Chapter VII. The Fourth Administration. (1892-1894)
Iliad, i. 250.
Two generations of mortal men had he already seen pass away, who with him of old had been born and bred in sacred Pylos, and among the third generation he held rule.
I
In 1892 the general election came, after a session that was not very long nor at all remarkable. Everybody knew that we should soon be dismissed, and everybody knew that the liberals would have a majority, but the size of it was beyond prognostication. Mr. Gladstone did not talk much about it, but in fact he reckoned on winning by eighty or a hundred. A leading liberal-unionist at whose table we met (May 24) gave us forty. That afternoon by the way the House had heard a speech of great power and splendour. An Irish tory peer in the gallery said afterwards, “That old hero of yours is a miracle. When he set off in that high pitch, I said that won't last. Yet he kept it up all through as grand as ever, and came in fresher and stronger than when he began.” His sight failed him in reading an extract, and he asked me to read it for him, so he sat down amid sympathetic cheers while it was read out from the box.
After listening to a strong and undaunted reply from Mr. Balfour, he asked me to go with him into the tea-room; he was fresh, unperturbed, and in high spirits. He told me he had once sat at table with Lord Melbourne, but regretted that he had never known him. Said that of the sixty men or so who had been his colleagues in cabinet, the [pg 491]
very easiest and most attractive was Clarendon. Constantly regretted that he had never met nor known Sir Walter Scott, as of course he might have done. Thought the effect of diplomacy to be bad on the character; to train yourself to practise the airs of genial friendship towards men from whom you are doing your best to hide yourself, and out of whom you are striving to worm that which they wish to conceal. Said that he was often asked for advice by young men as to objects of study. He bade them study and ponder, first, the history and working of freedom in America; second, the history of absolutism in France from Louis xiv. to the Revolution. It was suggested that if the great thing with the young is to attract them to fine types of character, the Huguenots had some grave, free, heroic figures, and in the eighteenth century Turgot was the one inspiring example: when Mill was in low spirits, he restored himself by Condorcet's life of Turgot. This reminded him that Canning had once praised Turgot in the House of Commons, though most likely nobody but himself knew anything at all about Turgot. Talking of the great centuries, the thirteenth, and the sixteenth, and the seventeenth, Mr. Gladstone let drop what for him seems the remarkable judgment that “Man as a type has not improved since those great times; he is not so big, so grand, so heroic as he has been.” This, the reader will agree, demands a good deal of consideration.
Then he began to talk about offices, in view of what were now pretty obvious possibilities. After discussing more important people, he asked whether, after a recent conversation, I had thought more of my own office, and I told him that I fancied like Regulus I had better go back to the Irish department. “Yes,” he answered with a flash of his eye, “I think so. The truth is that we're both chained to the oar; I am chained to the oar; you are chained.”
II
The electoral period, when it arrived, he passed once more at Dalmeny. In a conversation the morning after I was [pg 492] allowed to join him there, he seemed already to have a grand majority of three figures, to have kissed hands, and to be installed in Downing Street. This confidence was indispensable to him. At the end of his talk he went up to prepare some notes for the speech that he was to make in the afternoon at Glasgow. Just before the carriage came to take him to the train, I heard him calling from the library. In I went, and found him hurriedly thumbing the leaves of a Horace. “Tell me,” he cried, “can you put your finger on the passage about Castor and Pollux? I've just thought of something; Castor and Pollux will finish my speech at Glasgow.” “Isn't it in the Third Book?” said I. “No, no; I'm pretty sure it is in the First Book”—busily turning over the pages. “Ah, here it is,” and then he read out the noble lines with animated modulation, shut the book with a bang, and rushed off exultant to the carriage. This became one of the finest of his perorations.297 His delivery of it that afternoon, they said, was most majestic—the picture of the wreck, and then the calm that gradually brought down the towering billows to the surface of the deep, entrancing the audience like magic.
Then came a depressing week. The polls flowed in, all day long, day after day. The illusory hopes of many months faded into night. The three-figure majority by the end of the week had vanished so completely, that one wondered how it could ever have been thought of. On July 13 his own Midlothian poll was declared, and instead of his old majority of 4000, or the 3000 on which he counted, he was only in by 690. His chagrin was undoubtedly intense, for he had put forth every atom of his strength in the campaign. But with that splendid suppression of vexation which is one of the good lessons that men learn in public life, he put a brave face on it, was perfectly cheery all through the luncheon, and afterwards took me to the music-room, where instead of constructing a triumphant cabinet with a majority of a hundred, he had to try to adjust an Irish policy to a parliament with hardly a majority at all. These topics exhausted, with a curiously quiet gravity of tone he told me [pg 493]
that cataract had formed over one eye, that its sight was gone, and that in the other eye he was infested with a white speck. “One white speck,” he said, almost laughing, “I can do with, but if the one becomes many, it will be a bad business. They tell me that perhaps the fresh air of Braemar will do me good.” To Braemar the ever loyal Mr. Armitstead piloted them, in company with Lord Acton of whose society Mr. Gladstone could never have too much.
