This I add—that Procedure reform does not necessarily entail rapid legislation. ‘Business’ includes Estimates, Budget, and Supply. It is the transaction of this that I am more especially anxious to promote. Further, assuming that owing to some miraculous exercise of superhuman control H.M. Government remained in office, I would suggest that there might be very considerable tactical advantages from not plunging immediately into legislation, and from gaining time by setting the House of Commons to work on a difficult question in the consideration and settlement of which no issue of party or of confidence need arise.
Yours most sincerely,
Randolph S. Churchill.
The Cabinet did not meet again until the New Year, but Christmas was not a season of unbroken peace and good-will to Her Majesty’s Ministers. Not one, however experienced and imaginative, could penetrate the obscurity of the future or calculate the crisis to which events were hurrying. The election had left them in a large minority. The Government of Ireland was rapidly passing into the hands of the National League. The Viceroy had resigned. Mr. Gladstone was revolving vast and unfathomable schemes. Parliament was to meet for regular business upon January 21. Meanwhile the days were disturbed by every kind of rumour and alarm. Lord Randolph Churchill, who always cultivated the acquaintance of clever men irrespective of their political opinion, had friends in every camp and possessed many special channels of information. All he could gather he wrote to his chief:—
Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Salisbury.
India Office: December 22, 1885.
... Now I have a great deal to tell you.
Labouchere came to see me this morning. He asked me our intentions. I gave him the following information. I can rely upon him: (1) That there would be no motion for adjournment after the 12th, but that business would be immediately proceeded with after three or four days’ swearing. On this he said that, if we liked to go out on a motion for adjournment, he thought the other side might accommodate us. I told him that such an ineffably silly idea had never entered our heads. Then he told me that he had been asked whether he could ascertain if a certain statement as to a Tory Home Rule measure which appeared recently in the Dublin Daily Express was Ashbourne’s measure, and if the Tories meant to say ‘Aye’ or ‘No’ to Home Rule; to which I replied that it had never crossed the mind of any member of the Government to dream even of departing from an absolute unqualified ‘No,’ and that all statements as to Ashbourne’s plan were merely the folly of the Daily News. Then I was very much upset, for he proceeded to tell me that on Sunday week last Lord Carnarvon had met Justin McCarthy, and had confided to him that he was in favour of Home Rule in some shape, but that his colleagues and his party were not ready, and asked whether Justin McCarthy’s party would agree to an inquiry, which he thought there was a chance of the Government agreeing to, and which would educate his colleagues and his party if granted and carried through. I was consternated, but replied that such a statement was an obvious lie; but, between ourselves, I fear it is not—perhaps not even an exaggeration or a misrepresentation. Justin McCarthy is on the staff of the Daily News. Labouchere is one of the proprietors, and I cannot imagine any motive for his inventing such a statement. If it is true, Lord Carnarvon has played the devil. Then I told Labouchere that if the G.O.M. announced any Home Rule project, or indicated any such project, and by so doing placed the Government in a minority, resignation was not the only course; that there was another alternative which might even be announced in debate, and the announcement of which might complete the squandering of the Liberal party, and that his friend at Hawarden had better not omit altogether that card from his calculations as to his opponents’ hands. Lastly, I communicated to him that, even if the Government went out and Gladstone introduced a Home Rule Bill, I should not hesitate, if other circumstances were favourable, to agitate Ulster even to resistance beyond constitutional limits; that Lancashire would follow Ulster, and would lead England; and that he was at liberty to communicate this fact to the G.O.M.[48]
Meanwhile Mr. Gladstone, although embarrassed and forestalled by the disclosures in the newspapers, was deep in his Irish schemes. A chance conversation which he had had with Mr. Balfour in the middle of December had encouraged Mr. Gladstone to make a proposal to Lord Salisbury. He wrote (December 20) of the ‘stir in men’s minds’ and of the urgency of the question, how it would be ‘a public calamity if this great subject should fall into the lines of party conflict.’ Only the Government could deal with such a question, and on public grounds he specially desired that the existing Government would deal with it. If Lord Salisbury and his friends would bring forward ‘a proposal for settling the whole question of the future government of Ireland,’ he would desire to treat it in the same spirit as he had shown in respect to Afghanistan and the Balkan Peninsula.
We are assured that Mr. Gladstone laid great stress upon this proffer of support. He had told the Queen two years before that the Irish question could only be settled by a conjunction of parties. He seems to have imagined that such a proposal would be regarded us a fair and magnanimous undertaking, and would receive, as some may think it deserved, the unprejudiced deliberation of the Cabinet. He had received full information—denied to Lord Randolph Churchill—of Lord Carnarvon’s interview with Parnell. He believed in all sincerity that the Conservative Government were seriously considering, even if they were not already committed to, a policy of Home Rule in some form or other. He remembered the conferences on the Reform Bill, and the support which he had lately given to the new ministry. Neither he nor his friends seem fully to have appreciated the fear and aversion with which his opponents regarded him. His letter was treated with contempt. No other word will suffice. ‘A public calamity,’ forsooth! ‘If this great question should fall into line of party conflict!’ ‘His hypocrisy,’ wrote a Minister to whom this letter had been shown, ‘makes me sick.’ In the Tory Cabinet there was but one opinion about him. He was ‘mad to take office’; and if his hunger were not ‘prematurely gratified,’ he would be forced into some line of conduct which would be ‘discreditable to him and disastrous.’
Mr. Gladstone wrote again on the 23rd, pressing for a definite answer. ‘Time,’ he said, ‘was precious.’ Lord Salisbury suavely replied through Mr. Balfour, in a letter which has since been made public, that a communication of the views of the Government would at this stage be at variance with usage. As Parliament would meet for business before the usual time, it was better ‘to avoid a departure from ordinary practice which might be misunderstood.’ There, of course, the matter ended; and thus idly drifted away what was perhaps the best hope of the settlement of Ireland which that generation was to see. Mr. Gladstone tarried no longer. On December 26[49] he drafted a memorandum for submission to the various noblemen and gentlemen with whom he proposed to act, setting forth with all possible precision his immediate intentions. If the Government were ready to deal with Ireland in a manner that would satisfy him and satisfy the Irish Nationalists, he would support them. If not, he would turn them out at the earliest convenient opportunity; and if in consequence entrusted with the duty of forming a Government, he would make the acceptance of a plan of ‘duly guarded Home Rule’ an indispensable condition.