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: