings totalled £1.5 million in the same year. Developing the other half of his argument, Gladstone went on also to deny that Ireland was inequitably taxed. In fact, quite the reverse, Ireland did not pay excessive excise as a result of technicalities within the bonding system. The wealthier classes also remained exempt from taxes on hackney carriages, at the same time as paying income tax on the basis of the historic poor law valuation rather than on rental income, unlike their peers in England.28 The government rejected Dunne’s motion for a select committee, as it had done in 1853, but faced a similar motion a year later. On this occasion Gladstone’s tactics were again different. Although the general economic situation had improved, the fundamental questions underlying Irish finances within the framework of the Union remained, as well as the role of the state in economic development. Dunne claimed that a new report produced by   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 12 June 1863.   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 12 June 1863. 28   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 12 June 1863. 26 27

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the Dublin Chamber of Commerce supported his case that Ireland was being unfairly treated, prompting Gladstone to ask Carlisle if someone could be commissioned to prepare a detailed and sophisticated rebuttal.29 Mindful that Liberal electoral prospects had not improved over the previous year since 1863, the government ‘in deference to the Irish members’, agreed to the setting up of a select committee under Dunne’s chairmanship.30 The third of Gladstone’s principles, in fact, related to the Treasury’s role in supporting economic development and agricultural improvement in Ireland, usually through easier financial terms. This, once again, was not a new issue, having been at the centre of the discussion about the Irish Board of Works since its establishment in 1831. More particularly, the question had returned with the threatened famine conditions in 1862, just at the time when the Board of Works seemed to be reducing the scale of its operations upon the retirement of Sir Richard Griffiths. The possibility of a large drainage scheme for the River Shannon Basin – as well as other rivers like the Bann – revived, and a House of Lords select committee had reported on the subject in 1863. Sir Robert Peel, as the Chief Secretary, was immediately enthusiastic, and, in September 1864, he was joined by the new Lord Lieutenant, Lord Wodehouse, who had been a member of the earlier select committee. Wodehouse was impressed by the need for government assisted agricultural improvement, as any scheme involving the Shannon Basin was far too large and complex to be taken up simply by private investment and would need government administrative and legal support as well as financial assistance. Wodehouse saw it as a nationally significant scheme potentially, similar in importance to the development of the railway or harbour facilities in the country, on which there was also public interest at the time. Gladstone, while not wholly unsympathetic to easier loan facilities, made clear his general distrust of such a use of Treasury funds in letters to Sir George Grey and Wodehouse in December 1864: When we get to the giving of public money for works of supposed utility, we lose hold of the very best criterion for discerning and determining what works are really useful, I mean the private business of those concerned. At this very moment the Thames is bankrupt, and is likewise involved in the same question, in regard to outfalls, with the Shannon: but I utterly refused to give a penny of   See Gladstone to Carlisle, 7 January 1864, B.L. Add.MS 44534 f.25.   For Gladstone’s reply to Dunne’s motion, Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 26

29 30

February 1864, clxxiii, 1218; for reports, minutes and evidence produced by the select committee see, Parliamentary Papers, 513 (1864), xv. In fact, the Select Committee failed to agree its recommendations and to produce a report, after collecting a substantial body of evidence and opinion.

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public money. I think that we can hold a distinction between Ireland and Great Britain as to loans: but once we come to giving on one side of the Channel, we could not keep the floodgates shut on the other.

Gladstone continued in both letters to remind his correspondents of the thrifty Scots in terms of central government expenditure and of the profligacy of the Irish judicial establishment, and that the Irish propertied classes bore a lighter tax burden than their fellows in Great Britain, concluding his letter to Wodehouse that while he was not opposed to special Irish consideration: I hold that it should be strictly guarded and marked off by stout fences as exceptional and in cases of real need.31

By early January 1865, encouraged by Wodehouse, the Irish Board of Works had prepared a drainage scheme for the Shannon and the Bann for Treasury consideration. Clarendon reported that, although not wholly opposed, Gladstone was fearful that any scheme would simply encourage jobbery and corruption, and had also made it clear that he would resist any scheme which did not involve repayment of funds. A few weeks later he repeated his arguments in the Commons in reply to an Irish independent member’s motion that the government should take measures to stimulate employment in Ireland, repeating that the country was not unfairly treated financially. Later in the same debate, the young Lord Robert Cecil gave a rather different analysis. He believed that Ireland was distressed as a direct result of a system of land law which discouraged agricultural improvement on the part of landlord and tenant alike through the granting of leases. The consequences of annual tenancies was that landlords had no secure rental incomes on which to provide a basis for investment, and the tenant had no guarantee that they would secure sufficient beneficial use of any improvements without the right to compensation. As a result, improvement languished. On the main thrust of Gladstone’s argument that Ireland was not unfairly treated and so not entitled to special Treasury treatment, Cecil continued that Ireland’s difficulties were not due to the character of the people, but were more the result of historic British exploitation of Ireland during the period of the Penal Laws whereby capital was siphoned out of the country. Buttressing his argument by quoting the younger Pitt, he concluded that once   For Wodehouse’s enthusiasm for improvement through a major drainage scheme amongst others see his speech at the Lord Mayor of Dublin’s dinner, 24 November 1864, in J. Powell (ed.), Liberal by Principle: The Politics of John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley, 1843–1902 (London, 1996), p. 97, for Gladstone to Grey and Wodehouse, 13, 17 December 1864 1864, B.M. Add. MS.44162 f.139, 44224 f.170, from which above quotations taken. 31

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such capital had been lost to Ireland and used in the development of Liverpool and Manchester, it was difficult to get back. Ireland, Cecil concluded, had been inequitably treated in the past and was entitled to some kind of restitution. Therefore, the later division between Gladstonian Home Rule combined with Treasury orthodoxy and Salisbury’s constructive unionism was evident in the foundations of public policy some 20 years before.32 Throughout the 1865 parliamentary session, Gladstone continued to obstruct the Shannon scheme and deny that any injustice existed in the financial relations between the two countries. He rejected appeals to improve the buildings at Maynooth, disputed that the repeal of the Corn Laws had damaged Ireland and complained that Irish initiatives were often taken without prior Treasury consultation. At the same time, some modest improvement in loan facilities seems to have been agreed and Gladstone did not wholly reject a ‘fast track’ consideration of the condition of Irish railways within the overall work of the Royal Commission under the Duke of Devonshire.33 Many of these responses were probably largely a matter of political and electoral tactics. More importantly for Gladstone in the longer term was the fact that the debate about the future condition and politics of Ireland was shifting away from finance and economic development and towards religious questions. The arrival of Wodehouse in Ireland in September 1864 had coincided with particularly violent sectarian rioting in Ulster, which seems to have shocked both Wodehouse and Gladstone. Earlier in 1864, Gladstone unusually had chosen to speak in a debate on the Irish national education system, in which by implication he had been critical of the Church of Ireland’s response to the non-denominational policy established by Whig governments in the 1830s. Later in August, in a letter to the Attorney General for Ireland, Gladstone had also written that he was thinking more widely about Irish reform, while firmly stating that the answer to the condition of the country was not to be found through Treasury finance. By December, Wodehouse began to see his way forward through a dual policy of support for the Shannon improvement scheme and a commitment to Irish university reform in response to the priorities of the Catholic bishops. For some ministers in London, particularly Clarendon as a former Lord Lieutenant, Irish university reform was politically attractive in   For Clarendon’s comment on Gladstone’s first reactions to the Shannon proposals see, Clarendon to Wodehouse, 2 February 1865, Kimberley Ms Bodl.Libr. (Oxford), Eng.MS c 4018 f.114, for Gladstone’s third parliamentary defence of his views on finance and Ireland and Cecil’s alternative view see Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 24 February 1865, clxxvii, 674 and 717. 33   For Gladstone on these questions see, Gladstone to Stafford Northcote, 13 March, to Devonshire, 11 April, to Wodehouse, 9 May 1865, B.L. Add. MS 44535 ff. 33, 44, 56, Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 7 April 1865, clxxviii, 917. 32

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winning Catholic support and as a first response to fears of a Fenian agitation. The pace of Episcopal negotiations in London and Dublin between the Irish bishops and the government increased rapidly at the end of the year at the same time as the Chancellor was resisting large improvement schemes. Gladstone was not closely involved in these university negotiations nor is it clear what his private opinions were at this stage on the question.34 What he did do, rather dramatically, was open up another front in the debate on Liberal policy towards Ireland. In his speech on Dillwyn’s motion to disestablish the Church of Ireland on 28 March 1865, he concentrated on its minority status, its failure to evangelise the Irish people since the passing of the Union, and its indefensible material privilege. What Gladstone skilfully achieved through his speech was to bring together, through the issue of reform of the Church of Ireland, a cause that would satisfy the Irish Catholic hierarchy, at the same time as they were in private discussions with his colleagues on Irish university reform. He also implied a redistribution of the Church of Ireland’s endowments which could be used for Irish social and economic improvement (and which had long been a demand of radical Liberals, advanced in the 1830s as an alternative to an Irish Poor Law). At least potentially he had squared the circle of religious change, economic improvement and Treasury financial orthodoxy. At the same time Gladstone had altered the balance in the discussions between Dublin and London over Irish policy from the focus on educational reform and economic improvement to questions of church establishments and the status and funding of Irish university education. What was conspicuously omitted was any clear proposal to reform the land law, on which Gladstone remained silent, declaring, not wholly disingenuously, his ignorance on the subject to the Irish member, W.A. Maguire, just the previous day.35 At the general election in July 1865, the Liberal government was, therefore, able to offer itself as one in favour of moderate Irish reform. It had established a select committee on the financial relations, at the same time as indicating support for further modifications to the Church of Ireland, and had also agreed to review the 1860 land legislation. More significant was that it was already deeply involved in private negotiations with the Catholic bishops over changes   For Gladstone on Irish national education, Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 23 June 1864, clxxvi, 219; on Ireland more generally and especially the Belfast riots, Gladstone to Attorney-General for Ireland, 27 August 1864, B.L. Add.Ms 44534, f.120; for Clarendon on Irish universities, Clarendon to Wodehouse, 29 January, 4 February, 24 February 1865, Kimberley Ms., Bodl. Libr., Eng. Ms c 4018 ff. 80,114, 4020 f. 121. 35   On Fenianism see, Wodehouse to Grey, 27 November 1864, Bodl.Libr. MS c 4016 f.33; for Gladstone on Dillwyn’s motion, Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 28 March 1865, clxxviii, 430; on land law, Gladstone to Maguire, 27 March1865, B.L. Add.MS 44535 f. 38. 34

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to the Irish university system. In such a fluid situation, ‘a man holding my office’, as Gladstone put it, could not fail to feel a deep interest, but such engagement was unlikely to involve the Treasury directly.36 In the event, the Liberals did better electorally in Ireland than Brand and others had feared, doubtless aided by an unexpectedly strident speech by Lord Derby in defence of the Church of Ireland. Confirmed in office, Wodehouse continued to develop his schemes for university reform and agrarian improvement. Events, however, conspired against him; first Palmerston died in mid-October and the succession of Russell meant that reform of the franchise once again became a key ministerial issue. More important for those in Dublin was the increasing Fenian threat at the same time as a risk of cattle plague spreading to Ireland threatened the economic recovery. Both had the effect of diverting Wodehouse’s attention from large schemes of infrastructural improvement at the moment when university negotiations with the Irish bishops were also becoming bogged down. Faced with the prospect of continuing Treasury obstruction, Wodehouse put major agrarian improvement schemes to one side. For his part, Gladstone wrote delphically to the Irish landlord, W.J. Vesey Fitzgerald: I heartily agree that many may be added to the gallant company of Irish landlords, who are struggling to do their duty, or who, I agree with you in believing have powers in their hands quite as effectual as any that belongs to the state. Fenianism itself will do good if it leads us all in our different stations to do what we can for the true welfare of the country, whose sufferings and disorder cannot but be our reproach.37

Three months later, after congratulating Wodehouse on his handling of the Fenian threat, Gladstone went on to say that if modest progress during 1866 could be made on one or more of the issues relating to the model schools, landlord and tenant relations or the railways, then the session would not have been barren. But, he concluded, the ministry needed the Irish executive to provide them with the information on the first two issues, ‘about which we are not well informed’.38 As the Fenian threat grew, during the spring of 1866, so did demands for increased police powers and resources. Gladstone supported the government’s 36   For agreement to establish a Select Committee on the land law on a motion of Maguire see, Palmerston, Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 31 March 1865, clxxviii, 618, for Gladstone quotation, see Gladstone to Wodehouse, 6 July 1865, B.L. Add. Ms 44535, f. 81. 37   See Gladstone to Vesey Fitzgerald, 3 November 1865, B.L., Add. MS 44535, f.142 38   See Gladstone to Wodehouse, 13 March 1866, Bodl. Libr. MS Eng c 4041, f.49.

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suspension of habeas corpus and the increases to the constabulary vote, but could not resist returning to an old charge. He reminded Wodehouse that, with falling population, police costs should also be declining, and that without vigorous executive control in Dublin, spending locally would spiral out of control, without the Treasury being able to exercise any check as to its necessity or efficiency.39 The collapse of the ministry following the defeat of Russell’s Reform Bill in June 1866 found the government’s Irish policy in limbo. With anxiety about the spread of Fenianism, together with university reform running into the sand of political and religious incompatibility, as well as large schemes of agrarian or infrastructural improvement put to one side and cattle plague threatening, it was almost a relief to go into a more reactive mode in opposition.40 How, therefore, should we describe Gladstone’s understanding of Ireland in 1866? Firstly, with the experience of the previous seven years, Gladstone now understood much more clearly how complex and interconnected was the relationship between Ireland and Britain. Secondly, Gladstone’s life-long engagement in the status, doctrines and practices of the Church of England now meant that the Church of Ireland’s constitutional position and possibly its resources were open for re-examination. It had not been the first priority for the outgoing ministry, but Gladstone had made it clear that he was not prepared to expose the Church of England to the risk ‘of tying the living to the dead’, if the Church of Ireland could be reformed as part of a gradual rapprochement with the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland. In 1866, reconciliation between the Catholic hierarchy and the Liberal government seemed possible through the university question in the first instance. Thirdly, he seems to have had little concern about Fenianism per se and what it might mean, except in so far as it might focus the minds of all those involved with Ireland in resolving the country’s difficulties. Gladstone had not put up any resistance to the suspension of habeas corpus, something which was to later agitate him considerably during his second ministry. Fourthly, he seems to have had no preoccupying interest in reform of the Irish land law, except modestly to satisfy Irish member opinion. As David Steele pointed out 30 years ago, it was Chichester Fortescue, the new Irish

  For suspension of Habeas Corpus see Russell, Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 16 February1866, clxxxi, 585; for Gladstone’s speech, Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 17 Feb.1866, 716; on policing costs, Gladstone to Wodehouse, 14 March 1866, Bodl.Libr. MS Eng c 4044 f.1. 40   For an acerbic letter on the failure of Russell and Gladstone since Palmerston’s death see, Clarendon to Kimberley, 8 July 1866, Bodl. Libr. MS Eng c4049 f. 164. [Wodehouse had been created Earl of Kimberley the previous month]. 39

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Chief Secretary in early 1866, who was the champion of land law reform and Gladstone’s mentor on the issue.41 Finally, and most significantly, Gladstone’s primary interests in Ireland up to the fall of the ministry were those relating to the public finances and the role of the Treasury. These had been centred on the three principles identified as a result of his two periods as Chancellor of the Exchequer. They were equality of treatment across the United Kingdom, the elimination of jobbery and waste along with the pursuit of cheap government and hostility to using Treasury finance for other than national or imperial purposes. These principles, however, were problematic both in theory and in day-to-day practice. Significantly, what they did not include was any reference to reforming the institutions of local government within the context of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. It was, however, local government that was ultimately to provide the policy bridge between Treasury finance and Irish ambitions from 1885 onwards. What, therefore, should be said in conclusion about the long-term significance of this evolution of Gladstone’s thinking on the finance and the government of Ireland? In short, it remained a key element in that evolution. Three examples will have to suffice. Firstly, Gladstone remained resolutely committed to land tenure reform in Ireland rather than a remoulded system of land ownership assisted through tenant purchase and public finance. Only once reform of Irish local government came to be discussed fully from the early 1880s was he prepared to contemplate more structural changes and only in terms in which the financial risk was taken by other individuals or public bodies, ultimately a Home Rule administration in Dublin. Secondly, the history of the Irish Board of Works is instructive. Set up in 1831 to facilitate infrastructural improvement and responsible to the Treasury, its operations went into rapid decline from 1853, the moment of Gladstone’s arrival at the Treasury. Finally, the question of the financial relations between Britain and Ireland, raised by Colonel Dunne in 1853, hovered over the discussions of Home Rule from 1885 until 1914, not just in terms of what the imperial contribution should be, but more fundamentally around what should be the economic foundations on which such a financial contribution might be calculated. In 1886, if the Home Rule Bill had passed its second reading, it would have got bogged down in such questions, as happened later. Even a Royal Commission in 1896 could not resolve the issue, although, ironically, it did conclude that Ireland had been unfairly taxed since 1853. No resolution had been secured at the time of the outbreak of the First World War.

  E.D. Steele, Irish Land and British Politics: Tenant Right and Nationality, 1865–1870 (Cambridge, 1974). 41

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Gladstone should, however, have the last words, as expressed in 1866 and 1880 respectively and encapsulating the mixture of stern economic principle and moral idealism that characterised his long relationship with Ireland over 60 years: I deprecate all Irish policy founded on a mere system of money grants. You cannot raise a country, you cannot liberate a country, you cannot ennoble a country, you cannot descend into and purge the sources of discontent, by any policy such as that. The only mode of doing justice to Ireland is a mode that will unite the hearts of the people with the laws and institutions of the country, which shall begin and finally put an end to that frightful and monstrous evil which not even the language of my fervid friend can characterize too strongly.42

And: Let me take this opportunity of saying another word of a subject of real importance. Ireland has been illegitimately paid for unjust inequalities by an unjust preference in much lavish public expenditure ... I am afraid you may find in the Secretary’s office a bad tradition. I do not recollect ever, during nearly 10 years for which I have been Finance Minister, to have received from a Secretary for Ireland [though some of them have been Treasury men] a single suggestion for the reduction of expenditure whatever.43

  See Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 2 August 1866, clxxxiv, 1940.   See Gladstone to Forster, 8 May 1880, in footnote 9 above.

42 43

Chapter 10

Gladstone and the Ionian Islands C. Brad Faught

‘Always the biggest beast in the forest’, as Roy Jenkins put it so memorably, the political career of William Ewart Gladstone continues to attract a great deal of attention, especially by those interested in the imperial and international history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 Much of that interest lies in Gladstone’s various encounters with Britain’s expanding Victorian empire. From his Uganda policy, which contributed significantly to the fall of his last government in 1894, to his role a few years earlier in the occupation of Egypt and the Sudan and the subsequent failure of the Gordon expedition to Khartoum; from his South Africa and India policies of the early 1880s to his championing of the rights of small states, especially Bulgaria under the Ottoman Empire, in the 1870s, Gladstone’s comprehension of the main themes of nineteenth-century international history – especially nationalism and democracy – progressed in step with the times.2 In particular, Gladstone’s brief spell as Extraordinary (and then Lord) High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands in the late 1850s offers an excellent but neglected perspective on his maturing view of the British Empire; and, more generally, of empire, nationalism and the public law of Europe. The Ionian interlude – ‘this small question’, as Gladstone called it – acted as a kind of rehearsal of the imperial and international themes that would come to dominate three of his four administrations.3 To that end, this chapter is concerned primarily with examining two questions. First, in what ways did the Ionian geo-political situation reveal the working assumptions of mid-Victorian British imperialism?   R. Jenkins, Gladstone (London, 1995), p. xv.   See G. Martel, Imperial Diplomacy: Rosebery and the Failure of Foreign Policy (Kingston

1 2

and Montreal, 1986); C.B. Faught, Gordon: Victorian Hero (Washington, DC, 2008); Faught, ‘An Imperial Prime Minister? W.E. Gladstone and India, 1880–85’, The Journal of the Historical Society, 6/4 (December 2006): pp. 555–78; D.M. Schreuder, Gladstone and Kruger: Liberal Government and Colonial ‘Home Rule’, 1880–85 (London, 1969); W.E. Gladstone, The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East (London, 1876); R. Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1876 (London, 1963). 3   London, British Library, Gladstone Manuscripts Add. MS 44588, fol. 101.

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Secondly, to what degree did the Ionian appointment offer a hands-on prelude to Gladstone’s later and increasingly liberal view of nationalism as expressed during and after the defining Midlothian Campaign of 1879? In several studies of Gladstone his decision to take up this appointment is questioned or even lamented. Jenkins calls it a ‘preposterous undertaking’; Philip Magnus sees it as imprudent; even Colin Matthew seems to view it somewhat circumspectly.4 More lightly, Jan Morris called it ‘Pan and Mr. Gladstone’.5 Naturally, Gladstone himself understood the job to be one of high importance and came to see the Ionian Islands presciently as a microcosm of the emergent nationalist reality of later nineteenth-century Europe. ‘Scarcely have I had a moment to collect my thoughts for any other purpose’, he would write later about the time he spent focusing on the Ionian question.6 After some years of wrestling with bloodless tariffs and sliding rates of taxation as Chancellor of the Exchequer he was ready once again, as Richard Shannon puts it succinctly, ‘to govern men’.7 The Ionian Islands lie off the extreme western coast of mainland Greece. Of the seven principal islands, six of them – Corfu, Paxos, Levkas, Cephalonia, Ithaca and Zante – cluster together while the seventh, Kythera, is some distance to the south of the main group. They are verdant and lush, contrasting sharply with the much drier Greek mainland. They are also drenched with the accretions of the ages, stretching back to their appearance, it is thought, in Homer’s The Odyssey and then down through recorded time to Rome and Byzantium. Corfu especially, the best known island of the seven and arguably the most important politically and geographically, continues to occupy a prominent place in the Western imagination, if only as a popular holiday destination. The Islands came under the control of the Venetians in 1207. Thereafter, a variety of Europeans exercised influence in the region. They were followed in their turn by the Ottoman Turks, although they never exercised complete control over the Islands. Modern Ionian history begins in 1797 when revolutionary France deemed the Islands to be a key strategic base in the eastern Mediterranean. ‘The Turkish Empire is decaying’, wrote Napoleon to the Directory from Milan in that year, ‘the possession of the [Ionian] islands would enable us to support

4   Jenkins, Gladstone, p. 190; P. Magnus, Gladstone (London, 1954), p. 134; H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1868 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 164–7. 5   J. Morris, Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (London, 1979), p. 249. 6   M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew (eds), The Gladstone Diaries (14 vols, Oxford, 1968– 1994), vol. 5, p. 359, 31 December 1858. 7   R. Shannon, Gladstone: 1809–1865 (London, 1984), p. 365.

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it if that were possible, or to take our share’.8 And taking their share is exactly what occurred in October of that year with the signing of the Treaty of Campio Formio. The French Republic now had a key foothold in the Levant, of which Napoleon wrote revealingly to the French Foreign Minister, Talleyrand: ‘What more can she want?’9 The answer came in 1798 with the French invasion of Egypt. However, their swift defeat by Nelson at the Battle of the Nile ended the idea of using the Ionian Islands as a staging base for a potential invasion of British India. It also resulted in them being chased out of the Islands later that year. In place of French rule the Septinsular Republic was established under joint Russo-Ottoman protection. But Napoleon’s rhetorical question would be answered for a second time in 1807 when the Islands were ceded once again to a resurgent France via the Treaty of Tilsit, negotiated with Russia’s Tsar Alexander I. Nevertheless, the pattern of French control would prove itself to be brief. The last French-controlled island, Kerkyra, was surrendered in 1814 and Napoleon’s ultimate defeat the next year at Waterloo brought with it the Islands’ formal cession to Great Britain under the terms of the second Treaty of Paris. The negotiations that had brought the Islands under British control fell mainly to the Foreign Minister, Lord Castlereagh. His enthusiasm for their acquisition was less than great, however, and he would have been happy to see them go to the Austrians, but they did not want to encumber themselves further in the region. Moreover, there was no way that the Russians would be allowed to creep back down the Balkans.10 Consequently, it would have to be Britain and, as of 5 November 1815 when the Treaty of Paris was signed, the United States of the Ionian Islands was put under the British flag with a High Commissioner and a soon-to-be-written constitution. The next year – 1816 – Sir Thomas Maitland became Britain’s first Lord High Commissioner to the Ionian Islands. As ‘King Tom’, he toured his new territory, met the leading families and drafted a constitution. This document would form the basis of British rule in the Islands for the next 30 years until the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848 caused it to be reassessed. Gladstone’s appointment 10 years later would be undertaken largely in an attempt to repair the constitution. In the meantime, however, though power was vested mostly in the Lord High Commissioner and the British government, a bi-cameral legislature – the Assembly and the Senate – was established with local representation, which 8   Quoted in M. Pratt, Britain’s Greek Empire: Reflections on the History of the Ionian Islands from theFall of Byzantium (London, 1978), p. 61. 9   Pratt, Britain’s Greek Empire, p. 67. 10   A. Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (London, 2007), p. 524.

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carried with it at least the patina of internal control. In practice, however, neither Maitland nor any of his successors paid much attention to either legislative house. On one notable occasion Maitland, roused from sleep and in nightshirt and cap, apparently told the Senate to go to hell, and then promptly went back to bed! (There is no record of what the Senate said in reply.)11 Nevertheless, on the whole the system worked well enough from the British perspective: the oil of local patronage did its job and the Ionian Islands drifted along under the protection of the mid-nineteenth century Pax Britannica. In typical fashion, the occupying power built roads and viaducts, reinforced fortifications, enlarged harbours, strengthened the legal system and expanded education, including founding a university, the Ionian Academy, in 1824. In this regard, the imperial balance sheet shows rather well; less well, however, does it show in the realm of politics. The lack of constitutional development at the core of Ionian political life began to be seen early, and by the 1830s the British regime was being criticised on a number of fronts. These included what was regarded by some to be excessive taxation, as well as its restrained response to the Greek fight for independence from the Ottomans of the previous decade, with which many Ionians had identified. In the 1840s the political climate worsened as Ionian politics cleaved into an unlikely alliance of conservatives dedicated to preserving their own privileged position under the British, and radicals who aspired to a union with Greece based on the twin pillars of religious orthodoxy and cultural Hellenism. In the midst of this cleavage stood the pro-consular figure of the Lord High Commissioner, Lord Seaton, who sought to reduce the potential for political unrest by initiating certain reforms such as freedom of the press and unfettered elections to the Assembly. Alas, these actions were viewed as both cynical and essentially toothless because the British executive government – the atti di governo – still prevailed. While the revolutionary spirit of 1848 had made a brief visitation in the Ionian Islands in the form of a small-scale local protest against the government, a kind of political pall had settled over the Islands afterwards. Sir John Young, Lord High Commissioner from 1854 and Gladstone’s immediate predecessor, believed this pall to be ineradicable, and said so in a dispatch to London in June of 1857.12 Calling Britain’s position in the Islands ‘false’, he recommended that Corfu and Paxos be made colonies within the Empire and that the five other islands be allowed to join Greece. As sensible as this argument might have appeared to some – namely the Prime Minister Lord Palmerston – it was not something that could be made to work in the aftermath of the Crimean War when the winds of   Pratt, Britain’s Greek Empire, p. 108.   R. Holland and D. Markides, The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for Mastery in the

11 12

Eastern Mediterranean 1850–1960 (Oxford, 2006), p. 16.

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the Eastern Question continued to blow strongly.13 Palmerston did not like the idea of Greek colonies, a priori, but neither did he favour the potential prospect of abandoning strategically important Corfu, which, he assumed, would be occupied quickly by Russia should the British leave. So something else had to be done. Eventually, that something else would be Gladstone’s mission. The summer of 1858, when these issues were coming to a head, was a rather languid one for Gladstone. Out of parliamentary office, as he had been during the previous two summers, he spent much of June and July at Hawarden, his country home in North Wales. The many hours he spent reading in the Temple of Peace were offset by brisk walks and by his new-found pastime of tree-felling, but the clock ticked slowly for Gladstone, then aged 47 and in the prime of life. His political position was unclear in those twilight years for the Peelites. The Conservatives were moving to induce Gladstone to rejoin their ranks. Both the new Prime Minister, Lord Derby, and Disraeli made appeals to him which Gladstone rejected, recognising in doing so that he would have to bide his time until internecine Conservative Party politics opened an alternative way forward, or not. In early September 1858 Gladstone, together with some members of his family, left Hawarden for a tour of the Scottish highlands. Never much of a shot, a brief episode of deerstalking – ‘I went on the hill: missed two deer’ – left him convinced that his eyesight was increasingly impaired.14 Nonetheless, the tour continued apace and on 28 September he arrived at Lord Aberdeen’s Haddo House. It was there that Gladstone received a letter from the Colonial Secretary, Lord Lytton, inviting him to become special commissioner to the Ionian Islands.15 There is no doubt that the Conservatives saw the invitation as an opportunity to reconcile Gladstone to them. Politically, there was little risk in sending him on the mission, whatever its outcome. At the same time it was a prestigious enough appointment to appeal to his pride. Moreover, the post appealed to Gladstone personally because of his pronounced philhellenism. Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (1858), his recently published threevolume work, was ample evidence of that even if the reviews of it were less than enthusiastic.16 The chance to traverse the Islands of his ancient hero was highly appealing, as was viewing the Greek Orthodox Church in situ. By the middle of October, therefore, Gladstone was deep into reading the stack of official papers sent to him by Lytton and at the end of the month he committed himself to the job.     15   16   13 14

J. Ridley, Lord Palmerston (New York, 1971), p. 541. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 5, p. 324, 13 September 1858. BL GP Add. MS 44241, fol. 1. W.E. Gladstone, Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (London, 1858).

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Accompanying Gladstone, in a reprise of their recent Scottish tour, would be his wife Catherine and their youngest surviving daughter, Agnes, then sixteen, along with a couple of aides, James Lacaita and Arthur Gordon, Lord Aberdeen’s son. He confirmed his acceptance of the appointment as High Commissioner Extraordinary to Lytton on 30 October, kissed hands at Windsor six days later, read through one last round of Ionian papers at the Colonial Office and set out for the mythical islands of Homer on 8 November.17 Travelling for just over two weeks via Brussels, Berlin, Prague, Vienna and Trieste, the lately sea-sick Gladstone party reached Corfu on board HMS Terrible on the morning of 24 November. They were met by a thunderous 17gun salute and welcomed by Sir John Young to the residency, the Palace of St Michael and St George. As was his wont, Gladstone got down to business immediately, spending the entire afternoon in earnest conversation with the Lord High Commissioner about the state of Ionian politics. The two men were old friends, having been at Eton and Christ Church together, and Young greeted Gladstone’s appointment with evident approbation. He had written to Lytton earlier in November: ‘I am very glad Mr. Gladstone is coming … No selection of a man could be better’. Still, being replaced could not have been an easy thing for him to accept.18 Making matters worse was that, during Gladstone’s stay in Vienna, he had been informed that the dispatch written by Young in 1857 had been stolen from the Colonial Office and published in the London Daily News. In the dispatch, Young had proposed colonial status for Corfu and Paxos, and union with Greece for the other islands. Although Young had now retreated from this controversial position, the damage was already done. It seems, however, that Gladstone was not bothered unduly by the newspaper’s act of ‘treachery’, as Lytton called it. He happily attended a dinner party that evening and a ball a few days later, where he even, as noted in his diary, ‘with huge difficulty … got through a quadrille’.19 Indeed, Gladstone’s Ionian mission had a considerable number of moments of relaxation, of sightseeing and picnicking. It even included (sometimes unintended) levity, as on the occasion when he gave a speech using the ancient Greek of his Eton and Oxford education. As related by his secretary, James Lacaita, Gladstone assumed that the assembled multitude would appreciate being addressed in their native tongue. At the conclusion of the speech, Lacaita (who knew no Greek, ancient or modern) asked someone standing next to him

  Gladstone Diaries, vol. 5, pp. 334–6, 30 October to 8 November 1858.   BL GP Add. MS 44588, fol. 84. 19   BL GP Add. MS 44241, fol. 62; Gladstone Diaries, vol. 5, p. 343, 27 November 1858. 17

18

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in Italian what he had thought of it. ‘Oh, magnificent, magnificent!’ came the reply. ‘But I do not know what it was all about, for you see I know no English’.20 Comical episodes such as this one were weaved, however, around some hardheaded politicking. Gladstone attempted to put into words the essence of the Ionian political problems as he understood them, and his recommendations for solving them. As Matthew observes rightly, Gladstone’s ‘instinct was always consolidatory’.21 But his growing familiarization with the Ionian constitutional and political situation meant that this instinct began to sit in some degree of tension with that of the embryonic nationalism of the people and their evident desire to become part of the Kingdom of Greece. For Gladstone, Ionian-Greek nationalism was legitimate but only in so far as it could be expressed properly within the constitutional boundaries of the British Empire. And in his inimitable style he set out to explain why and how this could be done. One of the first things he did after settling into his role in Corfu was to set down for himself a list of questions, the answering of which would guide his thinking on the Ionian situation. Probably the most pertinent of this 11-entry list was number 3, in which he asked: ‘What are the practical points of collision between [the] Protecting Power and the popular feelings or public interests of the Islands?’22 Popular feeling or ‘the abstract sentiment of nationality’, as Gladstone defined nationalism at the time, was that thing which had to be wrestled to the ground in order to understand more fully the nature of the ongoing protest in the Islands.23 Its earlier local crescendo in 1849 in a brief rebellion in Cephalonia was something that both intrigued and alarmed him. Having been Undersecretary at the Colonial Office in the mid-1830s, just prior to when both Upper and Lower Canada broke out in rebellions tinged with nationalism, and then Colonial Secretary in 1845–46, he struggled hard to understand how exactly the Ionians understood their now analogous position. As far as Gladstone could tell, what had been lacking in British governance over the Islands – at least since 1849 – was any real attempt at political development, of Liberal reform. To him, there was little that was coincidental in Canada having gained Responsible Government – the implementation of which he had begun to call ‘the fixed rule of the policy of the British Empire’ – in that year. Yet in the Ionian Islands, the 1850s marked nothing so much as a long campaign for enosis, or union with Greece, ‘by various kinds of demonstration’.24   Quoted in C. Lacaita, An Italian Englishman, 1813–1895: Sir James Lacaita (London, 1933), p. 114. 21   Matthew, Gladstone, p. 165. 22   BL GP Add. MS 44747, fols 200–2. 23   BL GP Add. MS 44588, fol. 170. 24   BL GP Add. MS 44588, fol. 109. 20

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These radical demonstrations must stop, he argued, and they would stop, so he believed, once proper political reforms were proposed and introduced in the Ionian Assembly. Owing to Sir John Young’s publicized dispatch, his own position in this regard was both uncomfortable and untenable, and very shortly Gladstone recommended to Derby that he be recalled. In the meantime, Gladstone continued to deliberate on the form and content of his recommendations and, beginning on Christmas morning and running through Boxing Day, he drafted an almost 13,000-word document. Spent in this fashion, one can surmise that Christmas 1858 in the Ionian Islands was not high on the list of Gladstone family festive season memories, but the drafting of this vast dispatch is a telling example of Gladstone’s immense capacity for concentrated work, whatever the occasion. ‘We launch on a new year’, he confided to his diary not long after completing the dispatch, and in a style typical of the man continued, ‘may the God of justice do justice here, whether through my means or through some channel less clogged with sin’.25 Gladstone’s lengthy dispatch arrived in London on 10 January 1859 and the next day Lytton telegraphed him to say that Young had indeed been recalled and that Gladstone’s new ‘Commission is made out’.26 He, rather than Young, was now the Lord High Commissioner or, it might be said, the Imperial-Man-on-the-Spot. In London, Gladstone’s appointment was met with considerable public denunciation as evidence of an unseemly and grasping careerism on his part, the result of which was the usurping of Young’s job. There were some overwrought words published in defence of the hapless Young, especially in the Times, but of much greater importance was the fact that, in accepting the Lord High Commissionership, Gladstone would have to vacate his seat in the Commons. The requirement to do so was indeed an inexplicable oversight, but once this fact was realized fully, he hastened to complete the job and resign his new office to enable a subsequent return to Parliament.27 Still, for a few weeks at least, thoughts about maintaining his parliamentary seat representing Oxford were put aside as he strove mightily to convince both Derby and, in turn, the Ionian Assembly, that the ideas and recommendations filling the pages of his weighty dispatch should form the basis of constitutional reform in the Islands. In considering Gladstone’s progress as a thinker and policymaker on imperial and international themes, this Ionian dispatch has not received the kind of notice it deserves. As we shall see, Gladstone’s attempts to manage the expectations of the Ionian political class over the prospects of enosis with Greece would founder   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 5, p. 359, 31 December 1858.   Quoted in Magnus, Gladstone, p. 137. 27   He was re-elected in Oxford on 13 February 1859, less than two weeks after resigning as 25 26

Lord High Commissioner.

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within weeks.28 But what does the content of the dispatch reveal of his view of imperialism, nationalism and the Concert of Europe, his term of choice to describe the international relations of his day? To Gladstone, the situation in the Ionians brought to mind both a ‘chronic disease’ and ‘a sudden access of fever’.29 Generic medical terminology aside, he saw in the Ionians’ insistence on Hellenic union a universal constant, one that would only grow as the century proceeded, and something that was being experienced already within the British Empire in places such as Canada and Australia. Notably, Gladstone failed to cite Ireland in this regard, but he pressed home the larger point by stating that, although the Ionian Islands might not figure prominently in any of the great debates of Europe, they should be seen as representative of what was to come. ‘This small question’, he wrote prophetically, ‘is the narrow corner of a very great question, one no less in all likelihood than the reconstruction of all political society in South Western Europe’.30 Here Gladstone is adopting the tone of internationalism that would become such a clear part of his political rhetoric in the mid-1870s and remain so until the end of his career over 20 years later.31 Indeed the dispatch, which as we have seen written in haste in the heat of an unlikely Christmas spent in the Adriatic, is replete with the kind of language that was ahead of its time (at least in the liberal-reformist lexicon) and perhaps infected with a certain local romantic flair. Its precise genesis notwithstanding, Gladstone employs terms such as ‘personal feelings’, ‘school of freedom’, ‘liberty’, ‘popular rights’ and ‘cry for union’ to describe the Ionians’ desire to achieve freedom through union with Greece.32 In Gladstone’s signature style, these terms all were shrouded in myriad qualifiers and subjunctives the like of which made so many of his hearers and readers throughout his long career wonder at the nature of his precise meaning. But Gladstone – and this for him is a defining reservation – while ready to take a strong rhetorical position on the desirability of enosis, was not about to campaign for the Ionians’ ‘fitness’ for union if it meant discord in the Concert of Europe and a compromise of the integrity of the British Empire. ‘England must remain responsible, in the eyes of Europe’, he wrote firmly, ‘for the security of the Islands’.33 In working through the Ionian question Gladstone tested the waters that he would return to so often later in his political life. Whether it was the beleaguered     30   31   32   33   28

29

Holland and Markides, The British and the Hellenes, pp. 13–45. BL GP Add. MS 44588, fol. 101. BL GP Add. MS 44588, fol. 174. See also D. Schreuder’s chapter in this volume. BL GP Add. MS 44588, fols 99–180. BL GP Add. MS 44588, fol. 168.