III
It has sometimes been made a matter of blame by friends no less than foes, that he should have undertaken the task of government, depending on a majority not large enough to coerce the House of Lords. One or two short observations on this would seem to be enough. How could he refuse to try to work his Irish policy through parliament, after the bulk of the Irish members had quitted their own leader four years before in absolute reliance on the sincerity and good faith of Mr. Gladstone and his party? After all the confidence that Ireland had shown in him at the end of 1890, how could he in honour throw up the attempt that had been the only object of his public life since 1886? To do this would have been to justify indeed the embittered warnings of Mr. Parnell in his most reckless hour. How could either refusal of office or the postponement of an Irish bill after taking office, be made intelligible in Ireland itself? Again, the path of honour in Ireland was equally the path of honour and of safety in Great Britain. Were British liberals, who had given him a majority, partly from disgust at Irish coercion, partly from faith that he could produce a working plan of Irish government, and partly from hopes of reforms of their own—were they to learn that their leaders could do nothing for any of their special objects?
Mr. Gladstone found some consolation in a precedent. In 1835, he argued, “the Melbourne government came in with a British minority, swelled into a majority hardly touching thirty by the O'Connell contingent of forty. And they staid [pg 494] in for six years and a half, the longest lived government since Lord Liverpool's.298 But the Irish were under the command of a master; and Ireland, scarcely beginning her political life, had to be content with small mercies. Lastly, that government was rather slack, and on this ground perhaps could not well be taken as a pattern.” In the present case, the attitude of the Parnellite group who continued the schism that began in the events of the winter of 1890, was not likely to prove a grave difficulty in parliament, and in fact it did not. The mischief here was in the effect of Irish feuds upon public opinion in the country. As Mr. Gladstone put it in the course of a letter that he had occasion to write to me (November 26, 1892):—
In forming his fourth administration Mr. Gladstone found one or two obstacles on which he had not reckoned, and perhaps could not have been expected to reckon. By that forbearance of which he was a master, they were in good time surmounted. New men, of a promise soon amply fulfilled, were taken in, including, to Mr. Gladstone's own particular satisfaction, the son of the oldest [pg 495]
of all the surviving friends of his youth, Sir Thomas Acland.299
Mr. Gladstone remained as head of the government for a year and a few months (Aug. 1892 to March 3, 1894). In that time several decisions of pith and moment were taken, one measure of high importance became law, operations began against the Welsh establishment, but far the most conspicuous biographic element of this short period was his own incomparable display of power of every kind in carrying the new bill for the better government of Ireland through the House of Commons.
In foreign affairs it was impossible that he should forget the case of Egypt. Lord Salisbury in 1887 had pressed forward an arrangement by which the British occupation was under definite conditions and at a definite date to come to an end. If this convention had been accepted by the Sultan, the British troops would probably have been home by the time of the change of government in this country. French diplomacy, however, at Constantinople, working as it might seem against its own professed aims, hindered the ratification of the convention, and Lord Salisbury's policy was frustrated. Negotiations did not entirely drop, and they had not passed out of existence when Lord Salisbury resigned. In the autumn of 1892 the French ambassador addressed a friendly inquiry to the new government as to the reception likely to be given to overtures for re-opening the negotiations. The [pg 496] answer was that if France had suggestions to offer, they would be received in the same friendly spirit in which they were tendered. When any communications were received, Mr. Gladstone said in the House of Commons, there would be no indisposition on our part to extend to them our friendly consideration. Of all this nothing came. A rather serious ministerial crisis in Egypt in January 1893, followed by a ministerial crisis in Paris in April, arrested whatever projects of negotiation France may have entertained.300
IV
In December (1892), at Hawarden, Mr. Gladstone said to me one day after we had been working for five or six hours at the heads of the new Home Rule bill, that his general health was good and sound, but his sight and his hearing were so rapidly declining, that he thought he might almost any day have to retire from office. It was no moment for banal deprecation. He sat silently pondering this vision in his own mind, of coming fate. It seemed like Tennyson's famous simile—
It would have been preternatural if he had shown the same overwhelming interest that had animated him when the Irish policy was fresh in 1886. Yet the instinct of a strong mind and the lifelong habit of ardent industry carried him through his Sisyphean toil. The routine business of head of a government he attended to, with all his usual assiduity, and in cabinet he was clear, careful, methodical, as always.
