The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 2 (of 3) / 1859-1880

by John Morley

Chapter VII. “Day's Work Of A Giant”. (1870-1872)

We have not been an idle government. We have had an active life, and that is substantially one of the conditions of a happy life.... I am thankful to have been the leader of the liberal party at a period of the history of this country, when it has been my privilege and my duty to give the word of advance to able coadjutors and trusty and gallant adherents.—Gladstone.

I

The most marked administrative performance of Mr. Gladstone's great government was the reform and reorganisation of the army. In Mr. Cardwell he was fortunate enough to have a public servant of the first order; not a political leader nor a popular orator, but one of the best disciples of Peel's school; sound, careful, active, firm, and with an enlightened and independent mind admirably fitted for the effective despatch of business. Before he had been a month at the war office, the new secretary of state submitted to Mr. Gladstone his ideas of a plan that would give us an effective force for defence at a greatly reduced cost. The reorganisation of the army was one of the results of that great central event, from which in every direction such momentous consequences flowed—the victory of Prussian arms at Sadowa. The victory was a surprise, for even Lord Clyde, after a close inspection of the Prussian army, had found no more to report than that it was a first-rate militia. Sadowa disclosed that a soldier, serving only between two and three years with the colours, could yet show himself the most formidable combatant in Europe. The principle of Cardwell's plan was that short enlistment is essential to a healthy organisation of the army, and this reform it was that produced an efficient reserve, the necessity for which had [pg 360] been one of the lessons of the Crimean war. A second, but still a highly important element, was the reduction of the whole force serving in the colonies from fifty thousand men to less than half that number.[232] “To this change,” said Mr. Cardwell, “opposition will be weak, for the principle of colonial self-reliance is very generally assented to.” The idea, as Lord Wolseley says, that a standing army during peace should be a manufactory for making soldiers rather than either a costly receptacle for veterans, or a collection of perfectly trained fighters, “had not yet taken, hold of the military mind in England.”[233] The details do not concern us here, and everybody knows the revolution effected by the changes during Mr. Gladstone's great administration in the composition, the working, and the professional spirit of the army.

Army Reform

Army reform first brought Mr. Gladstone into direct collision with reigning sentiment at court. In spite of Pym and Cromwell and the untoward end of Charles I. and other salutary lessons of the great rebellion, ideas still lingered in high places that the sovereign's hand bore the sword, and that the wearer of the crown through a commander-in-chief had rights of control over the army, not quite dependent on parliament and secretary of state. The Queen had doubted the policy of disestablishing the church in Ireland, but to disestablish the commander-in-chief came closer home, and was disliked as an invasion of the personal rights of the occupant of the throne. This view was rather firmly pressed, and it was the first of a series of difficulties—always to him extremely painful, perhaps more painful than any other—that Mr. Gladstone was called upon in his long career to overcome. The subject was one on which the temper of a reforming parliament allowed no compromise, even if the prime minister himself had been inclined to yield. As it was, by firmness, patience, and that tact which springs not from courtiership but from right feeling, he succeeded, and in the June of 1870 the Queen approved an [pg 361] order in council that put an end to the dual control of the army, defined the position of the commander-in-chief, and removed him corporeally from the horse guards to the war office in Pall Mall.[234] This, however, by no means brought all the military difficulties to an end.

One particular incident has a conspicuous place on the political side of Mr. Gladstone's life. Among the elements in the scheme was the abolition of the practice of acquiring military rank by money purchase. Public opinion had been mainly roused by Mr. Trevelyan, who now first made his mark in that assembly where he was destined to do admirable work and achieve high eminence and popularity. An Act of George III. abolished selling of offices in other departments, but gave to the crown the discretion of retaining the practice in the army, if so it should seem fit. This discretion had been exercised by the issue of a warrant sanctioning and regulating that practice; commissions in the army were bought and sold for large sums of money, far in excess of the sums fixed by the royal warrant; and vested interests on a large scale grew up in consequence. The substitution, instead of this abusive system, of promotion by selection, was one of the first steps in army reform. No effective reorganisation was possible without it. As Mr. Gladstone put it, the nation must buy back its own army from its own officers. No other proceeding in the career of the ministry aroused a more determined and violent opposition. It offended a powerful profession with a host of parliamentary friends; the officers disliked liberal politics, they rather disdained a civilian master, and they fought with the vigour peculiar to irritated caste.