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Bulgarians in 1876, or the destitute Afghans in 1879, or the fanatical Sudanese Mahdists struggling ‘rightly to be free’ in 1884 or the persecuted Armenians in the 1890s, Gladstone found himself enmeshed in the competing demands of imperial strategy, international responsibility and nationalist aspiration.34 For the Ionians, the bulk of whom, it seemed apparent, wished to throw off their status as a British Protectorate, such prevarication was not what they wanted to see from their eminent Lord High Commissioner. Gladstone’s decision to allow the Assembly to petition the Queen regarding the Islands’ future was a political necessity for him, but ultimately a hollow exercise for them, because he had no intention of recommending that the seven islands be removed from British protection in order to allow for union with Greece. Despite his own Homeric vision of the Islands – strengthened now by ample personal visitation to various classical sites – the potential impact on them of union with Greece was in Gladstone’s view catastrophic. For Britain to abrogate the terms of the Treaty of Paris would be ‘an act of criminal folly’, he wrote in the summation of the dispatch, as it would leave the Islands open to the assumed machinations and degradations of the Ottomans, as well as those of the Russians and thereby to a deepening of the ongoing Eastern Question.35 Shortly after writing these words, Gladstone journeyed to nearby Turkish-controlled Albania where his preconceptions of Ottoman rule were readily reinforced: ‘Visited the mosque, heard the muezzin, & went through the town [Philiates]. Turkish dinner, in rude abundance’, he wrote in his diary on 2 February. ‘The whole impression is most saddening: it is all indolence, decay, stagnation …’ .36 A generation later, Gladstone’s soaring rhetoric denouncing the Turks’ vicious treatment of their subject Bulgarian Christians would build mightily on this personal impression, but for now he was in the final throes of a mission that he was within days of handing off to his successor, Sir Henry Storks, who already had been named to the post.37 On 29 January 1859, the Assembly responded to what Gladstone had laid before it in his impassioned speech of four days earlier. Their rejection of it was swift and complete: citing the ‘unchanged marks’ of their Ionian nationality and the ‘primary elements’ of their Hellenic civilisation, the Assembly made it clear that its ‘unanimous disposition’ was in favour of union with Greece.38 Nothing else would do and in a petition adopted on 30 January the Assembly made its position clear. The Queen’s reply to it, which arrived on 2 February, the same day that Gladstone was visiting Albania, was     36   37   38   34 35

Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), Third Series, 288. 55, 12 May 1884. BL GP Add. MS 44588, fol. 173. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 5, p. 367, 2 February 1859. Gladstone, The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. BL GP Add. MS 44748, fol. 32.

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equally clear. In a reference to the Treaty of Paris, it stated that Britain cannot ‘consent to abandon the obligations she has undertaken’. And there, presumably, was an end to it.39 Of course, the Queen’s reply was no more an end to it than would be Gladstone’s final departure less than three weeks later. As he noted privately and with obvious understatement, ‘the Assembly considers that the Queen’s Reply does not close the question of Union with Greece’.40 Gladstone’s return to Corfu on 3 February, annoyingly late as he wrote in exasperation, ‘thanks to the Turkish ideas of time’, inaugurated an intense two weeks of discussion and correspondence.41 A few days earlier on 1 February he had resigned as Lord High Commissioner, which caught the Ionian Assembly by surprise. In resigning, Gladstone seems to have accomplished two things. Firstly, he made plain his own sense of personal prestige in being a statesman in charge of his own destiny. Secondly, he was ready to leave the Islands, believing himself to be the consolidator of the British Protectorate by blunting radical Hellenism with the promise of sustained constitutional maturation within the British colonial system. To that end he addressed the Assembly on 5 February informing it both of the Queen’s rejection of union with Greece and of his own recommendations for reform. Of the latter, the essential one was responsible government, which, he argued, would mark the natural culmination of Ionian constitutional development. His speech was intended to woo the moderates and squeeze out the radicals, who, if they could not be marginalised politically, would be dealt with, he warned, by the local high police. This was Gladstonian pro-consular action with teeth. Indeed, both the offer and the threat were met in kind by union radicals who proclaimed that such ‘deadly gifts’ would mean ‘national suicide’. Alas, for Gladstone, the Assembly’s almost unanimous refusal – including that of most moderates – to accept his recommendations, combined with a loud public campaign against them, doomed his mission. Complicating matters was the imminent arrival of the new Lord High Commissioner, Storks, whose recent appointment now called into question Gladstone’s own authority. As these tension-filled mid-February days passed it became apparent to Gladstone that his strategy was failing rapidly, something he made clear in a note to Lytton: ‘the Assembly … were now able to play against me the game of time, with the certainty of winning’. Despite looming failure he was not about to admit as much, however, claiming to Lytton that his actions and recommendations were ‘necessary in order to vindicate the policy and character of England. They were necessary in order to clear the   BL GP Add. MS 44748, fol. 42.   BL GP Add. MS 44748, fol. 43. 41   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 5, p. 367, 3 February 1859. 39 40

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ground for an earnest attempt at improved administration. They were necessary in order to test the ordinary quality of Ionian patriotism’.42 Storks arrived in Corfu on 16 February and was inaugurated as Lord High Commissioner the next day. On the 19th the Gladstone party departed the island with due ceremony; except, that is, for the Assembly, which sent no one to the public embarkation whilst defiantly continuing to sit in session. Thus, in this semi-ignominious fashion, Gladstone’s Ionian interlude – which, with his usual financial exactitude, he later calculated cost the Treasury precisely £1,063 1s 2d – came to an end.43 How, then, to sum up this episode in Gladstone’s imperial and international progress? As K.A.P. Sandiford has noted, Gladstone believed fundamentally that Europe was ‘a compact family of nations with a common law and common interests’.44 For this reason, combined with the realities of the aftermath of the Crimean War, the vicissitudes of the intensifying Eastern Question and prevailing Imperial concerns – most pressingly the stark impact of the Indian Mutiny of just two years before in 1857 – Gladstone remained highly circumspect about emergent nationalism. As manifested in the Ionian Islands, he endorsed it as the entirely laudable and patriotic Hellenic spirit. But of course for him that was not the same thing as allowing it to push out the British Protectorate with what he understood would be attendant perils for both the Concert of Europe and for the British Empire itself. In 1859, Gladstone was not yet ready to take to the hustings, as it were, for modern nationalism. His instincts were essentially preservationist, schooled by his experience of empire as a place of constitutional gradualism. Still, he would later make clear in the Midlothian Campaign of 1879, during which he enunciated six ‘Right Principles of Foreign Policy’, that the most important of these was the ‘equal rights of all nations’. It is, he told the Scottish electorate who thronged to hear him, ‘that to which I attach the greatest value … the principle of equality among nations lies, in my opinion, at the very basis and root of a Christian civilization, and when that principle is compromised or abandoned, with it must depart our hopes for tranquillity [sic] and of progress for mankind’.45 In this way Gladstone grew into a larger appreciation of the nationalist principle, but it was one textured and shaped by a deep belief that Britain always rewarded its subject peoples with just the right amount of self-government at just the right moment in time. His reformist policy   Quoted in Holland and Markides, The British and the Hellenes, pp. 41–2.   BL GP Add. MS 44748, fol. 85. 44   K.A.P. Sandiford, ‘Gladstone and Europe’, in B.L. Kinzer (ed.) The Gladstonian Turn of 42 43

Mind (Toronto, 1985), p. 177. 45   W.E. Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches 1879 (ed.) M.R.D. Foot (Leicester, 1971), p. 123.

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in India in the early 1880s during his second administration, for example, when in the lead-up to the so-called Ilbert Bill he worked hard in support of the embattled Viceroy, Lord Ripon, to liberalise certain of the criminal laws of the subcontinent in order to make them fairer to Indians, was a clear case of Gladstone wishing to facilitate local constitutional advancement.46 To him, India was not the fulcrum of British power, the ‘jewel in the crown’, but rather it was a place entrusted to Britain and therefore its governance required the gravest sense of responsibility. After all, unlike most of his peers, he had long been convinced that ‘to the actual, as distinguished from the reported, strength of the Empire, India adds nothing’.47 His denunciation of the Royal Titles Act that, under the Disraeli government, had made Queen Victoria ‘Empress’ of India in 1876, drew much of its fire from the fact that, in his view, it symbolised rule and authority rather than custodianship and development. Of this view of national and imperial affairs Gladstone remained confident, even as the Ionian Islands themselves would move out from under British protection five years later in 1864 and into union with Greece. But as he sailed away from Corfu on that February morning in 1859, soon to encounter seasickness yet again, but more to the point, emotionally ‘at the lowest depth’, he had had his first and only experience as a captain of empire. In that sense Gladstone was the most prominent political precursor to those many imperial pro-consuls to come over the next hundred years who would face the same dilemma that he had encountered and, in response to it, seek ways to either ameliorate nationalism to the continuation of British rule, or, as became the norm after the Second World War, bring that rule to an end. For Gladstone, his brief period in the Ionian Islands resulted in failure. But the political situation encountered there had exposed him directly to a form of colonial nationalism, the emerging ideological giant of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and thereby introduced him to one of the main themes of his later career as prime minister. As Colin Matthew observed, ‘reconciliation between the “equal rights of all nations” and the requirements of international order was a highly problematic duty for the Liberal Prime Minister of an imperial power’.48 David Bebbington has pointed out such thinking by Gladstone represented ‘a synthesis of community and humanity’.49 Maintaining this synthesis, both intellectually and in the sphere of imperial and international affairs, is something with which Gladstone wrestled for the remainder of his long political life.     48   49   46 47

See Faught, ‘An Imperial Prime Minister?’, pp. 555–78. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, p. 166, 24 November 1881. Matthew, Gladstone, p. 376. D. Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics (Oxford, 1994), p. 305.

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PART V ETHICS AND INTERNATIONALISM

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Chapter 11

Gladstone and War Roland Quinault A war undertaken without cause is a war of shame and not of honour. Gladstone (1878)1

Gladstone is largely remembered as a statesman whose objectives – ‘peace, retrenchment and reform’ – were incompatible with war. In 1894, shortly before his final resignation from the premiership, he observed: ‘My name stands in Europe as a symbol of the policy of peace, moderation and non-aggression … I have been in active political life for … sixty-two years and a half. During that time I have actively opposed militarism’.2 After his death, John Morley wrote that one of Gladstone’s deepest convictions was that war could never be a cure for moral evils.3 Gladstone’s advocacy of financial retrenchment appeared to confirm his anti-war credentials because military spending was the largest item of government expenditure. Nevertheless, his reputation as both a pacific statesman and a stern economist was not always justified by his outlook and actions. Gladstone had no direct personal experience of either combat or the military. In 1841, he told Peel that he was not fit to hold a post connected with the Army or the Navy, ‘for of them I know nothing’.4 He was fortunate that his parliamentary career took place during the interval between one great international conflict – the Napoleonic War – and another – the First World War. There was, however, no lack of warfare during the Victorian era for Britain was regularly involved in conflicts around the globe, including the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, two Afghan wars, several wars with China and numerous ones in Africa. The British government was also closely concerned with other conflicts, such as the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. Thus, Gladstone frequently had to deal with the political, economic and moral issues arising from war. Gladstone’s early attitude to war was shaped by his family background, which was commercial, but not anti-military. There were soldiers amongst his maternal relatives, whilst his next elder brother, John Neilson – to whom he was     3   4   1 2

W.E. Gladstone, The Paths of Honour and Shame (London, 1878), p. 12. J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (3 vols, London, 1904), vol. 3, pp. 507–8. Morley, Gladstone, vol. 3, p. 547. British Library, Gladstone Papers, Add. MS 44819, f. 70, Gladstone’s memo, 31 August 1841.

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initially close – chose a career in the Royal Navy. His father, John Gladstone, a Liverpool merchant, amassed a large fortune during the long war with France and he supported the use of military and economic warfare against both Napoleon and the United States.5 In 1823, John Gladstone called an all-party meeting in Liverpool to raise money to support the Greeks in their struggle for independence and in 1827 he approved the destruction of the Turkish fleet at Navarino by an allied force.6 He thus set a precedent for William’s subsequent stance on the Eastern Question. While William was at Eton, he had a young man’s fascination with combat and he read the histories of Froissart and Hume, in his own words, ‘only for the battles and always skipping when it came to the sections headed “A Parliament”’.7 As an adult, however, he showed little interest in military history, although he admired the most famous commander of his childhood: Napoleon. He made a stirring translation, from the Italian, of the ode, by Manzoni, on the death of Napoleon and, in old age, he expressed his ‘quasi-admiration’ for Napoleon, whom he thought had shown ‘supreme greatness’, if not of a moral kind.8 When Gladstone visited the battlefield of Waterloo in 1832, at the age of 22, he was undecided whether he should mourn the bloodshed or celebrate the victory: How dearly the honours and benefits of that field were bought and how does the very grandeur of the victory itself bear a melancholy witness to the intensity of the struggle. If indeed that battle were fought in a wrong cause, how painful has been our guilt; if in a right one, and in accordance with the commands of God, yet with how much alloy of baser motives has the grand enterprise been prosecuted! Yet after all, if the cause were good, this is indeed a spot where an Englishman’s heart should beat high with exultation.9

Gladstone’s concern with the morality of war partly reflected the influence of his ‘four masters’: Aristotle, St Augustine, Dante and Bishop Butler. He described Aristotle’s Politics as a work ‘of immense value for all governors and public men’,10 and in that work, Aristotle had argued that war was simply a means to peace. Gladstone often echoed that view when he condoned military action. He was     7   8   9   5

S.G. Checkland, The Gladstones, a Family Biography 1764–1851 (Cambridge, 1971), p. 74. Checkland, Gladstones, pp. 148, 159. Morley, Gladstone, vol. 1, p. 29. L.A. Tollemache, Talks with Mr Gladstone (London, 1903), pp. 67, 99. M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew, The Gladstone Diaries (14 vols, Oxford 1968–1994), vol. 1, pp. 415–6, 8 February 1832. 10   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 2, p. 208, 20 November 1835. 6

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also influenced by Saint Augustine, who adopted the Roman theory of the just war and argued that war could be justified if it was brought about by injustice on the part of others.11 He shared Augustine’s belief that God determined the duration of wars and punished those who engaged in unjust conflicts.12 In 1879, he declared that the 1842 massacre of British and Indian troops in Afghanistan had been God’s retribution on Britain for embarking on an unjust war: ‘It is written in the eternal laws of the universe of God that sin shall be followed by suffering. An unjust war is a tremendous sin’.13 He thought that Bishop Butler would have been horrified by the eagerness of some Victorians to discuss the chances of war without considering what were its causes, for he took the view that ‘A war undertaken without cause is a war of shame, and not of honour’.14 Gladstone’s aversion to war was evident when he was a young Tory MP, although he was careful to march in step with Peel and his party colleagues. In 1840, he spoke strongly against the Opium War with China but only after he had asked ‘whether my speaking out on them would do harm, and having been authorized’.15 A year later, he dropped a motion, condemning the Whig government for demanding compensation from China for the loss of the opium, because it might injure the prospect of a Tory victory at the coming general election. He did so even though he was ‘in dread of the judgment of God upon England for our national iniquity towards China’.16 His unease on the compensation issue gave him qualms about accepting office in 1841, but Peel advised him to leave the question suspended.17 When a second Opium War broke out, in 1857, Gladstone denounced both the trade and Britain’s conduct: War taken at the best is a frightful scourge to the human race, but because it is so the wisdom of the 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.18

11   Saint Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. H. Bettenson (London, 2003), pp. 861–2, 866. 12   Augustine, City of God, pp. 216–17. 13   The Times, 2 December 1878, p. 7, Gladstone’s speech at Woolwich. 14   Gladstone, Paths of Honour and Shame, pp. 9, 12. 15   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 3, p. 21, 8 April 1840. Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), Third Series, 53 (1840), cc. 818–19. 16   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 3, p. 29, 14 May 1840. 17   British Library, Gladstone Papers, Add. MS 44819, f. 70, Gladstone’s note, 31 August 1841. 18   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 144 (1857), c. 1802.

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He condemned attacks on Chinese women and children and declared: ‘I will not believe that England will lay the foundations of its Eastern Empire in sin and in shame like this’. When Cobden’s motion criticising the war was passed, Gladstone described it as ‘doing more honour to the House of Commons than any I ever remember’.19 He was in good company, however, for both Disraeli and Russell voted for the motion. During the two Opium Wars, Gladstone was out of office and thus free to attack the government’s policy, but when a third war with China broke out, in 1859, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Palmerston’s second ministry. When the Chinese government refused to ratify the Treaty of Tiensin, which established diplomatic and commercial relations with the West, the British government authorised a punitive expedition to Peking. Gladstone accepted the need for the expedition and grieved at the British losses,20 but he questioned the desirability of teaching ‘European manners by Asiatic methods’.21 He did not, however, voice his reservations in public. Thus, his stance in office was different to his stance in opposition, a state of affairs that was more obviously the case with respect to Gladstone’s attitude to the Crimean War. When Russia invaded Wallachia and Moldovia in 1853 – two autonomous Ottoman principalities at the mouth of the Danube – Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Aberdeen’s coalition. He initially hoped that Britain could avoid military action: The time is happily passed when an ignorant eagerness for war could take possession of masses of the community; we do not fail to profit by the lessons from history, though after 40 years of peace, when most of us have grown up without any actual experience of the evils of a state of war, we may be able to forget their number and magnitude. The heavy burdens which war entails on posterity are the least of its evils; it is the effusion of human blood, the dissolution of domestic ties, the letting loose of a moral scourge over a country, which ought to be thought of, and which impose an absolute obligation on Governments and statesmen to avoid it at the cost of any sacrifice short of duty and honour.22

Gladstone’s naive optimism that war had lost its charms for the public was soon disproved, for when Turkey declared war on Russia, British opinion sided with the Turks. Gladstone, speaking at Manchester, hoped that diplomacy would   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 5, p. 202, 3 March 1857.   Gladstone Papers, Add. MS 44748, f. 121, memo on China, 17 September 1859. 21   Gladstone Papers, Add MS 44748, f. 123, Gladstone’s secret memo to Lord John Russell, 19 20

22 September 1859. 22   The Times, 30 September 1853, p. 7, Gladstone’s speech at Inverness.

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avoid ‘that frightful calamity, a general war’ but then declared – to great cheers – that the fall of the Ottoman Empire ‘would be dangerous to the peace of the world’ and, consequently, that it was Britain’s duty, ‘at whatever cost, to set itself against such a result’.23 A few months later, when Aberdeen said that he wanted to retire from office if Britain became involved in an offensive war, Gladstone disagreed: I said that a defensive war might involve offensive operations and that a declaration of war placed the case on no new ground of principle … We stand I said upon the ground that the Emperor invaded countries not his own, inflicted wrong on Turkey and what I feel much more most cruel wrong on the wretched inhabitants of the Principalities.24

He made it clear that he would support military action against Russia not only in the Balkans, but also in the Baltic. Nevertheless, Gladstone continued to denounce war in the abstract. He told MPs: There is pomp and circumstance, there is glory and excitement about war, which, notwithstanding the miseries it entails, invests it with charms in the eyes of the community, and tends to blind men to those evils to a fearful and dangerous degree.25

A few weeks later, when Britain declared war on Russia, he wrote to his wife: ‘war, war, war; that is the excitement and turmoil of the moment and I fear that it will swallow up everything good and useful’.26 Yet Gladstone had no doubts about the justice of the war. He believed that Britain and France occupied a ‘very high moral position’ because they were acting ‘as the armed constabulary of Europe’ against Russia – ‘the wanton disturber’ – to vindicate ‘the public law and peace of Europe’. Consequently, he thought that the allies had the right to destroy the Russian naval base and fleet at Sebastopol in the Crimea.27 Richard Shannon has claimed that Gladstone ‘sold his soul to the Palmerstonian war aim of capturing Sebastopol as the price of keeping the coalition afloat’.28 But Gladstone supported an attack on Sebastopol for military     25   26   27   28   23 24

The Times, 13 October 1853, p. 7, Gladstone’s speech at Manchester. Gladstone Papers, Add. MS 44,778, f. 167, Gladstone to Aberdeen, 22 February 1854. Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 131 (1854), c. 376. A.T. Bassett (ed.), Gladstone to his Wife (London, 1936), p. 104, 28 March 1854. Gladstone Papers, Add. MS 44,163, ff. 137–40, Gladstone to Sir James Graham, 17 May 1854. R. Shannon, Gladstone, Vol. 1 1809–1865 (London, 1982), p. 314.

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reasons, not domestic political ones. Neither Raglan, the army commander, nor Admiral Duncan, the naval commander, favoured an assault on Sebastopol, but Gladstone did not think that the military should determine the strategy of the war: Reference no doubt must be made to the judgment of the generals; but had I the power I would confine that reference as much as possible to the point of the sufficiency of the force, and restrain them as much as possible from weighing (except with a view to any immediate and urgent necessity) the importance of this object as compared with others, which we may without presumption regard as being with respect to all general grounds nearly a settled point.29

Gladstone took a close interest in the invasion of the Crimea and wrote in his diary: ‘most of my reading time is absorbed in the wonderful details of the Battle of the Alma and its sequel’.30 He congratulated Palmerston for having urged an attack on Sebastopol and gladly agreed to an Admiralty request for large expenditure – not voted by Parliament – for floating batteries and gunboats required for an attack on the Russian fortress of Cronstadt in the Baltic.31 During the winter of 1854–55, the British troops before Sebastopol suffered greatly.32 Gladstone acknowledged that there were shortcomings in the supply chain, but recalled Napoleon’s observation ‘that he who had made war without many errors has not made war long’. He pledged that the attack on Sebastopol would continue and was confident that more successes could be expected.33 While he accepted that the Charge of the Light Brigade was ‘an unhappy error of command’, he did not regard it as an example of the pointless suffering occasioned by war.34 He attacked Roebuck’s motion, for a select committee to enquire into the condition of the Army before Sebastopol, as an unconstitutional interference with the authority of the executive government.35 When Palmerston agreed to a committee of enquiry, Gladstone resigned from the government along with other Peelites. He questioned the veracity of the press reports from the Crimea and observed that ‘sufferings and privations are the necessary incidents of a state     31   32   29

Gladstone Papers, Add. MS 44,744, ff. 70–1, memorandum by Gladstone, 22 June 1854. Gladstone Diaries, vol. 4, p. 653, 11 October 1854. Gladstone Papers, Add. MS 44271, f. 63, Gladstone to Palmerston, 4 October 1854. A. Lambert and S. Badsey, The War Correspondents: The Crimean War (Stroud, 1994), pp. 134–67. 33   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 136 (1854–55), cc. 234–7. 34   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 138 (1855), cc. 1046. 35   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 136 (1854–5), cc. 1186–205. 30

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of war’.36 Thus, his resignation was in no sense an acknowledgement that the object or conduct of the war was unjustified. It was not until three months later, in May 1855, that Gladstone criticised the continuation of the war.37 He argued that ‘military campaigns in time of war are not to be regarded as ends, but as means for the attainment of ends’, and he claimed that Russia was now ready to accept the allies’ peace terms, which had been rejected in 1853.38 He warned that continuing the war merely for the sake of military glory would ‘tempt the justice of Him in whose hands the fates of armies are so absolutely lodged as the fate of an infant slumbering in its cradle’.39 Gladstone told the Duke of Argyll that there was a great difference between a ‘just and needful’ war and one carried on without any adequate justification or well defined practical object.40 He accepted, however, that the British public wished to continue the war and he conceded that he had underestimated the extent to which the war, once started, would acquire a momentum of its own: What I find press hardest among the reproaches upon me is this: ‘You went to war for limited objects; why did you not take into account the high probability that those objects would be lost sight of in the excitement which war engenders, and that this war, if once begun, would receive an extension far beyond your views and wishes.41

Yet as the war drew to an end, early in 1856, Gladstone concluded that it had been ‘of a very satisfactory character as a whole though it has been frightful to wade through such a sea of blood’.42 He claimed that the war had been begun and carried out ‘with perfect purity of motives’, although he accepted that it had involved suffering on an epic and unprecedented scale.43 His stance was far removed from that of the pacifists, except in one respect. He welcomed the protocol in the Treaty of Paris, by which international differences were to be submitted to arbitration, as the first time that the European powers had   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 136 (1855), cc. 1840–45.   G. Douglas, eighth Duke of Argyll, Autobiography and Memoirs (2 vols, London, 1906),

36 37

vol. 2, p. 32, Gladstone to Argyll, 14 May 1855. 38   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 138 (1855), cc. 1046–65. 39   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 138 (1855), c. 1068. 40   Argyll, Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 37, Gladstone to Argyll, 18 October 1855. 41   Argyll, Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 43, Gladstone to Argyll, 1 December 1855. 42   Gladstone Papers, Add. MS 44,262, f. 195, Gladstone to the Duke of Newcastle, 26 January 1856. 43   [W.E. Gladstone] ‘The War and the Peace’, The Gentlemen’s Magazine, 139 (August 1856), pp. 146–9, 151.

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declared ‘at least a qualified disapproval of a resort to war’.44 That anticipated his acceptance, in 1872, of the Geneva arbitration, which settled the US claim against Britain for damages caused by the Alabama, a confederate privateer, during the American Civil War. The Crimean War revived Gladstone’s interest in the study of Homer and particularly in The Illiad, which deals with the Trojan War. In 1855, he wrote: ‘I am busy reading Homer about the Sebastopol of old time’.45 He was struck by the parallels between the war in the Crimea and the Trojan War as related by Homer: The history of the siege of Sebastopol has yet to be written. We apprehend that if it could find a second Homer, it would vindicate its claim to be even more than a second Troy. There are whimsical resemblances between the first and the last great sieges of the world … both were conducted by means of maritime force against a power defending itself only by land, the party acting on the defensive was in both cases the aggressor, and in neither was the siege conducted by investment, but in both by sheer fighting between the armies.46

Gladstone noted that in modern, as in ancient, times the causes of war are apt to be swallowed up in their circumstances, for those who go to war ‘embark upon a stream, always powerful, often ungovernable’.47 That stream had financial, as well as military, consequences. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gladstone was responsible for funding the war with Russia. In his 1853 pre-war Budget, he described the income tax as ‘an engine of gigantic power’, which would enable the government, in the event of war, to raise the Army to 300,000 men and the Navy to 100,000.48 He then laid the fiscal foundations for such a rise in military expenditure by lowering the income tax threshold to £100 – thus doubling the number of people who paid the tax – and by extending it to Ireland. In his 1854 Budget, he stated that 50,000 men had already been added to the military establishment – evidence that the government intended to prosecute the war with vigour.49 Then he announced that the cost of the war would be met by doubling the income tax to 14 pence in the pound for the next six months – a decision that he justified on moral grounds. He described the expenses of war as ‘the moral check, which     46   47   48   49   44 45

Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 142 (1856), cc. 93–9. Morley, Gladstone, vol. 1, p. 549, Gladstone to Aberdeen, 9 August 1855. Gladstone, ‘The War and the Peace’, p. 150. [William Gladstone]’Homeric characters’, Quarterly Review, 102 (July 1857), pp. 210–11. Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 125 (1853), cc. 1362–63. Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 131 (1854), c. 372.

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it has pleased the Almighty to impose upon the ambition and lust of conquest that are so inherent in so many nations’.50 A month later, Gladstone asked Parliament to ‘give us the means of carrying on a just and necessary war’, by granting an additional ten million pounds in taxation.51 This would be raised not only by extending the higher rate of income tax for another six months but also by the issue of six million pounds of Exchequer Bonds. Thus, Gladstone partly abandoned the principle of funding the war from current revenue that he had recently lauded as a moral check. The increase in taxes and loans, which he arranged, made it possible to double the size of the Army and Navy in just a year.52 Shortly before his resignation, in 1855, he was involved in organising another large war loan.53 In his later budgets, Gladstone also funded large increases in military expenditure. In 1859 and 1860, he doubled income tax to pay for increased naval defence and the war with China. He reiterated his earlier view that loans were ‘a great moral snare’ because they separated what he termed ‘the natural conjunction between acts and their consequences’.54 In 1862, however, he denied that he had laid down the maxim that all war finance should be raised by taxation: ‘I hold by the doctrine that war loans are in many ways a great evil; but I admit their necessity’.55 Thus, Gladstone had it both ways: he justified higher taxation as a moral check on the lust for war, but he also recognised the need for loans to fund major conflicts. In 1859, Gladstone criticised the ‘strange and nearly frantic passages on war’ in Alfred Tennyson’s poem, Maud, which had been published in 1855, during the war with Russia. Those passages implied that war was a cure for moral evil, whereas Gladstone claimed that war had ‘in its modern form especially, peculiar and unequalled evils’. They included the power of ‘fascinating the imagination of those whose proud and angry passions it inflames’. He complained that the huge amounts of money spent on war led to the suspension of ‘every rule of public thrift’, inflation and hard times for the poor. It also created a ‘political economy of war’ – in other words ‘a military-industrial complex’ – that was difficult to resist.56 Yet the outcome of the Crimean War had led Gladstone to conclude that modern science had contributed as much to the arts of peace as it had to     52   53   50

Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 131 (1854), c. 376. Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 132 (1854), c. 1478. K.T. Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation 1846–1886 (Oxford, 1998), p. 179–80. O. Anderson, ‘Loans versus taxes: British financial policy in the Crimean War’, Economic History Review, second series, 16 (1963): p. 316. 54   Gladstone Papers, Add. MS 44,394, ff. 96–7, Gladstone to Elgin, 5 September 1860. 55   Morley, Gladstone, vol. 1, pp. 516–17, Gladstone to Northcote, 8 August 1862. 56   [W.E. Gladstone] ‘Tennyson’s Poems’, Quarterly Review, 106 (October 1859): pp. 462–3. 51

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warfare. He argued that science, by facilitating the rapid deployment of military resources, shortened the duration of conflict and thus reduced its destructive ravages.57 That assertion was speedily disproved by the duration and intensity of the American Civil War. Gladstone initially regarded the conflict in the United States as ‘a war without cause and a war without cause is a foolish and wicked war’.58 That was a strange claim because President Lincoln declared that it was a war to preserve the Union, while the abolitionists regarded it as a war to end slavery. In 1862, Gladstone acknowledged England would support the war against the Confederacy if it really was a conflict between slavery and freedom but with this important caveat: We have no faith in the propagation of free institutions, either political or social, at the point of the sword among those who are not prepared to receive them; it is not by such means that the ends of freedom are to be gained. Freedom to be real, must be freely accepted, freely embraced. You cannot invade a nation in order to convert its institutions from bad ones into good ones.59

Later that year, when Gladstone learnt of Lee’s victory at Fredericksburg, he observed: ‘surely this will end the madness’.60 The war, however, dragged on for another two and a half years and although Gladstone was impressed by the dynamism with which it was fought, he was never entirely convinced of its necessity and justice. Twenty-five years later, when Gladstone read John Motley’s claim that other struggles between liberty and despotism paled before the American Civil War, he annotated in the margin: ‘No: Montenegro’.61 That was a surprising comment because Montenegro was a small, backward and despotically ruled principality. It had, however, gained de facto independence from the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century and Gladstone strongly sympathised with the struggles of the various Balkan peoples for nationhood. He rejected the view that once mankind had been divided into nations then war became a necessary way of

  Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 142 (1856), cc. 96–7.   Gladstone Papers, Add. MS 44531, f. 167, Gladstone to the Duchess of Sutherland, 29

57 58

May 1861. 59   Mr Gladstone’s Address and Speeches at Manchester, April 1862 (London, 1862), pp. 55–6, Address to the Chamber of Commerce, 24 April 1862. 60   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 6, p. 169, 27 December 1862. 61   G.W. Curtis (ed.), The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley (2 vols, London, 1889), vol. 2, p. 189.

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settling disputes.62 During the Eastern Crisis of 1876–78, Gladstone accused educated English opinion of wanting war, almost for its own sake, although ‘it is neither within the duty nor the right of England to take into her own option the enforcement by arms of the general interests of Europe’.63 In other words, he was opposed to unilateral action. In 1878, Gladstone condemned Disraeli’s Conservative government for sanctioning the Indian government’s war with the Afghans. Gladstone regarded the invasion of Afghanistan as ‘war with dishonour’ – in stark contrast to Disraeli’s claim to have achieved ‘peace with honour’ at the Congress of Berlin a few months before.64 During his 1879 Midlothian campaign, he denounced the Indian Army’s tactic of burning Afghan villages, claiming that it left women and children to perish in the winter snow just for the sake of ‘a war as frivolous as ever was waged in the history of man’.65 He produced no evidence, however, of such deaths and a few years later – in 1885 – he strongly endorsed the view that Afghanistan must not become a Russian satellite.66 Gladstone also criticised the contemporaneous war with the Zulus in southern Africa. He noted that the Zulus, who were simply trying to defend their homeland, were no match for British troops, armed with modern weapons.67 He rejected the argument that the war would release the Zulus from oppression by their king, Cetewayo.68 Gladstone’s denunciation of particular wars did not equate to a denunciation of war in all circumstances. In 1874, he had noted – in an obvious reference to Prussia – that some modern states owed all their greatness to successful war. He also conceded that the Ancient Greeks – ‘the most wonderful people whom the world has ever seen’ – had spent much of their time fighting foreigners. That had been justifiable, he argued, because their objective was not conquest, but the creation of a cohesive and independent national life.69 That was a dubious claim, but it tallied with his justification of much more recent struggles for national independence. In a speech, early in 1880, Gladstone described the belief that   J.B. Mozley, Sermons preached before the University of Oxford and on various occasions (Oxford, 1876), pp. 114–15, Gladstone’s annotations at Gladstone’s Library, St Deiniol’s, Hawarden. 63   Gladstone, Paths of Honour and Shame, p. 15. 64   The Times, 2 December 1878, p. 7, Gladstone’s speech at Woolwich. 65   W.E. Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, 1879 (London, 1879), p. 92, Gladstone’s speech at the Forester’s Hall, Dalkeith, 26 November 1879. 66   R. Quinault, ‘Afghanistan and Gladstone’s Moral Foreign Policy’, History Today, 52/12 (2002): pp. 28–34. 67   Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, 1879, pp. 90–1. 68   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 246 (1879), c. 1376. 69   W.E. Gladstone, ‘A Contribution towards determining the place of Homer in History and Egyptian Chronology’, The Contemporary Review, 24 ( July 1874): pp. 24–5. 62

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there would be no more wars in the future – because disputes would be settled by negotiation – as a serious error, although a noble one: However much you may detest war – and you cannot detest it too much – there is no war – except one, the war for liberty – that does not contain in it elements of corruption, as well as of misery … but however deplorable wars may be, they are among the necessities of our condition, and there are times when justice, when faith, when the welfare of mankind require a man not to shrink from the responsibility of undertaking them. And if you undertake war, so also you are often obliged to undertake measures that may lead to war.70

That declaration set the tone for the surprisingly hawkish policy of Gladstone’s second ministry. British troops remained engaged in active operations in Afghanistan for a further year and then withdrew for military, financial and political reasons, rather than moral ones. Gladstone’s government also organised naval action to ensure the cession of territory to Montenegro, and his threat to occupy Smyrna led to the transfer of Thessaly from Turkey to Greece – one of the largest territorial changes of the century. In 1882, moreover, Gladstone’s government ordered military action in Egypt. Previously, when out of office, Gladstone had condemned calls for the occupation of Egypt, arguing that it would not protect the Suez Canal.71 Once Prime Minister, however, he showed no sympathy for the Egyptian nationalist movement led by Arabi. In 1882, there were attacks on Europeans at Alexandria. Gladstone’s government hoped that the French would join the British in taking retaliatory action, but they declined. Nevertheless, Gladstone disregarded his longstanding support for multilateral, rather than unilateral, military intervention and ordered the Royal Navy to bombard Alexandria. Much damage was done to the city and even more to Gladstone’s pacific reputation. Bright resigned from the government and denounced the intervention as worse than anything perpetrated by Disraeli, which was an accusation not without foundation. Gladstone agreed with Bright that most wars had been sad errors,72 but defended the government’s action. He then sanctioned, moreover, a British Army campaign, led by General Wolseley, to defeat Arabi. Punch depicted Gladstone invading Egypt with an umbrella, rather than a sword, but there was nothing gentle about the battle of Tel-el-Kebir on 13 September, at which 70   W.E. Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, March and April 1880 (Edinburgh, 1880), pp. 30–3, Speech at Edinburgh, 17 March 1880. 71   W.E. Gladstone, ‘Aggression on Egypt and Freedom in the East’, The Nineteenth Century, 2 (August 1877): pp. 149–66. 72   Morley, Gladstone, vol. 3, p. 84, Gladstone to Bright, 14 July 1882.

