Mr. Disraeli’s Electoral Address, which was issued in October, had three defects. It appealed to the country to return the Ministry to power in order to prevent the Pope from becoming master of England—a perfectly absurd attempt to revive the “bogey” of Papal aggression. It proclaimed no positive policy, for it merely pledged the Government not to disestablish the Irish Church. It was as stilted in its rhetoric as Tancred’s revelation on Mount Sinai. Mr. Gladstone’s Address, issued a week later, was much more seductive and business-like. It proclaimed a positive policy of administrative reform and of retrenchment, justified a policy of conciliation to Ireland, and pressed for the disestablishment of the Irish Church. The result of the appeal to the new electors was fatal to the Government. The Liberals carried the country by a majority of over 100 seats. Lancashire strongly supported the Conservatives—whereas Yorkshire was strongly Liberal. The Liberals showed themselves weak in some of the Home Counties where “villadom,” as Lord Rosebery calls it, reigns supreme. Though the Tory Party was sadly shattered in Essex, the counties were, however, on the whole, wonderfully faithful to Mr. Disraeli, and he came within one vote of dividing with Mr. Gladstone the thirteen electoral boroughs, with a population between 100,000 and 60,000. The Liberals, on the other hand, were strongest in boroughs with a population between 60,000 and 20,000, and in those with a population above 100,000 they captured 41 seats out of 49. Mr. Gladstone was rejected by South-West Lancashire, but the Greenwich electors, having taken the precaution to return him, rendered his defeat of little practical importance. Mr. Mill lost his seat for Westminster, and thus his Parliamentary career closed, his only contribution to the Statute-Book being the law compelling railway companies to attach smoking carriages to passenger trains. Lord Hartington was beaten in North Lancashire, and Mr. Bernal Osborne, one of the wits of the House, lost his seat at Nottingham. Scotland returned only seven Tories, nicknamed by the late Mr. Russel, editor of the Scotsman, the “Seven Champions of Constitutionalism.” Roughly speaking, the Liberals won in counties where Dissent was strong, whereas the Tories won in counties where the influence of the Church of England prevailed. The boroughs that were carried by the Tories were those where the competition of Irish labour was most felt, or where anti-Papal agitators had most influence, and in Lancashire, where Anglican clergy and laymen had, during the Cotton Famine, been most assiduous in administering the Relief Fund.
Mr. Disraeli met defeat with manliness and dignity. Mr. Gathorne-Hardy advised him to resign, but Lord Derby, on the other hand, urged him to hold on to office. On the 28th of November a Cabinet Meeting was held, and Ministers decided to resign rather than wait to be ejected from their places by a vote of the House of Commons. The Prime Minister went down to Windsor on the 2nd of December, and not only tendered the resignation of the Cabinet to the Queen, but advised her to send for Mr. Gladstone. In fact, Mr. Disraeli, like a highbred player, having lost his game paid the stakes without a grudge or a murmur. Mr. Gladstone was summoned by telegraph to Windsor on the 3rd, and was commissioned to form a Government. Mr. Disraeli refused all honours for himself, though he was offered a peerage, but Mrs. Disraeli was created Viscountess Beaconsfield in her own right. On the 18th of December Parliament met, and the Ministry was complete. It consisted of fifteen members, of whom six were peers, one an eldest son of a peer, and eight were Commoners. The only Radical appointed was Mr. Bright—unless Mr. Gladstone could be counted a Radical—and in all questions between the middle-class and the masses Mr. Bright was already a Conservative. It was a Ministry of All the Talents—formidable in debate, great in administrative capacity, and strong in intellectual power—but it was unmistakably Whiggish. It was the Whigs who were first consulted about the disposal of the offices, and the spirit of Palmerston, who gave Mr. Milner Gibson a seat in his Cabinet “just to keep the Radicals quiet,” still prevailed. In forming the Ministry, Mr. Gladstone thus ignored the fact that his Cabinet inaugurated a new democratic era, in which the relative importance of Whigs and Radicals had been reversed. By admitting Radicals merely to minor offices he disappointed the combative wing of his party, whose unbought zeal had really carried him to power.[286] Some Tories of the “baser sort” put about the report that the Queen would refuse to receive Mr. Bright as a Minister. The Queen, however, as if to mark her disapproval of such insinuations, went out of her way to pay Mr. Bright special attention when he was presented to her. With delicate tact she sent word to him that in deference to his hereditary scruples as a Quaker, she would not expect him to kneel before her when he came to “kiss hands” on taking office.