The first question before parliament depended upon the Commons voting the money to compensate officers who had acquired vested interests. If that were secure, there was nothing to hinder the crown, in the discretion committed to it by the statute, from cancelling the old warrant. Instead of this, ministers determined to abolish purchase by bill. Obstruction was long and sustained. The principle of the bill was debated and re-debated on every amendment in [pg 362] committee, and Mr. Gladstone reported that “during his whole parliamentary life, he had been accustomed to see class interests of all kinds put themselves on their defence under the supposition of being assailed, yet he had never seen a case where the modes of operation adopted by the professing champions were calculated to leave such a painful impression on the mind.” Credible whispers were heard of the open hostility of high military personages. In one of the debates of this time upon the army (Mar. 23, 1871), speakers freely implied that the influence of what was called the horse guards was actively adverse to reform. Mr. Gladstone, taking this point, laid it down that “military authorities without impairing in the slightest degree the general independence of their political opinions, should be in full harmony with the executive as to the military plans and measures which it might propose; and that only on this principle could the satisfactory working of our institutions be secured.”

The correspondence with the Queen was copious. In one letter, after mentioning that parliament had been persuaded to extend the tenure of the commander-in-chief's office beyond five years, and to allow the patronage and discipline of the army to be vested in him, though the secretary of state was responsible, Mr. Gladstone proceeds:—

It would have been impossible to procure the acquiescence of parliament in these arrangements, unless they had been accompanied with the declaration of Mr. Cardwell, made in the name of the cabinet, and seen and approved by your Majesty, that “it is of course necessary for the commander-in-chief to be in harmony with the government of the day” (Feb. 21, 1871), and with a similar declaration of Mr. Gladstone on March 23, 1871, also reported to, and approved by your Majesty, that while all political action properly so called was entirely free, yet the military plans and measures of the government must always have the energetic co-operation of the military chiefs of the army.

Purchase And Royal Warrant

The end was of course inevitable.[235] The bill at last passed [pg 363] the Commons, and then an exciting stage began. In the Lords it was immediately confronted by a dilatory resolution. In view of some such proceeding, Mr. Gladstone (July 15) wrote to the Queen as to the best course to pursue, and here he first mentioned the step that was to raise such clamour:—

As the government judge that the illegality of over-regulation prices cannot continue, and as they can only be extinguished by putting an end to purchase, what has been chiefly considered is how to proceed with the greatest certainty and the smallest shock, and how to secure as far as may be for the officers all that has hitherto been asked on their behalf. With this view, the government think the first step would be to abolish the warrant under which prices of commissions are fixed. As the resolution of the House of Lords states the unwillingness of the House to take part in abolishing purchase until certain things shall have been done, it would not be applicable to a case in which, without its interposition, purchase would have been already abolished.

Two days later (July 17) the Lords passed what Sir Roundell Palmer called “their ill-advised resolution.” On July 18 the cabinet met and resolved to recommend the cancelling of the old warrant regulating purchase, by a new warrant abolishing purchase. It has been said or implied that this proceeding was forced imperiously upon the Queen. I find no evidence of this. In the language of Lord Halifax, the minister in attendance, writing to Mr. Gladstone from Osborne (July 19, 1871), the Queen “made no sort of difficulty in signing the warrant” after the case had been explained. In the course of the day she sent to tell Lord Halifax, that as it was a strong exercise of her power in apparent opposition to the House of Lords, she should like to have some more formal expression of the advice of the cabinet than was contained in an ordinary letter from the prime minister, dealing with this among other matters. Ministers agreed that the Queen had a fair right to have their advice on such a point of executive action on her part, recorded in a formal and deliberate submission of their opinion. The advice was at once clothed in the definite form of a minute.