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British troops destroyed Arabi’s largely untrained and poorly equipped army. When Wolseley entered Cairo and captured Arabi, Gladstone sent him effusive congratulations and nominated him for a barony.73 Gladstone had no doubts about the justice of the British intervention. He wrote to his wife: ‘The war has been undertaken in singleness of purpose, on behalf of justice peace and liberty, and its progress has thus far been conformable to its origins and its aims’.74 In public, Gladstone defended the intervention in both triumphal and pacific terms: The war has proved that our army is composed of men as brave as their forefathers. I should not speak of the mere triumph of armies in glowing terms were not the cause of the war justifiable. We have carried out this war from a love of peace, and, I may say, on the principles of peace. We have been putting down a military anarchy.75

Gladstone had, however, another, more selfish reason for taking a firm line against Arabi. He was a large holder of Egyptian bonds, the value of which was depressed by Arabi’s revolt but then rose sharply after the British intervention. That was not, however, public knowledge at the time. Gladstone’s successful invasion of Egypt in 1882 made less impression on the British public than his failure to save General Gordon at Khartoum in 1885. Gordon was sent to the Sudan with a brief to evacuate that country but he disregarded his orders once he reached Khartoum and was largely responsible for his own fate. Nevertheless, Gladstone was widely blamed for Gordon’s death and the episode reinforced the view that he was a less than whole-hearted supporter of the armed services. Yet Gladstone was still prepared, as he had been in the past, to provide large sums for the military if he thought that the occasion demanded it. In April 1885, he obtained from Parliament a twenty-seven million pound vote of credit to strengthen the armies in Egypt and on the Afghan frontier. His firm response to the Penjdeh Incident – a Russian incursion into Afghanistan in March 1885 – illustrated his determination to resist unprovoked aggression. In Punch, Tenniel depicted Gladstone as a knight in armour upholding the Penjdeh covenant. The Russians took notice and a peaceful settlement of the Afghan border question was effected. Gladstone was critical of the armaments industry in theory, but not always in practice. In 1878, he declared that ‘when you desire people to produce a million’s   Sir F. Maurice and Sir G. Arthur, The Life of Lord Wolseley (London, 1924), pp. 160–1.   Bassett, Gladstone to his Wife, p. 239, Gladstone to Catherine, 13 September 1882. 75   The Times, 4 October 1882, p. 6, Gladstone’s speech at Penmaenmawr. 73 74

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worth of guns you take them away from the production of a million’s worth of something else’.76 Yet he never opposed the development of modern weapons. In 1885, he inspected Hiram Maxim’s quick-firing machine gun, which aroused his curiosity but not his moral condemnation.77 When war broke out with the Matabele people in 1893, Gladstone wrote to the Colonial Secretary: ‘Your new war as a war is a calamity, but one which I am sure you will do all that can be done to confine within the narrowest limits’.78 While the British forces deployed were relatively few, their use of modern weapons made it a very unequal conflict. In one engagement, 50 soldiers fought off 5,000 warriors with the aid of four Maxim guns. During the last decade of his life, Gladstone accepted much hospitality from Stuart Rendel, who was not only the leader of the Welsh Liberal MPs, but also a senior member of the Armstrong armaments company. Rendel was ennobled in Gladstone’s 1894 resignation honours and his daughter Maud married Gladstone’s younger son, Henry. He was a Director of Armstrong-Whitworth before and after the First World War. Gladstone’s last humanitarian campaign, in the mid-1890s, was to stop the massacre of Armenians by the Turks. He claimed that the European Powers had the right, according to the law of nations, to threaten Turkey with coercion if it persisted. Coercion did not necessarily involve war and, if justly and judiciously employed, might avert war. Gladstone also claimed that Turkey had flouted the terms of the 1878 Anglo-Turkish Convention and that gave Britain the right to use force, providing it did not to obtain any selfish gain from the conflict. But he did not suggest what form British action might take and he conceded that if Britain was threatened with war by other European powers, it could then pull back with honour. Consequently, The Times dismissed his proposal as both rash and cowardly.79 Gladstone conceded that ‘while we are bound to follow and require humanity in our own house, we may not have a title to enforce it in the house of our neighbour’.80 Gladstone’s attitude to war was complex and not easy to summarise. He frequently – and movingly – denounced both war in the abstract and the mindset that uncritically and enthusiastically accepted the need for conflict. 76   The Foreign Policy of the Government, Speech of Mr Gladstone at Rhyl, 31 October 1878 (Manchester, 1878), p. 24. 77   D.W.R. Bahlman (ed.), The Diary of Sir Edward Walter Hamilton, 1880–1885 (2 vols, Oxford, 1972), vol. 2, p. 854, 2 May 1885. 78   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 13, p. 308, Gladstone to Ripon, 10 October 1893. 79   The Times, 25 Sept 1896, p. 5 80   W.E. Gladstone, ‘The Massacres in Turkey’, The Nineteenth Century, 236 (October 1896): p. 677.

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Nevertheless, he endorsed the need for war when he thought that the cause was just. In theory, he was always a multilateralist, who favoured collective military action by the great powers, acting as the Concert of Europe, against unprovoked aggression. In practice, however, such co-operation was rarely achieved, although there was joint action with the French in both the Crimea and China. But when France, in 1882, refused to join Britain in intervening in Egypt, Gladstone took unilateral action. Any qualms that he still had on that score were reduced by the initial success of the intervention in Egypt. The subsequent debacle in the Sudan, however, appears to have revived his old reservations about unilateral military action. Certainly caution was the keynote of his attitude to military adventures abroad in the last decade of his career. The contrast between Gladstone’s theory and practice was also evident with regard to war finance. He opposed war loans, on principle, as an encouragement to reckless militarism but he sometimes resorted to them, in practice, in order to fund major conflicts. Despite all his rhetoric in favour of retrenchment, he raised very large sums for warfare when the need arose. Indeed, Gladstonian finance proved a formidable weapon in Victorian Britain’s military arsenal. The gap between Gladstone’s rhetoric about war and his actions during conflicts reflected the extent to which he altered his stance to conform with partisan pressures or popular feeling. His condemnation of war was more evident when he was in opposition than when he was in office. That was apparent in the 1840s and 1850s, as well as in the late 1870s and early 1880s. But whether Gladstone was in or out of office, he was never in favour of peace at any price and his abhorrence of war was always a qualified abhorrence. He never openly allied with the pacifists and frequently disregarded them, as in 1854 and 1882.81 He condoned war, moreover, when he considered that it could be justified by some moral principle. That required clear evidence of a casus belli – a definite act of aggression that justified military action in response. The lack of impartial evidence of such aggression worried him with respect to the wars with China and the American Civil War. When such evidence was available, however, he accepted the need for strong military action and its inevitable consequences: large expenditure and much death, injury and disease. His readiness, at those times, to endorse offensive operations undermines the claim that his attitude to war can be categorised simply as that of a ‘defencist’.82 Gladstone’s hatred of oppression and political or ethnic violence prompted him to rouse the conscience of the nation and the world. He never assumed, however, that persecution in itself provided a justification for military   M. Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations 1854–1945 (Oxford, 2000), p. 54. 82   Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists, p. 54. 81

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intervention. The Bulgarian horrors led him to call for the wholesale removal of the Turks from Bulgaria, but not by British bayonets. Even the Armenian massacres did not prompt him to enunciate a clear doctrine of moral interventionism. His attitude to war was influenced by his Christian faith, but not in a simplistic way. While he feared God’s retribution against those who waged unjust wars, he believed, on the other hand, that God sanctioned justified military action. When Parliament, in 1854, agreed to grant 10 million pounds for what Gladstone regarded as ‘a just and necessary war’, he wrote in his diary: ‘Never had I more cause to feel the unutterable mercy of God, the strength of his sustaining arm & the power of the vision of the great High Priest in Heaven offering himself for us’.83 For Gladstone, God was the fiery Jehovah of the Old Testament as well as the pacific Christ of the Gospels. When Gladstone died, the crowds that turned out for his funeral were, reputedly, smaller than those that greeted the guards on their return home after the battle of Omdurman several months later.84 Yet Gladstone’s views on war had a more lasting influence than those of many warriors. During the second Boer War, both wings of the Liberal party echoed his views. The Liberal imperialists, who backed the war, remembered his firm opposition to unprovoked aggression, while the Liberal critics of the war recalled his desire to end war as soon as its main objectives had been achieved. Campbell-Bannerman’s attack on ‘methods of barbarism’ – the internment of women and children in concentration camps – echoed Gladstone’s concern with the plight of women and children during the China and Afghan wars. In 1914, the Liberal government of Asquith – Gladstone’s young lieutenant – went to war with Germany in conscious conformity with both Gladstone’s general principles and his particular policy. As Asquith pointed out, Gladstone had upheld the rights of small nations and had specifically warned Germany, in 1870, that the British government would not tolerate an attack on neutral Belgium. In the 1930s, the policy of appeasing Nazi Germany ran counter to an observation by Gladstone in 1859: Peace itself is not a blessing when we purchase it upon conditions which from their very nature accumulate the materials of future … and more profound convulsion … Let Europe have peace by all means upon any terms that will mitigate the sharpness and lessen the mass of human suffering; upon any terms except such as 83   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 132 (1854), c. 1478; Gladstone Diaries, vol. 4, p. 617, 8 May 1854. 84   R.D. Fulton, ‘Sensational War Reporting and the Quality Press in Late Victorian Britain and America, in J.H. Weiner and M. Hampton (eds), Anglo-American Media Interactions, 1850– 2000 (Basingstoke, 2007), p. 28.

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basely sell the birthright of the future for the mess of pottage that is to feed only the hunger of today.85

That was essentially the argument which Churchill – a former Liberal who was deeply influenced by Gladstone’s example – used when he attacked Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement with Hitler. When Tony Blair was prime minister, he cited Gladstone’s example to justify his policy of ‘moral’ military interventionism. He failed, however, to distinguish between Gladstone’s condemnation of foreign massacres and his reluctance to take military action to prevent them. One of Blair’s justifications for the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, was to bring democracy and good government to that country. Yet Gladstone, as previously noted, took the view that ‘you cannot invade a nation in order to convert its institutions from bad ones into good ones’.86 Gladstone usually sought to avoid war but he was ready to wage it, at almost at any cost, if he thought that it was justified. He summarised his stance, in a memorandum written shortly before his final resignation, in 1894. He wrote: ‘I am ready to see England dare the world in arms: but not to see England set the world in arms’.87 His example, in that respect, cast a long shadow over the attitude of the British government and people to war.

  [W.E. Gladstone] ‘Foreign Affairs – War in Italy’, Quarterly Review, 105 (April 1859),

85

p. 563.

  Gladstone’s Speeches at Manchester, 1862, pp. 55–6, Address to the Chamber of Commerce, 24 April. 87   Gladstone Papers, Add. MS 44648, f.145, Gladstone’s memo, 20 January 1894. 86

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Chapter 12

Gladstone and the Suppression of the Slave Trade Richard Huzzey

On 19 March 1850, looking back at his parliamentary speech on the slave trade earlier that day, William Gladstone remarked in his diary that he ‘was much amused with the liberality of the compliments from the radicals who with the Tories were (as it happened) the main supporters, being less under the whip’.1 Although he did not know it, this unlikely support from laissez-faire free traders would become a much more significant partnership in the decades ahead. The diary entry captures the young Gladstone at mid-century, unaccustomed to alliance with radical MPs and at a crossroads. The controversy he spoke about – the question of naval suppression of the slave trade – reveals the peculiar ways in which this issue cut across already fragmented party lines. Gladstone’s opinion was typically complex and, on this occasion, cut across the factional positions. This strange clash over the slave trade warrants further attention, both to understand Victorian attitudes to slavery and to understand the evolution of Gladstone’s views on that subject. This ‘most extraordinary debate of the session’, in the view of one contemporary regional newspaper, offers an interesting glimpse of the remaking of both British politics and Gladstone himself.2 By 1850, the latter had detached himself from the Conservative Party and was beginning a migration that led not only into the Liberal Party but towards a radically different style of politics. It was a time when the Tory MP and the son of a West Indian merchant began an evolution from the People’s William to the Grand Old Man of popular liberalism; it came at the climax of a decade Colin Matthew described as ‘the crucial period of his political development’.3 In the broader context of politics between the fall of Sir Robert 1   The Gladstone Diaries (eds) M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew (14 vols, Oxford, 1968– 1994), vol. 4, p. 194, 19 March 1850. 2   The Bradford Observer, 21 March 1850, p. 4. 3   H.C.G. Matthew, ‘Introduction’ in Gladstone Diaries, vol. 3, p. xli; A. Hawkins, ‘A Forgotten Crisis: Gladstone and the Politics of Finance during the 1850s’, Victorian Studies, 26/3 (Spring 1983): pp. 287–320, at p. 287.

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Peel and the crystallisation of the Liberal Party, the suppression controversy intersected with a number of themes that would define politics for the second half of the nineteenth century: it wrapped together questions of empire, trade, military expenditure, moral foreign policy and state economy. The Gladstone family’s background as slave-holders is well known and his intervention in this debate could be painted as an embarrassing late indulgence of his conservative, anti-abolitionist roots. Roland Quinault has explored such themes in a recent article which highlights Gladstone’s lifelong ambiguity towards slavery.4 But, the question of suppressing the slave trade formed a distinct, if related, sphere of political policy to the ownership of slaves. Following the Slavery Abolition Act, passed in 1833 and implemented in 1834, successive British ministries focused on the suppression of the maritime slave trade. Since the Slave Trade Abolition Act of 1807, Britain had pursued a series of treaties permitting mutual right of search with other nations.5 These agreements, with most seafaring powers except France and the United States, were enforced by Britain’s squadrons off the coast of Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean. Squadrons of Royal Navy cruisers intercepted slavers’ vessels at embarkation from Africa or on arrival in the New World; British ships acted, as Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston put it, as the ‘police’.6 By the 1840s, the force had begun to grow substantially and there were more than 20 ships off the west coast of Africa alone. The annual cost of the slave trade suppression complex reached an historic peak of around half a million pounds in 1849–50.7 The pacific inclinations of Richard Cobden and the ‘Manchester School’ free traders led them to oppose this suppression of the slave trade by force,8 especially as British commitment escalated towards mid-century. They welcomed Gladstone’s criticism of the cruisers, as he recorded, amusedly, in his diary,9 although Cobden’s arguments were also financial and motivated in part   R. Quinault, ‘Gladstone and Slavery’, Historical Journal, 52/2 (2009): pp. 363–83.   C.D. Kaufmann and R.A. Pape, ‘Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain’s

4 5

Sixty-Year Campaign against the Atlantic Slave Trade’, International Organization, 53/4 (1999): pp. 631–68. 6   Parliamentary Papers (1847–48), xxii (1), pp. 13, 17. 7   K. Hamilton and P. Salmon (eds), Slavery, Diplomacy and Empire: Britain and the Suppression of the Slave Trade (Brighton, 2009); D. Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford and New York, 1987), pp. 92–3. 8   Although it should be noted that Cobden’s ‘pacifism’ was complex and accommodated the notion of defensive war: see especially M. Ceadel, ‘Cobden and Peace’, in A. Howe and S. Morgan (eds), Rethinking Nineteenth Century Liberalism: Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 189–207. 9   On the radicals in the Commons, see M. Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847– 1860 (Oxford, 1995).

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by a desire to avoid conflict with the United States.10 As much as Gladstone’s stance on suppression looked back to his pro-slavery past, it also heralded a new attention to the economics and imperial policies of laissez-faire associated with Cobden’s radicalism. The forcible suppression policy had attracted relatively little notice before 1838, when anti-slavery agitation was focused on emancipation and apprenticeship in the West Indies. During the 1840s, however, the antislavery consensus – in Parliament and in the country – fractured over issues such as whether Britain’s ‘Great Experiment’ in free labour would flourish or fail alongside a free trade in sugar.11 Cobden and his fellow free-trade radicals demonstrated a seemingly mean-spirited apathy towards the slave trade to modern eyes. As early as 1937, W.L. Burn’s account tartly welcomes the fact that emancipation came ‘before the Manchester school had decided which forms of philanthropy were and which were not to be blessed’.12 However, the radicals’ case for withdrawing the cruisers was rather more ideological. The most tenacious of the West Africa squadron’s critics was William Hutt, the radical MP for Gateshead. Hutt raised the question of suppression regularly in Parliament from the mid-1840s and successfully pushed for a select committee into British suppression policy, which he then chaired. Gladstone was a member of this committee, which sat during the 1847–48 and 1849 sessions. Although by no means united on every aspect of the issue, the two men corresponded during the select committee, and Gladstone was the first ally Hutt consulted at the start of the 1850 session on the timing and wording of his motion.13 On 19 March 1850, Hutt proposed to the House of Commons that Britain should sever all treaty obligations requiring the deployment of anti-slave trade cruisers as the first step to their complete withdrawal.14 It was on this occasion that Gladstone became an unexpected hero to the radicals, winning plaudits for his hour-long oration. His future Cabinet colleagues, Lords Russell and Palmerston, insisted that Hutt’s proposals would bring shame on Britain and permit the unchecked expansion of the transatlantic slave trade, with all its attendant suffering. Russell, seeing the appeal of radical arguments to many of his supporters, insisted that the division on Hutt’s motion was a matter of confidence in his government. The Whig-Liberals therefore triumphed, as Gladstone observed, because the   For further details, see A. Howe (ed.), The Letters of Richard Cobden, vol.II (Oxford, 2010).   For the wider politics of free labour before and after emancipation, see S. Drescher, The

10

11

Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford, 2004). 12   W.L. Burn, Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies (London, 1937), p. 99. 13   British Library, Gladstone Papers, Add. MS 44369, fol. 5: Hutt to Gladstone, 9 January 1850. 14   Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), Third Series, 1850, cix, 1094. The recommendation of the select committee for withdrawal had only been decided by Hutt’s casting vote as chairman.

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prime minister’s threat placed them ‘under the whip’. Not wishing to permit the protectionist Tory rump to gain power, Liberal MPs voted against their wishes, furious that their chief had ‘virtually dictated to them’ how they could vote.15 The Times rather tastelessly quipped that ‘Massa Russell’ had whipped his enslaved MPs unwillingly through the noe lobby.16 Why did Gladstone commit himself to supporting Hutt’s motion so prominently? While his position on suppression could be conveniently disregarded as a final indulgence in his juvenile pro-slavery, the motives for his involvement in this lost cause help reveal the logical development of his political ideas. His motivations in the controversy straddled both varieties of anti-coercionist thought, Tory and radical, positioned as he was between the Scylla of political economy and the Charybdis of West Indian interest politics. To understand the principles and calculations behind the anti-coercionist position, it helps to look at the strange affiliations of other MPs. Peel and most of his disciples voted against withdrawing the cruisers. While a band of Hutt’s fellow radicals stood by him, his support was drawn predominantly from the ranks of protectionist Tories. Of the 154 votes Hutt carried in that debate, 89 came from Tory protectionists.17 Gladstone’s ideas about suppression were tied to all three of these groups – Peelites, Tories and radicals – so it makes sense to look at the complex repertoire of ideas that informed approaches to the slave trade question. Not wishing to see their Conservative enemies replace Russell, a large proportion of Peelites followed Peel in voting for the repeal of the sugar duties in 1846. The alliance was rather ironic, given that Peel had been swept to power in 1841 after defeating the Whig-Liberals on the very same question, prior to his conversion to free trade.18 Gladstone was not a member of the Commons in 1846, but he would almost certainly have voted against free trade in sugar. As a Conservative frontbencher in 1841, he had argued that ‘colonial interests alone’ could not protect the sugar duties and proposed that ministers should adopt an anti-slavery stance; Peel was not persuaded that there was much value in this and sought to highlight other arguments.19 In 1850, Peel and most of his close followers supported the cruisers and Russell’s government, yet Gladstone,   The Times, 21 March 1850, p. 4; S. Walpole, The Life of Lord John Russell (2 vols, London, 1889), vol. 2, p. 107. 16   The Times, 20 March 1850, p. 5. 17   BL, Hobhouse papers, Add. MS 61829: Hobhouse Diary: entry for 19 March 1850; Bethell, Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade, p. 324. 18   Huzzey, ‘Free Trade, Free Labour and Slave Sugar in Victorian Britain’, Historical Journal, 53/2 (2010): pp. 359–79; for contemporary criticism of Peel’s voting record on sugar, the cruisers and the slave trade, see Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 1850, cix, 1111–12. 19   BL, GP Add. MS 44819, fol. 66, 23 Aug. 1841, as cited in Gladstone Diaries, vol. 3, p. 133. 15

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unusually, did not follow Peel.20 In becoming a high-profile critic of naval suppression, the younger man was still heavily influenced by his anxieties about West Indian production. Given that he had just a few years earlier followed his leader, Peel, in repealing the Corn Laws, splitting the Conservative party and embracing free trade, Gladstone’s sympathies with protectionist arguments against the cruisers may seem strange. However, his heresy from Peelite politics was undeniably consistent, given his views on sugar.21 He worried about the prosperity of the sugar colonies and, like many Conservatives, he saw the withdrawal of the cruisers as a way to pressure for a restoration of sugar protection. Regretting the West Indies’ economic decline after emancipation, Gladstone saw Palmerston’s beloved cruiser system as a cynical, costly and bloody distraction; Whig free trade in sugar did much to encourage the slave trade to Cuba or Brazil, while the cruisers did virtually nothing to stop it.22 Punch expressed this criticism in a satirical take on the Whigs’ combination of free trade and naval force, in a poem published the day after Gladstone’s speech: I’m the Genius of Britannia, and, you know, I rule the waves, And I form’d a resolution to put down the trade in slaves, So I’ve fitted out a squadron, and it costs me very dear, At the lowest computation full a million pounds a year. Yet the slave-trade I’m maintaining all the whole I ‘gainst it fight, I support it with the left hand whilst I strike it with the right; Of slave-grown sugar, being cheap, a vast amount I eat, I have such a tender conscience, but a tooth so very sweet!23

In Parliament, the interests of the sugar colonies were, perversely, aligned with a laissez-faire policy towards Atlantic suppression as a means of pressuring for a protectionist policy towards sugar. In the cruisers controversy, Gladstone was trapped between his origins in West Indian money and the new direction of Peelite politics. He chose to pursue sugar protection as a debt owed to planters. As a member of the select committee, he had been one of the members calling for sugar protection to be restored as an anti-slave trade measure. On this matter, 20   Although Gladstone certainly admired Peel, it is possible that historians have underestimated the political differences between them. See R. Quinault, ‘Gladstone and Disraeli: A Reappraisal of their Relationship’, History, 91/304 (2006): pp. 557–76, at p. 559, and Richard A. Gaunt’s chapter in this volume. 21   Quinault, ‘Gladstone and Slavery’, p. 373. 22   Huzzey, ‘Free Trade’, p. 375; Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 19 March 1850, cix, 1168. 23   Punch, 20 March 1850, p. 130.

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the members of the committee split from their usual alliances along pro- or anticoercion lines and Gladstone differed from Hutt and the radicals.24 If he fundamentally disagreed with them on sugar protection, then Gladstone did, regardless, share some of the radicals’ views about the ills of naval coercion. Like other members of the select committee, he feared that the suppression treaties required Britain to exert imperial power which would, sooner or later, lead to war.25 Rather than convincing other countries to follow Britain’s lead in abolishing and suppressing their national slave trade, the violent cruiser system aroused national pride against abolitionists. Gladstone went further than his radical allies in predicting how Brazil could develop a domestic abolitionist movement if British coercion eased. He imagined that Brazilian emancipation would never be achieved through naval coercion, but out of domestic fears of a growing population of hostile slaves, who could anytime rise up in a bloody insurrection. Only Gladstone and four other members (including his Peelite comrade Lord Lincoln) were willing to endorse a resolution put to the select committee which predicted that a slave revolution, along the lines of that which had occurred in Haiti, was more likely to spur Brazilians to abolish their slave trade than bullying from the British Navy.26 The only way a military system of suppression could work, Gladstone reasoned, would require the repeal of the Sugar Duties Act, a doubling of the squadron, the right to search French and American shipping, an international agreement on the slave trade being piracy and a way of Brazil and Spain accepting their treaty obligations. Given only the first two of these requirements lay within Britain’s power, he saw no hope of achieving them. Rather than persist in a hopeless blockade, he suggested it was better to abandon all pretence.27 If Gladstone had painted the squadron as merely ineffective, then his arguments for saving the substantial cost might have been less persuasive. However, he insisted that: ‘I am not governed in the main by a desire to get rid of this charge [on the taxpayer]. I want to grapple with the question fairly, as a question of humanity and of philanthropy’.28 Like his radical allies, he emotively described the ways suppression caused greater suffering. In his speech, he argued that the cruiser system ‘does not diminish, but, on the contrary, has a tendency to increase the sum of human wretchedness’.29 Gladstone painted the horrors of the illegal slave trade, arguing that the conditions were far more wretched than     26   27   28   29   24 25

PP, 1849 (410), pp. xx–xxi. PP, 1847–48 (283), p. 71. PP, 1849 (1), p. xxv; Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 19 March 1850, cix, 1172. Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 19 March 1850, cix, 1170–72. Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 19 March 1850, cix, 1164. Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 19 March 1850, cix, 1164.

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anything during the legal slave trade prior to the 1807 Abolition Act. At that time, mortality rates had been between one eighth and one half of those in the 1840s.30 He had previously deployed his oratorical talents to defend slaveholding as a necessary evil and to champion the oppressive apprenticeship of free blacks after emancipation.31 Now he presented the suffering of enslaved Africans as an eminent reason to abandon the cruiser system. These arguments did little to convince Palmerston, Russell and their fellow supporters of the naval system that Hutt or his allies cared about Africans at all. Pacifist abolitionists within the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines’ Friend had welcomed alternatives to naval suppression, but became disillusioned with Hutt’s proposal when they realised he had no alternative strategy for state action against the slave trade.32 In Parliament, Hutt was, unsurprisingly, accused of abandoning Britain’s proud anti-slavery traditions and taking an un-Christian attitude towards the human cost of the slave trade. Gladstone rose to the challenge of defending the radical MP, rebutting the idea that his opponents had any monopoly on humanitarian motives. Speaking in 1850, Gladstone tried to drive home this point that ‘my Hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead [Hutt] does not mean to say the Government should maintain an indifference on the subject’, but preferred alternative tactics. Creating the opportunity for foreign countries to develop their own anti-slave trade measures was not, he insisted, the same as encouraging their Atlantic slave trades.33 Gladstone came under attack in similar terms. One critic of Hutt’s select committee dismissed the members opposed to the cruisers as lacking any experience of colonial affairs, with the exception of Gladstone, whose efforts only exposed ‘his undisguised Slave-trading bias’.34 By 1851, Gladstone was accused of being a secret supporter of an unchecked slave trade. Like both Tory and radical opponents of military suppression, he hoped to see more immigration of indentured labourers to the West Indies. This would drive down wages, reviving the profitability of the failing colonies’ sugar cultivation. Because the cruisers’ enemies had painted the naval system as an impediment to the unchecked flow of these ‘free’ labourers from Africa and elsewhere, rumours quickly spread that   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 19 March 1850, cix, 1164.   I. Gross, ‘Parliament and the Abolition of Negro Apprenticeship, 1835–1838’, English

30 31

Historical Review, 96 (1981): pp. 560–76, at p. 569. 32   The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines’ Friend, 1 April 1850, p. 50; Hutt said this was not the case, but did not reveal what was his alternative plan: Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 1850, cix, 1183. 33   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 19 March 1850, cix, 1160. 34   [Sir G. Stephen] ‘A Barrister’, Analysis of the Evidence Given Before the Select Committee Upon the Slave Trade (London, 1850), pp. 3, 46.

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those in favour of withdrawal wanted to see a revived slave trade. Hence, one pamphleteer suggested that he had penned a critique of schemes to regulate rather than suppress a trade in enslaved Africans for tropical labour, warning that William Gladstone was suggesting this scheme. While some ideas along these lines were discussed, most politicians, including Gladstone, did not foresee such a drastic volte face and drew clear differences between indentured migration and a regulated slave trade.35 William’s father, Sir John, had pioneered the recruitment of Indian labourers for his estates in Guiana soon after emancipation, which earned the censure of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society as ‘the Gladstone slave trade’.36 It was an easy connection to make for those placing the younger man’s motives under such suspicion, although he and his father had both supported the abolition of slave trading (as opposed to slave ownership) by British subjects.37 In fact, rather than simply suspending his freetrade principles to serve the established interests of his family, the son’s position was far more complex. Gladstone’s approach to slave trade suppression was a fusion of the two contradictory impulses in the anti-coercionist coalition; he personified the strange alliance between laissez-faire radicals and Tory protectionists. With the anti-coercionists defeated, Palmerston’s military anti-slavery policy apparently triumphed and, in the months after the 1850 vote, Palmerston’s new burst of gunboat diplomacy dispersed previous scepticism about the cruisers because it was followed by Brazilian anti-slavery action.38 It seemed as if violence had been vindicated, but the differences exposed over suppression would reappear in later Victorian politics. Throughout his later career, Gladstone struggled against those who believed the interests of British trade and civilisation were best advanced with force. To appreciate the dimensions of this controversy for early Victorian politics and the development of Liberal politics, it is helpful to examine the 1850 clash as a revealing glimpse of the ways in which his iconoclastic position on the slave trade reflected his past or future politics and the consistencies between them. This is possible by examining Gladstone’s

  Regulated Slave Trade: From the Evidence of Robert Stokes (London, 1851), p. iv; for a rare example of such a plan, see W. Allen, A Plan for the Immediate Extinction of the Slave Trade for the Relief of the West India Colonies (London, 1849), pp. 20–6. 36   Reporter, 14 July 1841, p. 158; Reporter, 29 Jan. 1840, p. 9; B. Premium, Eight Years in British Guiana: Being the Journal of a Residence in that Province from 1840 to 1848 (London, 1850), pp. 230–1; S.G. Checkland, The Gladstones: A Family Biography, 1764–1851 (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 321–6. 37   Quinault, ‘Gladstone and Slavery’, p. 373. 38   Bethell, Abolition, pp. 325–7. 35

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views on suppression through the three elements of his famous 1880 election slogan, ‘peace, retrenchment and reform’.39 Gladstone was never a pacifist, even if his greatest popular campaigns were strongly associated with pacific impulses.40 His support for Hutt’s motion was based upon a principled preference for peaceable means, but his earlier attitude to the slave trade showed pragmatism and flexibility. As Secretary of State for the Colonial Office – albeit for only six months, commencing in December 1845 – in Peel’s second ministry, Gladstone had exerted government pressure for other nations’ political action against the slave trade.41 One of his political mentors, Lord Aberdeen, had bullied Brazilian politicians over slave trade diplomacy with an Act of Parliament authorising the Navy to search Brazil’s shipping. This was the same high-handed tactic, backed by threats, which Palmerston used with Spain.42 Even if Gladstone made these accommodations with the suppression system, when serving in government in the early 1840s, he had developed a frustrated disdain for it by the end of the decade. In the short term, French invasion scares meant that Hutt’s calls in the last years of the decade were ill-timed.43 Despite their immediate failure, co-operation with Hutt and other Cobdenite radicals over slave trade suppression was part of Gladstone’s wider interest in tranquil international relations (explored by Deryck Schreuder in his contribution to this volume), which would flourish in his later electioneering. During the 1850s, his concern with British violence directed against a foreign menace surfaced again when he was of the few non-radicals to criticise the suppression of Borneo piracy.44 Gladstone would finally get the opportunity to end the suppression system on the west coast of Africa as prime minister from 1868, after Cuban abolition effectively undermined the Atlantic slave trade. He also repealed Lord Aberdeen’s Act, which violated Brazilian sovereignty in pursuit of slave trade suppression.45 This was not, however, a victory for pacifist anti-slavery, but a   E. Biagnini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 128–9, 136. 40   See Roland Quinault’s chapter in this volume. 41   D.W. Bebbington, William Ewart Gladstone: Faith and Politics in Victorian Britain (Grand Rapids, 1993), p. 105. 42   On the Act, see W.D. Jones, ‘The Origins and Passage of Lord Aberdeen’s Act’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 42/4 (November 1962): pp. 502–20. On Aberdeen and Gladstone, see Hawkins, ‘Forgotten Crisis’, p. 294. 43   P.M. Mbaeyi, British Military and Naval Forces in West African History, 1807–1874 (New York, 1978), p. 61. 44   A. Middleton, ‘Rajah Brooke and the Victorians’, Historical Journal, 53/2 (May 2010): pp. 381–400 at p. 394. 45   Quinault, ‘Gladstone and Slavery’, p. 378. 39

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reflection, it seemed to contemporaries, of the success of Palmerston’s policy. The cruisers were not actually withdrawn, but their duties were refocused on the protection of British settlements and commercial interests from 1870, their command paired with that of the Cape squadron.46 These changes were part of Gladstone’s wider assault on naval expenditure that would be characteristic of his later governments. He was pessimistic about the use of naval power for all foreign and imperial policy problems. Ideologically, this was a shift for Liberal foreign policy away from Palmerston’s preference for military menace and towards a co-operative commercial order.47 However, Gladstone’s attitudes towards military intervention were not simply a migration towards Cobdenite radicalism. His support for Hutt’s motion first highlighted such an affinity with free-trade ideas, but his views on foreign policy also reflected the Tory colonial interests of his family background. John Gladstone favoured protection in all things and so differed from his son, after 1846, about the best means for promoting British trade (except on sugar, where William had made an exception). However, the elder Gladstone had been a bitter critic of Palmerston’s gunboat diplomacy in China, rueing the disruption for British merchants and the damage to emerging commercial partnerships with foreigners. In this sense, William shared with his father, as well as Cobden, a distaste for national rivalry rather than international co-operation.48 Hence, his 1850 scepticism towards the role of force in suppressing the slave trade was a point of consistency with both his past and future politics. The Political Examiner praised Gladstone’s opinion that the ‘beam in our own eye should be quite enough to occupy us’, in place of attempting to cultivate moral anti-slavery sentiments at the barrels of a gunboat.49 Gladstone’s pronouncement during the 1850 debate that ‘[i]t is not an ordinance of Providence that the government of one nation shall correct the morals of another’ foreshadowed the stance that he was sometimes to take up in later decades.50 Viewed through this prism, Gladstone’s concern for the expense and uselessness of the suppression system was not hard-hearted, amoral economy. Rather, Gladstone saw expenditure on a naval blockade as damaging to the global forces of civilisation as it was detrimental to the British taxpayer. He spent 46   Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade, pp. 386–7; D. Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1980), p. 325; A. Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 113–14. 47   B. Semmel, Liberalism and Naval Strategy: Ideology, Interest, and Sea Power During the Pax Britannica (Boston, MA, 1986). 48   Checkland, Gladstones, pp. 326, 332–3. 49   The Political Examiner, 23 March 1850, p. 177. 50   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 19 March 1850, cix, 1162.

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the day of the debate, 19 March 1850, reading pamphlets and papers on the slave trade and his speech reflects this research.51 With characteristic attention to detail, his attack on the cruisers used statistical evidence from his reading to suggest that the naval system had been entirely ineffectual. He made great play of the qualified criticism of the West African squadron’s commander, Sir Charles Hotham, who had criticised the results of British policy, liberally interpreting his evidence to the select committee.52 Gladstone’s case was not based on financial cost, but rather the derisory or negative impact the humanitarian crusade had on the slave trade. He argued that suppression had merely driven up profitability by introducing more ‘hazard and adventure’ for slavers, but this did not itself affect the attractions of the middle passage for slave traders.53 His leading questions to witnesses during the select committee hearings make it clear that he was seeking the evidence to document this line of reasoning.54 Through this economic reasoning, Gladstone suggested that the state had unintentionally protected the profits of the slave traders to Brazil, when only domestic Brazilian habits could end the market’s demand. Because of the antagonism with Britain, fraternal commerce and anti-slavery sentiment had failed to develop between the two nations. The Morning Chronicle pointed readers to Gladstone’s speech as the best source of factual analysis, though his opponents regularly criticised his selectivity and distortion of data.55 The withdrawal of the slave-trade cruisers was conceived as an act of retrenchment, expressing faith in the ability of commerce between peoples to achieve what the dead hand of state coercion could not. Like protection, the military option was an expensive way to make the world worse off.56 On this issue, though not always on others, Gladstone’s arguments merged with the laissez-faire foreign policy of Cobden, whom Anthony Howe has highlighted as an overlooked influence on Gladstone’s political ideology.57   Gladstone Diaries, vol. 4, p. 194, 19 March 1850.   A prominent naval officer who had served in the slave trade patrols, charged him with

51 52

deliberately manipulating the select committee hearings to misrepresent Hotham’s views when they did not suit his own: J. Denman, The African Squadron and Mr. Hutt’s Committee (London, 1850), p. 18. 53   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 19 March 1850, cix, 1161. 54   PP, 1847–48 (536), p. 76. 55   The Morning Chronicle, 20 March 1850, p. 5; ‘Barrister’, Analysis of the Evidence, p. 50. 56   On popular radicals’ thirst for retrenchment, which even Gladstone could not quench, see Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, p. 137. 57   A. Howe, ‘Gladstone and Cobden’ in D. Bebbington and R. Swift (eds), Gladstone Centenary Essays (Liverpool, 2000), pp. 113–32. For Cobdenite and Palmerstonian foreign policies, see A. Howe, ‘Two Faces of British Power: Cobden Versus Palmerston’ in D. Brown and M. Taylor (eds), Palmerston Studies II (Southampton, 2007), pp. 168–92.

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The inconsistency of Gladstone’s position in 1850 was his stubborn support for a restoration of the sugar tariff, on which he disagreed with the Cobdenites. Within just a few years of Hutt’s defeat, Gladstone would serve alongside Russell and Palmerston in Lord Aberdeen’s coalition, as Chancellor of the Exchequer. His first Budget, in 1853, removed tariff protection from a range of goods and reduced it for others. Ironically, he did not alter the Whigs’ tapered plans to reduce the sugar duties, despite his previous support for sugar protection.58 This must, partly, have been an acceptance of reality, since Parliament had reaffirmed support for naval suppression and free trade in sugar so recently. Indeed, to have done otherwise would also have wrecked the coalition with the Whigs. It also demonstrated a further departure from his origins as a partisan of the West Indian interest. More importantly, Gladstone’s enthusiasm for a lighter, commercial touch in taxation policy reflected a developing sympathy with the broader laissez-faire implications of his Peelite trade policies. The future prime minister’s complex, evolving attitude towards Africa was an outgrowth of these principles. In his 1850 speech, he appealed to his involvement in Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton’s Niger expedition a decade earlier in 1839–41. Arguing that ‘the only means of effectually extinguishing the slave trade, lay in the cultivation and civilisation of Africa’, Gladstone used his role in that mission to avoid accusations of immorality and inhumanity.59 His involvement in this anti-slavery project had been useful to Buxton precisely because it was unexpected. The involvement of a Tory associated with the West Indies showed the breadth of political interest in the plan. However, it also ensured some friction within the group. Gladstone objected to the second half of the committee’s choice of name – the ‘Society for the Suppression of the Slave Trade and the Civilization of Africa’.60 He is likely to have embraced the idea of a commercial venture as a prospective alternative to the cruisers. Buxton’s manifesto for the initiative despaired of the chances of the Navy alone suppressing the Atlantic slave trade. The hope that the Society, rather than private commercial exchanges, could shape the ‘civilization’ of the continent was likely the part he doubted. An emphasis on ‘legitimate’ trade suppressing the slave trade was an article of faith for the anti-coercionists of 1850 and for the ministers defending coercion too. Even if the cruisers remained, Gladstone, as Chancellor in 1853, held firm in his belief that British trade policy was key   Hawkins, ‘Forgotten Crisis’, p. 292.   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 19 March 1850, cix, 1158. 60   Howard Temperley, White Dreams, Black Africa: The Antislavery Expedition to the River 58 59

Niger, 1841–1842 (New Haven and London, 1991), p. 32; Gladstone Diaries, vol. 3, p. 32, 27 May 1840.

