My Memory of Gladstone

by Goldwin Smith

Among other relics of Gladstone’s Conservatism was his clinging to his seat in Parliament for the University of Oxford, in which he was supported by a rather strange and precarious alliance of High Churchmen voting for the High Churchman and Liberals voting for the progressive Liberal; a combination the strain upon which became extreme when Palmerston, in whose Government Gladstone was, made Shaftesbury, the lay leader of the Evangelicals, his Minister for ecclesiastical affairs, and allowed him to go on promoting Low Churchmen. But the Tories never made a greater mistake than the ejection of Gladstone from his Oxford seat. By sending him from Oxford to Liverpool, they, to use his own phrase, unmuzzled him. It is true, I believe, that, on the day of his rejection, the Bible fell out of the hand of the statue of James I. on the gate tower of the Bodleian, an omen of the separation of the Church from the State. The stone being very friable, the fall was not miraculous; although it was curiously apt.

It was a mistake, however, to say that the disestablishment of the Irish Church had been an issue in the Oxford election. I compared notes on that point with my friend, Sir John Mowbray, who had been the chairman of the Tory committee, and agreed with me in saying that the Irish Church was not an issue. Gladstone took up disestablishment for Ireland, which had been long on the Liberal programme, when he had been thrown out of power by Disraeli on the question of extension of the suffrage. He was ambitious, happily for the country; and he wanted to recover the means of doing great things. His admirers need not shrink from that avowal. But he was also sincerely convinced, as well he might be, and as all Liberals were, that the State Church of Ireland was about the most utterly indefensible institution in the world. He framed his measure, expounded it, and carried it through Parliament, in his usual masterly way; and the Anglican Church in Ireland, it is believed, has felt herself the better for the operation ever since. Gladstone’s High Church friends in England forgave him with a sigh. The State Church of Ireland was separate from that of England, and was Low Church and opposed to everything Catholic from local antagonism to the Church of Rome.

Before his junction with the Liberals, Gladstone had deprecated the interference of Parliament with the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge on the ground that they were private foundations with which Parliament had no right to interfere; and when he brought on his Oxford Reform Bill he had to perform one of his feats of retrospective explanation. But, as usual, he did his work well, though he still left more to be done. By his legislation, clerical as his sympathies were, the universities were set free from clericism, reopened to science, and reunited to the nation. Our Oxford Bill was badly cut up in the Commons, some misguided Liberals playing into the hands of Disraeli, who of course meant mischief. When the Bill in its mutilated state went up to the Lords, it appeared that the Tory leader, Lord Derby, though he felt bound to speak against the Ministerial measure, was not really prepared to throw it out, and that consequently there had not been a whip upon his side. It was then suggested to the Ministers in charge of the Bill that the Commons amendments might be thrown out in the Lords, and the Bill might be sent back in its original state to the Commons, where our friends might by that time be better advised, and the Opposition benches, as it was the end of the session, might be thinned. Russell, then the leader in the Commons, condemned the suggestion as most rash and not unlikely to be the death of the Bill. Gladstone was lying sick of an attack, strange to say, of the chicken-pox. On appeal to him, the signal for battle was at once held out, as I felt sure it would be; and the result was just what we desired.

In connection with this legislative dealing with the endowed colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, the principle may be said to have been practically adopted, though not formally laid down, that, after the lapse of fifty years from the death of a Founder, the Legislature may deal freely with all his regulations, saving the main object of his foundation. The assumption that the wills of Founders were for ever inviolable, in spite of the lapse of ages and the total change of circumstances, had led, as it must always lead, to a perpetuity of perversion and to the defeat of the main object of the Founders themselves.