The preparation of the bill was carefully and elaborately worked by Mr. Gladstone through an excellent committee [pg 497]
of the cabinet.301 Here he was acute, adroit, patient, full of device, expedient, and the art of construction; now and then vehement and bearing down like a three-decker upon craft of more modest tonnage. But the vehemence was rare, and here as everywhere else he was eager to do justice to all the points and arguments of other people. He sought opportunities of deliberation in order to deliberate, and not under that excellent name to cultivate the art of the harangue, or to overwork secondary points, least of all to treat the many as made for one. That is to say, he went into counsel for the sake of counsel, and not to cajole, or bully, or insist on his own way because it was his own way. In the high article of finance, he would wrestle like a tiger. It was an intricate and difficult business by the necessity of the case, and among the aggravations of it was the discovery at one point that a wrong figure had been furnished to him by some department. He declared this truly heinous crime to be without a precedent in his huge experience.
The crucial difficulty was the Irish representation at Westminster. In the first bill of 1886, the Irish members were to come no more to the imperial parliament, except for one or two special purposes. The two alternatives to the policy of exclusion were either inclusion of the Irish members for all purposes, or else their inclusion for imperial purposes only. In his speech at Swansea in 1887, Mr. Gladstone favoured provisional inclusion, without prejudice to a return to the earlier plan of exclusion if that should be recommended by subsequent experience.302 In the bill now introduced (Feb. 13, 1893), eighty representatives from Ireland were to have seats at Westminster, but they were not to vote upon motions or bills expressly confined to England or Scotland, and there were other limitations. This plan was soon found to be wholly intolerable to the House of Commons. Exclusion having failed, and inclusion of reduced numbers for limited purposes having failed, the only [pg 498] course left open was what was called omnes omnia, or rather the inclusion of eighty Irish members, with power of voting on all purposes.
Each of the three courses was open to at least one single, but very direct, objection. Exclusion, along with the exaction of revenue from Ireland by the parliament at Westminster, was taxation without representation. Inclusion for all purposes was to allow the Irish to meddle in our affairs, while we were no longer to meddle in theirs. Inclusion for limited purposes still left them invested with the power of turning out a British government by a vote against it on an imperial question. Each plan, therefore, ended in a paradox. There was a fourth paradox, namely, that whenever the British supporters of a government did not suffice to build up a decisive majority, then the Irish vote descending into one or other scale of the parliamentary balance might decide who should be our rulers. This paradox—the most glaring of them all—habit and custom have made familiar, and familiarity might almost seem to have actually endeared it to us. In 1893 Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues thought themselves compelled to change clause 9 of the new bill, just as they had thought themselves forced to drop clause 24 of the old bill.
V
It was Mr. Gladstone's performances in the days of committee on the bill, that stirred the wonder and admiration of the House. If he had been fifty they would have been astonishing; at eighty-four they were indeed a marvel. He made speeches of powerful argument, of high constitutional reasoning, of trenchant debating force. No emergency arose for which he was not ready, no demand that his versatility was not adequate to meet. His energy never flagged. When the bill came on, he would put on his glasses, pick up the paper of amendments, and running through them like lightning, would say, “Of course, that's absurd—that will never do—we can never accept that—is there any harm in this?” Too many concessions made on the spur of the [pg 499]
moment to the unionists stirred resentment in the nationalists, and once or twice they exploded. These rapid splendours of his had their perils. I pointed out to him the pretty obvious drawbacks of settling delicate questions as we went along with no chance of sounding the Irishmen, and asked him to spare me quarter of an hour before luncheon, when the draftsman and I, having threshed out the amendments of the day, could put the bare points for his consideration. He was horrified at the very thought. “Out of the question. Do you want to kill me? I must have the whole of the morning for general government business. Don't ask me.”303
Obstruction was freely practised and without remorse. The chief fighting debater against the government made a long second-reading speech, on the motion that the clause stand part of the bill. A little before eight o'clock when the fighting debater was winding up, Mr. Gladstone was undecided about speaking. “What do you advise?” he asked of a friend. “I am afraid it will take too much out of you,” the friend replied; “but still, speak for twenty minutes and no more.” Up he rose, and for half an hour a delighted House was treated to one of the most remarkable performances that ever was known. “I have never seen Mr. Gladstone,” says one observer, “so dramatic, so prolific of all the resources of the actor's art. The courage, the audacity, and the melodrama of it were irresistible” (May 11).