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to weaning West African nations off the Europeans’ slave trade.61 He heralded his abolition of the soap tax as a vital anti-slavery measure, tactfully explaining that while ‘[s]ome have thought the means of force used are unavailing’, now ‘all agree that the promotion of legitimate commerce would be most satisfactory, the most effective, and the most desirable of all instruments you can apply’.62 By admitting palm oil soaps into the British marketplace, Gladstone promised to help cleanse West Africa of the slave trade. It may have been an addition, rather than an alternative, to British sea power, but it reflected the principles of retrenchment as action rather than inaction against the world’s evils. In this sense, opposition to naval suppression was a typically Gladstonian form of reform. Because he viewed the slave trade as a ‘gigantic and extraordinary evil’, he was unwilling to accept an apparently ineffective status quo.63 Moreover, the Gladstone of 1850, criticising expenditure on slave trade operations, was not so far from the emotive moralist of the Bulgarian Atrocities during the later Midlothian campaign as we first assume: in criticising the military policy, he was not adopting the indifferent realpolitik of Beaconsfieldism.64 Sentimental descriptions of British sailors or African slaves suffering as a result of the naval suppression system were often used during the debates, giving them the character of moral reform rather than dry economy. Gladstone feared that naval operations would become a reflexive national tradition, unexamined and untouched by ministers despite the damaging consequences. Withdrawal of the cruisers, then, could be an iconoclastic challenge and the promotion of new ways of solving old problems, rather than mere reaction or amorality. The facts of the mid-nineteenth-century suppression controversy suggest a number of observations for the history of anti-slavery and Gladstone’s politics. As Roland Quinault has shown, Gladstone never entirely resolved himself to a proactive abolitionist policy, even if he condemned the slave trades on the west and east coasts of Africa.65 Yet as soon as he had wound up the anti-slave trade operations of the Navy on the west coast, his first government was pushed by popular outcry to support Bartle Frere’s mission to Zanzibar in 1874. This led to new diplomatic and military commitments on the east coast of Africa, which would shape British colonisation of the continent in the last quarter

  Quinault, ‘Gladstone and Slavery’, p. 375.   William Gladstone, Speech of the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Financial State

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and Prospects of the Country (London, 1853), p. 48. 63   Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 19 March 1850, cix, 1163. 64   On the Midlothian Campaign, see R. Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, 1876 (London, 1966). 65   Quinault, ‘Gladstone and Slavery’, pp. 363–4, 381.

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of the nineteenth century.66 The fact that Gladstone did not or could not resist this public enthusiasm, despite his lingering scepticism, is a sign of the continuing appeal of anti-slave trade sentiment, even at a time of increasing racial prejudice. Beyond demonstrating the strength of national concern, it also shows Gladstone’s willingness to work with the grain of public opinion on slave-trade issues. While preferring commercial to military operations against the slave trade throughout his career, the People’s William successfully avoided future collisions with public attachment to military anti-slavery operations. For Gladstone, the cruiser debate represented an important period in transition, as he worked with radicals (to his own surprise) and as he constructed a new framework of political principles, including a reluctance to use military force. This was a foretaste of his subsequent disdain for the muscular foreign policy of Palmerstonian liberalism. Historians have long struggled to understand why and how Gladstone’s politics evolved and, lately, have emphasised a ‘dialectic’ quality in his ideas. The Grand Old Man’s political thought was founded on a belief in the evolutionary character of the world, born from a providential faith in God’s unfolding plan.67 This perspective helps us understand how his role in the cruiser controversy could be both rooted in his Tory and Liberal politics. Colin Matthew observed that after Gladstone’s first decade in politics, ‘he never again attempted, as he had … [earlier in life], first to state an abstract principle, then to work it out in politics’. The post-Conservative Gladstone ‘invested practical measures with abstract principle; here lay one of the secrets of his great public success’.68 This seems to be a formula to apply to the cruiser debate, as Gladstone moved from perceived ineffectiveness to principled arguments for retrenchment and an alternative strategy. The middle-aged Peelite MP’s role in the passing slave trade emergency of 1850 was not the last gasp of filial Toryism or a first blow for Gladstonian zeal. Rather, it was a confusing, complex experience in his transition from one to the other and a sign of the tumultuous politics of anti-slavery in particular and of the uncertainty of the 1850s in general. No wonder that Gladstone ‘was much amused’ at the novel support he won for his intervention in the suppression debate.

66   R.J. Gavin, ‘The Bartle Frere Mission to Zanzibar, 1873’, Historical Journal, 5/2 (1962): pp. 122–48. 67   For an excellent recent summary of literature on Gladstone’s consistency or inconsistency – and a discussion of the role of dialectic in his political thought – see the textbook by I. St John, Gladstone and the Logic of Victorian Politics (London and New York, 2010), pp. 391–7. 68   Matthew, ‘Introduction’ in Gladstone Diaries, vol. 3, p. xlii.

Chapter 13

Gladstone’s ‘Greater World’: Free Trade, Empire and Liberal Internationalism Deryck M. Schreuder

‘Read Dilke’s Greater World’, W.E. Gladstone noted in his diary on Wednesday 11 November 1868, while wintering at Hawarden Castle, his country estate near Chester in North Wales.1 It is one of the few significant mistranscriptions in that extraordinary life-journal of recording books read and time spent, both public and private.2 In Charles Dilke’s best-selling travel volumes of that season, the young radical imperialist had, of course, only explored ‘Greater Britain’ when recording his global circumnavigation of the Anglo-world – across the Americas and the wider British Empire of migrant settlement in the southern hemisphere.3 Gladstone’s mistake is surprising because his marginalia comments in the book show how closely he had read it. Yet Gladstone’s simple slip of the pen also reveals the new British prime minister’s presumptions about the international status, suasion and influence of his ‘England’ (Gladstone rarely spoke of ‘Britain’). The Victorians indeed lived at the centre of a pax Britannica.4 Writing in The North   M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew (eds), The Gladstone Diaries (14 vols, Oxford, 1968– 1994), vol. 6, p. 685 and fn. 9, Wednesday 11 November 1868. 2   In addition to The Gladstone Diaries, J. Morley’s three-volume Life of William Ewart Gladstone (London, 1903) remains an invaluable biography and personal memoir. C. Matthew’s two-volume study, Gladstone, 1809–74 (Oxford, 1986) and Gladstone, 1875–98 (Oxford, 1994) expands on his own trenchant introductions to the Gladstone Diaries. For a more iconoclastic perspective, see the important recent study by R. Shannon, Gladstone: God and Politics (London, 2007). 3   C.W. Dilke, Greater Britain (2 vols, London, 1868). For the wider contemporary reception of Dilke’s best-seller, see A.P. Thornton, The Imperial Idea and its Enemies (London, 1959), pp. 21, 39. 4   See J. Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise of the British World System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge, 2009); B. Nasson, Britannia’s Empire: Making a British World (London, 2004); R. Johnson, British Imperialism (London, 2003); N. Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2003); T. Lloyd, Empire: A history of the British Empire (London, 2001); B. Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British imperialism, 1850–1950 (London, 2004); P. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2000 (London, 2000); D. Judd, Empire: The British Imperial Experience from 1765 to the Present (London, 1996); J. Belich, ‘To Replenish the earth’: The 1

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American Review (in 1878), Gladstone himself could memorably describe his own society as ‘the head servant in the great household of the world’. However, despite being the leader of one of the major great powers of the day, Gladstone appeared at times to be a ‘Little Englander’, one who argued that the strength of England was essentially in England.5 Gladstone was certainly the most reluctant of foreign interventionists or unilateralists. He confessed himself uncomfortable with military ventures (though he could evince a righteous fervour when assaulting wrong-doing states). He vehemently opposed Disraeli’s ‘new imperialism’ from the 1870s.6 In his passion for a Victorian version of individual human rights – from Italians to Cretans to Bulgarians to Armenians – he called for international humanitarian action.7 Even in his most inflammatory anti-Turkish language (over the Bulgarians), Gladstone developed no ‘axis of evil’ to shape a crusading global foreign policy.8 Indeed, his fundamentally internationalist outlook pointed in the opposite direction – hence the stinging Tory rebuke that Gladstone was the spirit of negation in foreign politics: with his concern for collective action by the great powers, Gladstone was certainly the ideological enemy of Realpolitik. In E.H. Carr’s famous categorisation of international relations – between the realists and the idealists – Gladstone stood with Woodrow Wilson and the other moralising idealists.9 Inter-war liberal scholarship after Versailles indeed saw ‘Gladstonianism’ as containing the germ of the idea of a League of Nations.10 Palmerston may have been an actively ‘truculent defencifist’ of the national interest – Martin Ceadal’s nicely nuanced phrase – but Gladstone himself

Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1873–1939 (Oxford, 2009); and, of course, W.R. Louis (general editor), The Oxford History of the British Empire (5 vols, Oxford, 1998). 5   P. Knaplund, Gladstone and Britain’s Imperial Policy (1927; London, 1966). 6   See C.C. Eldridge, England’s Mission: The Imperial Idea in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli, 1868–1880 (London 1973). 7   See M. Schwartz, The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Era of Disraeli and Gladstone (London, 1985). 8   B. Porter, Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World (Yale, 2006); R.B. Silvers (ed.), Come: American Power after Bush (New York, 2008). 9   Wilson even had an image of Gladstone on his professorial and presidential desks. Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The United Nations and the Quest for World Government (London, 2007), p. 178. For the idealist/realist dichotomy, see E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London and New York, 1964). 10   J.L. Hammond and M.R.D. Foot, Gladstone and Liberalism (London, 1952); J. L. Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation (London, 1938), with incisive commentary by M. R. D. Foot (London 1964); and J. L. Hammond, ‘Gladstone and the League of Nations Mind’, in H. A. L. Fisher et al. (eds), Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray (London, 1936).

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remained a highly ‘selective interventionist’.11 That he largely promoted this approach through a range of collective diplomatic vehicles, preferably the old ‘Concert of Europe’, otherwise in appropriate ‘coalitions of the willing’, acting in the name of public opinion and public law. Gladstone certainly set his face sternly against all bellicosity in foreign and imperial policy. He could be troubled over direct unilateral exercise of force by a great power. Palmerston’s unilateral China policy in the Opium Wars, for example, accordingly appalled Gladstone’s internationalist statesmanship. But Gladstone was never a pacifist, for he stood firmly in the European ‘Just War’ tradition. ‘However deplorable wars may be’, as he declared flatly, ‘they are among the necessities of our condition; and there are times, when justice, when fact, when the failure of mankind, requires one not to shrink from the responsibility of undertaking them …’12 Britain went into the Crimean War in the name of the public law of Europe, and it took its stance in the Franco-Prussian war in the name of that same law regarding Belgium. Even the notorious 1882 Bombardment of Alexandria was (for Gladstone at least) undertaken in the name of that same public law of nations (and only after Anglo-French joint action failed to materialise).13 Gladstone, like many of his contemporaries, considered England a progressive nation fully aligned with the ‘Spirit of the Age’.14 But being Gladstone, he had again evolved his own moral and metaphysical view of mid-Victorian power and prosperity, of cultures and peoples, of Providence and history. This became the locus out of which his complex global politics were to find expression. To Gladstone, the world was indeed, as he often said, ‘merely a large room into which it has pleased God to place us’.15 Such a ‘God-given world’ was hardly static. It was imbued with change and possibility, of ‘right’ social ordering and of human redemption. His first major 11   Martin Ceadal, ‘Gladstone and a Liberal Theory of International Relations’, in Peter Ghosh and Lawrence Goldman (eds), Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain: Essays in the Memory of Colin Matthew (Oxford, 2006), pp. 74–94. The foundation study is by Paul Knaplund, Gladstone’s Foreign Policy (New York, 1935). 12   Gladstone cited in Deryck M. Schreuder, ‘“The Peacemaker”: Gladstone’s International Politics’, The Annual Gladstone Lecture, delivered at St Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden, North Wales, on Thursday 7 July 1994, p. 20. 13   R. Harrison, Gladstone’s Imperialism in Egypt (Conn., 1995); Matthew, Gladstone, vol. 2, pp. 130–49; Darwin, Empire Project, pp. 70–4; and R.E. Robinson and J.A. Gallagher, with A. Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London, 1961), pp. 122–59. 14   For the pre-eminence of the British in nineteenth century global affairs, see D.C.M. Platt, Finance, Trade and Politics in British Foreign Policy, 1815–1914 (Oxford, 1968); and R. Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914 (London, 2002). 15   Gladstone to son Willy, 22 October 1854, in D.C.Lathbury (ed.), Correspondence on Church and Religion of William Ewart Gladstone (2 vols, London, 1910), vol. 2, p. 154.

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publication, The State in its relations with the Church (1838), had revealed an illjudged support for an Anglican state Establishment to achieve his moral ends.16 Less obviously, that huge confessional tract pointed to a major fascination with the concept of the ‘religious nationality’ of a people – something which ultimately underpinned his own approach to the mid-nineteenth-century nationalist movements and of nation-making, of human rights and of ‘peoples struggling to be free’. As he put it: ‘The Almighty has allowed nations and peoples to exist in the main for themselves, and permitted them to be the first judges of their own destiny’.17 The earnest young Gladstone was fascinated with the concept of Divine Will. Later writings of this gottbetrunken man are drenched in the notion of ‘the Providential governance of the world’, as he declared in his Address on becoming Rector of Edinburgh University in 1860. ‘Divine care’, in his own meaningful phrase, extended to all humanity, with Gladstone’s God primarily concerned with ‘the recovery and renovation of mankind’.18 Ancient history and the classical Greeks also mattered greatly in Gladstonian thought, as David Bebbington’s scholarship has demonstrated: Gladstone believed that he saw in their writings (and society) a pre-figuring phase of the great Judaic traditions leading up to the Incarnation and the Christian era in history.19 In the famed (and controversial) A Chapter of Autobiography (1868), there came his declaration that over the centuries Christianity had been working to humanise and transform societies around the world – as humanity ‘moved from a stationary into a progressive period’.20 He would, therefore, have none of Tennyson’s anti-progressive gloom in Locksley Hall after 60 Years (1888).21 Not only was progress ‘absolute and without discount’, but, ‘on the whole … we who have lived fifty, sixty, seventy years back, and are now living have lived into a gentle time … reaping and not scattering, earning and not wasting’. Gladstone   R.J. Helmstadter, ‘Conscience and Politics: Gladstone’s First Book’, in J.B. Kinzer (ed.), The Gladstonian Turn of Mind, pp. 3–42; and D.M. Schreuder, ‘Gladstone and the Conscience of the State’, in P. Marsh (ed.), The Conscience of the Victorian State (Syracuse, 1979), pp. 73–134. 17   See K. Sandiford, ‘W E Gladstone and Liberal Nationalist Movements’, Albion 13/1 (Spring 1981). Gladstone’s comment is cited in Schreuder, ‘Peacemaker’, p. 21. 18   Gladstone, ‘The Place of Ancient Greece in the Providential Order’, reprinted in Gleanings of Past Years, 1843–79 (London, 1879), pp. 31–96. On ‘Divine Will’, see Matthew, Gladstone, vol. 2, p. 90. 19   D. Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics (Oxford, 2004); and D.M. Schreuder, ‘History and the Utility of Myth: Homer’s Greece in Gladstonian Liberalism’, in F. West (ed.) Myth and Mythology (Canberra, 1989). 20   Gladstone, A Chapter of Autobiography (London, 1868), reprinted in Gleanings from Past Years, 1848–79 (London, 1879), pp. 97–151. 21   R.T. Shannon, The Crisis of Imperialism (London, 1974), pp. 199–202. 16

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had ultimately come to hold a particular view of world history: there was, ‘going on a profound and mysterious movement whether we will or not, [which] is bringing the nations of the civilized world, as well as the uncivilized, morally as well as physically, nearer to one another, and making them more responsible before God for one another’s welfare’.22 Gladstone’s progressive Christian globalism was hardly a set of private, devotional beliefs. As he once publicly declared in 1877: Belief in God surely implies much more than He is superhuman and imperceptible. Over and above what He is Himself, He is conceived of as standing in certain relation to us; as carrying on a moral government of the world … and to dispose the course of events in such a way that, in general and upon the whole, there is a tendency of virtue to bring satisfaction and happiness.23

Towards other Christian traditions and peoples, Gladstone proffered an Anglican toleration (while noting where they were wrong); and non-Christian faiths he treated with conditional respect, but also with a missionary prospect.24 The doctrines of grace, and St Augustine’s inclusivity, informed his attitude to non-European cultures – though a residual antipathy to Islam endured. Gladstone had no modern theory of ‘corresponding theologies’ and we must not make him more of a cultural and theological pluralist than he really was. (He was certainly no cultural relativist). However, in general, Gladstone himself still held firm to a positive universal human prospect.25 Fascinated with social and belief ‘systems’, he happily referred to the ‘great social forces which move onwards in their might and majesty’. And he ultimately extended this into a linear ‘law’ of history itself: ‘When we contemplate many of the political societies, such as the Roman, the British, the American’, as he ultimately proposed in his Studies   Gladstone cited in Schreuder, ‘Peacemaker’, p. 20   The Edinburgh Review, March 1877. 24   E.F. Biagini, Gladstone (London, 2000), pp. 88–9; and ‘Exporting “Western & Beneficent 22 23

Institutions”: Gladstone and Empire’, in D. Bebbington and R. Swift (eds), Gladstone Centenary Essays (Liverpool, 2000) pp. 214–17. See also Gladstone in ‘Aggression on Egypt and Freedom in the East’, The Nineteenth Century (1877), reissued as a pamphlet in 1884. 25   See B. Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988), chapter 9, pp. 340–72, and ‘Gladstone’s theological politics’, in M. Bentley and J. Stevenson (eds), High and Low Politics in Modern Britain. See also the pioneering study by D.W. Bebbington, William Ewart Gladstone: Faith and Politics in Victorian Britain (London, 1993); A. Ramm, ‘Gladstone’s religion’, Historical Journal, 28/2 (1985); and William Ewart Gladstone (London, 1989). More generally, see P. Butler, Gladstone: Church, State and Tractarianism (London, 1982) and J.H. Parry, Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and Liberal Party, 1867–75 (London, 1986).

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Subsidiary to Bishop Butler (1896), then, ‘their movement through successive stages is astonishing’. But each of these stages he saw as ‘a new argument of design’.26 Gladstone’s thought here perhaps reflected the redemptive trajectory of the Bible itself. But it certainly underpinned his occasional and extravagant claim that he stood on the side of history – as much in the name progressivism as of the angels. After the drama of ‘Midlothian’, he gravely noted in his diary for December 1879, on ‘having been morally forced into this work as a great and high election of God. And I certainly cannot but believe that He has given me special gifts of strength …’ Indeed, ‘I must here record my peculiar sense of divine support both physical and moral granted to me in Scotland’. And more generally: ‘Looking calmly on this course of experience, I do believe the Almighty has employed me for His purpose in a manner larger and more special than before, and has strengthened and led me on accordingly’.27 Gladstone’s notion of progress was also, therefore, the very opposite of raw utilitarian materialism on the march. His was more a case of ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’. As he reflected, his own age was becoming ‘predominantly a history of emancipation – that is enabling man to do his work of emancipation, political, economical, social, moral, intellectual’. It was J.H. Newman who early perceived that Gladstone’s ‘great object is the religionising of the State’. He might have added that it was also about ‘religionising’ the imperial map of Gladstone’s ‘greater world’.28 Modern Gladstonian scholarship has sometimes struggled to integrate Gladstone’s Christian beliefs with his politics – not least his exercising of executive power as a Minister of the Crown. Some writers have leaned towards the reductionist view that his religiosity was simply a rationalising afterthought to policy and diplomatic initiatives. The analytic problem is ours. Gladstone never claimed to act from Christian idealism alone, and he saw public life as the art of the possible. But his politics were deeply embedded in an intellectual and social vision which was steeped in a religious frame of mind. This provided him with an acute lens through which he viewed the nation and wider world. ‘The action of man in the State is moral’, he declared in his Chapter of Autobiography, ‘as truly as it is in the individual sphere’.29   Gladstone cited in Hilton, Age of Atonement, p. 344.   Gladstone Diaries, 28 and 31 December 1879; and Schreuder, ‘Gladstone and the

26 27

Conscience of the State’, p. 81. 28   Newman admired Gladstone, but was also highly critical of his attempts to draw together state, church and religion in his politics. See especially Lathbury (ed), Religious Correspondence on Church and Religion, vol. 1, pp. 69–70; and Schreuder, ‘Gladstone and the Conscience of the State’, p. 121. 29   Gladstone, Chapter of Autobiography, p. 146.

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Gladstone simply lived with the urgent reality of a ‘Divine Governing Power’, and the notion of a timelessly present God. Indeed, as Boyd Hilton has powerfully argued, the doctrine of Universal Atonement was here central to his kind of politics.30 Every global process carried moral and redemptive portent. Gladstone embraced ‘the immense opportunity which God opens before us …’ And he ultimately intuited a broad and complex providential pattern (or esign) in the unfolding human story: ‘God, as it were, takes the map of His own counsels out of the recesses of His own idea and graciously lays it near our own view; condescending, as it were, to make us partakers of His thought’.31 Great social change had brought great moral opportunity. In Gladstonian language again: ‘… the foundation of the Lord standeth sure; he will find instruments for his work, in His time, and happy are we if we are among them’. As an analytic explanation of both outlook and inspiration, we need here to take Gladstone at his own word. ‘Design was a key Gladstonian word’, Richard Shannon has acutely remarked. ‘It was his pertinacity in this quest, together with his immense natural energy and talents, that made Gladstone so formidable. Nothing was more confidence-inducing than a sense of divinely intimate embrace of Providence …’32 ‘Fear of the Lord’ was, therefore, no ritual incantation: it was a philosophy of immediacy and of action.33 And Gladstone was profoundly a man of restless action. In a private sense, this meant a Pauline ‘redeeming of time’ (the rationale for his famous diaries); more publicly, it focused on ‘agency’ – through good and great works.34 Politics became just such an individual agency, as a ‘high calling’ in an era of transformative change, and through the development of progressive ‘systems’ of government and law, political economy and international presence. The great issue of the 1879 campaign was, he stressed to the voters of Midlothian, more than just a party-political divide: ‘What we are disputing about is a whole system of Government’.35 Those emancipating social systems then focused not least on small government, liberty of opportunity and individual conscience: they would make for a great     32   33   30

See Hilton, Age of Atonement, chapter 9, pp. 340–72. Gladstone quoted in Hilton, Age of Atonement, p. 344. Shannon, Gladstone: God and Politics, p. 24. Gladstone to Granville, 19 May 1877: ‘The vital principle of the Liberal party, like that of Greek art, is action’. See A. Ramm (ed.), The Political Correspondence of Mr Gladstone and Lord Granville (4 vols: vols 1 and 2, London, 1952; vols 3 and 4, Oxford, 1962) vol. 1, p. 40. 34   ‘Introduction’, by M.R.D. Foot, Gladstone Diaries, vol. 1, pp. xix–xlix. 35   W.E. Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches 1879, with an Introduction by M.R.D. Foot (Leicester, 1971), p. 50. See the important study by E.F. Biagini, Liberalism, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Politics in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–80 (Cambridge, 1992). 31

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national community, where ‘community’ was a critical key to Gladstonian social theory and civic values: ‘I am much attached to decentralizing doctrines’, he once reflected in pointing to the moral virtue of strong local government.36 Those ideals would also animate Greater Britain overseas – his was a ‘liberal empire’ of kinship – and, even ultimately, his vision of the non-British world beyond that. With the lifting of the ‘dead hand of the state’ – a kind of secular original sin – a new human prospect had simply opened. ‘Modern times have established a sisterhood of nations …’ he frequently liked to assert.37 The progressive vista of Gladstone’s aspirations was accordingly never anchored in any Rostowian Model, involving global ‘stages of economic growth’.38 But it certainly did incorporate and rest on liberal capitalism, the market and individualism. These were the facilitating agencies which made possible communities of self-supporting and self-respecting citizens. This was never clearer than in his remarkable ‘Address to the Political Economy Club’ (in London) on the 1876 centenary of the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. ‘The operations of commerce are not confined to the material ends’, as he argued. Indeed, ‘that there is no more powerful agent in consolidating and in knitting together the amity of nations; and that the great moral purpose of the repression of human passions, and those lusts and appetites which are the great cause of war, is in direct relation with the understanding and application of the science [of political economy] which you desire to propagate’.39 Many Gladstone scholars have pointed past Adam Smith to the Burkeian foundations of Gladstone’s social outlook. But Gladstone himself sometimes happily disturbed traditions (and venerable histories) when it suited him to achieve social and moral ends. Laissez-faire and religious nationality were but part of his new thought. Breaking down bad old habits – social and economic – was equally vital. Part of Gladstone’s sheer protean character (and political capacity) thus lay in the fact that he was concurrently both conservationist ‘peacemaker’ and radical ‘troublemaker’ (to evoke A.J.P. Taylor’s famous descriptors).40   I thank David Bebbington for this emphasis; and Professor M.R.D. Foot for stressing the ‘conservationist’ tendencies in Gladstonian social theory and politics. 37   See Gladstone to Granville, 25 September 1870, in Ramm, Political Correspondence of Gladstone and Granville, vol. 1, pp. 130–31; and Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches, 1879, p. 128. 38   See the influential study by W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, 1960), chapter 2, ‘The Five Stages of Economic Growth’, pp. 4–16. 39   Gladstone, ‘Address’, 13 May 1876, cited in Matthew, Gladstone, vol. 2, p. 20. 40   A J P Taylor, The Troublemakers: Dissent over British Foreign Policy, 1792–1939, The Ford Lectures, Oxford 1975 (London, 1985), especially pp. 62–86. 36

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We should not be surprised. Gladstone’s temper directed him towards the purity of extremes; while his sense of action (and ambition) moved him back towards power. When young he had even flirted with ‘millenarianism’: ‘surely the actual signs of the times are as should make us ready for the coming of our Lord’;41 and, when older, it turned him increasingly to favour the visceral excitement of ‘worlds turned upside down’. Here was the source of both dramatic domestic reforms, and of those – apparently sudden – international interventions. He never doubted that the lodestone of conscience would ensure an ultimate purposefulness in his myriad of stratagems. As he once said admiringly of Daniel O’Connell’s dynamic career: ‘His boomerang always came back’.42 Long before Chairman Mao declared a ‘cultural revolution’, Gladstone had discovered the politics of purposeful social disturbance. He believed that he and his contemporaries lived in an era of dislocating change which required equally powerful changes in public policies. Old shibboleths were no good. Major policy interventions, and ‘Big Bills’, became his political preference. ‘There has been a great shaking in our times; and many have done no more than substitute a new set of mere opinions for the old’. Fundamentally, new options now had to be canvassed. This would come about through radical domestic institutional reforms (anti-slavery and temperance, Ireland and disestablishment, free trade, franchise and budget); and these were then paired externally, so to speak, with international interventions in the name of nationality or humanitarianism. Later, there was to be the invocation of popular opinion in his zealous adoption of ‘the Platform’ where he could emotionally appeal to masses over classes, and which indeed included his vision for a Greater Britain or Greater World. Ultimately, he drew the latter together in those extraordinary ‘Midlothian Speeches’ which amounted less to a programme for government and more of a national mission crusade. He himself proudly declared them to be ‘festivals of freedom’ and ‘interchanges of sentiment’. Gladstone’s famous ‘Six Principles of Foreign Policy’ read today more like a modernised set of Ten Commandments for international affairs than any projection of a grand strategy for a great power.43 In the end, Gladstone’s public life was centred as much on method as on ideology. I have written elsewhere about Gladstonian politics, both domestic and global, being a series of ‘experiments in truth’ – drawing from both careful social and policy study, coupled with high moral opportunism and high emotional energy (explosively fuelled by what Philip Magnus memorably styled as Gladstone’s occasional ‘mental earthquakes’), which infused a certain   Gladstone quoted in Schreuder, ‘Gladstone and the Conscience of the State’, p. 75.   Gladstone, ‘Daniel O’Connell’, The Nineteenth Century ( January, 1889): p. 167. 43   See Gladstone’s third Midlothian speech, Midlothian Speeches, 1879, pp. 114–16 and for 41 42

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fanaticism into some of his ‘missions’.44 The man himself seems to have thought that this extraordinary amalgam was indeed his major God-given political talent: it provided ‘right-timing’ and was potentially Providential. Gladstone’s own journal early records a sense of ‘Divine purpose pointing to the path I have chosen’. He later reflected privately that ‘if Providence has endowed me with anything which can be called a striking gift’, it had been revealed ‘at certain political junctures’. He was fascinated with the notion of ‘ripeness’ and ‘timing’ when it came to advancing evolving ideas and policy about social and international issues through a personal ‘appreciation of the general situation and its results’. Here was his way of feeling towards a providential direction in history: To make good this idea, this must not be considered as the mere acceptance of public opinion, founded upon discernment that it has risen to a certain height needful for a given work. It is an insight into the facts of particular eras, and their relationship to one another, which generates in the mind a conviction that the materials exist for forming a public opinion, and directing it to a particular end.45

Gladstone’s idealism did not blind him to the fact that he ultimately saw politics as ‘connecting itself with the silent changes which are advancing in the very bed and basis of modern history’. Politics had to be about the ‘attainable and practicable’.46 Gladstone’s concern throughout was not so much for the ‘national interest’ per se, but rather with a kind of ‘national project’ – the nurturing of a transformative and expanding ‘greater world’ within what he saw to be a progressive phase in world history. Laissez faire and free trade became the battle cries towards this ‘New Jerusalem’. ‘By pursuing such a course as this it will be in your power to scatter blessings among the people’, as he declared when introducing the Anglo44   P. Magnus, Gladstone; a biography (London, 1954), pp. 12, 49–50, 160–1. There is a vivid portrait of Gladstone’s personality in R. Jenkins, Gladstone (London, 1996) and P. Clarke has analysed his popular appeal in A Question of Leadership: Gladstone to Thatcher (London, 1991), chapter 1, ‘The politics of moral populism’, pp. 11–42. For ‘experiments in truth’, see Schreuder, ‘Gladstone and the Conscience of the State’, pp. 85–6. 45   Gladstone, Unfinished Autobiographical Note, 1890, printed in J. Brooke and M. Sorenson (eds), The Prime Minister’s Papers: W E Gladstone (London, 1871–81), vol. 1, p. 136. 46   Gladstone, Chapter of Autobiography, p. 98. Matthew, Gladstone, vol. 2, p. 90. See also Gladstone ‘Electoral Facts’, The Nineteenth Century (November 1867). See also M. Pugh, The Making of Modern British Politics, 1867–1939 (Oxford, 1982); T.A. Jenkins, The Liberal Ascendancy, 1830–86 (Manchester, 1994); B. Harrison, The Transformation of British Politics, 1869–1995 (Oxford, 1996); M. Winstanley, Gladstone and the Liberal Party (London, 1990); and J. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (Yale, 1993).

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French Treaty to the House on 10 February 1860. And exactly why? – ‘because in legislation of this kind you are not forging mechanical helps for men, nor endeavouring to do that for them which they ought to do for themselves; but you are enlarging the means without narrowing their freedom …’ .47 When it came to the application of such ideals in the global politics of ‘Colonial and Foreign’, as the famous ‘header’ in The Times expressed it, some commentators have pointed to an apparent absence of any such development. In fact, Gladstone’s ‘Greater World’ was, for him, a holistic construct. Domestically, he saw the genius of the nation embedded in a progressive community through participatory local government: ‘I think it lies at the root of our national aptitudes by teaching the art of government in various and limited but effective forms to those persons all over the land …’. As noted above, he thought he could detect a similar ‘movement’ globally.48 With Cobden, he indeed saw free trade as ‘God’s diplomacy’; and then he went further: trade (and migration) underpinned the progressive face of the new political economy around the world. Gladstone may have been ‘the most pacific of our statesmen’, in Walter Bagehot’s phrase, but he remained a man of power with a deep sense of responsibility to the nation as ‘Empire’. Disraeli was famously scornful of a Liberal imperial policy ‘to effect the disintegration of the Empire of England …’ , but Gladstone himself had his answer: ‘While I am opposed to imperialism, I am devoted to the Empire’.49 The issue for Gladstone was rather over how such power was to be exercised; and how the meaning of empire for the human prospect was to be realised. He may well have been an anti-expansionist; but he was certainly no ‘protodecolonizer’. As Sydney Checkland long ago emphasised, young Gladstone came from a major imperial family, of slaving estates and trading systems, including commercial ventures in the Indian Raj itself.50 Gladstone himself naturally saw the overseas estates as an integral part of the national patrimony, open to the same deep responsibilities of good governance and social improvement – the essence of his moral progressivism. Midlothian electors were to be told of the

  Gladstone introducing the Anglo-French Treaty of 1860 to the House of Commons, Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, 10 February 1860. For the immediate political context of Free Trade see Matthew, Gladstone, vol. 1, pp. 120–35. See also Schreuder, ‘Gladstone and the Conscience of the State’, pp. 93–4. 48   Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches 1879, pp. 46–7. 49   See Gladstone’s major article, ‘England’s Mission’, in The Nineteenth Century Review (September 1878). 50   S.G. Checkland, The Gladstones: A Family Biography, 1764–1851 (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 316–28. 47

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immorality of aggrandising imperialism (‘the lust for territory’); but also of the glories of the existing ‘great, wonderful, and world-wide [British] Empire’.51 The imperial record now speaks to this Gladstonian vision and engagement. Firstly, it is simply myth that colonial (and foreign) policy was an afterthought in Gladstonian politics; or an opportunistic gesture in Midlothian by an ‘old man in a hurry’. He certainly found the ‘imperial theatre’ – epitomised by creating Victoria as Empress of India – to be distasteful. Had he been prime minister after 1874, it is highly unlikely – as Oliver MacDonagh once acutely pointed out – that Gladstone would ever have bought those portentous Suez Canal Shares.52 Nonetheless, Gladstone’s statesmanship was still thoroughly imperial. I calculate, for example, that over his extraordinary 60-year parliamentary career at Westminster, he filled an astonishing 13,038 columns of Hansard, with nearly half of those speeches and interventions significantly devoted to Ireland, empire and global affairs (3,011 for colonial and foreign, and 2,102 for Irish affairs). Furthermore, there is a consistent involvement with issues of external power and empire, which mirror the evolution of his career, his interventions and his ‘missions’. It might even be argued that, through ‘empire’, Gladstone evolved some of his major domestic policy paradigms. For example, colonial self-government was an informing atavism in his evolving ‘home rule’ thinking about the United Kingdom; certainly the British North America Act (of 1867) became a major Canadian influence in the very drafting of the early Irish Home Rule bills. And a central justification for Irish Home Rule was always thoroughly imperial and colonial: simply offering, as he said to Sydney Buxton in June 1886, what had been done ‘with such advantage for Frenchmen in Canada, Dutchmen at the Cape, and for the children of convicts in Tasmania – to give her management, not of English, or of Scotch, or of imperial, but of Irish affairs’.53 Even Gladstone’s own curious ‘Gilbert and Sullivan-like’ imperial high commissionership to the Ionian Islands (1858–59) seems to have sharpened his

  Gladstone, ‘First Midlothian Speech’, 25 November 1879, Midlothian Speeches 1879, p. 47.   O. MacDonagh, ‘The Anti-Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review, 14

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(1962): pp. 489–501, responding to J.A. Gallagher and R.E. Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review, 2/6 (1953): pp. 1–15. See also F. Harcourt, ‘Disraeli’s Imperialism’, in Historical Journal (1980): pp. 87–109; and Eldridge, England’s Mission (London, 1973). 53   Gladstone to Sydney Buxton, 29 June 1886, Gladstone Papers, British Museum Add. MS 44548 f. 106. Analysed in D.M. Schreuder, ‘Locality and Metropolis in the British Empire: a Note on some connections between the British North America Act (1867)’ and ‘Gladstone’s first Irish Home Rule Bill (1886)’, in J.A. Benyon, et al. (eds), Studies in Local History: Essays in Honour of Professor Winifred Maxwell (Cape Town, 1976), pp. 48–58.

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thinking about that division of powers within the empire.54 And more generally, the success of religious pluralism in a diverse range of British settlement colonies certainly quickened his fascination with Anglican disestablishment at home – ‘Giving up Gold for Faith …’ as one of his provocative aphorisms put it. Even more tellingly of his imperial outlook, there is the national British fiscal data which indicates that, no matter what the Gladstonian rhetorical flourishes, his governments never wobbled on the importance of imperial trusteeship. Liberals paid for empire in a manner quite comparable with that of the supposedly more patriotic Conservatives. Seen within the overall expenditure on empire – defence, naval, consular, military expeditions – Liberal budgets actually rose steadily from 1868–69, never really to fall despite the occasional plateau in growth. Gladstone began as prime minister with an imperial commitment of some 22 million pounds sterling per annum, and that incrementally rose to some 26 million pounds by the time he lost power to Disraeli in 1874. The second Gladstone administration did indeed pull back the 1879 Conservative imperial budget vote (of 32 million pounds), but only slightly, to around 30 million pounds. And that is roughly where it stayed until the 1886 Budget (reflecting ‘much Africa’, as he put it – Egypt and tropical ‘Partitions’). The final Gladstone administration worked from the base of the Salisbury budget allocations, rising to 35.5 million pounds by 1895.55 In short, while Gladstonianism moralised the meaning of imperialism, Liberal politics never sacrificed empire-trusteeship for rhetoric. Indeed, Gladstone saw both power and Providence working together in the pax Britannica. Empire had its own ethical rationale, its own place in the systemic and providential ordering of the world. Moreover, Gladstone had created a ‘firewall’ in his thought between this empire of moral probity and an empire of constant aggrandisement – a lesson not all great powers have then or since been able to sustain. Empire could not be justified ‘unless you can show that you are qualified to make use of that territory for the purposes which God gave earth to men’.56   There is an excellent account of this bizarre venture in R. Holland and D. Markides, The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for the Mastery of the Eastern Mediterranean, 1850–1960 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 13–45. See also Matthew, Gladstone, vol. 1, pp. 163–4 for the broader meaning which Gladstone placed on the Ionian nationality; and M. Pratt, Britain’s Greek Empire (London, 1978) for the fuller narrative. See also C.B. Faught’s chapter in this volume. 55   The financial data is compiled from B.R. Mitchell and P. Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (London, 1971). For Gladstone’s final resignation (1895) over the naval estimates controversy, see H.C.G. Matthew, The Liberal Imperialists (Oxford, 1973). 56   See Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches 1879, especially his railway station speeches on Monday 1 December at Dumferline, Perth and Aberfeldy, pp. 164–79. 54

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For Gladstone, the British colonial emigrant became the vital agent of a global enlightenment process of both laissez-faire and cultural transmission: We think our country is a country blessed with laws and a Constitution that are eminently beneficial to mankind, and if so, what can be more desired than that we should have the means of reproducing [it] in different portions of the globe.

