I.
The opening successes of British foreign policy under the Gladstone Government were to a large extent neutralized by other difficulties in which the new Administration found itself at once involved. Ireland carried confusion into the very heart of Imperial authority, and discord into the counsels of the Government.
On October 30th, 1880, Lord Tenterden wrote:
'Odo Russell says there is a general opinion abroad that the Gladstone Government will be in a minority when Parliament meets, … and that then the policy of England will have to be changed. There will be no more demonstrations, or concerts, or inconvenient proposals. I told him that such ideas were illegitimate offspring of Musurus and the Morning Post.'
These rumours of coming defeat sprang from the Irish situation. Captain Boycott's case had given a new word to the language; agrarian murders were frequent; and the decision to seek no powers outside the ordinary law, which had been pressed on Mr. Forster, was vehemently challenged by the Opposition. Radicals wished for a Bill offering compensation to tenants evicted under harsh conditions; but this proposal bred dissension in a Government largely composed of great landlords, two of whom, Lords Hartington and Lansdowne, possessed wide domains in Ireland. On June 13th, 1880, Sir Charles, after dining with Lord Rosebery in company with Mr. Gladstone, noted that there was disagreement in the Cabinet, 'all the peers being opposed to an Irish Land Bill, and all the Commoners supporting Forster in this branch of his proposals.'
'On July 2nd trouble broke out in the Cabinet with a letter from Lord Hartington advising the withdrawal of Forster's Irish Land Bill. [Footnote: The Compensation for Disturbance measure.] … I placed my conditional resignation in Chamberlain's hands, and he his and mine in Forster's, in case the latter was inclined to nail his colours to the mast. I noted in my diary: "I do not care in the least about the Bill, but I must either go out with these men or climb into the Cabinet over their bodies, to either become a Whig or to eventually suffer the same fate, so I prefer to make common cause. I suppose there will be a compromise once more;" and so, at the Cabinet of the next day, Saturday, the 3rd, there was.'
The compromise of July 3rd did not terminate dissension. Lord Lansdowne retired from the Government, and in the first days of August the Compensation for Disturbance Bill itself was rejected by the Lords, many of Mr. Gladstone's nominal supporters voting against it.
This was the first revolt of the Whigs. The old order was passing, and shrewd eyes perceived it. Lord Houghton wrote to Sir Charles from Vichy on August 8th:
"I told Hugessen [Footnote: Mr. Knatchbull-Hugessen had been created Lord Brabourne in this summer.] that a peer always voted with his party the first Session as a matter of etiquette; but it seems he does not think so. The Government will have to decide in the vacation whether they can govern without the Whigs or not. I am glad that I have not to decide this point, but I own I am glad that I have lived in a Whig world. It has been a wonderful combination of public order and personal liberty. I do not care much for future order, but I care a good deal for individual liberty, which is slipping away from under us."
For the moment the House of Lords had given victory to the Whigs; but the sequel was, in Mr. Gladstone's own words, "a rapid and vast extension of agrarian disturbance," which grew all through the winter of that famine- stricken year, presenting to the Chief Secretary the traditional Irish problem, how to deal with a lawless demand for redress of grievances. Towards the end of September Mr. Chamberlain wrote:
"Next Session will settle Forster one way or the other. Either he will pass a Land Bill and be a great statesman, or he will fail and be a pricked bubble for the rest of his natural life."
Mr. Forster wanted to pass a Land Bill, but he also wanted to deal with lawlessness by coercive legislation, and, after the Cabinet hurriedly called on September 28th, Mr. Chamberlain reported:
'"With regard to Ireland, Forster made a strong case for a Coercion Bill, but the Cabinet thought it best that the insufficiency of the present law should be thoroughly proved before new powers were asked for."
'Chamberlain went on:
'"Probably a prosecution will be tried against Parnell and the Land League for intimidating tenants and others. Even if it fails, it may divert the attention of the Land League from its present agitation, and so lead to a cessation of outrages."'
'I added in my diary: "I hope they will not commit the folly of prosecuting Parnell, which they discussed to-day. I sent for Hill, and got the Daily News to damn the idea." But my intervention through the Daily News was not on this occasion sufficiently strong ultimately to prevent this folly, for I had not, this time, any following at my back.'
Later in the year he told Mr. Chamberlain that "to try to stop Irish land agitation by making arrests was like firing a rifle at a swarm of midges."
Mr. Chamberlain replied from Birmingham on October 27th;
"I do not half like the Irish prosecutions, but I fear there is no alternative, except, indeed, the suspension of the Habeas Corpus, which I should like still less. Parnell is doing his best to make Irish legislation unpopular with English Radicals. The workmen here do not like to see the law set at defiance, and a dissolution on the 'Justice for Ireland' cry would under present circumstances be a hazardous operation."
Mr. Forster was eager to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, and wanted to have Parliament specially summoned in order to carry through repressive legislation.
'On Monday morning, November 15th, on my return to London, I saw Harcourt, and told him that I should follow Chamberlain in resigning if a special Irish Coercion Session without a Land Bill were to be called. I saw Chamberlain immediately after the Cabinet which was held this day. Bright and Chamberlain were as near splitting off at one end as Lord Selborne at the other. Mr. Gladstone proposed at the Cabinet the creation of English, Scotch, and Irish Grand Committees, but obtained very little support….