No wonder if the talk downstairs at dinner among his colleagues that night, all turned upon their chief, his art and power, his union of the highest qualities of brain and heart with extraordinary practical penetration, and close watchfulness of incident and trait and personality, disclosed in many a racy aside and pungent sally. The orator was fatigued, but full of keen enjoyment. This was one of the three or four occasions when he was induced not to return to the House after dinner. It had always been his habit in taking charge of bills to work the ship himself. No wonder that he held to this habit in this case.
On another occasion ministers had taken ground that, as the debate went on, everybody saw they could not hold. An official spokesman for the bill had expressed an opinion, or intention, that, as very speedily appeared, Irish opposition would not allow to be maintained. There was no great substance in the point, but even a small dose of humiliation will make a parliamentary dish as bitter to one side as it is savoury to the other. The opposition grew more and more radiant, as it grew more certain that the official spokesman [pg 501]
must be thrown over. The discomfiture of the ministerialists at the prospect of the public mortification of their leaders was extreme in the same degree. “I suppose we must give it up,” said Mr. Gladstone. This was clear; and when he rose, he was greeted with mocking cheers from the enemy, though the enemy's chief men who had long experience of his Protean resources were less confident. Beginning in a tone of easy gravity and candour, he went on to points of pleasant banter, got his audience interested and amused and a little bewildered; carried men with him in graceful arguments on the merits; and finally, with bye-play of consummate sport, showed in triumph that the concession that we consented to make was so right and natural, that it must have been inevitable from the very first. Never were tables more effectively turned; the opposition watched first with amazement, then with excitement and delight as children watch a wizard; and he sat down victorious. Not another word was said or could be said. “Never in all my parliamentary years,” said a powerful veteran on the front bench opposite, as he passed behind the Speaker's chair, “never have I seen so wonderful a thing done as that.”
The state of the county of Clare was a godsend to the obstructive. Clare was not at that moment quite as innocent as the garden of Eden before the fall, but the condition was not serious; it had been twenty times worse before without occupying the House of Commons five minutes. Now an evening a week was not thought too much for a hollow debate on disorder in Clare. It was described as a definite matter of urgent importance, though it had slept for years, and though three times in succession the judge of assize (travelling entirely out of his proper business) had denounced the state of things. It was made to support five votes of censure in eight weeks.
On one of these votes of censure on Irish administration, moved by Mr. Balfour (March 27), Mr. Gladstone listened to the debate. At 8 we begged him not to stay and not to take the trouble to speak, so trumpery was the whole affair. He said he must, if only for five minutes, to show that he identified himself with his Irish minister. He left to dine, [pg 502] and then before ten was on his feet, making what Lord Randolph Churchill rightly called “a most impressive and entrancing speech.” He talked of Pat this and Michael that, and Father the other, as if he had pondered their cases for a month, clenching every point with extraordinary strength as well as consummate ease and grace, and winding up with some phrases of wonderful simplicity and concentration.
A distinguished member made a motion for the exclusion of Irish cabinet ministers from their chamber. Mr. Gladstone was reminded on the bench just before he rose, that the same proposal had been inserted in the Act of Settlement, and repealed in 1705. He wove this into his speech with a skill, and amplified confidence, that must have made everybody suppose that it was a historic fact present every day to his mind. The attention of a law-officer sitting by was called to this rapid amplification. “I never saw anything like it in all my whole life,” said the law-officer; and he was a man who had been accustomed to deal with some of the strongest and quickest minds of the day as judges and advocates.
One day when a tremendous afternoon of obstruction had almost worn him down, the adjournment came at seven o'clock. He was haggard and depressed. On returning at ten we found him making a most lively and amusing speech upon procedure. He sat down as blithe as dawn. “To make a speech of that sort,” he said in deprecation of compliment, “a man does best to dine out; 'tis no use to lie on a sofa and think about it.”
Undoubtedly Mr. Gladstone's method in this long committee carried with it some disadvantages. His discursive treatment exposed an enormous surface. His abundance of illustration multiplied points for debate. His fertility in improvised arguments encouraged improvisation in disputants without the gift. Mr. Gladstone always supposed that a great theme needs to be copiously handled, which is perhaps doubtful, and indeed is often an exact inversion of the true state of things. However that may be, copiousness is a game at which two can play, as a patriotic opposition now and at other times has effectually disclosed. Some thought in these days that a man like Lord Althorp, for [pg 503]
instance, would have given the obstructives much more trouble in their pursuits than did Mr. Gladstone.