He concluded memorably: I think it is in a work by Mr Roebuck that the expression is used that the object of colonization is the creation of so many happy Englands [abroad].57

That ‘reproduction’ was to be typically dynamic within Gladstonianism. It did not mean direct imperial imposition: ‘We cannot stamp the image of England on colonies like a coat of arms upon wax’. But it did presume key British social and moral influences to create the right kind of Greater Britain overseas.58 Parallel to his key concern over the niceties of the household franchise at home, Gladstone advocated the emigration of landowners – as against traders – to the empire; and the creation of upper houses in colonial parliaments, in the hope of balancing raw democracy in the New World. Gladstone also constantly and naturally looked to the eager work of voluntary groups in the age of progressive colonial foundations: they were part of the vibrant ‘influences’ which ‘aim at moulding colonial measures and institutions as nearly as any to a British model’. And that naturally included the Christian churches of all denominations. (‘Nonconformists and Presbyterians I think I have always let off pretty easily’, as he once remarked).59 Even more than in Ireland – where he increasingly cast Anglicanism as a ‘mission church’ – he early accepted that Establishment was inappropriate in Greater Britain overseas: ‘the great conditions of social existence are so differently cast between us and them’.60

  See also, Knaplund, Gladstone and Britain’s Imperial Policy (1966). ‘Part 2’ usefully reprints Gladstone’s key policy declaration – ‘Our Colonies’ – delivered at Chester on 12 November 1853. The story of the remarkable diaspora of the British as migrants has been superbly evoked in E. Richards, Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600 (London, 2004). 58   Gladstone, ‘Our Colonies’, pp. 202–3. See also the reflective analysis of E.F. Biagini, ‘Exporting “Western and Beneficent Institutions”: Gladstone and Empire, 1880–85’, in Bebbington and Swift, Gladstone Centenary Essays, pp. 202–24. 59   Schreuder, ‘Conscience of the State’, p. 121. 60   Knaplund, Gladstone and Britain’s Imperial Policy, pp. 80–4. 57

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Gladstone could say that, of course, because he had now shifted his own Christianising enthusiasms to the work of mission agencies, not least through the Colonial Bishoprics Trust Fund, together with the appointment of the right missionary clergy. It excited Gladstone to think of these individuals as ‘men who have succeeded the Apostles not less in character than in commission’. Bishops Selwyn (New Zealand), and Gray (Cape Colony), were the ideal propagating agents ‘as to manners and fashions, and as to the tone which overspreads and harmonizes the whole’.61 It also followed that advances in the home democracy would be exported to the colonies – even if this meant radically redrawing the traditional ‘metropolitanperiphery’ relationship. History was naturally raided in legitimising theory. Influenced partly by the contemporary colonial writings of George Cornewall Lewis, and even more by George Grote’s celebrated 12 volume History of Greece (1846–56), Gladstone proclaimed a choice between Hellenic and Roman imperiums. ‘The Greek idea of colonization’ was, apparently, an empire of ‘perfect freedom’ – having been ‘founded from Greece not by action of governments, nor by the meeting of cabinets or by the acts of ministers but by the spontaneous members of the community themselves’. There had followed a ‘wonderfully rapid growth of greatness and prosperity’, combined with ‘the utmost warmth of attachment and affection to the mother country’.62 By sorry contrast in more recent imperial history, an entire empire had been lost in the Americas because the wrong model had been applied. The lesson was plain: experience has proved that if you want to strengthen the connection between colonies and this country – if you want to increase the resemblance between the colonies and this country – if you want to see British law held in respect, and British institutions adopted and beloved in the colonies, [then] govern them upon the principle of freedom.63

If this did not sound like an empire at all, then Gladstone was at pains to qualify the ideal with liberal practice. Freedom still involved reciprocity in imperial relations; even in his seminal 1853 Chester speech on ‘Our Colonies’, he identified a careful division between imperial and colonial responsibilities. 61   Gladstone had long been involved with the Colonial Bishoprics Trust Fund as a dimension of his early Tractarianism . See Matthew, Gladstone, vol. 1, pp. 98, 152. 62   Knaplund, Gladstone and Britain’s Imperial Policy, pp. 10, 20, 203–7 for Gladstone’s ‘Greek idea of colonisation’. More generally see J.M. Ward, Colonial self-Government: The British Experience, 1759–1856 (London, 1976). 63   Knaplund, Gladstone and Britain’s Imperial Policy, p. 225.

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Equally, over the moot issue of free trade (and tariffs), Gladstone held the view that what was good for England was good for those ‘Happy England’s Abroad’. He was, therefore, somewhat shocked when several of the major settlement colonies began to take self-government seriously and put in place their own tariff policies. Such colonial policies could bring the unity of a liberal empire near to ‘reductio ad absurdum’.64 But pragmatism and history, as usual, tutored and tempered Gladstone. He ultimately saw a liberal empire as a resilient ‘empire of association’. And he was indeed a supporter in Parliament when all the major colonial self-government acts were debated – from the early Australian and New Zealand bills in mid-century, through to the British North America Act (1867) and the Cape legislation (1871). He was even the promoter of the controversial retrocession of the Disraelian annexation of the Transvaal (1877), following Boer republican rebellion. This culminated in the Majuba Hill debacle for the British army under General Colley – leading to the Pretoria (1881) and London Conventions (1884).65 The Indian Empire appeared to sit in a slightly different category. By trade, investment and revenues (supporting a huge Indian army), India made England into a world power.66 But, even here a consistent Gladstonianism was at work. Partly this is because India epitomised the enduring conservationist tendencies in his politics, expressed as a special kind of high-minded trusteeship. ‘I hold firmly and unconditionally that we have a great duty towards India’, and he could declare: ‘we have no interest in India except the well-being of India herself ’. (He later even spoke rhetorically of ‘India for the Indians’).67 In practical terms, the Gladstone agenda meant nudging the Raj further towards more progressive, participatory and liberal policies in the name of good moral governance. During Lord Ripon’s viceroyalty (1880–84), the British promulgated reforms which called into active collaboration select sections of educated middle-class elite of urban India. This was to be singularly important in the long-term political dynamics of the Raj in the decades ahead.68   Quoted in Knaplund, Gladstone and Britain’s Imperial Policy, p. 108.   D.M. Schreuder, Gladstone and Kruger: Liberal Government and Colonial ‘Home Rule’

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(London, 1969), especially chapters 3, 4 and 7. 66   Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, pp. 9–13; F.H. Hinsley (ed.), ‘The Partition of Africa’, in The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. XI (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 622– 9; Darwin, The Empire Project, pp. 130–1. 67   Matthew, Gladstone, vol. 2, pp. 126–31, and Thornton, The Imperial Idea and its Enemies, pp. 43–4. See also the specialist studies by R.J. Moore, Liberalism and Indian Politics 1872–1922 (London, 1966); and ‘India and the British Empire’, in Eldridge, British Imperialism, chapter 3. 68   See Moore, Liberalism and Indian Politics (1966); and S. Gopal, British Policy in India, 1858–1905 (Cambridge, 1965).

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Perhaps emblematically, the later-nineteenth century empire was to become an increasingly uncongenial place for progressive Gladstonianism. The rise of new nationalisms and ‘new imperialisms’ – with their protective tariffs, alliance systems and territorial conquests – all put his kind of liberalism at a certain discount. Gladstone’s second administration (1880–85) constantly played catch up in dealing with the issues of instability at the margins of British tropical power. He was slightly amazed to find himself as one of the European ‘Partitioners’ of Africa (through the Berlin Congress of 1884) when he had personally abhorred European tropical colonialism, regarding it as a form of deranged statecraft. He had indeed once welcomed Bismarck to the conquest of the deserts and marshes of the Tropics.69 Local crises, national-interest jingoism and revitalised missionary humanitarianism ultimately forced imperial advances, albeit piecemeal and reactive. Then, over Egypt, Gladstone fatally misread the Arabi movement. He saw a major military threat to stability (and English bond-holders, of whom he was one) when, in fact, he was probably looking at the kind of proto-nationalist, middle-class rising (against the old Khedival rule), which elsewhere he had smiled upon. The nightmare was complete when the impetuous (and mystical) General ‘Chinese’ Gordon failed to get the British out of the Sudan, and was instead killed on the upper Nile by the Mahdi. Gladstone found himself suddenly transformed from GOM to MOG (‘Grand Old Man’ to ‘Murderer of Gordon’). It was to be a dramatic and chastening finale to his extended attempts to shape a liberal empire.70 When we review ‘Foreign’ (as against Colonial) in the Liberal reckoning, we broadly have an equally integrated Gladstonian world-view. His enduring search for ‘political systems’, and for the appropriate policy application of principle and conscience, began early in his career. Here he was a child of the postRevolutionary War settlements, and of the influence of conservative statesmen such as Castlereagh and Metternich in developing a ‘Concert’ of European powers.71 The Concert reflected his High-Church veneration of tradition and monarchical order of states; but, just as he gradually abandoned his pure High  D.M Schreuder, The Scramble for Southern Africa: The Politics of Partition Re-appraised, 1877–95 (1980; new edition, Cambridge, 2008). 70   Matthew, Gladstone, vol. 2, pp. 130–49, and Darwin, Empire Project, pp. 70–4 for the most balanced assessments. See also R. Harrison, Gladstone’s Imperialism in Egypt (Conn. 1995), and P.M. Holt, The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 1881–1898 (Oxford, 1958) for Arabi intervention, Gordon expedition and the Khartoum tragedy. 71   C.J. Lowe, The Reluctant Imperialists (2 vols, London, 1967); K. Bourne, The Foreign Policy of Victorian England, 1830–1902 (Oxford, 1970); M.E. Chamberlain, Pax Britannica: British Foreign Policy, 1789–1914 (London, 1988). 69

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Church position on matters religious, so Gladstone moved to a more liberal perspective on international relations. Those 1815 settlements were not so much ‘A World Restored’ (Henry Kissinger’s noted idiom) as a monarchical freezing of the post-Napoleonic order – allowing for no recognition of new political orders through new democratic liberalism.72 Gladstone not only came to develop a more dynamic view of the Concert, but he came to empathise with John Stuart Mill’s activist position in support of liberty – most powerfully developed in Mill’s Vindication of the French Revolution of February 1848. Every progressive government had ‘the right to assist struggling liberalism – by mediation, by money, or by arms, wherever it can prudently do so; [just] as every despotic government when aid is needed or asked for, never scruples to aid despotic governments’.73 From beginning with Castlereagh’s view of the Concert as an instrument for balancing the status quo among the major European powers, Gladstone had moved to embrace the influence and outlook of George Canning. This involved the evolution of the Concert as a standing means to collective security and a reflection of a dynamic European order.74 It has to be said that Gladstone also learned from Palmerston’s liberalism (if not from his English nationalism); and from his own close engagement with ‘Pam’ over the Italian Risorgimento. By natural instinct, Gladstone applied his own moral preoccupations to the Concert system and its traditional leadership. He all too easily moralised and personalised the drama of European power politics. Christian humanitarianism also stirred him towards activist (and emotive) foreign impulses – as was evident over the Neapolitan prisoners and then over the Cretans (1857) – where he engaged in his own public agitations to move the collective conscience of Europe. And, once he had become a man of executive power at mid-century, he began to articulate a view of the Concert which was thoroughly dynamic. Beyond security, it should be concerned to serve the development of a Christian order of nationalities; and it should also become a creative force in itself through the development and institutionalisation of a law of nations. Carsten Holbraad has incisively commented that Gladstone appears to have ‘involved himself as   I am indebted to the major pioneering work by C. Holbraad, The Concert of Europe: A study in German and British International Theory, 1815–1914 (London, 1970). See also: W.N. Medlicott, Bismarck, Gladstone and the Concert of Europe (London, 1956); M. Schwartz, The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Era of Disraeli and Gladstone (London, 1985); and J. Clarke, British Diplomacy and Foreign Policy 1782–1865: The National Interest (London, 1989). See also H. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problem of Peace, 1812–22 (New York, 1957). 73   Mill cited in Holbraad, Concert of Europe, p. 164. 74   Holbraad, Concert of Europe, pp. 164–5. 72

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the champion of morality. He saw England’s power as but one of the forces of progressivism in conflict with the enemies of nationality, reason, justice, humanity and international law’.75 The mature Gladstonian position on international politics and theory was soon to be put in place. Gladstone embraced Mill’s humanitarian impulse: namely, the actual use of collective action to support and relieve oppressed peoples in the name of liberty and nationality. As prime minister, Gladstone was constrained by cabinet solidarity and the national interest. Moreover, Gladstone was not naive over the limits of his own approach. As he once confessed to his redoubtable foreign secretary, Earl Granville: It is all a question of the application of principles. In moral forces, and in their growing effect upon European politics, I have a great faith; possibly on that very account, I am free to confess, sometimes a misleading one.76

Nor was he naive about the capacity of the Concert: ‘That Old Jade, the Concert’, as he remarked on several occasions. Yet, as he was still to write strongly to Catherine (his wife) in 1880, on the eve of becoming prime minister for the second time: It is the working of the European concert for the purposes of justice, peace and liberty, with efficiency and success, which is the great matter at issue. That has always been the ideal of my life in Foreign Policy; and if this goes forward rightly to the end (to enthrone a public law in Europe), it will be the most conspicuous instance yet recorded, the best case of success achieved [in my public life].77

Law was indeed vital within societies as well as between states. The ‘moral union of nations’, as Gladstone declared, was really vested in public values: ‘without public international right, there is no instrument available for settling the transactions of mankind except material force’.78 Gladstonian scholarship has undervalued that personal engagement with the development and practice of publicinternational law.79 One of Gladstone’s most intimate High-Church friends was   Holbraad, Concert of Europe, pp. 165–8.   Gladstone to Granville, 8 October 1870, in Ramm, The Political Correspondence of Mr

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Gladstone and Lord Granville, vol. 1, p. 140. 77   Gladstone to Catherine Gladstone, 10 October 1880, in A.T. Basset (ed.), Gladstone to his Wife (London, 1936); and Holbraad, Concert of Europe, pp. 168–9. 78   See Gladstone Cabinet Memorandum, 23 November 1870; Gladstone Papers (BM) Add. MS 44759 f. 203. 79   See Holbraad, Concert of Europe, pp. 186–93; and Matthew, Gladstone, vol. 2, pp. 20–1.

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Robert Phillimore, whose four volume Commentaries upon International Law (1854–57) infused mid-Victorian policy formulation. In publications (and in correspondence), Phillimore confirmed Gladstone in his profound view that ‘the necessity of mutual intercourse is laid in the nature of States, as it is of individuals, by God, who willed the State and created the individual’. Phillimore also offered Gladstone a ‘confessional jurisprudence’. From Burke he argued that ‘justice is the great conscience of mankind’, while from Hooker and Bishop Butler he projected an Anglican vision of ‘the commonwealth of Christendom’. Speaking at the inauguration of The Association for the Reform and Codification of the Law of Nations in 1880, Phillimore underscored the general Gladstonian position by proposing that ‘no foreign law … enjoins or sanctions an institution, custom or practice [which is] at variance with the immutable Laws of Right, written by the finger of God on the heart of man, or with those which have been the subject of His express Revelation, can be admitted into a Christian State’.80 Gladstone engaged widely with this new, progressive academic discipline; and he interacted closely with its major scholars beyond Phillimore. Montague Bernard, from 1859 the founding Chichele Professor of International Law and Diplomacy at Oxford, was an example. He focused on the key issue of ‘has the law of nations … the right to the name of Law?’; and he advanced an essentially Gladstonian answer. No person could henceforth live within the narrow confines of a national society alone: ‘He [now] belongs to a large family; he breathes a freer air’, and is integrally part of ‘the progress of civilization, which gave him a settled government and civil institutions, acquaints him with foreign nations and teaches him, [by] enforcing the lessons of the Gospels, his relationship to the whole human race’. Indeed, Bernard proposed the new concept of an ‘international society’. Yes, international law was ‘mainly a customary law, for the great society of states owns no legislator and has no international tribunals …’ But ‘it is [still] a society and therefore has a law’. Indeed: ‘we can already discern the slow but inevitable growth of a European public opinion’.81 At the practical and operational level, the new coda of international law had increasingly come to facilitate regular inter-state relations across a range of issues. The major proponent of this systemic approach was a significant Gladstonian supporter (until Irish Home Rule), John Westlake, ultimately Whewell Professor in Law at Cambridge. His special interest was arbitration and mediation between powers; and the controversial Alabama resolution – which we often associate with Gladstone alone – actually reflected his and his school’s normative approach to international affairs. Westlake ultimately believed that international law was one   For Phillimore’s role, see Schreuder, ‘Peacemaker’, p. 27.   Schreuder, ‘Peacemaker’, p. 26.

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of the greatest achievements of the Victorian age; and that it was all secured within a social vision which closely mirrored Gladstone’s own Christian globalism. ‘In our time there is a considerable shifting in belief in a commonwealth of mankind … [all] the stronger because the soil has been prepared by Christianity, and by the mutual respect which great States, literally equal in power and similar in civilization, cannot but help feeling for one another’.82 Gladstone’s positive outlook on the world, and on the course of modern history, became essentially alien to most of humanity after the historic divide of the Great War; and he all too easily became one of Lytton Strachey’s flawed Eminent Victorians. An earlier generation of scholars than our own (not least J.L. Hammond and Paul Knaplund) gave us the liberal internationalist to match Morley’s liberal emancipist. Hammond even detected a ‘League of Nations Mind’ in Gladstone, and he celebrated Gladstone’s ‘European sense’; while Paul Knaplund saw the genius of a Gladstonian idea in the modern Commonwealth of Nations.83 But they wrote before the rise of National Socialism and failure of the League of Nations to face down European fascism; while the modern Commonwealth of Nations has proved to be hard on liberal idealists – not least over civil and human rights violations. Liberal apologists of the same period also failed to consider why it was that Gladstone (and that generation of Liberal jurists) did not take the next, practical step in their idealising of the Concert (and collective security generally), by working towards an organisational structure for institutionalising Great-power diplomacy, peacemaking and international law. Instead, Europe triggered a World War in the early twentieth century through relying on rigid alliances and secret treaties between the great powers. The Collected Works of Professor John Westlake on international law symbolically appeared from Cambridge University Press in August 1914. The ‘Gladstonian Moment’ in international affairs now seems ultimately as transitory as the ‘Wilsonian Moment’.84 However, in the light of our generation’s travails over international affairs, there has come a more nuanced appreciation. In a trenchant recent history of the United Nations, Paul Kennedy has looked to the longue durée, and highlighted   Schreuder, ‘Peacemaker’, pp. 26–7.   P. Knaplund, ‘Great Britain and the British Empire’, in Hinsley (ed.), The New Cambridge

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Modern History (1962), vol. XI, pp. 383–410. 84   E. Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-determination and the International Origins of Anti-colonial Nationalism (Oxford, 2007). See also the challenging comparative study by R. Kelley, The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone (New York, 1969); and M. Bentley’s measured perspective in The Climax of Liberal Politics: British Liberalism in Theory and Practice, 1868–1918 (London, 1987). See also Matthew, Gladstone, vol. 2, p. 393.

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the crucial importance of the internationalist impulse provided by earlier liberal traditions – such as Gladstonianism – in both thought and action.85 Moreover, theories of collective security continue at the heart of international politics, along with the less dramatic but fundamental role of the jurisprudence of international law. And developing a ‘Global Commonwealth of Citizens’ – as Danielle Archiugi has recently argued – is an international vision that Gladstone would have absolutely have understood given his ideals of a common, progressive human comity of nations.86 Then there is the equally contested matter of how super powers handle their authority. It is all too easy to make ‘the national interest’ the exclusive rationale for exercising the latent capacity of an international order of major states. Finding a ‘more realistic balance between naïve idealism and cynical pragmatism’ is the huge challenge now placed before the Obama administration, for example; and it is one in which Gladstonian ideals and politics remain vitally germane. Furthermore, there is the question of how today’s great powers actually conduct the imperium which seems inevitably attached to their expansive activities in diplomacy, trade and regional authority. ‘Empire Lite’ has, in many ways, replaced the old colonial constructs. But the issue of dominance and development remains. In an empathetic study of America’s outreach, Niall Ferguson has still evoked ‘a Gladstonian critique of today’s inept imperialisms’, not least in Iraq.87 Finally, there is the huge and enduring matter of the ‘rights’ of individual human beings within an international society. The long nineteenth century – 1770 to 1920 – saw the rise of an admirable concern for the human condition across the globe, starting with the campaign against slavery but also extending to other victims of state oppression. Over the Armenians (1894), Gladstone proposed a clear international challenge for then and now: ‘Do not let me be told that one nation has no authority over another. Every nation, and it needs to be every human being, has authority on behalf of humanity and of justice’.88 Gary Bass’ recent best-selling book, Freedom’s Battle (2008), has charted the origins and fate of those humanitarian interventions. Gladstone is a central player in this extraordinary historical drama – not least over the Bulgarian atrocities in the 1870s – with the story extending well into the twentieth   Kennedy, Parliament of Man, pp. 5, 178, 282–4, 290.   See D. Archiugi, Global Commonwealth of Citizens (Princeton, 2008); and also S. Moyn,

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The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard, 2010). 87   Ferguson cited in G.J. Bass, Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (New York, 2008), p 378. See also N. Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London, 2004), pp. 218–20. 88   Gladstone on the Armenians, 29 December 1894, cited in Bass, Freedom’s Battle, p. 316.

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century.89 When UK Prime Minister Tony Blair delivered his noted Kosovo speech in Sofia in 1990, he evoked Gladstone directly: ‘Can the outside world simply stand by when a rogue state brutally abuses the basic rights of those it governs? Gladstone’s answer in 1876 was clear. And so is mine today’. Timothy Garton Ash has sharply portrayed Blair as ‘Tony Gladstone’.90 There is certainly something almost enduringly ‘Homeric’, if not actually heroic, about Gladstone’s extraordinary public journey. Reflecting on the life of one of Gladstone’s great contemporaries, Cardinal J.H. Newman, Terry Eagleton has recently remarked: he ‘had the guts of the great Victorians as well as their neuroses’.91 Gladstone had just such huge intellectual and moral courage in confronting the issues of his day – not only his own industrialising society, but of his nation within a ‘greater world’ in social and ideological transformation. He brought a particular idealist (and Christian) moral vision to the human condition, elements which gave contemporary charisma but which appear alien to our temper. In Colin Matthew’s penetrating observation: ‘Gladstone was thus both characteristic and bizarre’.92 Yet his world-view was grounded in a deep appreciation of international historical change, and it still offers a vibrant challenge as to how we might address common issues for our own even more globalised environment. Paradoxically, it is, therefore, Gladstone as international activist who speaks most strongly to the 21st century; while Gladstone as the pre-eminent European domestic liberal, remains essentially embedded in his pre-collectivist era of moral reform politics. The calls for humanitarian intervention grow more – not less – in our conflicted world; and in this new century alone there have been savage violations of human rights in Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia. But ‘action’ on what basis, and by whom, remain contested questions. In the case of Gladstone, the history of idealist engagement was hugely complex, especially regarding ‘humanitarian interventions’: 1876, for example, is alone hedged about with difficulties – relating not least to opportunism, political strategy, Christian commitments and anti-Muslim Ottoman governance in Bulgaria; it was also

  Bass, Freedom’s Battle, pp. 239–312.   T. Blair cited in Bass, Freedom’s Battle, p. 237; G. Ash cited on p. 378. But see also R.

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Quinault’s questioning of that assumption in his chapter above. 91   Terry Eagleton, ‘Washed in Milk’, a review of John Cornwell, Newman’s Unquiet Grave – The Reluctant Saint (London, 2010), in London Review of Books, 5 August, 2010, p. 10. Gladstone was in fact quite self-conscious about shaping his own place in history: see Deryck Schreuder, ‘The making of Mr Gladstone’s posthumous career – the role of Morley and Knaplund as “Monumental Masons”, 1903–1927’, in Kinzer, The Gladstonian Turn of Mind, pp. 197–243. 92   Matthew, Gladstone, vol. 2, p. 86.

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classic case of high moralising and policy overstretch, without enough concern for the domino-like consequences.93 That accepted, the Gladstone experience remains a rich source of reflection on international politics and the role of great powers. David Armitage has cautioned against believing that good history can guarantee good policy.94 But in the enduring international debate between realism and idealism – and of the false dichotomy between those policy poles – few case studies offer as much. The distinguished moral philosopher C.A.J. Coady has recently cautioned against the dangers of simple ‘moralism in thinking about politics and particularly foreign affairs’; about ‘confusing morality with moralism’; as well as ‘persistently substituting a vague concept of national interest for a more robust and realistic understanding of morality’.95 This exactly captures the conceptual (and political) challenges with which Gladstone struggled across a lifetime of engagement with his ‘Greater World’. He plainly had varying success. But there was striking originality, and enormous moral commitment, in what he attempted within international affairs – something which we dismiss at our own cost, including our self respect as global citizens.96

  R.T. Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, 1874 (London, 1963); and ‘Midlothian: 100 years after’, in P.J. Jagger (ed.), Gladstone: Politics and Religion (London, 1985), pp. 88–103. 94   D. Armitage reviewing G. Bass, Freedom’s Battle in Times Literay Supplement, 23 May 2009, p. 8. 95   C.A.J. Coady, Messy Morality (Oxford, 2009), p. vii. 96   See M. Ignatiev in The New Republic, reprinted in The Weekend Australian, 11–12 October 2008, pp. 8–9: ‘We are not done with evil, and so we are done with humanitarian intervention. Its time will come again; or it had better come, if we are to continue to respect ourselves’. 93

Part VI EPILOGUE

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Chapter 14

Gladstone’s Legacy Eugenio Biagini

A Grand Old Legacy On 18 April 1992, The Economist devoted its leading article to ‘A prophet of the Left’. This was neither Marx nor Gandhi, but Gladstone. He dominated the magazine’s cover illustration, where he was represented surrounded by the microphones of journalists eager to pick his brains on current political affairs. For the occasion, the ‘Grand Old Man’ was pictured wearing a colourful green coat, embroidered with red, yellow and purple roses. As the roses and their colours suggest, The Economist was recommending this ‘postmodern’ version of the great Victorian reformer as a model for both Labour and the Liberal Democrats, with the editor insisting that Gladstone symbolised a radical philosophy which continued to be relevant to British society. After over a decade of Thatcherism, during which time ‘Victorian values’ had become almost a Tory rallying cry, it was remarkable to see the arch-Victorian Gladstone being identified as a suitable model for the Left. However, what was even more interesting was that the leaders of both the Liberal Democrats and the Labour party soon started to behave as if they were actually taking the Economist’s advice to heart. Certainly they were perceived to be doing so by both the press and political analysts. So, what made Gladstone’s legacy politically relevant on the eve of the new millennium? In order to answer this question, this chapter will start by summarising Gladstone’s liberalism and how it influenced early twentiethcentury radicalism. It will then return to the revival of his reputation from the 1990s. Although Gladstone enjoyed a long and complex political life during which he was closely identified with a wide range of different policies, it will be argued here that what mattered most for the Left in the twentieth century was the last phase of his career, starting in 1876. Until then the ‘People’s William’ had been famous primarily as the champion of free trade and laissez-faire. By contrast, over the following twenty years his reputation depended on his attitude to foreign policy and Ireland, one involving a synthesis of principles both political and religious.

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The Grand Old Man’s Public Image Gladstone’s political longevity depended on his ability to reinvent his image as time went by. It helped that he enjoyed not one but several political lives, starting as a Tory idealist in 1832 and ending as the hero of the Liberal Left in 1896 (when he delivered his last, famous public speech on the duty of the international community to stop the Armenian massacres). During his 64 years in politics, he adopted a range of different strategies. From 1846 he moved away from the Tories, when the latter rejected Sir Robert Peel – to whom Gladstone was very close. Between 1853 and 1859 he drew closer to the Liberals over the question of the Italian Risorgimento and national unification, the latter being an issue which polarised both public opinion and the parties in Parliament. As Chancellor of the Exchequer (1853–55, 1859–65) he established the free-trade fiscal system which soon resulted in a new consensus, defining the relationship between citizens and the state for the next 70 years.1 Later, between 1868 and 1885, Gladstone became the great ‘modernizer’ of British politics and society, presiding over two of the most significant reform governments in the history of these isles. The separation of church and state in Ireland, a democratically managed system of primary education, the reform of trade union legislation, the first major steps towards ‘meritocracy’ in the armed forces, the reform of university education and the most radical restructuring of the electoral system hitherto attempted (in 1883–85) – these were some of the historic achievements of the Gladstone governments. However, Gladstone’s most lasting legacy, and the ultimate reason for his enduring appeal, is not to be found in his record as a reformer and practical politician. Neither is it solely due to his charisma, although this was sufficiently important to inspire Max Weber when he elaborated his famous leadership theory.2 Rather, such a legacy was based on Gladstone’s ability to use his charisma in order to launch a new definition of liberalism. Traditional Victorian liberalism was a creed of gradual constitutional reform, combined with classical political economy, free trade and the notions of self-help and individual freedom as basic principles defining the relationship between state and society. Having done so much to establish these norms, Gladstone became the first prime minister to move away from them from as early as 1870 with his first Irish Land Act which interfered with property rights in an attempt to improve the lot of tenants, and with the nationalisation of 1   M. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–1914 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 63–72. 2   M. Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber. Essays in sociology (London, 1948), pp. 77–9.

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the telegraphs which became a state monopoly in the same year.3 If these were departures from established government practice, it must also be borne in mind that such ‘practice’ allowed for a considerable degree of flexibility. There were endless ‘exceptions to the rule’ of non-intervention because, contrary to what is commonly assumed, the so-called laissez-faire of Victorian liberalism was not really about the ‘minimalist state’. Instead, as Martin Daunton has shown: the supposed contradiction between laissez-faire and state intervention is misleading. A better way of viewing the Victorian state is through a combined process of dismantling protectionism and chartered state monopolies, creating a sense of balance in the economy and politics so that the state was not favouring a group over another through tax breaks or privileges … The emergence of the laissez-faire state, if that term is still possible, was … about a new form of regulation and anti-monopolism.4

In fact, in Gladstone’s days as prime minister, government intervention was becoming increasingly popular with the Liberals. Although most of it was carried out by local authorities, as exemplified by Joseph Chamberlain’s municipalisation of gas and water supplies in Birmingham, central government intervention became more aggressive from 1881, when Gladstone’s Second Land Bill established a system of joint ownership in Ireland. This measure was justified on pragmatic and historicist grounds, as an attempt to stabilise social relations in Ireland by giving tenants a stake both in their country and the rule of law. This involved modifying the law in order for it to reflect what were supposed to be the cultural expectations of a peasant nation. However, there was a further dimension to Gladstone’s argument, which emerged during the parliamentary debate leading to the adoption of that measure. When the free-market MP and economist Bonamy Price criticised the prime minister for his cavalier handling of property rights, Gladstone promptly answered that Price had spoken as if the government’s task was to legislate ‘for the inhabitants of the Saturn’, rather than for actual flesh and blood British subjects: Mr Bonamy Price … applies in all their unmitigated authority … the principles of abstract political economy to the people and circumstances of Ireland, exactly as if he had been proposing to legislate for the inhabitants of Saturn or Jupiter.5

  I.J. Cohen, ‘Toward a theory of state intervention: The nationalization of the British telegraphs’, Social Science History, 4 (Spring 1980): pp. 155–205. 4   M. Daunton, State and Market in Victorian Britain (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 4–5. 5   The Times, 8 April 1881, p. 7. 3

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The point he was trying to make was that the needs of real people in their historical context were to be given priority over ideology and economic dogma. The latter should be modified to suit human needs, not vice versa. This emphasis on needs creating rights was a new departure, but the reasoning behind it had gradually emerged over the years. Firstly, there was what we may describe as the long-term response to the lessons of the Irish Famine of 1845– 50, which resulted in a gradual rethinking of the priorities in governmental action. Gladstone had been in office (with Peel) at the beginning of the Famine, and felt shocked and guilty that the government had not done enough to limit the consequences of such a devastating calamity. From the 1850s, generations of economists and civil servants started to study how such emergencies could be managed in future and government practice was amended accordingly.6 However, in terms of the principles invoked to justify state intervention, the real turning point for Gladstone came in 1876, and had nothing to do with either Ireland or political economy. For, at this point, he started to reinterpret the meaning and scope of liberalism in response to the challenges that emerged out of the Balkan crisis. The basic facts are well known, but it will be useful to summarise them briefly. At the time, the Turkish Empire in Europe was crumbling under the combined impact of external pressure and domestic revolts. In trying to crush a rebellion in Eastern Rumelia, Ottoman irregular troops massacred thousands of civilians (as many as 15,000 it was claimed at the time) in the course of what came to be remembered as the Bulgarian Atrocities. Similar episodes had taken place in previous decades in other parts of the Ottoman Empire, but the difference now was that the western media – whose reporters were allowed to visit the war zone – witnessed this ‘ethnic cleansing’ week after week, and published their reports in chilling detail. British opinion was outraged, with the Liberal press leading a groundswell of protest which subsequently acquired the dimensions of a political crusade. Eventually Gladstone – then in semi-retirement as a backbencher – took the lead: in September he published a pamphlet on the Bulgarian Horrors, which became an immediate best-seller. Then, in a series of speeches which attracted wide audiences and sparked off a national debate, he challenged both the Tory government and, indirectly, the leaders of his own Liberal party, to take action. They were all ‘guilty men’ for their indifference to human suffering, to which they turned a blind eye for the sake of misconceived British imperial priorities: they believed that Britain should support the Ottoman Empire at 6   See P. Gray, ‘The making of mid-Victorian Ireland? Political economy and the memory of the Famine’, and V. Crossman, ‘“With the experience of 1846 and 1847 before them”: The politics of emergency relief, 1879–84’, in P. Gray (ed.), Victoria’s Ireland? Irishness and Britishness, 1837–1901 (Dublin, 2004), respectively pp. 151–66 and 167–182.

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all costs, because the latter was supposedly a bulwark of the Indian Raj against Russian expansionism in Central Asia. The debate went on for years. The Tory Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield) secured a temporary triumph by preserving ‘peace with honour’ at the 1878 Berlin Congress, but Gladstone struck back in his first two Midlothian campaigns, in 1879 and 1880, which presented the country with the novel sight of an American-style whistle-stop ‘presidential’ electoral strategy. Huge crowds congregated at the main railway stations where the Gladstone train was expected to stop, eager to see him and listen to his indictment of Tory imperialism. Even larger and more enthusiastic audiences attended his main meetings in Edinburgh, during which he articulated the principles of a Liberal foreign and imperial policy based on European co-operation and a Christian understanding of international law as defined by diplomatic congresses and treaties. The charismatic politician was now in full swing. It must be noted that Gladstone’s populist style and strategy were originally influenced by religious modes of agitation. At the time this was natural enough, not only because Christianity was embedded in the British constitution, but also because the Nonconformist revivals had long established the effectiveness of preaching as a means of mobilising the masses. Moreover, because Gladstone was no longer the party leader (having stepped down in 1875), his influence depended chiefly on the popular support he was able to muster through his political ‘sermons’ and the newspaper press. In this respect, his position was comparable to that of the Dissenting preachers of the contemporary Moody and Sankey revival. And, for Gladstone as much as for the Nonconformist worthies, charisma depended largely on the message which he preached. As I have argued in greater detail elsewhere, from 1876 this message began to redefine liberalism as the politics of humanitarianism.7 While such a development was not welcomed by the parliamentary party and especially Whig frontbenchers, like the austere Lord Hartington, in the country activists revelled in the thought that their party stood for ‘righteousness’ and ‘truth’. This was particularly important for both the Nonconformists and working-class radicals. Throughout the nineteenth century, humanitarianism had been linked to a range of political issues, such as the anti-slave trade campaigns, the movement for factory legislation and the anti-Corn Law agitation. In the 1840s, it was central to Ernest Jones’s Chartist notion of ‘the people’, those governed ‘by their hearts and not their heads’, who thought that ‘God had created in mankind a natural

  E.F. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1906 (Cambridge, 2007), chapters 1, 2, 6 and 7. 7

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love for humanity’.8 In the 1850s and early 1860s, it facilitated the evolution of late Chartism into popular liberalism through moral and social reform pressure groups which appealed to radicals across the class divide. It was often religious in inspiration, but always non-sectarian. In fact, a commitment to ‘humanity’ was perceived as a form of enlightened patriotism and often brought together Evangelicals and Secularists, Positivists and Utilitarians, Christian Socialists and Idealists, Nonconformists and Irish Catholic Nationalists. Moreover, humanitarian rhetoric appealed to a section of the public wider than that made up of those politically aware people targeted by traditional liberalism. In particular, it spanned the gap between the genders, evoking strong responses among women. Despite not being electors, women were politically important both because they were understood to be able to influence their voting husbands and fathers, and because they were willing to volunteer their services as activists at elections. In the 1880s, even the Conservatives started to mobilise women, especially through the Primrose League, which experimented with the strategy of mixing political propaganda with organised leisure activities. Typically for a party dominated by Nonconformist puritan ethos, the Liberal equivalent did not involve the politicisation of leisure, but of missionary activism. The latter had traditionally been an important expression of women’s political ambitions because religion and charitable work were regarded as proper and suitable spheres in which women’s supposedly gender-specific responsiveness to human suffering could be deployed. As the abolition of the slave trade had illustrated, female religious activism could have political implications. From the early 1870s, the missionary call was extended to include social reform through secular agencies, as women acquired the vote and the right to stand as candidates for local government, while reformers such as Alfred Marshall insisted on the specifically feminine call to ‘moralize and ennoble’ society.9 Thus, it is not surprising that in the 1876 Bulgarian Agitation, ‘possibly because of the prominence of Nonconformists, and certainly because of the humanitarian focus of the movement, women played a large role’.10 By encouraging   M. Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism and the Romance of Politics 1819–1869 (2003), p. 255. The implicit anti-intellectualism involved in this attitude was also typical of Gladstonian populism, at least according to some of Gladstone’s critics: see G. Jones, ‘Scientists against Home Rule’, in D.G. Boyce and A. O’Day (eds), Defenders of the Union: A Survey of British and Irish Unionism since 1801 (London, 2001), pp. 188–200. 9   E.F. Biagini, ‘The Anglican Ethic and the Spirit of Citizenship: The Political and Social Context’, in T. Raffaelli et al. (eds) Alfred Marshall’s 1873 Lectures to Women (Aldershot, 1995), pp. 3–23. 10   A.P. Saab, Reluctant Icon. Gladstone, Bulgaria and the Working Class 1856–1878 (Cambridge, MA, 1991), pp. 101, 166, 188. 8

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their further involvement in Liberal crusades, Gladstone was refining rather than inventing a strategy. In 1879, it was to women that he addressed one of the most famous of his Midlothian speeches, when his indictment of Tory imperialism culminated in an emotional proclamation of rights – rights which were established by the Almighty and shared by all human beings, irrespective of national, religious, gender or race barriers.11 As Patrick Joyce has shown, the speeches involved a significant redefinition of civic identity, the Liberal ‘self ’, and the public conscience.12 That this happened despite Gladstone and the Liberal Party being opposed to political rights for women in parliamentary elections, was entirely typical of this age of transition from a system based on a restricted franchise to one of full democracy. In a country in which democracy was still a contested concept and where the legitimacy of the political system was being questioned, the Bulgarian Agitation and the Midlothian Campaign generated a level of national debate such as the country had seldom seen before. They also established a model for later nineteenth-century Liberal politics and, in particular, for the campaigns for Irish Home Rule, from 1886 to 1892. The endless circle of evictions and outrages in rural Ireland, which the Land Acts had only temporarily alleviated and which required the frequent suspension of civil liberty, together with the overwhelming nationwide success of Parnellism at the general election of 1885 convinced Gladstone that the United Kingdom was facing a new crisis of public conscience similar to that sparked off by the Bulgarian Horrors in 1876. Democracy was as yet untested and untried, but Gladstone believed that he could mobilise the electorate by linking the Irish cause to the broader politics of humanitarianism: Home Rule, he claimed, was the only alternative to coercion and the permanent suspension of civil liberty. His campaign went to the heart of British radicalism, galvanising and inspiring a new generation of radicals. It was important for the Liberals that this was done while keeping class out of politics, thus avoiding the conditions under which independent labour parties could become serious Left-wing competitors for the popular vote. The result is best illustrated by a comparison with continental Europe. Between 1886 and 1914, Germany, France and Italy saw the rise of socialist and workers’ parties, with a close correlation between the extent of urbanisation and socialism’s electoral success. By contrast, Britain saw the Liberals remaining the only mass party of the Left throughout the period, despite the country being more densely urbanised than any of its continental neighbours.   W.E. Gladstone, Midlothian speeches 1879 (Leicester, 1971), p. 94.   P. Joyce, Democratic Subjects:Tthe Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England

11 12

(Cambridge, 1994), pp. 206, 210.

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Finally, the Home Rule crisis renewed the viability of what Bill Kissane has described as ‘democratic elitism’, ‘whereby a dominant political elite proves able to absorb a variety of influences while at the same time maintaining their pivotal position within the system’.13 Even ‘New Liberalism’ was a Gladstonian phenomenon in at least two respects: its crusading humanitarian zeal and also its democratic elitism. As Atherley Jones, the son of the Chartist leader Ernest Jones, put it, this was a liberalism for the working classes, not by the working classes: it targeted their needs, ‘as yet inarticulate’, but allegedly identified for them by the party’s intellectuals, journalists and academics. It was this elite who decided what the ‘new liberalism’ was to be about, namely ‘a wider diffusion of physical comfort’.14 Gladstone’s Legacy in the Twentieth Century In 1992, The Economist stated: It is time for the left to go back to it [Liberalism], and to embrace those old Whig beliefs that survive in all three parties but have gone begging for a proper party champion ever since Labour displaced the Liberals in the 1920s. How to define them? As a philosophy, first and foremost – a compassionate but individualistic creed that produced the great Victorian reforms. This creed was both more suspicious of the state and less class-obsessed than the socialism that later swamped it. Enough of its spirit lingers in the main parties of the left – the Liberal Democrats as well as Labour – for it to inspire a new generation of British radicals.15

The new strategy was ‘Gladstonian’, not only in its disdaining of class politics and reclaiming individualism as part of the tradition of the ‘Left’, but also in economic and fiscal matters. It proposed that the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party should adapt their social policies to the neo-liberal consensus which had emerged since 1979: ‘If voters refuse to support higher-tax parties, then the truly poor can be helped only through programmes that are more rigorously selective. If much of this has a Thatcherite ring … so be it; Margaret Thatcher was in many ways a great radical’. The article concluded by championing   B. Kissane, Explaining Irish Democracy (Dublin, 2002), p. 228.   L.A. Atherley-Jones, ‘The New Liberalism’, The Nineteenth Century, 26 (1889): p. 192;

13 14

see also P.F. Clarke, Liberals and Social-Democrats (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 22–7. 15   ‘A prophet of the Left’, The Economist, 18 April 1992, p. 11.

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a revival of the Lib-Lab alliance which Gladstone had presided over during the last quarter of the nineteenth century: The alliance between the two parties will not come together quickly or easily; politicians of the left will have to learn new ways of working together. Already, though, some prominent Labour men are talking about creating a cross-party convention to agree on constitutional changes – exactly the kind of reforms the Whigs would have lauded … with baldness a new radical opposition could rise from the ruins [of Neil Kinnock’s Labour party]. Come back, William Gladstone, the saddened left has need of you.16

If Gladstone was now The Economist’s ‘prophet’, this article proved prophetic indeed. On 9 May 1992, Paddy Ashdown delivered what he regards as his ‘most important speech as Lib Dem Leader, and one [he] had been thinking about for almost a year’: it ‘proposed … a new coming together of the Left to form a progressive alliance dedicated to ending the Tory hegemony and bringing in radical reforms to the British Constitution, beginning with a Scottish Parliament’.17 Later, in the aftermath of the May 2010 General Election, Ashdown was again involved in trying to achieve a Lib-Lab pact. Ashdown also championed a more active foreign policy: rejecting the pragmatic empiricism of John Major, Ashdown wanted Britain to stand up for human rights. Coincidentally, his adoption of such a platform was a direct consequence of his witnessing ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, in a region not far from where the ‘Bulgarian Atrocities’ had taken place a century earlier. Indeed, in the summer of 1992, as Ashdown drove towards Belgrade, the Serbian radio ‘announced that the successor of Gladstone had entered the country on his way to see the Government’.18 At the time Ashdown found the comparison bizarre and burst into laughter, but in retrospect the parallels are uncanny. He himself became increasingly Gladstonian in his commitment to the rights of the persecuted Balkan minorities. As he wrote to his wife before embarking on one of the most dangerous missions a Liberal Party leader has ever carried out – a visit to besieged Sarajevo in June 1995 – ‘I am doing this because I think it has to be done … two things … drive me … justice – and I genuinely believe that a great injustice has been done to the Bosnian people – and my liberal beliefs. 16   ‘A prophet of the Left’, pp. 11–12. For the Lib-Lab alliance in the late nineteenth century see E.F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform. Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge, 2002), especially chapters 2 and 6. 17   P. Ashdown, The Autobiography of Paddy Ashdown. A Fortunate Life (London, 2009), p. 268. 18   Ashdown, Autobiography, p. 266.

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Internationalism is the core of the latter and, if our Party will not stand up for this, who will?’19 It was not only the Liberal Democrat leader who seemed to respond to The Economist’s appeal. On 1 December 1993, after a private dinner with Tony and Cherie Blair, Ashdown recorded in his diary that Blair ‘appeared to have arrived at the same view of the new politics of the Left as I had, but from a different direction’.20 From 1994 this became more and more evident. As Denis Kavanagh has observed, there was the sense that Blair was taking an approach to politics which had ‘an echo of Gladstone’, in that it had ‘deep moral and ethical rather than ideological roots’.21 In fact, something like a Lib-Lab electoral pact did come along as early as 1994, ‘the two parties secretly exchanging a list of Tory seats in which the one that had little chance of winning would not invest resources in contesting the seat’,22 and, in 1997, each of the two parties secured a spectacular electoral victory. It was the beginning of a neo-Gladstonian phase in British politics: while New Labour managed the Treasury along post-Thatcherite lines (as The Economist had prescribed), Robin Cook proclaimed the government’s adoption of an ‘ethical’ approach to international relations and Blair started to apply what looked like Ashdown’s militant humanitarianism to troubled areas of the world. Over the next five years, the press had plenty of opportunity to explore Gladstone’s relevance to twenty-first century politics and to criticise Blair as the new Gladstone.23 Political analysts, and soon historians, followed suit. As Denis Kavanagh and Peter Riddell observed, there was the impression of Blair trying to deal with Gladstone’s ‘unfinished business’, in particular Scottish and Welsh devolution (first discussed by the National Liberal Federation in the late 1880s), the reform of the House of Lords and the attempt to ‘pacify Ireland’. Likewise Vernon Bodganor argued that: the constitutional reform programme of New Labour has affinities less with New Liberalism, than with Gladstonian Old Liberalism, the Liberalism which prized diversity as an end in itself, and was highly sceptical of the benefits of ‘constructivism’, the idea that the state could engineer social outcomes. Thus, in one sense, the constitutional reform programme of New Labour is not new at all,   Ashdown, Autobiography, p. 283.   Ashdown, Autobiography, p. 274. 21   D. Kavanagh, ‘New Labour, New Millennium, New Premiership’, in A. Seldon (ed.), The 19 20

Blair Effect (London, 2001), p. 7; P. Riddell, ‘Blair as Prime Minister’, ibid., p. 24. 22   Ashdown, Autobiography, p. 277. 23   For two examples see: ‘But is Blair playing Churchill or Gladstone?’, The Guardian, G2, 4 October 2001; and ‘Blair as Gladstone’, The Times, 3 October 2004.

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but very old, although of course, for the Labour party to adopt a policy which goes so much against its raison d’être, is profoundly new.24

It was certainly ironic that, in order to ‘modernise’ the Labour party at the beginning of the twenty-first century, its leader felt compelled to hark back to the man who had led the Liberal Party a century before. It was – or ought to have been regarded as – a major admission of failure of the whole Labour project. However, Blair claimed that he was merely returning to the movement’s origins. After all, in the 1880s Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden, Arthur Henderson and George Lansbury had all started from Gladstonianism, which was then the common ground among all the ‘currents of radicalism’ in Britain. If this was true, as some historians have been arguing from the early 1990s at least,25 when did such Lib-Lab fraternity come to an end? This is not easy to answer, because within Labour there were always ‘liberals’ of one kind or other. The First World War was not necessarily a turning point: at least from 1914 to 1917, both Herbert Asquith and Arthur Henderson sang from the same Gladstonian hymn sheet, insisting, for example, that the war was about ‘[fulfilling] a solemn international obligation … not only of law but of honour … we are fighting to vindicate the principle … that small nationalities are not to be crushed, in defiance of international good faith, by the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power’.26 Henderson in particular was fond of quoting Gladstone about: public right as the governing idea of European politics … the definite repudiation of militarism as governing actor in the relations of states … the independent existence of smaller nationalities … And … by a slow and gradual process … [the development] of a real European partnership based on the recognition of equality of rights and established and enforced by a common will.27

Similar ideas – that the war as a ‘crusade’ and that foreign politics was a matter of humanitarian intervention – were canvassed by Liberal intellectuals, such as Gilbert Murray.28 As Peter Clarke has noted, ‘the Gladstonian propensity to translate international politics into issues of right and wrong was clearly at   V. Bogdanor, ‘Constitutional reform’, in Seldon (ed.), Blair Effect, p. 154.   See ‘Introduction’ to E.F. Biagini and A.J. Reid (eds), Currents of Radicalism (Cambridge,

24

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1991). 26   Hansard Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 6 August 1914, vol.65, 2079: Asquith’s speech on War Credits. 27   A. Henderson, The Aims of Labour (London, 1917), p. 36. 28   G. Murray, Faith, War and Policy: Lectures and Essays (London, 1918).

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work here … [and] fostered a black-and-white view of events which is consonant with Lloyd George’s switch to outright endorsement of the war’.29 Clarke also highlights a further dimension of the Gladstonian legacy, the self-righteousness of the conviction politician, especially one like Lloyd George, who had been directly exposed to the magnetism and religious appeal which emanated from the Grand Old Man.30 Probably the single most Gladstonian episode during the Great War was the Armenian Agitation of 1915–17. Masterminded by Lord Bryce and bankrolled by the government, this movement tried both to mobilise British humanitarianism and to influence US opinion in favour of intervention. It was part of the wider propaganda effort focused on the issue of atrocities allegedly perpetrated by the Central Powers. Bryce was a sort of quintessential Gladstonian. Born in 1838, in 1860 he considered joining Garibaldi’s Red Shirts to assist in their campaign to liberate southern Italy. Later he acted as one of the organisers of the 1876 Bulgarian Agitation and was involved in drawing up the programme for the Eastern Question Conference.31 Bryce became a Liberal MP (for Manchester) in 1880 and was increasingly influenced by Gladstone’s notions of the significance of Christian teaching for universal rights and moral citizenship. In 1893, Bryce became one of the founders of the Anglo-Armenian Association, and in 1894–95 he championed their rights when news of the massacres reached the West. At the beginning of World War I he was appointed to investigate German atrocities in Belgium because of his standing as a militant humanitarian and Gladstonian loyalist. This inquiry resulted in an official report which was widely criticised for its reliance on accounts which were secondhand.32 The Armenian Agitation was, however, based on a much more accurate collection of evidence, some of which had been submitted by the leaders of the campaign themselves, who had visited or worked in Armenia before and during the war. With the help of Arnold J. Toynbee, then a young Oxford history don, Bryce eventually produced a massive report, running to over 750 pages, 15,000 copies of which were sent to Congressmen and opinion-makers in the USA – in a transparent attempt to ‘Gladstonize’ the US into military action.33     31   32   29

P. Clarke, A Question of Leadership. From Gladstone to Blair (London, 1999), p. 92. Clarke, A Question of Leadership, p. 87. H.A.L. Fisher, James Bryce: Viscount Bryce of Dechmont, OM (London, 1927), vol. 1, p. 167. J. Bryce, Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages, appointed by His Majesty’s Government and presided over by the Right Hon. Viscount Bryce (London, 1915); see also T. Wilson, ‘Lord Bryce’s Investigation into Alleged German Atrocities in Belgium, 1914–1915’, Journal of Contemporary History, 14/3 (1979): pp. 369–83. 33   J. Bryce, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, produced with A.J. Toynbee, 1916 (Reading, 2005). 30

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In Britain, this campaign involved many fervent Gladstonians, including the Irish Nationalist T.P. O’Connor, Emily Robinson of The Daily News, the Buxton brothers, whose family had a long tradition of militant humanitarianism stretching back to the abolition of the slave trade and Lucy Cavendish. The latter was the Gladstone’s niece and the widow of Lord Frederick Cavendish, the Irish Chief Secretary murdered in Phoenix Park in 1882. Venerating her late husband’s memory as a martyr for the cause of Home Rule, which she supported for the rest of her life, Lucy Cavendish embodied the close link between humanitarianism overseas and the Irish demand for self-government. She had been an advocate of the Armenians from the 1890s, and in 1897 founded The Friend of Armenia, a periodical publicising their plight under Ottoman rule. The First World War created the conditions for the development of an alternative Labour Party philosophy as far as domestic affairs were concerned – in the shape of ‘Parliamentary socialism’. However, it did not diminish the relevance of Gladstonianism in international relations and in matters of civil rights. Thus, the Labour Manifesto of November 1918 included the idea of Home Rule (‘freedom’ for Ireland and ‘self-determination within the British Commonwealth’ for India), the repeal of wartime restrictions on civil and industrial liberty and a commitment to free trade and ‘a Peace of International Co-operation’.34 Labour’s bold reassertion of Gladstonianism, at a stage when the Liberals were both divided and discredited by Coalition politics, attracted to MacDonald’s party a number of radical intellectuals and publicists, including C.P. Trevelyan, Norman Angell, Arthur Ponsonby, J.A. Hobson, E.D. Morel and H.N. Brailsford, all of whom felt that Lloyd George had betrayed the cause of freedom. Some campaigned against the wartime atrocity-mongering, which they claimed had unduly demonised the enemy: but they did so in a Gladstonian fashion by denouncing ‘falsehood’ with as much indignation as Bryce had denounced the atrocities a few years earlier.35 Again, Gladstone’s legacy proved inescapable. The Liberals also continued to use the Grand Old Man’s language and further develop his vision. For example, consider Francis Hirst’s defence of Gladstone’s record as a financier and economist, J.L. Hammond’s celebration of his campaigns for democracy and Irish freedom and Gilbert Murray and many others extolling of his approach to foreign policy as the blueprint for twentieth-century liberalism.36 From 1919 to the end of the 1930s, supporting the League of Nations was the 34   ‘Labour Manifesto’, The Times, 28 November 1918. The theme of Labour’s debt to Gladstonianism has been explored in P. Bridgen, The Labour Party and the Politics of War and Peace, 1900–1924 (London, 2009). 35   A. Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime (London, 1928); see also K. Robbins, The Abolition of War: The ‘Peace Movement’ in Britain, 1914–1919 (1976). 36   R.S. Grayson, Liberals, International Relations and Appeasement (London), p. 3.

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Liberal orthodoxy in foreign policy. Although the historical context was different from the one in which Gladstone had operated, Liberal intellectuals such as J.L. Hammond and Paul Knaplund ‘made it [their] task to address the problem of international security and the League of Nations, as well as the spasmodically emerging concept of the “Commonwealth”, through the idiom and the ideals of Gladstonian Liberalism’.37 That this happened not only in Britain, but also in America, is evidence of the wide and enduring impact of such a political tradition. In fact, as Frank Turner and Deryck Schreuder have shown in their contributions to the present volume, the Gladstone legacy was the one for which Woodrow Wilson stood. The US president was himself both an intellectual and a sort of Transatlantic Gladstonian. He especially admired Gladstone’s vision of international relations.38 Moreover, he was also a ‘democratic elitist’ and as such was ready to adapt Gladstone’s strategy of addressing the people over the heads of Congress and the parties, in the belief that ‘the man in the street’ had a right to express his own view on foreign policy. Thus, in September 1919, Wilson started his own ‘Midlothian Campaign’, travelling for three weeks by train some 10,000 miles across the Middle and Far West to deliver 40 addresses offering an expanded treatise on progressive internationalism’.39 It is also remarkable that both Gladstone and Wilson, in bypassing the legislative assemblies of their respective countries and appealing directly to the people, made powerful statements about the nature of sovereignty. In Britain, this was both unprecedented and subversive of constitutional practice. In this respect Gladstone initiated a further debate, one which has continued to this day, about the purpose and limits of parliamentary sovereignty. It involves both the question of the referendum (direct versus parliamentary democracy) and the twin issues of Home Rule and European integration (the relocation of legislative powers away from Westminster to other elected assemblies).40 As Vernon 37   D.M. Schreuder, ‘The Making of Mr Gladstone’s Posthumous Career: The Role of Morley and Knaplund as “Monument Masons”’, in B.L. Kinzer (ed.), The Gladstonian Turn of Mind (Toronto, Buffalo and London, 1985), p. 198. The references are to P. Knaplund, Gladstone and Britain’s Imperial Policy (London, 1927) and Gladstone’s Foreign Policy (London, 1935); and J.L. Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation (London, 1938). 38   L.W. Martin, Peace Without Victory: Woodrow Wilson and the British Liberals (1973); R.S. Grayson, Liberals, International Relations and Appeasement (London, 2001), pp. 36–40, 50–3. 39   T.J. Knock, To End All Wars. Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Oxford, 1992), p. 260. 40   V. Bogdanor, The People and the Party System: The Referendum and Electoral Reform in British Politics (Cambridge, 1981); and J. Meadowcroft and M. Taylor, ‘Liberalism and the Referendum in British Political Thought 1890–1914’, Twentieth Century British History (1990), pp. 35–57.

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Bogdanor has pointed out, it is a striking feature that both the initial EEC membership and devolution were ‘validated by referendum, which, until the 1970s, was widely thought to be unconstitutional’.41 In other words, European integration and Home Rule within the UK entailed important constitutional changes which were introduced by means of a further major constitutional innovation. In a way, this proved that Gladstone had identified a real problem within the British parliamentary system of party government when in 1886 he boarded the prime-ministerial train to canvass the opinion of the people over Home Rule: at that time, a single-issue general election was the closest approximation to the idea of a referendum.42 In 1930, Herbert Samuel, supporting a parliamentary resolution for compulsory arbitration, cited Gladstone’s authority, and contrasted the Liberal advocacy of the rule of international law with contemporary Conservative unilateralism, which, he said, was no better than international anarchy.43 Here he was highlighting a real difference between the Liberals and the Tory front bench: as Peter Clarke has noted, Neville Chamberlain ‘had nothing but scorn for the League of Nations Union with its high-minded president, Professor Gilbert Murray, representing the superior wisdom of the chattering classes. He resented their glib Gladstonianism in seeing the issue as a simple matter of conscience’.44 In this respect, Labour was offering merely a stronger version of Gladstonianism, a point illustrated by George Ridley, MP for Clay Cross, who in 1938 attacked the government as ‘hypocritical pygmies’ for their attitude to the German and Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War. He argued that their policy was ‘a denial of every decency in international life’, and further expressed his belief that ‘in face of foreign intervention against the legitimate Government of Spain … a Gladstone would have thundered in a way that would have reverberated round the world’.45 It is true that, of the three major parties, the Conservatives were the least likely to draw inspiration from the departed champion of liberalism. Yet, post-1918 conservatism was forced to accept   Bogdanor, ‘Constitutional Reform’, p. 144.   A point which was explicitly made by some commentators also with reference to the

41 42

general election of December 1910 (focusing on the Lords’ veto power and again, albeit indirectly, on Irish Home Rule): ‘The present election is the nearest approach to a Referendum which the British constitution at present allows. It places before the people for the judgment of “Yes” or “No” not the principle of Home Rule or socialistic legislation, or a Single Chamber, but the question – whether the House of Lords shall have in future an absolute or a suspensive Veto’. O. Browning, The Irish Times, 3 December 1910, p. 7, italics in the original. 43   Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), House of Commons, 27 January 1930, vol. 234, c.682. 44   Clarke, A Question of Leadership, p. 122. 45   Cited in ‘Mr Ridley and the Government’, The Irish Times, 4 April 1938, p. 8.

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many of the policies which Gladstone had cherished, because the circumstances left no alternatives. Thus, they accepted self-government for Ireland and the disestablishment of the Church in Wales, returned to free trade in 1925–29 and abandoned the imperialism of the pre-1914 period in favour of a conciliatory approach which owed more to Gladstone than to Bonar Law or Salisbury. Indeed, one of Salisbury’s own sons, Lord Robert Cecil, was a fervent champion of international arbitration and closer to the Gladstone legacy than to anything for which the Conservative party stood. Thus, by 1928, the situation was paradoxical: Liberal principles had come to dominate post-war British politics at the very time that their party was unable to win a majority at elections. This combination of political impotence and intellectual influence was made even more striking by the fact that every political force outside the party included former eminent Liberals among its leaders, such as Winston Churchill as Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer and Richard Haldane on the Labour front bench. The period from 1931–79 was dominated by continuous emergencies: first the Great Slump, then the Second World War and eventually the Cold War, accompanied by ‘class politics’ at home. Coping with such crises involved adopting ideas and practices which were the opposite of what Gladstone had stood for and advocated.46 This also applies to the pursuit of social reform: what was incompatible with Gladstonian liberalism was not state intervention, but corporatism – the brokerage between organised interests outside the legislature, especially the TUC involvement in policy-making, which became a feature of the British economic ‘malady’ in the post-war years. The reaction against such practices in 1979–90 is one of the reasons why the Thatcher years have often been described as the Conservative party’s ‘Gladstonian moment’. In her 1996 Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture, the ‘Iron Lady’ herself staked her claims to ‘the liberalism of Mr Gladstone’ – in contrast to ‘the latterday Collectivists’ of Asquith and Lloyd George’.47 Moreover, recently Maurice Saatchi has claimed that ‘she saw that human dignity … resides in independence, individuality, self-determination’ – all very Gladstonian values, although he also opines that she perceived them as being ‘invariably … Tory … facts of life’.48 It is true that there are parallels between Thatcher’s personal experience and attitudes and the Gladstone tradition. The daughter of a Liberal Nonconformist 46   This did not prevent Winston Churchill from appealing to Gladstone’s authority in 1946, when he urged the French and the Germans to forgive each other and work together to rebuild Europe: ‘Churchill urges Franco-German partnership’, The Irish Times, 20 September 1946, p. 1. 47   Cited in E.H.H. Green, Thatcher (London, 2006), p. 31. 48   M. Saatchi, ‘Lady Thatcher Would Despise Today’s Vision’, Financial Times, 4 May 2009, p. 11.

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lay preacher and town councillor, Thatcher rediscovered not only ‘Victorian values’, but also claimed to be reasserting ‘legality and constitutionality’ against corporatist brokerage. However, questions remain over how Gladstonian were her actual policies. One of the best recent studies on the topic dismisses ‘the occasional references by Thatcherite ministers to Gladstonianism’ as something that ‘had more to do with electoral strategy at a time when the Liberal/Social democrat alliance was doing well in the polls than with serious thought about the nineteenth century’.49 However, other scholars have taken a more sanguine view of Thatcher’s debt to Gladstone. For example, Peter Clarke has gone so far as to argue for her ‘remaking’ the Conservative Party in ways that were as reminiscent of Gladstone’s style as of his financial precepts.50 Questions about Thatcher’s liberal imperialism and rhetoric of human rights abroad and about her legacy to Tony Blair take us into an even more controversial area, but again it is true that there are affinities. On the one hand, like Thatcher and Blair, Gladstone was rather inconsistent as a champion of humanitarianism, as illustrated by his refusal to act on Quaker petitions against the opium trade in China and his invasion of Egypt in 1882.51 On the other hand, liberal imperialism was not the personal legacy of Gladstone alone. Rather it was part of a wider British strategy, which he himself inherited from Palmerston and Canning, and which was partly dictated by Britain’s global role and interests as a nineteenth-century Super Power, as much as by any individual statesman’s convictions. It is evidence of Gladstone’s grip on the radical imagination that, to the end of his life, his reputation remained almost untarnished despite the inconsistency between his liberal rhetoric and his imperial policies. That he continued to speak to the political imagination of Left-wing reformers at the beginning of the twenty-first century must, however, have caused some surprise. As the country went through the disappointments and scandals which marked the end of New Labour, Gladstone’s name was again invoked as a battle-cry by some of the most prestigious public intellectuals and critics of the Blairite legacy of neo-liberalism and ‘privatism’. In particular, David Marquand has proposed Gladstone as the champion of the public, arguing that: Gladstone staked his whole career on the proposition that there is a public interest which goes wider than the sum of private interests; that it can and should be   R. Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain. The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s (London, 2009), pp. 6–7, 288–9. 50   Clarke, A Question of Leadership, p. 318. 51   See Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, pp. 223–4. 49

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determined through a process of debate and argument; and that, by appealing to their better natures, the public can be mobilized behind a legislative programme and a series of executive actions designed to pursue it. It is not irrelevant that one of the main reasons why the later Gladstone came to believe that the masses were better citizens than the classes is that he also came to believe that they were more willing to subordinate narrow, selfish concerns to the public good.52

From Marquand’s viewpoint, in late nineteenth-century Britain, ‘the “Gladstonian conscience” was a reaction against the economists’ attempt to force social relations into a market mould. The growth of probity in government, state regulations and private philanthropy were its most conspicuous features’.53 In his opinion, over a century later we desperately need to awaken again such ‘conscience’, as we struggle to come to terms with an ideologically driven Coalition Government which represents a regression from mature Gladstonianism to the pettiness of Mr Gradgrind. Conclusion Whatever the case, it is remarkable that the great Victorian continues to be part of the current debate and, as historians, we must ask why. It is argued here that, by injecting a massive dose of politicised humanitarianism into the Liberal creed, Gladstone extended the latter’s scope and meaning. His vision had three features which secured its long-term viability: firstly, it was compatible with market capitalism and yet provided a strategy for bypassing laissez-faire. Secondly, its internationalism was consistent with the aspirations of the democratic Left, and yet was articulated as a philosophy of government, rather than the creed of the permanent opposition (as other radical humanitarians, including John Bright and Richard Cobden, had done in the past). And thirdly, it proposed both a rhetoric and a vision which were sufficiently rich and ambiguous to withstand the test of time. In fact, these features have not only a universal relevance, but also, sadly, a growing one. For some of the problems that Gladstone identified from 1876 – in particular, the atrocities of ethnic cleansing and the struggle to affirm human rights – became more pressing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with globalisation, the growth of democratic nationalism and the backlash they inspired. As Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, the ‘erosion of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants’ – which Gladstone had denounced in 1876 and   D. Marquand, Decline of the Public (Cambridge, 2004), p. 58.   R. Skidelsky, ‘Now You Don’t. The Public Domain is Disappearing and No Political

52 53

Magician Can Bring it Back’, Times Literary Supplement, 25 June 2004, p. 3.

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again in 1896 (the Bulgarian and the Armenian massacres) – became a leading feature of post-1914 conflicts, to such an extent that ‘80 to 90 per cent of those affected by wars today are civilians’ (in contrast to 5 per cent in the First World War).54 Paradoxically, if Wilson’s 1919 vision of a world order based on ‘national self-determination’ was discredited when the latter turned out to be an explosive and impractical principle, the vision of his inspirer, Gladstone, has continued to be relevant for the age, inaugurated by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.55

  E. Hobsbawm, Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism (London, 2008), p. 18.   M. Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950’, The Historical

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Journal, 47/2 (2004): pp. 379–98.

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A Selected Bibliography Roger Swift Primary Sources Gladstone’s Diaries The Gladstone Diaries, 14 vols (Oxford, 1968–94), (ed.) Foot, M.R.D. [vols 1–2]; (ed.) Foot, M.R.D. and Matthew, H.C.G. [vols 3–4]; (ed.) Matthew, H.C.G. [vols 5–14]. The Diaries have been acclaimed critically and reviewed extensively, but see especially the reviews of the complete series by Agatha Ramm in the English Historical Review, vols 85 (1970); 91 (1976); 94 (1979); 99 (1984); 102 (1987); 106 (1991); 110 (1995). The Gladstone Papers The 750 volumes of the Gladstone Papers in The British Library form the largest collection of papers of a British Prime Minister held there. They are described in A.T. Bassett’s anonymous volume The Gladstone Papers (London, 1930) and catalogued in British Museum Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts: The Gladstone Papers (London, 1953). The Glynne-Gladstone Manuscripts These comprise over 25,000 items, including family letters, estate, household and business papers. For further details, see especially C.J. Williams (ed.), Handlist of the Glynne-Gladstone MSS in St Deiniol’s Library (Richmond, 1990). Edited Collections: Papers, Speeches and Correspondence The most comprehensive published collection of Gladstone’s correspondence, drawn from the Gladstone Collection at The British Library and Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden, is now available in microform, edited by H.C.G. Matthew as The Papers of William Ewart Gladstone (Papers of the Prime Ministers of Great Britain Series Eight, Primary Source Media, Reading, 1998). This ten-

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part series comprises printed speeches and newspaper cuttings from Gladstone’s Library and notes for speeches from The British Library [part 1]; special correspondence, with appropriate Aberdeen Papers and Bright Papers from the British Library [part 2]; special correspondence from The British Library, including letters from eminent contemporaries [parts 3–6]; Letter Books, in which Gladstone recorded and transcribed some 15,000 ‘out’ letters [part 7]; and general correspondence from The British Library [parts 8–10]. Each part of this collection is accompanied by a printed bibliography, offering itemlevel listings. For Gladstone’s speeches in the House of Commons, the most important source is Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd Series (1830–1891) and 4th Series (1892–1908). These have now been scanned from hard copy sources and digitised as the Hansard Archive, which can be accessed online. Other collections include: Bassett, A.T., Gladstone’s Speeches (London, 1916). Bassett, A.T., Gladstone to His Wife (London, 1936). Brooke, J. and Sorensen, M., The Prime Ministers’ Papers: W.E. Gladstone, 4 vols (London, 1971–81). Foot, M.R.D., Midlothian Speeches 1879 (Leicester, 1971). Guedalla, P., Gladstone and Palmerston: Being the Correspondence of Lord Palmerston with Mr Gladstone, 1851–1865 (London, 1928). Guedalla, P., The Queen and Mr Gladstone, 2 vols (London, 1933). Hutton, A.W. and Cohen, M.J., The Speeches and Public Addresses of the Rt. Hon. W.E. Gladstone, M.P., 2 vols (London, 1894). Lathbury, D.C., Letters on Church and Religion of William Ewart Gladstone, 2 vols (London, 1910). Ramm, A., Political Correspondence of Mr Gladstone and Lord Granville, 4 vols (London, 1952–62), reprinted as The Gladstone–Granville Correspondence, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1999). Chief Books by Gladstone A list of books and articles by Gladstone will be found under ‘publications’ in the subject index in volume 14 of The Gladstone Diaries, but see especially: The State in its Relations with the Church (London, 1838); 2 vols (London, 1841).

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Church Principles Considered in their Results (London, 1840). Prayers for Family Use (London, 1845). (trans.), Farini, L.C., Lo Stato Romano, 4 vols (London, 1851–54). On the Place of Homer in Classical Education and in Historical Inquiry (London, 1857). Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, 3 vols (Oxford, 1858). A Chapter of Autobiography (London, 1868). Juventus Mundi: The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age (London, 1869). The Vatican Decrees and their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation (London, 1874). Vaticanism: An Answer to Replies and Reproofs (London, 1875). The Church of England and Ritualism (London, 1875). Rome and the Newest Fashions in Religion (London, 1875). The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East (London, 1876). Homeric Synchronism: An Enquiry into the Time and Place of Homer (London, 1876). Homer (London, 1878). The Paths of Honour and Shame (London, 1878). Gleanings of Past Years, 1843–79, 7 vols (London,1879). Political Speeches in Scotland, November and December 1879 (London, 1879). Political Speeches in Scotland, Second Series (London, 1880). Landmarks of Homeric Study (London, 1890). The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture (London, 1890). The Odes of Horace (London, 1894). The Psalter with a Concordance and Other Auxiliary Matter (London, 1895). Studies Subsidiary to the Works of Bishop Butler (London, 1896). (ed.), The Works of Joseph Butler, D.C.L., 2 vols (London, 1897). Later Gleanings (London, 1898). Secondary Sources There is a vast body of secondary material relating to Gladstone’s life and career. Some of this is referred to in Gladstoniana: A Bibliography of Material Relating to W.E. Gladstone at St Deiniol’s Library, edited by Caroline J. Dobson (Hawarden, 1981), although a more comprehensive bibliography is provided in Gladstone: A Bibliography of Material Held at St Deiniol’s Library, compiled by Lucy M. Adcock (Hawarden, 1998). Material from these two seminal bibliographies is contained in Nicholas Adams (ed.), William Ewart Gladstone: A Bibliography (Westport, Conn., 1994). A useful bibliographical essay, which

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offers a thematic treatment of the subject, is also provided by David Bebbington in William Ewart Gladstone: Faith and Politics in Victorian Britain (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1993). Collected Essays on Gladstone Bebbington, D. and Swift, R. (eds), Gladstone Centenary Essays (Liverpool, 2000). Francis, P. (ed.), The Gladstone Umbrella: Papers Delivered at the Gladstone Centenary Conference 1998 (Hawarden, 2001). Francis, P. (ed.), The Grand Old Man: Sermons and Speeches in Honour of W.E. Gladstone (Hawarden, 2000). Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone, Politics and Religion (London, 1985). Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone (London, 1998). Jagger, P.J., Mr Gladstone: Founder’s Day Lectures: St Deiniol’s Library, 1931– 1955 (Hawarden, 2001). Kinzer, B.L. (ed.), The Gladstonian Turn of Mind: Essays Presented to J.B. Conacher (Toronto, 1985). Biographical Studies of Gladstone Books Bebbington, D., The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics (Oxford, 2004). Biagini, E.F., Gladstone (London, 2000). Birrell, F., Gladstone (London, 1933). Crosby, T.L., The Two Mr Gladstones: A Study in Psychology and History (New Haven, CT, 1997). Douglas-Home, A., ‘Mr Gladstone’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone, Politics and Religion (London, 1985), pp. 21–7. Eyck, E., Gladstone (London, 1938). Feuchtwanger, E.J., Gladstone (London, 1975). Gardiner, J., ‘Gladstone’ in Gardiner, J., The Victorians: An Age in Retrospect (London and New York, 2002), pp. 181–200. Gladstone, W., Gladstone: A Bicentenary Portrait (Norwich, 2009). Hammond, J.L. and Foot, M.R.D., Gladstone and Liberalism (London, 1952). Jenkins, R., Gladstone (London, 1995).

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Magnus, P., Gladstone: A Biography (London, 1954). Matthew, H.C.G., Gladstone (Oxford, 1998). Morley, J., The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 3 vols (London, 1903). Partridge, M., Gladstone (London, 2003). Partridge, M., William Ewart Gladstone, volumes 3 & 4 of Lives of Victorian Political Figures: Part I, ed. by M. Partridge and R. Gaunt, 4 vols (London, 2006). Ramm, A., William Ewart Gladstone (Cardiff, 1989). Reid, W.T. (ed.), Life of William Ewart Gladstone (London, 1899). Schreuder, D.M., ‘The Making of Mr Gladstone’s Posthumous Career: The Role of Morley and Knaplund as “Monumental Masons”, 1903–27’, in Kinzer, B.L. (ed.) The Gladstonian Turn of Mind (1985), pp. 197–243. Shannon, R.T., Gladstone, Vol. 1, 1809–1865 (London, 1982). Shannon, R.T., Gladstone, Vol. 2, Heroic Minister, 1865–1898 (London, 1999). Shannon, R.T., Gladstone: God and Politics (London, 2007). Stansky, P., Gladstone: A Progress in Politics (New York, 1979). Stead, W.T., Gladstone, 1809–1898: A Character Sketch (London, 1898). Windscheffel, R.C., Reading Gladstone (Basingstoke, 2008). Young, G.M., Mr. Gladstone (Oxford, 1944). Articles Checkland, S.G., ‘The Making of Mr Gladstone’, Victorian Studies, 12 (1969): pp. 399–409. Foot, M.R.D., ‘Morley’s Gladstone: A Reappraisal’, Bulletin of John Rylands Library, 51 (1969): pp. 368–80. Gordon, I.M., ‘Memories of Gladstone’, Contemporary Review, 148 (1935), pp. 405–15. Knaplund, P., ‘William Ewart Gladstone, the Christian Statesman’, Church Quarterly Review, 162 (1961): pp. 467–75. Malament, B.C., ‘W.E.Gladstone: An other Victorian?’, British Studies Monitor, 8 (1978): pp. 22–38. Murray, G., ‘Gladstone, 1898–1948’, Contemporary Review, 174 (1948): pp. 134–8. Stephen, M.D., ‘“After Thirty Years”: A Note on Gladstone Scholarship’, Journal of Religious History, 15 (1989): pp. 488–95.