He who in his youth had won the favour of the most bigoted of Tory patrons and entrance to public life by his rhetorical opposition to the Reform Bill of 1832, was destined in his maturity to father a Reform Bill at the thought of which the reformers of 1832 would have shuddered. The Reform Bill of 1832 had enfranchised the middle-class, but by abolishing the scot-and-lot borough, had deprived the working-class of the little representation which it possessed. Moreover, the legislative preponderance of the landed interest, which had the House of Lords to itself and a large section of the Commons, was too great for the general good. These were the best reasons for an extension of the suffrage, while the Whig party and its leader Russell, perhaps, as is the way of parties, finding their sails flapping against the mast, wished to raise a little popular wind. It is by the bidding of parties against each other for popularity, largely, that the suffrage has been extended. Russell had for some time been busy with reform, and had more than once moved in that direction, but had been deftly put aside by Palmerston, who, though a Liberal by profession, and revolutionary or affecting that character in foreign affairs, was in home politics a Tory at heart, and met general assertions of the right of men to the suffrage as “partakers of our flesh and blood” and presumptively entitled to a place “within the pale of the constitution,” with the aphorism that “the one right of every man, woman, and child was to be well governed.” It could not be said that the reform agitation, at all events south of Birmingham, was very strong. The large measure of extension brought in by Gladstone was opposed, in some very memorable speeches, by Robert Lowe, a high aristocrat not of birth but of intellect, who made the last stand against democracy and in favour of government by mind. He and his section, dubbed by regular party men “the Cave of Adullam,” helped Disraeli to kill the Bill. Disraeli then brought in and carried a Bill, not less radical, of his own, to which the Conservative gentry under the party whip, styled by Disraeli “education,” lent a doleful support; while Robert Lowe appealed to their consistency almost with tears, but in vain. Disraeli thus carried off the popularity of the measure, and enabled himself to say that the Tories were the true friends of the masses. But, besides this, Disraeli looked out of window, which Gladstone’s critics, perhaps not wholly without ground for their gibes, said that he did not, and had perceived and laid to heart the great fact that there were many in the masses who cared little for Liberalism or progress, and who would be apt under skilful management to vote Tory.

Such a subject as the French war lent transcendent interest to the great speeches of Pitt and Fox. Otherwise, their best efforts are not superior to Gladstone’s speech in favour of extension of the suffrage, though Gladstone’s style is different from theirs. Gladstone’s speeches are not literature. He spoke without notes, and no man can speak literature ex tempore. Nor are there any passages of extraordinary brilliancy. For such he had not imagination. But the speeches are masterly expositions of the measure and of the case in its favour, always dignified, impressive, and persuasive. The language is invariably good and clear; wonderfully so, considering the absence of notes, though it is somewhat diffuse, and had perhaps rather lost freshness by over-practice in debating-clubs when the speaker was young. The voice, the manner, the bearing of the orator were supreme, and filled even the most adverse listener with delight.

Gladstone’s multifarious reading does not seem to have included a large proportion of history or political philosophy. He has left among his writings nothing of importance in the way of political science, nor does he seem even to have formed any clear conception of the polity which he was seeking to produce. His guiding idea, when once he had broken loose from his early Toryism, was liberty which he appeared to think would of itself be the parent of all that was good. He had, perhaps, derived something from Russell, whose leading principle it was that the people needed only responsibility to make them act wisely and rightly. He had, apparently, no notion of any system of government other than party, which he seemed to treat as though it had been immemorial and universal, whereas it was born of the struggle for constitutional government against the Stuarts. Even as to the working of the British Constitution, his opinions are not very clear. He professed, and probably felt, the highest respect for the Lords; yet, when they played their constitutional part by throwing out Bills of his of which they did not approve, he denounced them as violators of the Constitution. Did he intend to vest supreme power absolutely in an assembly elected by manhood, or nearly manhood, suffrage?

For the Crown, Gladstone’s reverence went at least as far as to any but believers in political fetichism would seem meet, or as we feel to be perfectly consistent with the dignity of one so eminent and the real head of the State. Yet, it was understood that he was not a favourite at Court, and it is pretty evident that Her Majesty did not eagerly embrace the opportunity of calling on him to form a Government. With all her personal virtues and graces, she was a true granddaughter of George III., cherishing, as we have been told, apparently on the best authority, ideas of Divine Right, and liking to connect herself not so much with the Hanoverians as with the Stuarts. To her, progressive Liberalism could hardly be very congenial. Moreover, she was a woman, and in a competition in flattery Gladstone would have had no chance with his rival.

It is rather startling to learn from this Life how much there is of interference on the part of irresponsibility with the responsible Government of the Kingdom, and what drafts are made upon the time and energy of one who has the burden of Atlas on his shoulders by the demands of correspondence with the Court. Another thing of which the friends of personal government, who have been labouring so hard by pageantry and personal worship to stimulate the monarchical sentiment, may well take note, is the confidential employment of Court Secretaries, like Sir Herbert Taylor under George IV., in communications between the Sovereign and the Minister. They might find, when they had revived the personal power, that it was really wielded, not by Royalty itself, but by some aspiring member or members of the household.