That Mr. Gladstone's supporters should become restive at the slow motion of business was natural enough. They came to ministers, calling out for a drastic closure, as simple tribes might clamour to a rain-maker. It was the end of June, and with a reasonable opposition conducted in decent good faith, it was computed that the bill might be through committee in nineteen days. But the hypothesis of reason and good faith was not thought to be substantial, and the cabinet resolved on resort to closure on a scale like that on which it had been used by the late government in the case of the Crimes Act of 1887, and of the Special Commission. It has been said since on excellent authority, that without speaking of their good faith, Mr. Gladstone's principal opponents were now running absolutely short of new ammunition, and having used the same arguments and made the same speeches for so many weeks, they were so worn out that the guillotine was superfluous. Of these straits, however, there was little evidence. Mr. Gladstone entered into the operation with a good deal of chagrin. He saw that the House of Commons in which he did his work and rose to glory was swiftly fading out of sight, and a new institution of different habits of responsibility and practice taking its place.
The stage of committee lasted for sixty-three sittings. The whole proceedings occupied eighty-two. It is not necessary to hold that the time was too long for the size of the task, if it had been well spent. The spirit of the debate was aptly illustrated by the plea of a brilliant tory, that he voted for a certain motion against a principle that he approved, because he thought the carrying of the motion “would make the bill more detestable.” Opposition rested on a view of Irish character and Irish feeling about England, that can hardly have been very deeply thought out, because ten years later the most bitter opponents of the Irish claim launched a policy, that was to make Irish peasants direct debtors to the hated England to the tune of one hundred million pounds, and was to dislodge by imperial cash those who were persistently called the only friends of the imperial connection. [pg 504] The bill passed its second reading by 347 against 304, or a majority of 43. In some critical divisions, the majority ran down to 27. The third reading was carried by 301 against 267, or a majority of 34. It was estimated that excluding the Irish, there was a majority against the bill of 23. If we counted England and Wales alone, the adverse majority was 48. When it reached them, the Lords incontinently threw it out. The roll of the Lords held 560 names, beyond the peers of the royal house. Of this body of 560, no fewer than 419 voted against the bill, and only 41 voted for it.
VI
The session was protracted until it became the longest in the history of parliament. The House was sitting when Mr. Gladstone's eighty-fourth birthday arrived. “Before putting a question,” said Mr. Balfour in a tone that, after the heat and exasperations of so many months, was refreshing to hear, “perhaps the right honourable gentleman will allow me, on my own part and on that of my friends, to offer him our most sincere congratulations.” “Allow me to thank him,” said Mr. Gladstone, “for his great courtesy and kindness.” The government pressed forward and carried through the House of Commons a measure dealing with the liability of employers for accidents, and a more important measure setting up elective bodies for certain purposes in parishes. Into the first the Lords introduced such changes as were taken to nullify all the advantages of the bill, and the cabinet approved of its abandonment. Into the second they forced back certain provisions that the Commons had with full deliberation decisively rejected.
Mr. Gladstone was at Biarritz, he records, when this happened in January of 1894. He had gone there to recruit after the incomparable exertions of the session, and also to consider at a cool distance and in changed scenes other topics that had for some weeks caused him some agitation. He now thought that there was a decisive case against the House of Lords. Apart from the Irish bill to which the [pg 505]
Commons had given eighty-two days, the Lords had maimed the bill for parish councils, to which had gone the labour of forty-one days. Other bills they had mutilated or defeated. Upon the whole, he argued, it was not too much to say that for practical purposes the Lords had destroyed the work of the House of Commons, unexampled as that work was in the time and pains bestowed upon it. “I suggested dissolution to my colleagues in London, where half, or more than half, the cabinet were found at the moment. I received by telegraph a hopelessly adverse reply.” Reluctantly he let the idea drop, always maintaining, however, that a signal opportunity had been lost. Even in my last conversation with him in 1897, he held to his text that we ought to have dissolved at this moment. The case, he said, was clear, thorough, and complete. As has been already mentioned, there were four occasions on which he believed that he had divined the right moment for a searching appeal to public opinion on a great question.304 The renewal of the income tax in 1853 was the first; the proposal of religious equality for Ireland in 1868 was the second; home rule was the third, and here he was justified by the astonishing and real progress that he had made up to the catastrophe at the end of 1890. The fourth case was this, of a dissolution upon the question of the relations of the two Houses.