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Gladstone in Private Books Battiscombe, G., Mrs Gladstone: The Portrait of a Marriage (London, 1956). Bebbington, D., ‘Gladstone and Homer’ in Bebbington, D. and Swift, R. Gladstone Centenary Essays (2000), pp. 1–9. Checkland, S.G., The Gladstones: A Family Biography (London, 1971). Checkland, S.G., ‘Mr Gladstone, his Parents and his Siblings’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone, Politics and Religion (London, 1985), pp. 40–8. Deacon, R., The Private Life of Mr Gladstone (London, 1965). Drew, M., ‘Mr Gladstone’s Books’, Acton, Gladstone and Others (London, 1924). Drew, M., Catherine Gladstone (London, 1930). Esslemont, P., To the Fifth Generation: A Hundred Minutes with Gladstone (Aberdeen, 1941). Fletcher, C.R.L., Mr Gladstone at Oxford (London, 1908). Fletcher, S., Victorian Girls: Lord Lyttelton’s Daughters (London, 1997). Foot, M.R.D., ‘The Gladstone Diaries’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone, Politics and Religion (London, 1985), pp. 28–39. Garratt, G.T., The Two Mr Gladstones (London, 1936). Gilliland, J., Gladstone’s ‘Dear Spirit’: Laura Thistlethwayte (London, 1994). Gladstone, H., After Thirty Years (London, 1928). Gladstone, P., Portrait of a Family: The Gladstones, 1839–1889 (Ormskirk, 1989). Gooddie, S., Mary Gladstone: A Gentle Rebel (Chichester, 2003). Gower, Sir G.L., Some Memories of Gladstone (n.p., 1938). Hamilton, I.H., The Celebrity of the Century: William Gladstone at Dollis Hill House 1882–1894 (London: Dollis Hill House Trust, 2002). Harris, S.K., The Cultural Work of the Late-Nineteenth Century Hostess: Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew (New York, 2002). Isba, A., Gladstone and Dante: Victorian Statesman, Medieval Poet (Woodbridge, 2006). Jagger, P.J. (ed.), ‘Gladstone and his Library’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone (London, 1998), pp. 235–54. Jalland, P., ‘Mr. Gladstone’s Daughters’, in Kinzer, B.L. (ed.), The Gladstonian Turn of Mind (Toronto, 1985), pp. 97–122. Jalland, P., Women, Marriage and Politics, 1860–1914 (Oxford, 1986). Jalland, P., Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford, 1996), chapter 8. Lloyd-Jones, Sir H., ‘Gladstone and Homer’, in Sir H. Lloyd Jones, Blood for the Ghosts (London, 1982).

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Mallet, C., Herbert Gladstone: A Memoir (London, 1932). Marlow, J., The Oak and the Ivy: An Intimate Biography of William and Catherine Gladstone (New York, 1977). Masterman, L. (ed.), Mary Gladstone: Her Diaries and Letters (London, 1930). McKelvy, W.R., The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774–1880 (Charlottesville and London, 2007). Morris, L., ‘Catherine Gladstone and Victorian Philanthropy’ in Francis, P. (ed.), The Gladstone Umbrella (2001), pp. 35–49. Olney, R.J., ‘The Gladstone Papers, 1822–1977’, in Brooke, J. and Sorensen, M., The Prime Minister’s Papers. W.E. Gladstone IV: Autobiographical Memoranda 1868–1894 (London, 1981), pp. 118–130. Pritchard, T.W., History of St. Deiniol’s Library (Hawarden, 1999). Ratcliffe, F.W., ‘Mr Gladstone, the Librarian, and St. Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone, Politics and Religion (London, 1985), pp. 46–67. Robson, A.P., ‘A Bird’s Eye View of Gladstone’, in Kinzer, B.L. (ed.), The Gladstonian Turn of Mind: Essays Presented to J.B.Conacher (Toronto, 1985), pp. 63–96. Ritchie, J.E., The Real Gladstone: An Anecdotal Biography (London, 1898). Smith, G., My Memory of Gladstone (London, 1904). Tollemache, L.A., Talks with Mr Gladstone (London, 1903). Tollemache, L.A., Gladstone’s Boswell: Late Victorian Conversations, ed. Briggs, A. (Brighton, 1984). Turner, F.M., The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1981). Wickham, G., ‘Gladstone, Oratory and the Theatre’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone (1998), pp. 1–32. Articles Aitken, R., ‘A Tender Tyranny: William and Catherine Gladstone as Victorian Parents’, Flintshire Historical Society Journal, 38 (2010): 155–81. Beales, D., ‘Gladstone and his Diary: “Myself, the worst of all interlocutors’’’, Historical Journal, 25 (1982): 463–9. Bellmer, E.H., ‘The Statesman and the Ophthalmologist: Gladstone and Magnus in the evolution of human colour vision, one small episode of the nineteenth-century Darwinian debate’, Annals of Science, 56 (1999): 25–45. Bentley, M., ‘Gladstone’s Heir’, English Historical Review, 107 (1992): 901–24. Clayton, R., ‘W.E. Gladstone: An Annotation Key’, Notes & Queries, 246/2 ( June 2001): 139–43.

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Clayton, R., ‘Gladstone’s Library and the Cultural Organization of Knowledge’, Leeds Working Papers in Victorian Studies, 5 (2002): 91–109. Clayton, R., ‘Masses or Classes: The Question of Community in the Foundation of Gladstone’s Library’, Library History, 19 (November 2003): 163–72. Conacher, J.P., ‘A Visit to the Gladstones in 1891’, Victorian Studies, 2 (1958): 155–60. Davidoff, L., ‘Kinship as a Categorical Concept: A Case Study of Nineteenth Century English Siblings’, Journal of Social History, 39/2 (2005): 411–28. Gardiner, J.P., ‘Gladstone, gossip and the post-war generation’, Historical Research, 74/186 (2001): 409–24. Gilliland, J., ‘Helen Jane Gladstone (1814–1880): Sister of William’, Flintshire Historical Society Journal, 35 (1999): 177–89. Glasgow, E., ‘Gladstone and public libraries’. Library History, 16 (2000): 57–63. Isba, A., ‘Trouble with Helen: The Gladstone family crisis, 1846–1848’, History, 88/290 (2003): 249–61. Jackson, A., ‘A View from the Summit: The Gladstone Diaries Completed’, Irish Historical Studies, 30 (1996): 255–63. Jenkins, R., ‘Writing about Gladstone’, Journal of Liberal Democrat History, 20 (1998): 36–7. Matthew, H.C.G., ‘Gladstone’s Death and Funeral’, Journal of Liberal Democrat History, 20 (1998): 38–42. Matthew, H.C.G., ‘Gladstone and his Diaries’, Flintshire Historical Society Journal, 35 (1999): 167–75. Meisel, J.S., ‘The Importance of Being Serious: The Unexplored Connection between Gladstone and Humour’, History, 84/274 (1999): 278–300. Meisel, J.S., ‘Words by the numbers: A quantitative analysis and comparison of the oratorical careers of William Ewart Gladstone and Winston Spencer Churchill’, Historical Research, 73/182 (2000): 262–95. Nolan, D., ‘Gladstone and Liverpool’, Journal of Liberal Democrat History, 20 (1998): 17–22. Parker, W.M., ‘Gladstone as a Quarterly Review contributor’, Quarterly Review, 293 (1955): 464–76. Pointon, M., ‘Gladstone as Art Patron and Collector’, Victorian Studies, 19 (1975): 73–98. Powell, J., ‘Tollemache’s talks with Mr Gladstone’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 17, (1989): 31–46. Powell, J., ‘Small Marks and Instructional Responses: A Study in the Uses of Gladstone’s Marginalia’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 19 (1992): 1–17. Pritchard, T.W., ‘The Revd. S.E. Gladstone (1844–1920)’, Flintshire Historical Society Journal, 35 (1999): 191–241.

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Webb, C., ‘Some Personal Reminiscences of Mr Gladstone’, Church Quarterly Review, 153 (1952): 320–34. Windscheffel, R.C., ‘Gladstone and Scott: Family, Identity, and Nation’, Scottish Historical Review, 86/1/221 (2007): 69–95. Gladstone and Religion Books Arnstein, W.L., The Bradlaugh Case: Atheism, Sex and Politics Among the Late Victorians (Oxford, 1965). Bebbington, D., ‘Gladstone and the Nonconformists: A Religious Affinity in Politics’, in D. Baker (ed.), Church, Society and Politics, Studies in Church History, 12 (Oxford, 1975), pp. 369–82. Bebbington, D., William Ewart Gladstone: Faith and Politics in Victorian Britain (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1993). Binfield, C., ‘Networking through Sound Establishments: How Gladstone could make Dissenting Sense’ in Bebbington, D. and Swift, R., Gladstone Centenary Essays (2000), pp. 133–62. Brown, S.J., ‘Gladstone, Chalmers and the Disruption of the Church of Scotland’ in Bebbington, D. and Swift, R., Gladstone Centenary Essays (2000), pp. 10– 28. Butler, P., Gladstone: Church, State and Tractarianism: A Study of His Religious Ideas and Attitudes, 1809–1859 (Oxford, 1982). Ellens, J.P., Religious Routes to Gladstonian Liberalism: The Church Rate Conflict in England and Wales (University Park, Pennsylvania, 1994). Gilley, S., ‘Gladstone on State and Church’ in Francis, P., The Gladstone Umbrella (2001), pp. 1–13. Helmstadter, R.J., ‘Conscience and Politics: Gladstone’s First Book’, in Kinzer, B.L. (ed.), The Gladstonian Turn of Mind (Toronto, 1985), pp. 3–42. Hilton, B., ‘Gladstone’s Theological Politics’, in Bentley, M. and Stevenson, J. (eds), High and Low Politics in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1983), pp. 28–57. Hilton, B., The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988). Jagger, P.J., Gladstone: The Making of a Christian Politician: The Personal Religious Life and Development of William Ewart Gladstone, 1809–1832 (Allison Park, PA, 1991). Kenyon, J., ‘Gladstone and the Anglican High Churchmen, 1845–52’, in Kinzer, B.L. (ed.), The Gladstonian Turn of Mind (Toronto, 1985), pp. 43–62.

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Lathbury, D.C., Mr Gladstone (London, 1907). Matthew, H.C.G., ‘Gladstone, Vaticanism and the Question of the East’, in Baker, D. (ed.), Religious Motivation: Biographical and Sociological Problems for the Church Historian, Studies in Church History, 15 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 417–42. Matthew, H.C.G., ‘Gladstone, Evangelicalism and ‘‘The Engagement’’’, in Garnett, J. and Matthew, H.C.G. (eds), Revival and Religion since 1700: Essays for John Walsh (London, 1993). Meisel, J., ‘The Word in Man: Gladstone and the Great Preachers’ in Francis, P., The Gladstone Umbrella (2001), pp. 137–55. Russell, G.W.E., Mr Gladstone’s Religious Development (London, 1899). Shannon, R., ‘Gladstone, the Roman Church and Italy’, in Bentley, M., Public and Private Doctrine (London, 1993), pp. 108–26. Soloviova, T., ‘Anglican-Orthodox Dialogue in the 19th Century and Gladstone’s interest in the Reunion of Christendom’ in Francis, P., The Gladstone Umbrella (2001), pp. 50–72. Vidler, A.R., The Orb and the Cross: A Normative Study in the Relations of Church and State with reference to Gladstone’s Early Writings (London, 1945). Ward, W.R., ‘Oxford and the Origins of Liberal Catholicism in the Church of England’, in Dugmore, C.W. and Duggan, C. (eds), Studies in Church History, 1 (1964), pp. 233–52. Wolffe, J., Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford, 2000). Articles Addison, W.G.C., ‘Church, State and Mr Gladstone’, Theology, 39 (1939). Altholz, J.L., ‘The Vatican Decrees Controversy, 1874–5’, Catholic Historical Review, 57 (1972): 593–605. Altholz, J.L. and Powell, J., ‘Gladstone, Lord Ripon and the Vatican decrees, 1874’, Albion, 22 (1990): 449–59. Anderson, O., ‘Gladstone’s Abolition of Church Rates: A Minor Political Myth and Its Historiographical Career’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 25 (1974): 185–98. Bahlman, D.W.R., ‘The Queen, Mr Gladstone and Church Patronage’, Victorian Studies, 3 (1960): 349–80. Bebbington, D., ‘Gladstone and the Baptists’, Baptist Quarterly, 26 (1976): 224– 39.

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Conlin, J., ‘Gladstone and Christian Art, 1832–1854’, Historical Journal, 46/2 (2003): 341–74. Erb, P.C., ‘Gladstone and German Liberal Catholicism’, Recusant History, 23 (1997): 450–69. Fagan, E.F., ‘The Religious Life of Mr Gladstone’, Church Quarterly Review, 155 (1954): 16–21. Fitzsimons, R., ‘The Church of England and the First Vatican Council’, Journal of Religious History, 27/1 (2003): 29–46. Gibson, W.T., ‘“A Great Excitement”: Gladstone and church patronage, 1860– 1894’, Anglican and Episcopal History, 68/3 (1999): 372–96. Gray, W.F., ‘Chalmers and Gladstone: An Unrecorded Episode’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 10 (1948): 9–17. Lorenzo, D., ‘Gladstone, Religious Freedom and Practical Reasoning’, History of Political Thought, 26/1 (2005): 90–119. Lynch, M.J., ‘Was Gladstone a Tractarian? W.E. Gladstone and the Oxford Movement, 1833–45’, Journal of Religious History, 8 (1975): 364–89. Machin, G.I.T., ‘Gladstone and Nonconformity in the 1860s: The Formation of an Alliance’, Historical Journal, 17 (1974): 347–64. Marsh, P.T., ‘The Primate and the Prime Minister: Archbishop Tait, Gladstone and the National Church’, Victorian Studies, 9 (1965): 113–40. Moberly, W.H., ‘Gladstone on Church and State’, Theology, 49 (1946): 104–10. Parry, J.P., ‘Religion and the Collapse of Gladstone’s First Government, 1870– 74’, Historical Journal, 25 (1982): 71–101. Petersen, W.S., ‘Gladstone’s Review of ‘‘Robert Elsmere’’: Some unpublished correspondence’, Review of English Studies, 21 (1970): 442–61. Ramm, A., ‘Gladstone’s Religion’, Historical Journal, 28 (1985): 327–40. Ruston, A., ‘The Unitarian Correspondents of W.E. Gladstone: The British Library MSS’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, 18 (1986): 219–24. Stephen, M.D., ‘Gladstone’s Ecclesiastical Patronage, 1868–1874’, Historical Studies (Australia and New Zealand), 11 (1964): 145–62. Stephen, M.D., ‘Gladstone and the Composition of the Final Court in Ecclesiastical Causes’, Historical Journal, 9 (1966): 191–200. Von Arx, J.P., ‘Interpreting the Council: Archbishop Manning and the Vatican Decrees controversy’, Recusant History, 26/1 (2002): 229–42. Windscheffel, R.C.., ‘Politics, Religion and Text: W.E. Gladstone and Spiritualism’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 11/1 (Spring 2006): 1–29.

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GLADSTONE Gladstone and General Politics Books Adelman, P., Gladstone, Disraeli and Later Victorian Politics (London, 1970). Barker, M., Gladstone and Radicalism: The Reconstruction of Liberal Policy in Britain, 1885–94 (Hassocks, Sussex, 1974). Biagini, E.F., Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge, 1982). Blake, R., Gladstone, Disraeli and Queen Victoria: The Centenary Romanes Lecture (Oxford, 1993). Brooks, D., ‘Gladstone’s Fourth Administration, 1892–1894’ in Bebbington, D. and Swift, R., Gladstone Centenary Essays (2000), pp. 225–42. Brown, S., ‘One Last Campaign from the G.O.M.: Gladstone and the House of Lords in 1894’, in Kinzer, B.L. (ed.), The Gladstonian Turn of Mind (Toronto, 1985), pp. 154–76. Clarke, P., A Question of Leadership: British Rulers – Gladstone to Thatcher (London, 1991). Cooke, A.B., and Vincent, J.R., The Governing Passion: Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain, 1885–86 (Brighton, 1974). Cowling, M., 1867. Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution: The Passing of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1967). Gaunt, R., ‘A Stern Unbending Tory and Rising Young Hope: Gladstone, Newark and the Fourth Duke of Newcastle, 1832–1846’ in Francis, P., The Gladstone Umbrella (2001), pp. 14–34. Ghosh, P. and Goldman, L. (eds), Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain: Essays in memory of Colin Matthew (Oxford, 2006). Hamer, D.A., Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery: A study in Leadership and Policy (Oxford, 1972). Hanham, H.J., Elections and Party Management: Politics in the Time of Gladstone and Disraeli (London, 1959). Harvie, C., ‘Gladstonianism, the Provinces, and Popular Political Culture, 1860–1906’, in Bellamy, R. (ed.), Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice (London, 1990), pp. 152–74. Jenkins, T.A., Gladstone, Whiggery and the Liberal Party, 1874–1886 (Oxford, 1988). Jenkins, T.A., The Liberal Ascendancy, 1830–1886 (London, 1994). Jones, A., The Politics of Reform, 1884 (Cambridge, 1972).

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Lawrence, J., Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914 (Cambridge, 1998). Matthew, H.C.G., ‘Rhetoric and Politics in Great Britain, 1860–1950’, in Waller, P.J. (ed.), Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain: Essays presented to A.F. Thompson (Brighton, 1987), pp. 34–58. Matthew, H.C.G., ‘Gladstone, Rhetoric and Politics’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone (London, 1998), pp. 213–34. Meisel, J., Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone (Columbia, 2001). Meisel, J.S., ‘Mrs Thatcher and Mr Gladstone’, in Pugliese, S.G. (ed.), The Political Legacy of Margaret Thatcher (London, 2003), pp. 45–57. Morgan, K.O., ‘Gladstone, Wales and the New Radicalism’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone (London, 1998), pp. 123–36. Parry, J.P., Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party, 1867–1875 (Cambridge, 1986). Parry, J.P., The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1993). Parry, J.P., ‘Gladstone, Liberalism and the Government of 1868–1874’ in Bebbington, D. and Swift, R., Gladstone Centenary Essays (2000), pp. 94– 112. Peaple, S. and Vincent, J., ‘Gladstone and the Working Man’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone (London, 1998), pp. 71–84. Quinault, R., ‘Gladstone and Parliamentary Reform’ in Bebbington, D. and Swift, R., Gladstone Centenary Essays (2000), pp. 75–93. Ramm, A., ‘Gladstone as Politician’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone, Politics and Religion (London, 1985), pp. 104–16. Searle, G.R., The Liberal Party: Triumph and Disintegration, 1886–1929 (London, 1992). Schreuder, D.M., ‘Gladstone and the Conscience of the State’, in Marsh, P.T. (ed.), The Conscience of the Victorian State (New York, 1979), pp. 73–134. Shannon, R.T., ‘Midlothian: One Hundred Years After’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone, Politics and Religion (London, 1985), pp. 88–103. St John, I., Gladstone and the Logic of Victorian Politics (London and New York, 2010). Steele, E.D., Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855–1865 (Cambridge, 1991). Taylor, M., The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847–60 (Oxford, 1995). Vincent, J.R., The Formation of the Liberal Party (London, 1966). Williams, W.E., The Rise of Gladstone to the Leadership of the Liberal Party, 1859–1868 (Cambridge, 1934). Williams, C.J., Gladstone, Lloyd George and the Gladstone Rock (Denbigh, 1999).

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Wilson, A.N., ‘Gladstone’s First Premiership’ in Wilson, A.N., The Victorians (London, 2002), pp. 343–64. Winstanley, M.J., Gladstone and the Liberal Party (London, 1990). Wrigley, C., ‘“Carving the last few columns out of the Gladstonian quarry”: The Liberal Leaders and the Mantle of Gladstone, 1898–1929’ in Bebbington, D. and Swift, R., Gladstone Centenary Essays (2000), pp. 243–59. Articles Adelman, P., ‘Gladstone and Education’, History Today, 20 (1970): 496–503. Armitage, W.H.G., ‘The Railway Rates Question and the Fall of the Third Gladstone Ministry’, English Historical Review, 65 (1950). Arnstein, W.L., ‘Gladstone and the Bradlaugh Case’, Victorian Studies, 5 (1962): 303–30. Beales, D., ‘Gladstone and His First Ministry’, Historical Journal, 26 (1983): 987–98. Biagini, E.F., ‘Gladstone’s Midlothian Campaign of 1879’, Journal of Liberal History, 42 (2004): 6–11. Brack, D., ‘Speeches and speech-makers’, Journal of Liberal Democrat History, 34 & 35 (2002): 35–7. Brooks, D., ‘Gladstone and Midlothian:The Background to the First Campaign’, Scottish Historical Review, 64 (1985): 42–67. Cooke, A.B., ‘Gladstone’s Election for the Leith District of Burghs, July 1886’, Scottish Historical Review, 49 (1970): 172–94. Goodlad, G.D., ‘The Liberal Party and Gladstone’s Land Purchase Bill of 1886’, Historical Journal, 32 (1989): 627–41. Hamer, D.A., ‘Gladstone: The Making of a Political Myth’, Victorian Studies, 22 (1978): 29–50. Hoekstra, H., ‘De kracht van het gesproken woord: Politieke mobilisatie en natievorming bij Kuyper en Gladstone’ [The power of the spoken word: Political mobilisation and nation building by Kuyper and Gladstone], Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 116 (2003): 494–511. James, R.R., ‘Gladstone and the Greenwich Seat: The Dissolution of January 26th 1874’, History Today, 9 (1959): 344–51. Jenkins, R., ‘From Gladstone to Asquith: The Late-Victorian Pattern of Liberal Leadership’, History Today, 14 (1964): 445–52. Jenkins, T.A., ‘Gladstone, the Whigs and the Leadership of the Liberal Party, 1879–1880’, Historical Journal, 27 (1984): 337–60. Jones, J.R., ‘The Conservatives and Gladstone in 1855’, English Historical Review, 77 (1962): 96–8.

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Kelley, R., ‘Midlothian: A Study in Politics and Ideas’, Victorian Studies, 4 (1960): 119–40. Mael, W.H., ‘Gladstone, the Liberals and the Election of 1874’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 36 (1963): 53–69. Mares, D., ‘Goodbye Gladstone – Die liberale Partei im spätviktorianischen Großbritannien 1886–1906’ [Goodbye Gladstone. The Liberal Party in Late-Victorian Britain 1886–1906], Jahrbuch zur Liberalismus-Forschung, 19 (2007): 137–62. Morgan, K.O., ‘Gladstone and Wales’, Welsh History Review, 1 (1960): 65–82. Morphet, D.. ‘Political comment in the Quarterly Review after Croker: Gladstone, Salisbury and Jennings’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 36/2 (2003): 109–34. Nicholls, D., ‘Gladstone on Liberty and Democracy’, Review of Politics, (1961): 401–9. Parry, J.P., ‘Gladstone and the Disintegration of the Liberal Party’, Parliamentary History, 10 (1991): 392–404. Parsons, F.D., ‘Ignis Fatuus vs. Pons Asinorum: William Gladstone and proportional representation, 1867–1885’, Parliamentary History, 21/3 (2002): 374–85. Primrose, A.P., ‘Mr Gladstone’s Last Cabinet’, History Today, 1 (1951): 31–41; 2 (1952): 17–22. Ramm, A., ‘The Parliamentary Context of Cabinet Government, 1868–1874’, English Historical Review, 99 (1984): 739–69. Rossi, J.P., ‘The Nestor of his Party: Gladstone, Hartington and the Liberal Leadership Crisis, November 1879 – January 1880’, Canadian Journal of History, 11 (1976): 189–99. Russell, C., ‘Liberalism and Liberty from Gladstone to Ashdown’, Journal of Liberal Democrat History, 20 (1998): 4–10. Searby, P., ‘Gladstone in West Derby Hundred: The Liberal Campaign in SouthWest Lancashire in 1868’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 111 (1960): 139–66. Shannon, R., ‘Peel, Gladstone and Party’, Parliamentary History, 18/3 (1999): 317–52. Temmel, M.R., ‘Gladstone’s Resignation of the Liberal Leadership, 1875–1875’, Journal of British Studies, 16 (1976): 153–77. Thompson, A.F., ‘Gladstone’s Whips and the General Election of 1868’, English Historical Review, 63 (1948): 189–200.

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Gladstone and Economic Policy Books Anderson, O., A Liberal State at War: English Politics and Economics during the Crimean War (London, 1967). Biagini, E.F., ‘Popular Liberals, Gladstonian Finance and the Debate on Taxation, 1860–1874’, in Biagini, E.F. and Reid, A.J. (eds), Currents of Radicalism (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 134–62. Buxton, S., Mr Gladstone as Chancellor of the Exchequer (London, 1901). Daunton, M., Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799– 1914 (Cambridge, 2001). Hirst, F.W., Gladstone as Financier and Economist (London, 1931). Howe, A., Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997). Hyde, F.E., Mr Gladstone at the Board of Trade (London, 1934). Maloney, J., ‘Gladstone, Peel and the Corn Laws’, in Marrison, A (ed.), Free Trade and its Reception (London, 1998), pp. 28–47. Matthew, H.C.G., ‘Gladstonian Finance’, in Marsden, G. (ed.), Victorian Values: Personalities and Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Society (London, 1990), pp. 111–20. Prest, J., ‘Gladstone and the Railways’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone (London, 1998), pp. 197–212. Searle, G.R., Entrepreneurial Politics in Mid-Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1993). Articles Baysinger, B. and Tollison, R., ‘Chaining Leviathan: The Case of Gladstonian Finance’, History of Political Economy, 12/2 (1980): 206–13. Ghosh, P.R., ‘Disraelian Conservatism: A Financial Approach’, English Historical Review, 99 (1984): 268–96. Gunter, C. and Maloney, J., ‘Did Gladstone make a difference? Rhetoric and reality in mid-Victorian finance’, Accounting, Business & Financial History, 9/3 (1999): 325–48. Hawkins, A.B., ‘A Forgotten Crisis: Gladstone and the Politics of Finance during the 1850s’, Victorian Studies, 26 (1983): 287–320. Hodgkins, D., ‘Gladstone and Railways, Part 1’, Journal of the Railway & Canal Historical Society, 197 (2007): 501–8. Hodgkins, D., ‘Gladstone and Railways, Part 2: Gladstone, the Minister’, Journal of the Railway & Canal Historical Society, 198 (2007): 574–82.

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Maloney, J., ‘Gladstone as Chancellor’, Journal of Liberal Democrat History, 20 (1998): 12–16. Matthew, H.C.G., ‘Disraeli, Gladstone and the Politics of Mid-Victorian Budgets’, Historical Journal, 22 (1979): 615–43. Matthew, H.C.G., ‘Gladstonian Finance’, History Today, 37 (1987): 41–5. Zimmeck, M., ‘Gladstone Holds His Own: The Origins of Income Tax Relief for Life Insurance Policies’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 58 (1985): 167–88. Gladstone and Ireland Books Bebbington, D., ‘The Union of Hearts depicted: Gladstone, Home Rule and United Ireland’, in Boyce, D.G. and O’Day, A., Gladstone and Ireland (2010), pp. 186–207. Bell, P.M.H., Disestablishment in Ireland and Wales (London, 1969). Biagini, E.F. British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906 (Cambridge, 2007). Boyce, D.G., Nationalism in Ireland (London, 1982). Boyce, D.G., Nineteenth Century Ireland: The Search for Stability (Dublin, 1990). Boyce, D.G., The Irish Question and British Politics, 1886–1996 (London, 1998). Boyce, D.G., ‘Gladstone and Ireland’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone (London, 1998), pp. 105–22. Boyce, D.G., ‘In the Front Rank of the Nation: Gladstone and the Unionists of Ireland, 1868–1893’ in Bebbington, D and Swift, R., Gladstone Centenary Essays (2000), pp. 184–201. Boyce, D.G. and O’Day, A. (eds), Gladstone and Ireland: Politics, Religion and Nationality in the Victorian Age (London, 2010). Boyce, D.G., ‘Tracts for the Times? The Enduring Appeal of Gladstone and Ireland’, in Boyce, D.G. and O’Day, A., Gladstone and Ireland (2010), pp. 1–14. Boyce, D.G., ‘Gladstone and the four nations’, in Boyce, D.G. and O’Day, A., Gladstone and Ireland (2010), pp. 256–88. Bull, P., ‘Gladstone, the Fenian Prisoners and the Failure of his First Irish Mission’ in Francis, P., The Gladstone Umbrella (2001), pp. 98–114.

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Bull, P., ‘Isaac Butt, British Liberalism and an alternative nationalist tradition’, in Boyce, D.G. and Swift, R. (eds), Problems and Perspectives in Irish History since 1800 (Dublin, 2004), pp. 147–63. Comerford, R.V., ‘Gladstone’s First Irish Enterprise, 1864–1870’, in Vaughan, W.E. (ed.), A New History of Ireland, 5, Ireland under the Union, I: 1801– 1870 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 431–50. Fleming, N.C., ‘Gladstone and the Ulster Question’, in Boyce, D.G. and O’Day, A., Gladstone and Ireland (2010), pp. 140–61. Fleming, N.C. and O’Day, A., ‘Accommodation, conciliation and co-operation: A Gladstonian legacy’, in Boyce, D.G. and O’Day, A., Gladstone and Ireland (2010), pp. 233–55. Goodlad, G., ‘British Liberals and the Irish Home Rule Crisis: The dynamics of division’, in Boyce, D.G. and O’Day, A., Gladstone and Ireland (2010), pp. 86–109. Hammond, J.L., Gladstone and the Irish Nation (London, 1938). Kee, R., The Laurel and the Ivy: The Story of Charles Stuart Parnell and Irish Nationalism (London, 1993). Loughlin, J., Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question, 1882–93 (Dublin, 1986). Lubenow, W.C., Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis: The British House of Commons in 1886 (Oxford, 1988). Maguire, M., ‘Gladstone and the Irish Civil Service’, in Boyce, D.G. and O’Day, A., Gladstone and Ireland (2010), pp. 208–32. Maume, P., ‘Burke in Belfast: Thomas MacKnight, Gladstone and Liberal Unionism’, in Boyce, D.G. and O’Day, A., Gladstone and Ireland (2010), pp. 162–85. McCarthy, J.P., ‘History and Pluralism: Gladstone and the Maynooth grant controversy’, in Boyce, D.G. and O’Day, A., Gladstone and Ireland (2010), pp. 15–40. McDowell, R.B., Crisis and Decline: The Fate of the Southern Unionists (Dublin, 1997). O’Callaghan, M., British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland: Criminality, Land and Law under Forster and Balfour (Cork, 1994). Megahy, A., ‘Gl;adstone, Church and State’, in Boyce, D.G. and O’Day, A., Gladstone and Ireland (2010), pp. 41–64. Moore, T., ‘Anti-Gladstonianism and the pre-1886 Liberal secession’, in Boyce, D.G. and O’Day, A., Gladstone and Ireland (2010), pp. 65–85. O’Day, A., The English Face of Irish Nationalism: Parnellite Involvement in British Politics, 1880–86 (Dublin, 1977).

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O’Day, A., ‘The Irish Problem’, in Gourvish, T.R. and O’Day, A. (eds), Late Victorian Britain, 1867–1900 (London, 1988), pp. 229–50. O’Day, A., Irish Home Rule, 1867–1921 (Manchester, 1998). O’Day, A., ‘Gladstone and Irish Nationalism: Achievement and Reputation’ in Bebbington, D. and Swift, R., Gladstone Centenary Essays (2000), pp. 163–83. Quinault, R., ‘Victorian Prime Ministers and Ireland’ in Swift, R. and Kinealy, C. (eds), Politics and Power in Victorian Ireland (Dublin, 2006), pp. 54–68. Shannon, R.T., ‘Gladstone and Home Rule, 1886’, in Ireland after the Union: Proceedings of the Second Joint Meeting of the Royal Irish Academy and the British Academy, London 1986 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 45–59. Sheehy, I., ‘“A deplorable narrative”’: Gladstone, R. Barry O’Brien and the “historical argument” for Home Rule, 1880–90’, in Boyce, D.G. and O’Day, A., Gladstone and Ireland (2010), pp. 110–39. Steele, E.D., Irish Land and British Politics: Tenant Right and Nationality, 1865–1870 (Cambridge, 1974). Steele, E.D., ‘Gladstone, Irish Violence, and Conciliation’, in Cosgrove, A. and McCartney. D. (eds), Studies in Irish History presented to R. Dudley Edwards (Dublin, 1979), pp. 257–78. Warren, A., ‘Palmerston, the Whigs and the Government of Ireland, 1855– 1866’, in Brown, D. and Taylor, M. (eds), Palmerston Studies I (Southampton, 2007), pp. 95–126. Articles Beckett, J.C., ‘Gladstone, Queen Victoria, and the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, 1868–9’, Irish Historical Studies, 13 (1962): 38–47. Cosgrove, R.A., ‘The Relevance of Irish History: The Gladstone-Dicey Debate about Home Rule, 1886–87’, Eire-Ireland, 13 (1978): 6–21. Feuchtwanger, E.J., ‘Gladstone’s Irish Policy: Expediency or High Principle?’, Modern History Review, 3 (1991): 21–3. Foot, M.R.D., ‘The Hawarden Kite’, Journal of Liberal Democrat History, 20 (1998): 26–322. Hamer, D.A., ‘The Irish Question and Liberal Politics, 1886–1894’, Historical Journal, 12 (1969): 511–32. Hawkins, R., ‘Gladstone, Forster, and the Release of Parnell, 1882–8’, Irish Historical Studies, 16 (1969): 417–45. Herrick, F.H., ‘Gladstone, Newman and Ireland in 1881’, Catholic Historical Review, 47 (1961): 342–50. Heyck, T.W., ‘Home Rule, Radicalism and the Liberal Party, 1886–95’, Journal of British Studies, 13 (1974): 66–91.

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Lubenow, W.C., ‘Irish Home Rule and the Great Separation of the Liberal Party in 1886: The Dimensions of Parliamentary Liberalism’, Victorian Studies, 26 (1983): 161–80. Matthew, H.C.G., ‘Gladstone and Ireland’, Journal of Liberal Democrat History, 20 (1998): 23–5. Steele, E.D., ‘Gladstone and Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 17 (1970): 58–88. Steele, E.D., ‘Ireland and the Empire in the 1860s: Imperial Precedents for Gladstone’s First Irish Land Act’, Historical Journal, 11 (1968): 64–83. Vincent, J., ‘Gladstone and Ireland’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 63 (1977): 193–238. Warren, A., ‘Gladstone, Land and Social Reconstruction in Ireland, 1881–87’, Parliamentary History, 2 (1983): 153–73. Warren, A., ‘W.E.Forster, the Liberals and New Directions in Irish Policy, 1880–82’, Parliamentary History, 6 (1987): 65–126. Warren, A., ‘Disraeli, the Conservatives and the Government of Ireland: Part I, 1837–1868’, Parliamentary History, 18 (1999): 45–64. Gladstone and Foreign Affairs Books Beales, D., England and Italy, 1859–60 (London, 1961). Beales, D., ‘Gladstone and Garibaldi’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone (London, 1998), pp. 137–56. Biagini, E.F., ‘Exporting ‘‘Western & Beneficent Institutions’’: Gladstone and Empire, 1880–1885’ in Bebbington, D. and Swift, R., Gladstone Centenary Essays (2000), pp. 202–24. Caedel, M., ‘Gladstone and a Liberal theory of international relations’, in Ghosh, P and Goldman, L., Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain (2006), pp. 74–94. Cain, P., ‘Radicalism, Gladstone, and the liberal critique of Disraelian “imperialism”’, in Bell, D. (ed.), Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-century Political Thought (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 215–38. Chadwick, O., ‘Young Gladstone and Italy’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 30 (1979), pp. 243–59; reprinted in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone, Politics and Religion (London, 1985), pp. 68–87. Davies, W.W., Gladstone and the Unification of Italy (London, 1913).

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D’Haussy, C., ‘Gladstone, France and His French Contemporaries’ in Francis, The Gladstone Umbrella (2001), pp. 115–36. Eldridge, C.C., England’s Mission: The Imperial Idea in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli, 1868–1880 (London, 1973). Farnsworth, S., The Evolution of British Imperial Policy in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: A Study of the Peelite Contribution, 1846–1874 (1992). Faught, C.B., ‘“The Uganda Business”: Gladstone and Africa Revisited’ in Francis, P., The Gladstone Umbrella (2001), pp. 156–74. Gerlach, M., British Liberalism and the United States: Political and Social Thought in the Late Victorian Age (London, 2001). Hammond, J.L., ‘Gladstone and the League of Nations Mind’, in Thomson, J.A.K., and Toynbee, A.J. (eds), Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray (London, 1936). Harrison, R.T., Gladstone’s Imperialism in Egypt: Techniques of Domination (Westport, 1995). Holland, R. and Markides, D., ‘Gladstone and the Greeks: The Extraordinary Mission to the Ionian Islands 1858–1859’, in Holland, R. and Markides, D. (eds), The British and the Hellenes Struggles for Mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1850–1960 (London, 2006). Knaplund, P., Gladstone and Britain’s Imperial Policy (London, 1927). Knaplund, P., Gladstone’s Foreign Policy (New York, 1935). Knaplund, P., ‘Gladstone-Gordon Correspondence, 1851–1891: A Selection from the Private Correspondence of a British Prime Minister and a Colonial Governor’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 51, 4 (Special Edition, Philadelphia, 1961). Martel, G., Imperial Diplomacy: Rosebery and the Failure of Foreign Policy (Kingston and Montreal, 1986). McIntyre, W.D., The Imperial Frontier in the Tropics, 1865–1875: A Study of British Colonial Policy in West Africa, Malaya and the South Pacific in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli (London, 1975). Medlicott, W.N., Bismarck, Gladstone and the Concert of Europe (1956). Mulligan, W., ‘Gladstone and the Primacy of Foreign Policy’, in Mulligan, W. and Simms, B. (eds), The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660– 2000: How Strategic Concerns Shaped Modern Britain (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 181–96. Parish, P.J., ‘Gladstone and America’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone (London, 1998), pp. 85–104. Robinson, R., Gallagher, J. and Denny, A., Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London, 1961).

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Saab, A.P., Reluctant Icon: Gladstone, Bulgaria and the Working Classes (Cambridge, MA, 1991). Sandiford, K.A.P., ‘Gladstone and Europe’, in Kinzer, B.L. (ed.), The Gladstonian Turn of Mind (Toronto, 1985), pp. 177–96. Schreuder, D.M., Gladstone and Kruger: Liberal Government and Colonial ‘Home Rule’, 1880–85 (London, 1969). Seton-Watson, R.W., Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question: A Study in Diplomacy and Party Politics (London, 1935). Shannon, R.T., Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, 1876 (London, 1963). Shannon, R.T., ‘Midlothian: One Hundred Year After’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone, Politics and Religion (London, 1985). Shaw, A.G.L., Gladstone at the Colonial Office (London, 1986). Swartz, M., The Politics of British Foreign Policy in the Era of Disraeli and Gladstone (London, 1985). Taylor, A.J.P., The Troublemakers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792–1939 (London, 1957), chapter 3. Articles Biagini, E., ‘Gladstone and Britain’s Imperial Role’, Journal of Liberal Democrat History, 20 (1998): 33–5. Faught, C.B., ‘An Imperial Prime Minister? W.E. Gladstone and India, 1880– 1885’, Journal of the Historical Society [Boston, Mass.], 6/ 4 (2006): 555–78. Gopal, S., ‘Gladstone and the Italian Question’, History, 41 (1956): 113–21. Harcourt, F., ‘Gladstone, Monarchism and the ‘New’ Imperialism’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 14 (1985): 20–51. Herrick, F.H., ‘Gladstone and the Concept of the ‘English-speaking Peoples’, Journal of British Studies, 12 (1972): 150–6. Hopkins, A.G., ‘The Victorians and Africa: A Reconsideration of the Occupation of Egypt, 1882’, Journal of African History, 27 (1986). Knox, B., ‘British Policy and the Ionian Islands, 1847–1864: Nationalism and Imperial Administration’, English Historical Review, 99 (1984): 503–29. Lambert, S., ‘The influence of Parliament upon the Foreign Policy of the Gladstone Government, 1868–74’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 23 (1950): 94–6. Medlicott, W.N., ‘Gladstone and the Turks’, History, 13 (1928): 136–7. Newsinger, J., ‘Liberal imperialism and the occupation of Egypt in 1882’, Race & Class, 49/3 (2008): 54–75. Quinault, R., ‘Afghanistan and Gladstone’s moral foreign policy’, History Today, 52/12 (2002): 28–34.

