'I was still fighting about Borneo and about a Garter Mission to the King of Saxony, which I thought a waste of public money, and I was in a difficulty with the Cabinet as to Errington's mission—of the details of which I was not kept informed.
'Wolff, who evidently had been told something by Errington himself, gave notice of a question to ask Hartington whether communications had taken place with the Papal See as to prelates in India, and Lord Granville directed me to answer that no such communications had been made by Her Majesty's Government. As, however, I thought that communications had been made by Errington, I felt that this would be a virtual lie, and wrote to Hartington to ask him. Hartington then took the answer upon himself, and in his reply to me he said that there had been some discussions on a closely connected matter, but not exactly on that mentioned in the question, and that nothing had been done by him in the matter. Who, then, instructed Errington?… The Errington mission led for a moment to strained relations between Lord Granville and myself, and one of my letters he said was evidently intended to be "wholesome in Lent." "The tone of it is hardly that of two members of the same Government, more particularly when they are excellent friends."'
Sir Charles apologized frankly and cordially for the tone of his certainly peremptory letter, but
'I had to stick to my text….
'It was evidently monstrous that I should be made to answer questions about negotiations of which I knew nothing, thus leading the House of Commons to believe that I was in some sense responsible to them for what passed, when as a matter of fact I was not informed, except privately, and in strict confidence, by Errington himself. One result of the concealment as to the whole Errington business was that Mr. Gladstone on one occasion gave an answer in the House of Commons which was untrue, although he did not know that it was untrue, and that on another occasion the same thing happened to Courtney, who as Under- Secretary of State for the Colonies denied that a Roman Catholic question affecting the Colonies' (the proposal for a cathedral at Gibraltar) 'had been discussed, when Errington himself told me that it had. The Colonial Office did not know.'
Later:
'There never was a more discreditable piece of business than the whole of this Errington matter. Errington himself is an excellent fellow. I have not a word to say against him. It is the Government and not Errington that must be blamed.
'At this time I received a pamphlet from Auberon Herbert on the title- page of which he had drawn a picture of Gladstone in the fiery pit beckoning me, and I, winged and crowned as an archangel, falling from heaven to him, with the inscription: "Lapsus e coelo; or how C.D. accepted an invitation."'
II.
Notwithstanding his attention to domestic politics, Sir Charles was first and foremost the representative of the Foreign Office, and during the spring of 1882 he was ceaselessly concerned in the negotiations which were in progress between the Russian Government and the British India Office, over which Lord Hartington then presided.