The stirring events now described had severely tried the nerves of the Queen. Early in the year she had been rendered anxious by a severe illness of the Prince Leopold, who was at one time so sick that it was supposed he was dying. Then she was still more shocked and alarmed by news of an attempt which had been made by a man, O’Farrell, to assassinate the Duke of Edinburgh (Prince Alfred) on the 12th of March at Clontarf, near Port Jackson, in New South Wales. O’Farrel’s motives were never quite satisfactorily explained, though it was said at the time that he was a Fenian emissary. He was hanged for the crime on the 21st of April, and the Duke, who had been shot in the back, gradually recovered from his wound.
The great and unexpected popularity with which a little book from the Queen’s pen—“Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands”—containing a diary of her holiday rambles, was received during the season, gratified her
THE QUEEN INSPECTING THE “GALATEA” IN OSBORNE BAY. (See p. 319.)
much. It delighted the people, to whom it showed the homely, matronly, sensible business-like qualities which Englishmen value in the women of their race, reflected in the daily life of their Sovereign. It was a book that reproduced the wife and the house-mother rather than the Monarch, and it was written with great tenderness of feeling and artless simplicity of expression. The sketches, too, with which it was illustrated were amazingly popular, and in truth they were really bold and telling. But the little work had no public importance, save that it served to establish between the Queen and her people relations that were not only affectionate, but almost confidential. The extreme High Churchmen, however, were greatly alarmed to find from the Queen’s Journals that she had strong leanings to the Presbyterian Church. This notion was due to the fact that she took great delight in the preaching and spiritual ministrations of the Scottish Chaplains Royal, who were of course Presbyterians, and who officiated at the Court when it was in Aberdeenshire. It was not easy to understand why the High Churchmen should desire to prevent the Queen from following the bent of her own mind and heart in such a matter. It was absurd to argue that her position as Head of the Church of England bound her to Anglican orthodoxy, for she was also Head of the Church of Scotland. Nor did her Coronation Oath, which merely binds the Sovereign to uphold the Protestant faith, restrict her to the services of the Church of England. The fact is, personages belonging to the great family of European Princes have so many relationships and cross-currents of sympathy with kinsfolk of various creeds, that they become instinctively tolerant in religious matters. Still the attacks of the High Churchmen did neither the Queen nor her book any harm. It had merely revealed the fact that she was a Christian woman, personally pious and God-fearing, with a reverent and almost puritanical sense of duty, though rather indifferent, perhaps, to external religious forms. The Queen had shown that she understood the distinction between Christianity and Churchianity, and hence the outcry of the extreme Anglicans against her book. The truth was that her Majesty never made any secret of her personal liking for the ministrations of Dr. A. P. Stanley, Dean of Westminster, and one of the leaders of the Broad Church Party in the Church of England. When she exhibited a similar preference for his Presbyterian friends, Dr. Norman Macleod and Principal Tulloch in the Scottish Church, her offence was complete in the eyes of violent High Churchmen.
After receiving the Address based on Mr. Gladstone’s Resolution, and laying the foundation stone of the new St. Thomas’s Hospital, the Queen fled to Balmoral to recover from the nervous excitement of political warfare. It unfortunately happened that when the Scottish Members in discussing the Scottish Reform Bill substituted a household franchise pure and simple for a rating franchise, a Ministerial crisis was produced. Mr. Disraeli, in fact, desired authority to coerce Members by threatening a dissolution. For this purpose he had to consult the Queen, and certainly the three days lost in communicating with Balmoral gave rise to some inconvenience. This tempted Mr. Reardon, M.P. for Athlone, in the interests of the West End tradesmen, to put a question on the notice-paper of the House of Commons, as to the cause of the Queen’s absence from the capital. The Speaker, however, refused to let it appear, because it impudently suggested her Majesty’s abdication in favour of the Prince of Wales. In June the Queen had recovered her health, and on the 22nd she gave a brilliant garden party at Buckingham Palace. Six hundred invitations were issued, and she received her company, says Lord Malmesbury, “very graciously.” She was, he adds, “looking remarkably well, and everybody said she seemed to enjoy her party.” Two days before that she had reviewed 27,000 Volunteers in Windsor Park. This affair was very badly managed. There were no commissariat arrangements, and there was no ambulance. Hungry officers wandered away to get food, and when the marching past was over, some of the troops—faint from hunger and thirst, and having lost their leaders—ignored discipline altogether, and on the return to Datchet Station heaped vituperation on any officers of rank they came across.
On the 9th of July both Houses of Parliament congratulated the Queen on the birth of a little grand-daughter, who had been brought into the world by the Princess of Wales on the 6th. On the same evening (the 9th) the Duke of Edinburgh, who had brought his ship, the Galatea, home, landed at Osborne and dined with the Queen; and on the 13th she visited her son’s vessel, which she inspected under his guidance.