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Quinault, R., ‘Gladstone and Slavery’, Historical Journal, 52 (2009): 363–83. Reidy, D.V., ‘Panizzi, Gladstone, Garibaldi and the Neapolitan Prisoners’. The Electronic British Library Journal (2005): 1–15. Sandiford, K., ‘Gladstone and Liberal-Nationalist Movements’, Albion, 13 (1981): 27–42. Schreuder, D.M., ‘Gladstone and Italian Unification: The Making of a Liberal?’, English Historical Review, 85 (1970): 475–501. Schreuder, D.M., ‘Gladstone as ‘Trouble-Maker’: Liberal Foreign Policy and the German Annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, 1870–1871’, Journal of British Studies, 17 (1978): 106–35. Schreuder, D.M., ‘The Gladstone–Max Müller debate on Nationality and German Unification: Examining a Victorian “Controversy”’, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 18 (1979): 561–81. Steiner, K. von den, ‘The Harmless Papers: Granville, Gladstone and the Censorship of the Madagascar Blue Books of 1884’, Victorian Studies, 14 (1970): 165–76. Whitridge, A., ‘British Liberals and the American Civil War’, History Today, 12 (1962): 688–95. Gladstone and his Contemporaries Books Abbott, B.H., Gladstone and Disraeli (London, 1972). Aldous, R., The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs Disraeli (London, 2006). Bastable, J.D., Newman and Gladstone Centennial Essays (Dublin, 1978). Bebbington, D., ‘Gladstone and Grote’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone (London, 1998), pp. 157–76. Blake, R., ‘Gladstone and Disraeli’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone (London, 1998), pp. 51–70. Chadwick, O., Acton and Gladstone (London, 1976). Dessain, C.S. and Gornall, T. (eds), The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, 27: The Controversy with Gladstone, January 1874 to December 1875 (Oxford, 1975). Drew, M., Acton, Gladstone and Others (London, 1924). Evans, E., ‘Gladstone and Peel’ in Bebbington, D. and Swift, R., Gladstone Centenary Essays (2000), pp. 29–56. Ghosh, P.. ‘Gladstone and Peel’, in Ghosh, P. and Goldman, L., Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain (2006), pp. 45–73.

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Goodlad, G.D., ‘Gladstone and his Rivals: Popular Liberal Perceptions of the Party Leadership in the Political Crisis of 1885–86’, in Biagini, E.F. and Reid, A.J. (eds), Currents of Radicalism (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 163–83. Guedalla, P., The Queen andMr Gladstone: 1845–1879 (London, 1933). Howe, A., ‘Gladstone and Cobden’ in Bebbington, D. and Swift, R., Gladstone Centenary Essays (2000), pp. 113–32. Isba, A., Gladstone and Women (London and New York, 2006). Kerr, F., ‘Did Newman answer Gladstone?’, in Nicholls, D. and Kerr, F (eds), John Henry Newman: Reason, Rhetoric and Romanticism (London and Bristol, 1991), pp. 135–52. Lee, S.J., Gladstone and Disraeli (London, 2005). McClelland, V.A., ‘Gladstone and Manning: A Question of Authority’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone, Politics and Religion (London, 1985), pp. 148–70. Partridge, M., ‘Gladstone and Palmerston, 1840–1865’ in Francis, P., The Gladstone Umbrella (2001), pp. 73–97. Rooke, P.J., Gladstone and Disraeli (London, 1970). Steele, E.D., ‘Gladstone and Palmerston, 1855–65’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone, Politics and Religion (London, 1985), pp. 117–47. Wheeler, M., ‘Gladstone and Ruskin’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone (London, 1998), pp. 177–96. Articles Blyth, J.A., ‘Gladstone and Disraeli: ‘Images’ in Victorian Politics’, Dalhousie Review, 49 (1969): 388–98. Campbell, K., ‘W.E. Gladstone, W.T. Stead, Matthew Arnold and a new journalism: Cultural politics in the 1880s’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 36/1 (2003): 20–40. Erb, P.C., ‘Politics and theological liberalism: William Gladstone and Mrs Humphry Ward’, Journal of Religious History, 25/2 (2001): 158–72. Foot, M.R.D., ‘Gladstone and Panizzi’, British Library Journal, 5 (1979): 48–56. Holmes, D., ‘Gladstone and Newman’, Dublin Review, 241 (1967): 141–53. Joseph, G., ‘The Homeric Competitions of Tennyson and Gladstone’, Browning Institute Studies, 10 (1982): 105–15. Maloney, J., ‘Gladstone’s Gladstone?: The Chancellorship of Robert Lowe, 1868–73’, Historical Research, 79/205 (Aug. 2006): 404–28. Prest, J., ‘Gladstone and Russell’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 16 (1966): 43–63. Quinault, R., ‘Gladstone and Disraeli: A Reappraisal of their Relationship’, History, 91/304 (2006): 557–76.

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Reynolds, B., ‘W.E. Gladstone and Alessandro Manzoni’, Italian Studies, 6 (1951): 63–9. Stephen, M.D., ‘Liberty, Church and State: Gladstone’s relations with Manning and Acton, 1832–70’, Journal of Religious History, 1 (1961): 217–32. West, J., ‘Gladstone and Laura Thistlethwayte, 1865–75’, Historical Research, 80/209 (2007): 368–92. Windscheffel, R.C., ‘Gladstone, Tennyson and History: 1886 and All That’, The Tennyson Research Bulletin, 8/3 (November 2004): 151–65. Windscheffel, R.C., ‘Gladstone and Scott: Family, identity, and nation’, Scottish Historical Review, 86/221 (2007): 69–95. Wrigley, C., ‘Lloyd George and Gladstone’, The Historian, 85 (2005): 8–17. Representations of Gladstone Bentley, M., ‘Victorian Prime Ministers: Changing Patterns of Commemoration’ in Taylor, M. and Wolff, M. (eds), The Victorians since 1901: Histories, Representations and Revisions (Manchester, 2004), pp. 44–58. Briggs, A., ‘Victorian Images of Gladstone’, in Jagger, P.J. (ed.), Gladstone (London, 1998), pp. 33–50. Mares, D., ‘Die visuelle Inszenierung des modernen Politikers: William Ewart Gladstone in der “Illustrated London News”’ [‘The visual representation of the modern politician. William Ewart Gladstone in the “Illustrated London News”’ in Ute Schneider et al. (eds), Dimensionen der Moderne: Festschrift für Christof Dipper (Frankfurt; Berlin, 2008), pp. 311–32. Matthew H.C.G., ‘Portraits of Men: Millais and Victorian Public Life’, in Funnell, P. and Warner, M. (eds), Millais: Portraits (London, 1999), pp. 137–61. Windscheffel, R.C., ‘Politics, Portraiture and Power: Reassessing the public image of William Ewart Gladstone’, in McCormack, M. (ed.), Public Men: Political Masculinities in Modern Britain (Houndmills, 2007), pp. 93–122. Theses Christensen, M.J., ‘St Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden: The Gladstone National Memorial’ (Unpublished MPhil thesis, University of Liverpool, 2000). Clayton, R., ‘“Enlarging the Text”: A Cultural History of William Ewart Gladstone’s Library and Reading’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Liverpool, 2003).

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Gardner, J., ‘William Ewart Gladstone and Christian Apologetics, 1859–96’ (Unpublished PhD, University of York, 2006). Isba, A., ‘Gladstone and Dante: The place of Dante in the life and thought of a Victorian Statesman’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Keele, 2001). Whitehouse, G., ‘The Relationship between Samuel Wilberforce and William Ewart Gladstone, 1835–73, with Special Reference to Contemporary Religious Issues’ (Unpublished MPhil thesis, University of Liverpool, 2011). Unpublished Papers from the annual Gladstone conference held at Gladstone’s Library (formerly St Deiniol’s), Hawarden, 1999–2010 Aitken, T., ‘Gladstone and Three Libraries: Montecassino, the London Library and St Deiniols’ (2001). Aitken, T., ‘Gladstone and Hallam’ (2002). Aitkin, T., ‘Sorry, Cobber, Didn’t Mean to Put You Crook: Gladstone and the Antipodes’ (2004). Aitken, T., ‘The Prophet Poet and the Damned Old Rascal: Gladstone and Tennyson after 1850’ (2006). Aitken, T., ‘Two Grand Old Williams: Mr Gladstone meets General Booth’ (2007). Aitken, T., ‘Debating with the Dead: William Gladstone Reads Catherine Booth’ (2008). Aitken, T., ‘A comedy in three persons: Mr Gladstone, Mrs Humphrey Ward and Miss Marie Corelli’ (2010). Aitken, R., ‘Dear Octopus’: William and Catherine Gladstone as Parents’ (2008). Aitken, R., ‘Stephen Gladstone’ (2010). Bebbington, D., ‘Gladstonian Liberalism’ (2004). Bebbington, D., ‘The Union of Hearts Depicted: Gladstone, Home Rule and the United Kingdom’ (2005). Bebbington, D., ‘Gladstone and Fasque’ (2010). Bradley, I., ‘Mr Gladstone in Song’ (2006). Brooks, D., ‘Gladstone and Irish Disestablishment: A Reconsideration’ (1999). Brooks, D., ‘Further Thoughts on Irish Home Rule, 1885–86’ (2002). Brooks, D., ‘Gladstone and the 1874 General Election’ (2010). Brown, D., ‘Gladstone and Palmerston’ (2005). Caernarven-Smith, P., ‘Gladstone as Budget Maker’ (2008). Campbell, T., ‘Gladstone as Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1880–1882’ (1999). Clayton, R., ‘Gladstone’s Reading’ (1999).

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Clayton, R. & Nixon, M., ‘Gladstonian Collections: Annotations and Artefacts’ (2005). Cuthbert, D., ‘Gladstone and the Modern British Electoral System’ (2002). d’Haussy, C., ‘Gladstone’s Sundays’ (1999). d’Haussy, C., ‘The Gladstones and their Children’ (2004). d’Haussy, C., ‘An Etonian writes home to his family’ (2005). Dixon, J., ‘Here comes trouble: An analysis of Parliamentary exchanges between William Gladstone and George Dixon 1868–74’ (2008). Faught, C.B., ‘Gladstone and India’ (1999). Gaunt, R., ‘Gladstone and William Edward Tallents’ (1999). Gomme, R., ‘The Gladstone Legacy: Aspects of the Peace Movement in the UK, 1894–1914’ (2000). Gooddie, S., ‘Mary Gladstone’ (2004). Hodgkins, D., ‘Gladstone and Edward Watkin’ (2005). Isba, A., ‘The Lady Lincoln Scandal’ (2006). Jackson, P., ‘Gladstone and Sir William Harcourt’ (2000). Little, T., ‘A Tale of Two Diaries: The 1892 and 1992 Elections’ (2005). Little, T., ‘Gladstone, Granville and Ireland, 1885–6’ (2010). Llewellyn, M., ‘On Books and the [Electronic] Housing of Them’ (2006). Lynch, M., ‘Gladstone’s Pursuit of Fallen Women’ (1999). McCarthy, J.P., ‘‘Sighing for the Past’: Gladstone’s Historical Imagination as seen in his First Two Books’ (2006). McCarthy, J.P., ‘Gladstone’s reaction to the Irish Famine, 1847–52’ (2008). Milne, M., ‘Gladstone’s Idea of a University’ (2002). Morris, G., ‘The Case of Captain Peter Wright’ (2004). Nicoll, F., ‘Gladstone, Gordon and the Sudan Campaign, 1884–5’ (2010). Nixon, M., ‘Gladstone’s Reading for Bulgaria’ (2004). Nixon, M., ‘Constructing the People’s William: Popular Biographies of Gladstone’ (2005). Nixon, M., ‘Memorialising Gladstone in Scotland: The Edinburgh and Glasgow Statues’ (2006). Paz, D., ‘Gladstone and Martin Farquhar Tupper: An Odd Friendship?’ (1999). Paz, D., ‘Gladstone and Sir Francis Hastings Doyle’ (2004). Pritchard, W., ‘Henry Neville Gladstone’ (2010). Quinault, R., ‘Gladstone and the Churchills’ (2000). Quinault, R., ‘Gladstone and London Transport’ (2005). Quinault, R., ‘Gladstone and Democracy’ (2006). Quinault, R., ‘Gladstone and the Crimean War’ (2008). Quinault, R., ‘Gladstone and Wales’ (2010). Radulescu, M., ‘Gladstone and the Romanians’ (2010).

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Sewter, P., ‘Gladstone the Woodsman’ (2008). Stray, C., ‘Mrs Gladstone’s Drawers: The Glynesse Glossary – A family language and its relatives’ (2000). Swift, R., ‘Gladstone and C.P.Villiers’ (2010). Tatel-Scott, M., ‘Gladstone and Extra-Parliamentary Oratory’ (2008). West, J., ‘Gladstone’s Country House Visits’ (2004). West, J., ‘Gladstone’s Country House Hosts, 1870–93: Continuity or Change?’ (2005). West, J., ‘Gladstone in Surrey’ (2006). West, J., ‘The Gladstones and the Cholera, 1866–7’ (2008). West, J., ‘Gladstone’s health during the Eastern Question crisis’ (2010). Whitehouse, G., ‘Gladstone and Samuel Wilberforce’ (2010). Windscheffel, R.C., ‘Williamson’s Mr Gladstone: A brief introduction’ (2006). Wrigley, C., ‘Gladstone and Lloyd George’ (2002).

Index Aberdeen 105 Aberdeen, Lord xv, 32, 38–9, 43, 47, 147, 164, 199, 203, 223, 238–9, 260, 264 Acland, Lady Alice 60–1 Acland, Sir Arthur 60–1 Acland, Thomas Dyke 131–2 Afghanistan 8, 144, 193, 228–9, 245, 247 Afghan Wars 235, 246–7, 250 Africa 12, 254–5, 261, 264–5 Alabama dispute 182, 242, 287 Albania 228 Alexander I, Tsar 221 Alexandria 246, 269 All Souls’ College 134 Alnwick 172 Amalgamated Society of Engineers 61 American Civil War 54, 235, 242, 244, 249 Angell, Norman 305 Anglo-French Commercial Treaty (1860) 54, 203, 277 Anglo-Turkish Convention (1878) 248 Anstice, Joseph 129 Anti-Corn Law League 113, 297 Arabi Pasha 246–67, 283 Arch, Joseph 63–4 Archiugi, Daniel 288 Argyll, Duke of 40, 49, 169, 188, 241 Arley Hall 157 Armenian massacres 248, 250, 268, 288, 311 Armitage, David 290 Arnold-Foster, Florence 86 Ashdown, Paddy 301–2 Ashover 77 Asquith, Herbert 250, 303, 308

Australia 66, 227 Bagehot, Walter 31, 43, 84, 277 Balfour, Arthur 49 Balfour, John 123 Ballot Act (1872) 181, 194 Balmoral 182 Bass, Gary 289 Battersea 52 Battles Alma (1854) 240 Majuba Hill (1881) 282 Navarino (1827) 236 Nile (1798) 221 Omdurman (1898) 250 Tel-el-Kebir (1882) 246 Waterloo (1815) 221, 236 Beales, Edmund 116 Bebbington, David 3–4, 7, 16, 20, 136, 231, 270 Belgium 66, 250 Belgrade 301 Bentinck, Lord George 42, 200 Bentley, Michael 48 Berlin 224 Bernard, Montague 286 Bettishanger 157 Bew, Paul 2 Biagini, Eugenio 7, 9, 12, 32, 52, 65 Bigland, Percy 87, 91 Birmingham 65, 105 Bismarck, Count Otto von 171 Blackburn 54, 57 Blair, Tony 8, 10, 25, 289, 302, 309 Bogdanor, Vernon 304–5 Boer War (1881) 189, 282

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Bonaparte, Napoleon 220–1, 236 Bonar Law, Andrew 308 Borneo 261 Boyce, George 7 Brailsford, H.N. 305 Brazil 257–8, 260, 263 Brechin 124, 172 Briggs, Asa 2, 99, 102, 135 Bright, John xv, 54, 69, 102, 107, 138, 246, 310 British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society 260 British North America Act (1867) 278, 282 Broadhurst, Henry 64–6 Brown, Capability 167 Bruce, James 131 Brussels 224 Bryce, Lord James 304–5 Buccleuch, Duke of 63 Buchmann, Ralph 135 Buckley 191 Bulgaria 219, 290, 299 Bulgarian massacres 63–4, 185, 228, 249–50, 265, 268, 289, 296, 304, 311 Burke, Edmund xv, 27, 56 Burn, W.L. 135, 255 Burns, John 61 Bush, George W. 27 Butler, Bishop Joseph xv, 237 Butt, Isaac 208–9 Buxton, Sydney 278 Buxton, Thomas Fowell 264 Caergwrle 160 Cambridge Apostles 130–1 Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry 250 Canada 225, 227 Cannes 157, 191 Canning, George 56 Canning, Viscount Charles 131

Capodimonte 57 Captain Swing 57 Cardwell, Edward 35, 47–9, 204–7 Carlton Club 48 Carlisle, Lord 206–7, 211 Carlyle, Edward Irving 132 Carlyle, Thomas xv, 62 Carr, E.H. 268 Carter, Jimmy 27 Castlereagh, Lord 221, 283–4 Catholic Emancipation 40, 49 Cavendish, Lady Lucy 305 Cavendish, Lord Frederick 178, 187,190, 305 Cavendish, Lord Richard 180 Caedel, Martin 249 Cephalonia 220, 225 Cetewayo 245 Chamberlain, Joseph 30, 95, 104, 109, 193, 295 Chamberlain, Neville 251, 307 Chartism 56, 63, 70, 297 Checkland, S.G. 15, 277 Chester xvi, 2, 53, 55–6, 62, 102, 152, 282 Childers, Hugh 123 China 236–67, 243, 249, 262 Chislehurst 180 Cholera Epidemic (1866) 178 Christ Church, Oxford 80–1, 92, 129, 131–7, 143, 155, 224 Church of England 16–19 Church of Ireland 200, 203–6, 214–16, see also Ireland Churchill, Lord Alfred S. 152 Churchill, Lord Randolph 30, 155, 169 Churchill, Winston Spencer 62, 251, 308 Clarendon, Lord 214 Clark, Andrew Gladstone 179 Clark, Dr Andrew 178–85, 187–92, 194 Clark, Lady 178 Clarke, William 112, 122

Index Clarke, Peter 52, 303–4, 307, 309 Cleveland 60 Clumber Park 46, 168 Coady, C.A.J. 290 Cobden, Richard xv, 36, 44–5, 102, 238, 254–5, 263, 277, 310 Cochran, A.B. 53 Colley, General 282 Congress of Berlin (1878) 245; (1884) 283 Conservative Party 31–50, 253 Consolidated Fund 33 Constant, Benjamin 27 Cook, Robin 302 Corfu 220, 222, 224, 229–31 Corn Laws 32–41, 213, 257 Cowper, Henry 78, 181 Cuba 257, 261 Craig, Edward Gordon 82 Crimean War (1854–6) 46, 150, 185, 235, 238–42, 269 Croker, John Wilson 145 Cronstadt 240 Crystal Palace 134, 152 Cullen, Archbishop 202 Currie, Bertram 192 Currie, Sir Donald 123, 188, 192 Dalmeny 160, 164, 172 Darlington 185 Darwin, Charles 15, 18, 19, 178 Daunton, Martin 295 Deal 190 Derby 58 Derby, Lord 40, 43, 46, 204, 215, 223, 226 de Stael, Madame 24–7 de Tocqueville, Alexis 27 Devonshire, Duke of 193, 213 Dickens, Charles 134 Diderot, Denis 86 Dilke, Sir Charles 267

343

Disraeli, Benjamin 2–3, 43, 46, 66–7, 79, 82, 94–5, 98, 104, 140, 171, 184–5, 190, 201, 206, 223, 231, 238, 245–6, 268, 277, 279, 297 Doncaster 170 Down 164 Dover 157 Doyle, Sir Francis 129–34, 141–5, 148–50, 153–4 Drayton Bassett 38 Dublin 100, 171, 214–17 Dumbarton 106 Dumfries 124 Duncan, Admiral 240 Dundee 105, 111, 178 Dunne, Colonel 201, 208–11, 217 Dunster 172 Durham 64 Drabble, Margaret 135 Eagleton, Terry 289 Eastern Question 11, 185–6, 223, 228, 236, 296, 304 Eastern Question Association 64 Edinburgh 65, 105, 107, 110–11, 178, 193, 297 Egypt 15, 53, 65, 143–4, 191–2, 219, 246–9, 283, 30 Elgin 69 Eliot, George 178 Enniskerry 17 Epsom 191 Eton College 85, 130, 178, 224, 236 Europe, Concert of 285–7 Evans, George 63 Fasque 141, 168, 187 Faught, Brad 11 Fenianism 214–16 Ferguson Niall 288 First World War (1914–18) 235, 250, 287, 304–5

344

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Fitzgerald, W.J. Vesey 215 Florence 172 Foot, M.R.D. xvi, 3, 171 Forster, W.E. 202 Fortescue, Chichester 217 France 26, 52, 54, 181, 194, 203, 235, 269, 277 Franco-Prussian War 181, 194, 235, 269 Fredericksburg 244 French Revolution 26 Frere, Sir Bartle 265 Froude, James Anthony 18 Furniss, Harry 83–4, 94–7, 107 Gallagher, John 11 Galton, Francis 75 Galway mail 204–5 Gash, Norman 32, 48 Gaskell, James Milnes 131 Gateshead 259 Gaunt, Richard 9 Germany 63, 67, 68, 171, 250 Ghosh, Peter 39 Gladstone, Agnes, daughter 224 Gladstone, Annie, daughter-in-law 173–4 Gladstone, Catherine, wife 57, 62, 67, 80, 131, 141–2, 157, 167, 171–2, 178, 180, 182, 186–8, 192, 223, 285 Gladstone, Helen, daughter 172, 187–8 Gladstone, Henry Neville (‘Harry’), son 165, 173, 186, 188, 190 Gladstone, Herbert John, son 162, 166, 170, 171, 173, 174, 178, 184 Gladstone, Sir John, father 141, 236, 260, 262 Gladstone, John Neilson, brother 236 Gladstone, Mary, daughter 91, 148, 191 Gladstone, Revd. Stephen Edward, son 168, 173–4, 188 Gladstone, William Ewart Bibliography 315–40 Commemorations xvi, xvii, 1–2, 15

Friendships 129–54 Foreign Policy, views on 235–52, 253–68, 269–94 Free Trade, views on 31–50, 253–68, 269–94, see also Cobden Government Posts Under Secretary for War and the Colonies 225, 260 Vice-President of Board of Trade 33 President of Board of Trade 33, 62 Colonial Secretary 34 Chancellor of the Exchequer 11, 25, 53–4, 61, 160, 199–220, 238, 242–3, 294 Prime Minister 1–14, 51–72, 155–76, 177–98, 235–52, 269–315, passim Health 172–3, 177–98 Homeric scholarship 20–4, 223–4, 242, 281 Images of 73–98, 100–2, 156, 159, 163, 174 Influence of Peel on 31–50 Ireland, views on 53, 65, 68–9, 143, 161, 189, 199–220, 278, see also Ireland Legacy 28–9, 295–314 Liberalism, views on 15–30, 31–2, 269–94, 295–314, passim Memorabilia 102–28 Recent historiography 1–12 Religious priorities 15–30, 270–72 Reputation 15–72, passim Tree-felling 107, 155–76 War, views on 235–52 Working Classes, attitude to 51–72 Gladstone, William Henry, son 162, 165–6, 171–3, 181 Glasgow 100, 104–5, 107–8, 110–11, 122 Glasgow Liberal Association 112 Glasgow University 101 Gloucester 171

Index Glynne family 59, 62, 178 Golden Jubilee (1887) 134 Gombrich, E.H. 78 Gordon, Arthur 224 Gordon, General Charles 192–3, 219, 247, 283 Gould, Francis Carruthers 95 Govan 102 Graham, Sir James 26, 38, 42, 48 Grant, James 84 Granville, Lord 178, 181, 188, 191–2, 206, 285 Greece, 219–32, passim Greenwich 184, 186 Gray, Bishop 281 Grey, Sir George 211 Griffiths, Sir Richard 211 Grimsby 171 Grosser, Maurice 79–82 Grosvenor, Lord 188 Grote, George 21–2, 25, 281 Guizot, Francois 24, 40 Hagley 164 Haldane, Richard 61, 308 Halifax 113, 171 Hallam, Arthur Henry 129 Haly, W.T. 40 Hamilton 123 Hamilton, Mary Agnes 51 Hamilton, Sir Edward Walter 184, 189, 192, 194 Hamilton, John McLure 75, 82, 91 Hamilton, Walter Kerr 131–2 Hammond, J.L. 8, 51, 287, 305 Hancock, W.N. 209 Harcourt, Lewis 35 Harcourt, Sir William 192 Hardy, Gathorne 92 Hare, Augustus 76 Harrison, Frederic 1, 12 Hartington, Lord 109, 185, 297

345

Hawarden Castle and estate 5, 10, 46, 57–60, 62, 65–6, 75, 80, 91, 102, 104, 124, 155–75, 179–80, 183–4, 188, 190, 223 Hawkes, George 152–3 Hawick 107–8 Hazlitt, William 86–7 Henderson, Arthur 303 Herbert, Sidney 32, 38, 46 Heywood, Thomas 85 Hilton, Boyd 32, 35, 273 Hirst, Francis 305 Hobsbawm, Eric 311 Hobson, J.A. 305 Holbraad, Corsten 285 Holl, Frank 75, 77, 79, 83, 170 Holland, Canon Scott 62 Holmbury 188 Holyoake, George Jacob 58 Home Rule 11, 15, 16, 20, 29, 35, 65–6, 68, 217, 278, 299–300, 305, see also Ireland Hoppen, K.T. 145 Hotham, Sir Charles 263 Howe, Anthony 263 Howson, Archdeacon 167 Huddersfield 55 Hudson, Derek 135 Hughes, Thomas 58 Hume, Joseph 37 Hutt, William 255–6, 258–9, 261, 263 Huzzey, Richard 11 Hyde 66 India 166, 219, 230, 282–3 Indian mutiny 235 Inglis, Sir Robert Harry 139 Ionian Islands 11, 219–34 Italy 52, 54, 157, 203, 294, 304 Ithaca 220 Ireland 111, 15, 20, 29, 35, 53, 65–9, 143, 161, 189, 217, 278, 299–300, 305

346

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Irish Board of Works 211–12, 217 Irish Famine (1845–52) 39, 296 Irish Church Disestablishment Act (1869) 179–80, 194 Irish Crimes Prevention Act (1882) 191 Irish Land Act (1870) 180–1, 189, 295 Irish Land Act (1881) 190, 295 Irish Universities Bill (1873) 183 Jack, J.M. 112 Jackson, Hunt 175 Jenkins, Roy 37, 56, 188, 219–20 Jenner, Sir William 188 Jefferson, Thomas xv, 29 Jephson, Dr Henry 137 Jones, Andrew 105 Jones, Atherley 300 Jones, Ernest 297 Joyce, Patrick 6, 299 Kavanagh, Denis 302 Keele Hall 157 Kennedy, Paul 288 Kerrigan, Kevin 106 Khartoum 193, 219, 247 Kilbarchan 124 Kingston 192 Kissinger, Henry 284 Knaplund, Paul 287 Knightley, Lady 79, 92 Labour Party 51–72, passim, 293, 300, 303, 305 Lacaita, James 224 Ladybank 124 Lancashire 54–6 Langdale Pikes 102 Lansbury, George 303 Lathbury, D.C. 40 Leamington 137 LeBrun, Charles 87 Lecky, W.E.H. 81

Lee, General Robert E. 244 Leeds 104, 113, 115, 190 Leicester 170 Leigh 170 Lewes, George Henry 86 Leveson Gower, F. 181, 188, 193 Levkas 220 Liberal Party 16, 51–72, 253, 301, 303, 306 Liberal Democrat Party 293, 300–1 Lib-Lab MPs 51–72, passim Liddell, Dean 80 Lincoln, Abraham 15, 244 Lincoln, Lord 32, 34, 38–9, 41, 46–7 Liverpool 65, 78, 152, 169, 204, 212 Lloyd George, David 304–5, 308 London 1, 62, 100, 179, 180, 214, 226 London Corresponding Society 113 London Dock Strike (1889) 66 London Hospital 178 London Trades Council 67–8 Longleat 157 Low, David 95 Lubbock, Sir John 164 Lucy, Henry 84, 94, 96 Lyttelton family 164 Lyttelton, Lord 178 Lyttelton, Lucy 178 Lytton, Lord 223–4, 226, 229 Maccoby, Samuel 54 MacDonagh, Oliver 278 Macdonald, Ramsay 10, 303 Magnus, Philip 276 Maguire, W.A. 214 Mahdists 228, 283 Mahon, Philip Henry 47–9 Maitland, Sir James 221–2 Major, John 301 Malmesbury, Lord 145 Manchester 44–5, 54, 65, 213, 238 Mann, Tom 61

Index Manning, Archbishop 180 Mansfield 171 Mares, Detlev 99 Marquand, David 310 Martin, John 112 Marx, Karl 67, 293 Matthew, Colin xvi, 3, 31, 73, 136, 155, 161, 177, 220, 231, 253, 266, 289 Maxim, Hiram 248 May, Phil 97 Maynooth 33, 171, 200 Maynooth Grant 17, 33–4, 37, 39, 202 McNeile, Revd. Hugh 154 Meisel, Joseph 6, 10 Melbourne, Lord 57 Midlothian Campaign (1879) 51, 115, 160, 186–7, 220, 230, 245, 265, 272–3, 275, 278, 299 Middlesbrough 171 Mill, John Stuart xv, 23, 284–5 Millais, John Everett 91–2, 170 Mitford, William 21 Mold 167 Moldovia 238 Monmouth 171 Montenegro 244, 246 Morel, E.D. 305 Morley, John xv, 31–2, 65, 68, 136, 192, 235 Morris, Jan 220 Motley, John 244 Munby, Arthur 77 Murray, Gilbert 8, 303, 306–7 Myers, Eveleen 87 Nairn 69 Napoleonic Wars 235 National Government 51 National Portrait Gallery 92 Neale, E.V. 58 Nelson, Lord 221 Newark 34, 103

347

Newcastle, Duke of 34, 131, 168 New Jersey 152 Newman, John Henry 18–19, 272, 289 Newnham College, Cambridge 172 New Unionism 68 New York 60 Neville, Lady Dorothy 74 Niger expedition (1839–41) 264 Nixon, Mark 10 North, Christopher 110 Northop 164 Nottingham 102, 170 Obama, Barack 288 O’Connell, Daniel 275 O’Connor, T.P. 82, 305 O’Day, Alan 7 O’Dell, Stackport Edward 76 O’Shea, Katherine 16 Oldham 62 Opium Wars (1840, 1857) 237–8, 250, 269 Ottoman Empire 27, 219–20, 228, 239, 244, 290, 296 Oxford University 85, 136, 202, see also Christ Church, Oxford Paget, Sir James 189 Paisley 123 Palmerston, Lord 54, 56, 199, 202–3, 205, 207, 222, 240, 255, 259, 262, 264, 269 Papal Agression 200 Paper Duty, Repeal (1861) 25, 56 Parker, Charles Stuart 48 Parliamentary Reform Crisis (1866–7) 50, 207, 216 Parliamentary Reform Demonstrations (1884) 100, 105, 118–19 Parliamentary Reform Legislation First Reform Act (1832) 56–7, 61, 110–11

348

William Gladstone

Second Reform Act (1867) 50, 207, 216 Third Reform Act (1884–5) 192–3 Parnell, Charles Stewart 16, 30 Paxos 220, 222 Paz, Denis 10 Partridge, Michael 8 Peaple, Simon 62 Peel, Arthur Wellesley 48 Peel, Sir Robert 10, 28, 30, 31–50, 134, 150, 235, 237, 294, 296 Peking 238 Pelham-Clinton, Henry 131 Penjdeh 247 Penmaenmawr 179, 185 Perth 48, 107, 109, 111, 123 Phillimore, Lady 91 Phillimore, Robert 131–2, 186, 286 Phoenix Park Murders 190, 305 Pitt, William (the Younger) 37, 45 Pius IX 26 Plymouth 61 Ponsonby, Arthur 305 Porter, Roy 182 Port Sunlight 115 Post Office Savings Bank 6 Potter, Rupert 92 Prague 224 Price, Bonamy 295 Protectionists 42–3, 255–6, 260 Queensferry 160 Quinault, Roland 7, 11, 254, 265 Raglan, Lord 239 Reform League 116 Reid, T. Wemyss 74, 81, 83 Rendel, Stuart 248 Richmond, George 77 Richmond, William Blake 75, 80–1 Riddell, Peter 302 Ridley, George 307

Rio de Janeiro 148 Ripon, Lord 231, 282 Ruskin, John 18–19, 62–3, 155, 170–1 Russia 15, 63, 221, 238–42, 247 Roach, Joseph 87 Robinson, Emily 305 Robinson, Ronald 11 Roebuck, John Arthur 138, 240 Roman Catholic Church 16, 18–19, 138, 202 Rome 151 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 27 Rosebery, Lord 49, 65, 105, 164, 172, 188, 191, 193 Rothschild, Lord 172 Royal Irish Constabulary 201 Royal Titles Act (1876) 231 Russell, Edward 78 Russell, George W.E. 77, 83 Russell, Lord John 34, 199, 200, 215, 238, 255, 256, 259, 264 Saatchi, Maurice 308 Saighton Hall 164 Salisbury, Lord 49, 68, 104, 109, 119, 124, 308 Saltney 53 Salvini, Tomasso 82 Sandiford, K.A.P. 230 Samuel, Herbert 307 Sarajevo 301 Schreuder, Deryck 12, 261, 306 Scotland 70, 99–128, passim Scott, Sir Walter 37 Seaton, Lord 222 Sebastopol 239–40 Selwyn, Bishop 281 Sewter, Peter 10 Seymour, Horace 152 Shaftesbury, Lord 162 Shannon, Richard 31, 32, 34, 40, 57, 136, 177, 220, 239, 273

Index Shepherd, John 64 Shorter, Simon 161 Skipton 170 Slave Trade 253–68 Slavery Abolition Act (1807) 254, 259 Slavery Abolition Act (1833) 254 Smiles, Samuel 55 Smith, Barnett 168 Smith, Goldwin 31, 35, 48 Snowden, Philip 303 Soap Trade 265 South Africa 219 South Sea Bubble 59 Spanish Civil War (1936–9) 307 Sowerby Bridge 171 Spielmann, H.H. 96 Spencer, Earl 42 St Deiniol’s Library 20, 158, 161 Stanley, Lord 34 Stead, W.T. 185 Steele, E.D. 217 Stephenson, Sir William 209 Stockton 171 Stonyk, Margaret 135 Storks, Sir Henry 228–30 Stourbridge 53, 60 Strachey, Lytton 287 Sudan 144, 192, 219, 283 Sugar Trade 41, 256–8 Suez Canal 246, 278 Sutherland, Duchess of 5 Swift, Roger 3, 9 Taff Vale Judgement 63 Taylor, A.J.P. 275 Tennant, Sir Charles 160 Tenniel, Sir John 94–5 Tennyson, Lord Alfred 136, 155, 178, 192, 243, 270 Terry, Ellen 74 Thatcher, Margaret 300–1, 308–9 Thessaly 246

349

Thistlethwayte, Laura 178–80, 182, 184, 186, 192 Thomas, David Wayne 6 Tolpuddle Martyrs 57 Tollemache, Lionel 50, 92 Tomlinson, George Dodgson 55 Toyn, Joseph 60 Toynbee, Arnold 304 Tractarians 18–19 Transvaal 144, 282 Treaty of Campo Formio (1797) 221 Treaty of Paris (1815) 221 Treaty of Paris (1856) 185, 228–9, 241 Treaty of Tilsit (1807) 221 Treaty of Tinsin (1859) 238 Treaty of Versailles (1919) 29 Trelawny, Sir John 44 Trevelyan, C.P. 305 Trevelyan, G.O. 123 Trieste 224 Tupper, Martin 131, 134–41, 145–54 Turkey 220, 228, 229, 236, 238, 246, 248 Turner, Frank 9, 306 United States of America 28–9, 52, 134–5, 138, 236 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) 311 Upas Tree 161–2 Victoria, Queen xvi, 6, 67, 134, 157, 167, 183, 188–9, 228, 231, 278 Victorian Values 293 Vienna 224 Vincent, John 62, 199 Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet) 24 Wallachia 238 Walmer Castle 164, 180, 190 Warner, Charles 86 Warren, Allen 11 Washington, George xv

350

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Waterford 201, 208 Watkin Path 102 Watts, Mrs George Frederic 73, 80–1 Weber, Max 294 Wellingborough 171 Wellington College 164 Wellington, Duke of 35, 133–4 Welsh Devolution 302 Welsh Disestablishment 68 Wesley, John xv West Calder 52, 67–8 West Indies 255–7 West, Sir Algernon 181–2 West, Jenny 10 Westlake, John 287 Westminster Abbey 1, 38 Whitby 181 Wickham, Edward 164 Wigan 161–2 Wilberforce, Bishop Samuel 184

Wilson, James 111, 122 Wilson, John 112 Wilson, Woodrow 27–8, 268, 306, 311 Windscheffel, Ruth Clayton 5, 20, 99 Wishaw 105, 110, 123 Woburn 157, 164 Wodehouse, Lord 203, 211–13, 215 Women’s Co-operative League 61 Wolseley, Sir Garnet 246–7 Wolverton, Lord 191 Wordsworth, William 134 Worshipful Order of Turners 156 Wrigley, Chris 10 York 167 Young, Sir John 201, 222, 224, 226 Zanzibar 265 Zululand 144 Zulu Wars (1879) 245