II
In words already quoted, Mr. Gladstone spoke of most of his life having been given to working the institutions of his country. Of all these institutions—House of Commons, Lords, cabinet, church, stern courts of law—that which he was most apt to idealise was the throne. His sense of chivalry and his sense of an august tradition continuously [pg 424] symbolised by a historic throne, moved him as the sight of the French Queen at Versailles had moved the majestic political imagination of Burke a century before. About the throne he sometimes used language that represented almost at its highest the value set upon it in text-books of the constitution, and in the current conventions of ceremonial speech.[274] Although what he called the iron necessities of actual business always threw these conventions into the background when the time came, yet his inmost feeling about the crown and the person of its wearer was as sincere as it was fervid. In business, it is true, he never yielded, yet even in his most anxious and pressing hours he spared neither time nor toil in endeavours to show the Queen why he could not yield. “Though decisions,” he said, “must ultimately conform to the sense of those who are to be responsible for them, yet their business is to inform and persuade the sovereign, not to overrule him.” One writer describes the Queen as “superb in standing sentry over the business of the empire.” This is obsequious phrase-making. But I will borrow the figure in saying what is more real, that Mr. Gladstone from beginning to end stood sentry over the interests, whether profound and enduring or trivial and fleeting, of the ancient monarchy of this kingdom. None who heard it will ever forget the moving and energetic passage in which when he was the doughty veteran of eighty years, speaking against his own followers on some question of a royal annuity, he moved the whole House to its depths by the passionate declaration, “I am not ashamed to say that in my old age I rejoice in any opportunity that enables me to testify that, whatever may be thought of my opinions, whatever may be thought of my proposals in general politics, I do not forget the service that I have borne to the illustrious representative of the British monarchy.”[275]
The Queen
My readers have had opportunity enough of judging Mr. Gladstone's estimate of the Queen's shrewdness, simplicity, high manners. Above all, he constantly said how warmly he recognised her sincerity, frankness, straight-forwardness, and love of truth. On the other side, his own [pg 425] eager mobility, versatility, and wide elastic range was not likely to be to the taste of a personage with a singular fixity of nature. Then the Queen was by the necessity of her station a politician, as was Elizabeth or George iii., although oddly enough she had a bitter dislike of what she thought the madness of “women's rights.” As politician, she often took views that were not shared either by the constituencies or by the ministers whom the constituencies imposed upon her. The Queen in truth excellently represented and incorporated in her proper person one whole set of those qualities in our national character, on which the power of her realm had been built up. Mr. Gladstone stood for a different and in some aspects and on some occasions almost an antagonistic set of national qualities. The Queen, according to those who knew her well,[276] dreaded what in the eighteenth century they called enthusiasm: she dreaded or disdained it in religion, and in politics almost more. Yet her Englishmen are full of capacity for enthusiasm, and the Scots for whom she had such cordial affection have enthusiasm in measure fuller still. Unhappily, in the case of Ireland that occupied so much of Mr. Gladstone's life, her sympathies with his long and vigorous endeavour notoriously stood at zero. The Queen's loyalty to the constitution and to ministers in office was unquestioned, but she was not well placed, nor was she perhaps by character well fitted, to gauge the fluctuating movements of an age of change, as it was the duty of her statesmen to gauge and plumb them. If a cabinet with the confidence of the House of Commons decides upon a policy, it must obviously be a premier's duty to persist, and in that duty Mr. Gladstone was resolute. If he had been otherwise, he knew that he would be falling short in loyalty to the country, and to its chief magistrate most of all.
In 1871 a wave of critical feeling began to run upon the throne. An influential journalist of that day, singularly free from any tincture of republican sentiment, thus describes it. “A few weeks ago,” he says, “a deep and universal feeling of discontent at the Queen's seclusion (or rather at its consequences) found voice in the journals of the country. No [pg 426] public print of any importance failed to take part in the chorus; which was equally remarkable for its suddenness, fulness, and harmony. Indeed, the suddenness of the cry was surprising—till we remembered that what was then said had lain unexpressed in the minds of the whole community for years, with annual increment; and that when popular feeling gathers in that way, it is generally relieved at last by something of the nature of an explosion.” He then goes on to speak of “republicanism of a very revolutionary form flooding in,” and says that such a complexion of affairs could be viewed with pleasure by no friend of the monarchy.[277] The details of this movement are no longer of much interest, and they only concern us here because they gave Mr. Gladstone real anxiety. For him it was one of the special duties of a prime minister, as distinguished from his cabinet, to watch and guard relations between the crown and the country. Whether in office or in opposition, he lost no opportunity of standing forth between the throne and even a faint shadow of popular or parliamentary discontent. He had done it in the case of Prince Albert,[278] and he did it now. When the end came after nearly thirty years from our present date, the Queen wrote: “I shall ever gratefully remember his devotion and zeal in all that concerned my personal welfare and that of my family.” In 1871 his zeal went beyond the Queen's personal welfare, and his solicitude for the institution represented by the Queen undoubtedly took a form of deferential exhortation—an exhortation that she should return to a fuller discharge of public duty, which the Queen found irksome. The Queen was as fond of Balmoral as Mr. Gladstone was fond of Hawarden. The contrast between the formality of Windsor and the atmosphere of simple attachment and social affection that surrounded her in Scotland, was as delightful to her as the air and the scenery. A royal progress through applauding multitudes in great cities made her ill. Hence, when Mr. Gladstone pressed her to defer a northern journey, or to open parliament, or to open a bridge, or otherwise emerge from seclusion, the Queen, though well aware that he had [pg 427] not, and could not, have any motive save her own and the public interest, undoubtedly felt that her energetic minister was attempting to overwork her. This feeling, as most of us know, breeds resistance, and even in time resentment. To say, however, that “in his eagerness Mr. Gladstone pressed her to do what she knew to be not her work so much as his,” is misleading and a little ludicrous.[279] Mr. Gladstone had persuaded himself that in the humour of the day persistence in seclusion did harm; it was his duty to give advice accordingly, and this duty he could not consent to shirk.
In other ways his very awe of the institution made him set an exacting standard for the individual who represented it. The letters contain a hundred instances. One may suffice. On the occasion of the Irish Church bill of 1869, the prime minister sent to the Queen a print of its clauses, and along with this draft a letter, covering over a dozen closely-written quarto pages, in explanation. Himself intensely absorbed and his whole soul possessed by the vital importance of what he was doing, he could not conceive that the sovereign, nursing a decided dislike of his policy, should not eagerly desire to get to the bottom of the provisions for carrying the policy out. The Queen read the letter, and reread it, and then in despair desired a gentleman practised in dealing with parliamentary bills, happening at that time to be at Osborne, to supply her with a summary.[280] The gaunt virtues of a précis—a meagre thing where qualifying sentences drop off, parentheses are cut out, adverbs hardly count, the noun stands denuded of its sheltering adjective—were never congenial to Mr. Gladstone's copious exactitude in hypothesis, conditions, and contingencies. Neither of these two illustrious personages was without humour, and it seems at once a wonder and a pity that the monarch did less than justice to this laborious and almost military sense of discipline and duty in the minister; while the minister failed in genial allowance for the moderation of a royal lady's appetite for bread and honey from the draftsman's kitchen. If failing [pg 428] there were, it was natural to a man of earnest and concentrated mind. Be all this as it may, he became more and more conscious that the correspondence and occurrences of 1871-2 had introduced a reserve that was new. Perhaps it recalled to him the distance and formality that marked the relations between King George iii. and the proudest, the most intrepid, and the greatest of his prime ministers.