According to custom, Broadhurst immediately called upon the Prime Minister. He said that if it were Mr. Gladstone’s wish that he should join the Administration, he hoped it would be in some capacity less important than that of Under-Secretary of the Home Office. But the Prime Minister would not listen to any objections to the offer. “I’ll answer for you myself,” said he, playfully. “You must prepare at once to enter upon the duties of the office.” Broadhurst adds: “I can honestly declare that I left Mr. Gladstone’s house without any of those feelings of exhilaration and pleasing excitement which the gift of office is generally supposed to awake in the breast of the politician.” He lived the hard struggle of his early years over again in the next half-hour. “The lowly beginning of my career,” he says, “its labours at the forge and the stonemason’s shop, the privations, the wanderings, and my varying fortunes, stood out in my mind’s eye as clearly as so many living pictures. Especially did my memory recall the months I had spent working on the very Government buildings which I was about to enter as a Minister of the Crown.” He deplored the lack of education in his early days, and visions of failure and humiliation in the discharge of his new duties, in consequence, tormented him.
CHAPTER XIII
DISAPPOINTED HOPES
1
It is probably as annoying to an expectant Minister to be offered what he regards as an inferior post as to be entirely ignored. Sir Robert Peel, in December 1834, offered Lord Ashley (subsequently the Earl of Shaftesbury) a seat on the Board of Admiralty, which Lord Ashley, thinking it altogether beneath him, promptly refused. “Had I not,” he writes in his Diary, “by God’s grace and the study of religion subdued the passion of my youth, I should now have been heart-broken. Canning, eight years ago, offered me, as a neophyte, a seat at one of the Boards, the first step in a young statesman’s life. If I am not now worthy of more, it is surely better to cease to be a candidate for public honours. Yet Peel’s letter, so full of flummery, would lead anyone to believe that I was a host of excellency. The thing is a contradiction.” Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that he accepted the post subsequently. He satisfied himself that it was of more importance than he at first supposed.
No politician had such curious adventures as an aspirant to office, and certainly no one has confessed so freely the bitterness of his disappointments, as Shaftesbury, whose name is so honourably associated with legislation for the protection of women and children employed in factories. In 1839 Peel was again engaged in making a Government. Queen Victoria had hardly been two years on the Throne, and was only twenty years of age. Peel invited Lord Ashley to accept a post in the Royal Household, urging that he desired to have around “this young woman, on whose moral and religious character depends the welfare of millions of human beings,” persons whose conversation would tend to her moral improvement. Lord Ashley acknowledges that he was “thunderstruck” when he received Peel’s letter, as he expected a far higher position than what he describes as “a mere Court puppet.” But in his reply he said, somewhat sarcastically, that if Peel desired it, he was willing to take “the office of chief scullion to the Court.” However, this Administration was not constituted. It was wrecked on what is known as “the Bedchamber question.” As one of the ladies of the Bedchamber, the Mistress of the Robes, who was most closely in attendance upon Queen Victoria, was related to some of the outgoing Whig Ministers, by whom she had been appointed—the office being at the time political, and its occupant bound to go out on a change of Government—Peel insisted upon her resignation. The Queen refused to consent to such a course, as one repugnant to her feelings, and Peel, thereupon refusing to form an Administration, the Melbourne Ministry were recalled to office. Two years later Peel was engaged once more in making a Government—this time Queen Victoria raised no objection to the Mistress of the Robes being changed—and again he offered Lord Ashley a place in the Royal Household, as a man who was deeply religious and moral. Lord Ashley now believed that Peel simply wanted to muzzle him, the leader of the growing humanitarian movement for the State regulation of factories. He refused the office. “I told Peel,” he wrote, “the case was altered; the Court was no longer the same; the Queen was two years older, had a child, and a husband to take care of her.” So he declined to devote himself to ordering dinners and carrying a white wand. He discovered subsequently, to his deep mortification, that Peel had already offered the post of Vice-Chamberlain of the Household to Lord —— (“the hero of Madame Grisi,” as Ashley describes him); and that Lord —— exclaimed: “Thank God, my character is too bad for a Household place!” Lord Ashley argued that “morality, therefore, was not the reason for putting me at Court.”
2
On January 27, 1855, the Coalition Government of Lord Aberdeen and Lord John Russell resigned, being defeated on a vote of censure charging them with mismanagement of the Crimean War. Lord Palmerston received the commands of Queen Victoria to form an Administration. He, too, desired to have a Ministry of both Liberals and Conservatives. On February 7th he wrote to Ashley—now the Earl of Shaftesbury and a Conservative—offering him the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster with a seat in the Cabinet. That was in the morning. In the afternoon Shaftesbury received a brief note from Palmerston requesting him to “consider the offer as suspended,” in consequence of unforeseen difficulties, which, it subsequently transpired, were the claims of the Liberals for a greater share of place and power in the new Government. This explanation came to Shaftesbury from Lady Palmerston. “Palmerston is distracted with all the worry he has to go through,” she wrote. In a P.S. she added: “It is no pleasure to form a Government when there are so many unreasonable people to please, and so many interested people pressing for their own gratification and vanity, without any regard to the public good or the interests of the Government and country.” Shaftesbury thus poured out his virtuously indignant soul on the subject to his son: “The selfishness, the meanness, the love of place and salary, the oblivion of the country, of man’s welfare and God’s honour, have never been more striking and terrible than in this crisis. These, added to the singular conceit of all the candidates for office (and all have aspired to the highest), have thrown stumbling-blocks in Palmerston’s path at every step. The greediness and vanity of our place-hunters have combined to make each one of them a union of the vulture and the peacock.”
Shaftesbury declares that he had then no desire for place; and it is impossible to doubt the genuineness of the thanksgiving on his “escape from office” in which he indulges. A month later some of the Members of the Administration resigned, and Palmerston again offered Shaftesbury the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster. But Shaftesbury was still reluctant. “I could not satisfy myself,” he says, “that to accept office was a Divine call. I was satisfied that God had called me to labour among the poor.” However, one morning he received this note from Lady Palmerston: “Palmerston is very anxious now that you should put on your undress uniform and be at the Palace a quarter before three to be sworn in. Pray do this, and I am sure you will not repent it.” Shaftesbury gave way to these pleading entreaties. The result was certainly curious. “I went and dressed,” he writes in his Diary, “and then, while I was waiting for the carriage, I went down on my knees and prayed for counsel, wisdom and understanding. Then there was someone at the door, as I thought to say that the carriage was ready. But instead of that a note, hurriedly written in pencil, was put into my hand. It was from Palmerston—‘Don’t go to the Palace.’” Many would have groaned in the anguish of their souls over this crowning disappointment. Shaftesbury declares he danced with joy. “It was to my mind,” he says, “as distinctly an act of special Providence as when the hand of Abraham was stayed and Isaac escaped.” Palmerston’s sudden change of mind is no doubt accounted for in a passage which I find in the Autobiography of the eighth Duke of Argyll, who was a member of Palmerston’s Cabinet. He states that one day Palmerston astonished all his colleagues by proposing that Lord Shaftesbury should be one of their number. “I was far too fond of Shaftesbury, and had much too great a respect for him to say one word in opposition,” Argyll writes; “but I saw that it rather took away the breath from a good many of my colleagues. His fervid nature, his uncompromising temperament, and his somewhat individual opinions were evidently not considered as promising well for united councils. My opinion, which, however, I kept to myself, was that he was a far more valuable man out of office than in it.” Argyll adds: “Palmerston evidently saw that the proposal was not very well received, and we heard nothing more of it.”