'It seemed probable that there would be a Coercion Bill and a Land
Bill, and that the Land Bill (although the resignation of the Lord
Chancellor was threatened) would give what was known as "the three
F's," and that the Government would insist on both Bills. [Footnote:
The "three F's" were "Fair Rent" (i.e., judicially fixed rent),
"Free Sale" (of tenant right), and "Fixity of Tenure.">[ The Lords
would probably throw out the Land Bill, and the Government would
resign….
'Chamberlain had dined with me on November 17th, and had given me late
news of the condition of the Cabinet, which had been adjourned until
Friday, the 19th.
'The division was really a division between the Commons' members on the one side (except Forster and Hartington, but with the support of Lord Granville), and Forster and Hartington and the Peers upon the other side; Lord Cowper, the Viceroy of Ireland' (who, although not a member of the Cabinet, had been called in for the occasion), 'making common cause, of course, with Forster….
'On the 19th the adjourned Cabinet was held; Forster was isolated, and all became calm. The Queen had telegraphed on the previous evening to Lord Granville in a personal telegram, in which she said that Mr. Gladstone had told her nothing about the dissensions in the Cabinet, and that she "must request Lord Granville either to tell her what truth there is in the statement as to dissensions or to induce Mr. Gladstone to do so!" Mr. Gladstone always held that the Queen ought not to be told about dissensions in the Cabinet; that Cabinets existed for the purpose of differing—that is, for the purpose of enabling Ministers who differed to thrash out their differences—and that the Queen was only concerned with the results which were presented to her by, or in the name of, the Cabinet as a whole. This seems reasonable, and ought, I think, to be the constitutional view; but the Queen naturally … hates to have personal differences going on of which she is not informed….
'On November 23rd I noted in my diary that Hartington … had grown restive, and wanted to resign and get Forster to go with him, and that Forster talked of it but did not mean it. Kimberley and Northbrook had come over to Mr. Gladstone's side, and the other view was chiefly represented by Lord Spencer and Lord Selborne; and I could not help feeling that if, as I expected, the split with Whiggery had to come, it had better be this split, so that we should have the great names of Gladstone and Bright upon our side. One could not help feeling that we had no men to officer our ranks, and that really, besides Mr. Gladstone, who was an old man, there was only Chamberlain…. Hartington was a real man, but a man on the wrong side, and with little chance of his getting rid of his prejudices, which were those, not of stupidity, but of ignorance; with his stables and his wealth it was useless to expect him to do serious work. Bright was a great name, and had a power of stringing together a series of sound commonplaces, so put that they were as satisfactory to the ear as distinct statements of policy would be; and had a lovely voice, but it was rhetoric all the same—rhetoric very different from Disraeli's rhetoric, but equally rhetoric, and not business.'
By November 25th the severity of the crisis may be gathered from a letter of Sir Charles's to Mrs. Pattison, which describes the grouping of forces. On the one side were "Gladstone, Bright, Chamberlain, Granville, Harcourt, Kimberley, Childers, Dodson, Northbrook; on the other Hartington, Forster, Spencer, Argyll, the Chancellor." "Forster," he wrote, "talks about resigning, but does not mean it. It is meaning it which gives us so much power."
'"If Chamberlain and I should be driven to resign alone, we shall have a great deal of disagreeable unpopularity and still more disagreeable popularity to go through." His old kinsfolk who cared for him were "hard- bitten Tories": Mr. Dilke of Chichester; his cousin, John Snook, of Belmont Castle; and Mrs. Chatfield, if she were still able to follow political events, would "badger him horribly." Worse still, he would have to endure "patting on the back by Biggar," to which he would prefer stones from "a Tory mob."
The lull in Cabinet troubles was only momentary:
'On December 10th, Chamberlain, the stormy petrel, came to stay. When we were at dinner there suddenly arrived a summons for a Cabinet to be held on Monday, instead of Thursday for which it stood, and we went off to Harcourt's. We found that he was not in the secret, and therefore decided that the Cabinet must have been called at the demand of the Queen on the suggestion of Dizzy, who was staying with her at this moment; "but it may have been called on account of Forster's renewed demand for coercion," as I noted.
'The next morning, December 11th, Lulu Harcourt came, and brought a note: "Dear Dilke, L. will tell you what he heard from Brett. It is odd that the Sawbones should know what we are trying to find out." Lulu reported that Dr. Andrew Clarke had told Reggie Brett, Hartington's secretary, that Parliament was, after all, to meet before Christmas. When Lulu was gone, Chamberlain and I decided that if there was only a pretended and not a real change we would resign, whatever our unpopularity. In the afternoon of the same day Harcourt wrote to Chamberlain that he had seen Hartington; that Forster had written to Gladstone that he could not wait till January 6th' (for extended powers of coercion). 'Harcourt said that the reports were not much worse, and only of a general kind; that Hartington thought Forster worried and ill. "In fact, I think he is like the Yankee General after Bull Run—not just afraid, but dreadful demoralized. I have only one counsel to give—let us all stick to the ship, keep her head to the wind, and cram her through it. Yours ever, W. V. H."
'Monday, December 13th.—… called before the Cabinet to find out whether the offer of Chamberlain's place would now tempt me to sell him! We won, after all!'
Mr. Forster had accordingly to wait till the New Year for the introduction of his Coercion Bill.