Chapter VIII. Retirement From Public Life. (1894)
Henry VIII. iii. 2.
I
“Politics,” wrote Mr. Gladstone in one of his private memoranda in March 1894, “are like a labyrinth, from the inner intricacies of which it is even more difficult to find the way of escape, than it was to find the way into them. My age did something but not enough. The deterioration of my hearing helped, but insufficiently. It is the state of my sight which has supplied me with effectual aid in exchanging my imperious public obligations for what seems to be a free place on ‘the breezy common of humanity.’ And it has only been within the last eight months, or thereabouts, that the decay of working sight has advanced at such a pace as to present the likelihood of its becoming stringently operative at an early date. It would have been very difficult to fix that date at this or that precise point, without the appearance of making an arbitrary choice; but then the closing of the parliamentary session (1893-4) offered a natural break between the cessation and renewal of engagements, which was admirably suited to the design. And yet I think it, if not certain, yet very highly probable at the least, that any disposition of mine to profit by this break would—but for the naval scheme of my colleagues in the naval estimates—have been frustrated by their desire to avoid the inconveniences of a change, and by the pressure which they would have brought to bear upon me in consequence. The effect of that [pg 507] scheme was not to bring about the construction of an artificial cause, or pretext rather, of resignation, but to compel me to act upon one that was rational, sufficient, and ready to hand.”
This is the short, plain, and intelligible truth as to what now happened. There can be no reason to-day for not stating what was for a long time matter of common surmise, if not of common knowledge, that Mr. Gladstone did not regard the naval estimates, opened but not settled in December 1893, as justified by the circumstances of the time. He made a speech that month in parliament in reply to a motion from the front bench opposite, and there he took a position undoubtedly antagonistic to the new scheme that found favour with his cabinet, though not with all its members. The present writer is of course not free to go into details, beyond those that anybody else not a member of the cabinet would discover from Mr. Gladstone's papers. Nor does the public lose anything of real interest by this necessary reserve. Mr. Gladstone said he wished to make me “his depositary” as things gradually moved on, and he wrote me a series of short letters from day to day. If they could be read aloud in Westminster Hall, no harm would be done either to surviving colleagues or to others; they would furnish no new reason for thinking either better or worse of anybody; and no one with a decent sense of the value of time would concern himself in all the minor detail of an ineffectual controversy. The central facts were simple. Two things weighed with him, first his infirmities, and second his disapproval of the policy. How, he asked himself, could he turn his back on his former self by becoming a party to swollen expenditure? True he had changed from conservative to liberal in general politics, but when he was conservative, that party was the economic party, “Peel its leader being a Cobdenite.” To assent to this new outlay in time of peace was to revolutionise policy. Then he would go on—“Owing to the part which I was drawn to take, first in Italy, then as to Greece, then on the eastern question, I have come to be considered not only an English but a European statesman. My name stands in Europe as a symbol of the policy of peace, moderation, [pg 508] and non-aggression. What would be said of my active participation in a policy that will be taken as plunging England into the whirlpool of militarism? Third, I have been in active public life for a period nearly as long as the time between the beginning of Mr. Pitt's first ministry and the close of Sir Robert Peel's; between 1783 and 1846—sixty-two years and a half. During that time I have uniformly opposed militarism.” Thus he would put his case.
After the naval estimates were brought forward, attempts were naturally made at accommodation, for whether he availed himself of the end of the session as a proper occasion of retirement or not, he was bound to try to get the estimates down if he could. He laboured hard at the task of conversion, and though some of his colleagues needed no conversion, with the majority he did not prevail. He admitted that he had made limited concessions to scares in 1860 and in 1884, and that he had besides been repeatedly responsible for extraordinary financial provisions having reference to some crisis of the day:—
II
While the House after so many months of toil was still labouring manfully upon English bills, two of them of no secondary importance, it was decided by his family and their advisers that Mr. Gladstone should again try the effects of Biarritz, and thither they went on January 13. Distance, however, could not efface from his mind all thought of the decision that the end of the session would exact from him. [pg 509]
Rumours began to fly about in London that the prime minister upon his return intended to resign, and they were naturally clad with intrinsic probability. From Biarritz a communication was made to the press with his authority. It was to this effect, that the statement that Mr. Gladstone had definitely decided, or had decided at all, on resigning office was untrue. It was true that for many months past his age and the condition of his sight and hearing had in his judgment made relief from public cares desirable, and that accordingly his tenure of office had been at any moment liable to interruption from these causes, in their nature permanent.
Nature meanwhile could not set back the shadow on the dial. On his coming back from Biarritz (February 10) neither eyes nor ears were better. How should they be at eighty-five? The session was ending, the prorogation speech was to be composed, and the time had come for that “natural break” between the cessation and renewal of his official obligations, of which we have already heard him speak. His colleagues carried almost to importunity their appeals to him to stay; to postpone what one of them called, and many of them truly felt to be, this “moment of anguish.” The division of opinion on estimates remained, but even if that could have been bridged, his sight and hearing could not be made whole. The rational and sufficient cause of resignation, as he only too justly described it, was strong as ever. Whether if the cabinet had come to his view on estimates, he would in spite of his great age and infirmities have come to their view of the importance of his remaining, we cannot tell. According to his wont, he avoided decision until the time had come when decision was necessary, and then he made up his mind, “without the appearance of an arbitrary choice,” that the time had come for accepting the natural break, and quitting office.
On Feb. 27, arriving in the evening at Euston from Ireland, I found a messenger with a note from Mr. Gladstone begging me to call on my way home. I found him busy as usual at his table in Downing Street. “I suppose 'tis the long habit of a life,” he said cheerily, “but even in the midst [pg 510] of these passages, if ever I have half or quarter of an hour to spare, I find myself turning to my Horace translation.” He said the prorogation speech would be settled on Thursday; the Queen would consider it on Friday; the council would be held on Saturday, and on that evening or afternoon he should send in his letter of resignation.
The next day he had an audience at Buckingham Palace, and indirectly conveyed to the Queen what she might soon expect to learn from him. His rigorous sense of loyalty to colleagues made it improper and impossible to bring either before the Queen or the public his difference of judgment on matters for which his colleagues, not he, would be responsible, and on which they, not he, would have to take action. He derived certain impressions at his audience, he told me, one of them being that the Sovereign would not seek his advice as to a successor.
He wrote to inform the Prince of Wales of the approaching event:—
The Prince expressed his sincere regret, said how deeply the Princess and he were touched by the kind words about them, and how greatly for a long number of years they had valued his friendship and that of Mrs. Gladstone. Mr. Balfour, to whom he also confidentially told the news, communicated among other graceful words, “the special debt of gratitude that was due to him for the immense public service he had performed in fostering and keeping alive the great traditions of the House of Commons.” The day after that (March 1) was his last cabinet council, and a painful day it [pg 511]
was. The business of the speech and other matters were discussed as usual, then came the end. In his report to the Queen—his last—he said:—
Mr. Gladstone sat composed and still as marble, and the emotion of the cabinet did not gain him for an instant. He followed the “words of acknowledgment and farewell” in a little speech of four or five minutes, his voice unbroken and serene, the tone low, grave, and steady. He was glad to know that he had justification in the condition of his senses. He was glad to think that notwithstanding difference upon a public question, private friendships would remain unaltered and unimpaired. Then hardly above a breath, but every accent heard, he said “God bless you all.” He rose slowly and went out of one door, while his colleagues with minds oppressed filed out by the other. In his diary he enters—“A really moving scene.”
A little later in the afternoon he made his last speech in the House of Commons. It was a vigorous assault upon the House of Lords. His mind had changed since the day in September 1884 when he had declared to an emissary from the court that he hated organic change in the House of Lords, and would do much to avert that mischief.306 Circumstances had now altered the case; we had come to a more acute stage. Were they to accept the changes made by the Lords in the bill for parish councils, or were they to drop it? The question, he said, is whether the work of the House of Lords is not merely to modify, but to annihilate the whole work of the House of Commons, work which has been performed at an amount of sacrifice—of time, of labour, of convenience, and perhaps of health—but at any rate an amount [pg 512] of sacrifice totally unknown to the House of Lords. The government had resolved that great as were the objections to acceptance of the changes made by the Lords, the arguments against rejection were still weightier. Then he struck a note of passion, and spoke with rising fire:—
Men did not know that they were listening to his last speech, but his words fell in with the eager humour of his followers around him, and he sat down amid vehement plaudits. Then when the business was at an end, he rose, and for the last time walked away from the House of Commons. He had first addressed it sixty-one years before.