On July 20 Mr. Gladstone announced to a crowded and anxious House the abolition of purchase by royal warrant. The government, he said, had no other object but simplicity and despatch, and the observance of constitutional usage. Amid some disorderly interruptions, Mr. Disraeli taunted the government with resorting to the prerogative of the crown to get out of a difficulty of their own devising. Some radicals used the same ill-omened word. After a spell of obstruction on the ballot bill, the bitter discussion on purchase revived, and Mr. Disraeli said that what had occurred early in the evening was “disgraceful to the House of Commons,” and denounced “the shameful and avowed conspiracy of the cabinet” against the House of Lords. The latter expression was noticed by the chairman of committee and withdrawn, though Mr. Gladstone himself thought it the more allowable of the two.

In a letter to his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, Mr. Gladstone vindicated this transaction as follows:—

July 26, '71.—I should like to assure myself that you really have the points of the case before you. 1. Was it not for us an indispensable duty to extinguish a gross, wide-spread, and most mischievous illegality, of which the existence had become certain and notorious? 2. Was it not also our duty to extinguish it in the best manner? 3. Was not the best manner that which, (a) made the extinction final; (b) gave the best, i.e. a statutory, title for regulation prices; (c) granted an indemnity to the officers; (d) secured for them compensation in respect of over-regulation prices? 4. Did not the vote of the House of Lords stop us in this best manner of proceeding? 5. Did it absolve us from the duty of putting an end to the illegality? 6. What method of putting an end to it remained to us, except that which we have adopted?

Freeman's Judgment

Sir Roundell Palmer wrote, “I have always thought and said that the issuing of such a warrant was within the undoubted power of the crown.... It did and does appear to me that the course which the government took was the least objectionable course that could be taken under the whole circumstances of the case.”[236] I can find nothing more clearly [pg 365] and more forcibly said upon this case than the judgment of Freeman, the historian—a man who combined in so extraordinary a degree immense learning with precision in political thought and language, and added to both the true spirit of manly citizenship:—

I must certainly protest against the word “prerogative” being used, as it has so often been of late, to describe Mr. Gladstone's conduct with regard to the abolition of purchase in the army. By prerogative I understand a power not necessarily contrary to law, but in some sort beyond law—a power whose source must be sought for somewhere else than in the terms of an act of parliament. But in abolishing purchase by a royal warrant Mr. Gladstone acted strictly within the terms of an act of parliament, an act so modern as the reign of George III. He in truth followed a course which that act not only allowed but rather suggested.... I am not one of those who condemn Mr. Gladstone's conduct in this matter; still I grant that the thing had an ill look. The difference I take to be this. Mr. Gladstone had two courses before him: he might abolish purchase by a royal warrant—that is, by using the discretion which parliament had given to the crown; or he might bring a bill into parliament to abolish purchase.... What gave the thing an ill look was that, having chosen the second way and not being able to carry his point that way, he then fell back on the first way. I believe that it was better to get rid of a foul abuse in the way in which it was got rid of, than not to get rid of it at all, especially as the House of Commons had already decided against it. Still, the thing did not look well. It might seem that by electing to bring a bill into parliament Mr. Gladstone had waived his right to employ the royal power in the matter.... I believe that this is one of those cases in which a strictly conscientious man like Mr. Gladstone does things from which a less conscientious man would shrink. Such a man, fully convinced of his own integrity, often thinks less than it would be wise to think of mere appearances, and so lays himself open to the imputation of motives poles asunder from the real ones.[237]

These last words undoubtedly explain some acts and tendencies that gave a handle to foes and perplexed friends.