III
The following day (March 2) he busied himself in packing his papers, and working at intervals on his translation of Horace. He told me that he had now reason to suppose that the Queen might ask him for advice as to his successor. After some talk, he said that if asked he should advise her to send for Lord Spencer. As it happened, his advice was not sought. That evening he went to Windsor to dine and [pg 513]
sleep. The next day was to be the council. Here is his memorandum of the last audience on Saturday, March 3307:—
As I crossed the quadrangle at 10.20 on my way to St. George's Chapel, I met Sir H. Ponsonby, who said he was anxious to speak to me about the future. He was much impressed with the movement among a body of members of parliament against having any peer for prime minister. I signified briefly that I did not think there should be too ready a submission to such a movement. There was not time to say a great deal, and I had something serious to say, so we adjourned the conversation till half past eleven, when I should return from St. George's.
He came at that time and opened on the same lines, desiring to obtain from me whatever I thought proper to say as to persons in the arrangements for the future. I replied to him that this was in my view a most serious matter. All my thoughts on it were absolutely at the command of the Queen. And I should be equally at his command, if he inquired of me from her and in her name; but that otherwise my lips must be sealed. I knew from him that he was in search of information to report to the Queen, but this was a totally different matter.
I entered, however, freely on the general question of the movement among a section of the House of Commons. I thought it impossible to say at the moment, but I should not take for granted that it would be formidable or regard it as in limine disposing of the question. Up to a certain point, I thought it a duty to strengthen the hands of our small minority and little knot of ministers in the Lords, by providing these ministers with such weight as attaches to high office. All this, or rather all that touched the main point, namely the point of a peer prime minister, he without doubt reported.
The council train came down and I joined the ministers in the drawing-room. I received various messages as to the time when I was to see the Queen, and when it would be most convenient to me. I interpret this variety as showing that she was nervous. It ended in fixing the time after the council and before luncheon. I carried with me a box containing my resignation, and, the council being over, handed it to her immediately, and told her that it contained [pg 514] my tender of resignation. She asked whether she ought then to read it. I said there was nothing in the letter to require it. It repeated my former letter of notice, with the requisite additions.
I must notice what, though slight, supplied the only incident of any interest in this perhaps rather memorable audience, which closed a service that would reach to fifty-three years on September 3, when I was sworn privy councillor before the Queen at Claremont. When I came into the room and came near to take the seat she has now for some time courteously commanded, I did think she was going to “break down.” If I was not mistaken, at any rate she rallied herself, as I thought, by a prompt effort, and remained collected and at her ease. Then came the conversation, which may be called neither here nor there. Its only material feature was negative. There was not one syllable on the past, except a repetition, an emphatic repetition, of the thanks she had long ago amply rendered for what I had done, a service of no great merit, in the matter of the Duke of Coburg, and which I assured her would not now escape my notice if occasion should arise. There was the question of eyes and ears, of German versus English oculists, she believing in the German as decidedly superior. Some reference to my wife, with whom, she had had an interview and had ended it affectionately,—and various nothings. No touch on the subject of the last Ponsonby conversation. Was I wrong in not tendering orally my best wishes? I was afraid that anything said by me should have the appearance of touting. A departing servant has some title to offer his hopes and prayers for the future; but a servant is one who has done, or tried to do, service in the past. There is in all this a great sincerity. There also seems to be some little mystery as to my own case with her. I saw no sign of embarrassment or preoccupation. The Empress Frederick was outside in the corridor. She bade me a most kind and warm farewell, which I had done nothing to deserve.
The letter tendered to the Queen in the box was this:—
In the course of the day the Queen wrote what I take to be her last letter to him:—
Windsor Castle, March 3, 1894.—Though the Queen has already accepted Mr. Gladstone's resignation, and has taken leave of him, she does not like to leave his letter tendering his resignation unanswered. She therefore writes these few lines to say that she thinks that after so many years of arduous labour and responsibility he is right in wishing to be relieved at his age of these arduous duties. And she trusts he will be able to enjoy peace and quiet with his excellent and devoted wife in health and happiness, and that his eyesight may improve.
[pg 516]The Queen would gladly have conferred a peerage on Mr. Gladstone, but she knows he would not accept it.
His last act in relation to this closing scene of the great official drama was a letter to General Ponsonby (March 5):—
It is hardly in human nature, in spite of Charles v., Sulla, and some other historic persons, to lay down power beyond recall, without a secret pang. In Prior's lines that came to the mind of brave Sir Walter Scott, as he saw the curtain falling on his days,—
Whether the departing minister had a lingering thought that in the dispensations of the world, purposes and services would still arise to which even yet he might one day be summoned, we do not know. Those who were nearest to him believe not, and assuredly he made no outer sign.