This depression
In 1880 the queen’s speech in the first parliament after Gladstone’s victory noted that ‘the depression which has lately been perceived in the Revenue continues without abatement’. Three years later on the same occasion Randolph Churchill, an unruly and rumbustious Tory, attacked the fact that no mention had been made ‘of the marked, continued and hopeless depression of trade in this country’. The word was on everyone’s lips, although no one seemed to know what it was. The House of Lords demanded a Commission on the Depression of Trade ‘to ascertain what this depression is’. No neat solution was found, but the word entered the political vocabulary and has never since left it.
In the autumn of 1880 Gladstone wrote to the queen that:
the state of Ireland is without doubt not only deplorable but menacing. Its distinctive character is not so much that of a general insecurity as that of a widespread conspiracy against property. The evils are distinct; both of them sufficiently grave. There is one most painful feature in the case, namely that the leaders of the disturbed part of the people incite them to break the law, whereas in the times of O’Connell there can be little doubt that in the midst of a strong political agitation they stoutly denounced agrarian crime and generally enforced observance of the law.
The ‘Irish Question’ and its damnosa hereditas was for Gladstone what the ‘Eastern Question’ had been for Disraeli, a perpetual source of mischief and anxiety. With Parnell inside parliament and the Fenians outside, what wolf should be kept from which door? The Home Rule politicians and the activists of the Land League posed a formidable threat that Gladstone only barely grasped. Between 1879 and 1880 agrarian violence and evictions increased threefold. The first man condemned for evicting tenants was called Captain Boycott, and his surname became the nature of his punishment. ‘I am very anxious to see how Gladstone means to get out of this Irish mess,’ Salisbury wrote. ‘It looks very like a revolution. We shall have to reconquer Ireland if we mean to keep her: and is there stuff and fibre in the English constituencies – at present composed – for this? I doubt it.’
The problem of Ireland had never gone away – or was it, rather, the problem of England? There were English land-agents, there were English landowners, there were English absentee landowners, the administration in Dublin Castle was English. The truth was that the English had never gone away. So many acts had been passed, over so many years, but all of them had favoured the English.
The Land League had responded to evictions and the like with rural outrages; this inflamed the situation without remedying it. Perhaps that was its purpose. Yet Gladstone pursued a policy against ‘landlordism’ on the clear understanding that land reform was the panacea for most of Ireland’s problems. His Land Act of 1881 enshrined the ‘three Fs’, fair rents, free sale and fixity of tenure; a judicial authority was established for fixing the fair rents, which cleared the air a little without changing the political weather. Joseph Chamberlain, then president of the Board of Trade, had made it clear that ‘we are agreed that it is impossible to concede the present demands of the Irish party. It is therefore war to the knife between a despotism created to re-establish constitutional law and a despotism not less completely elaborated to subvert and produce anarchy as a precedent for revolutionary change.’ When parliament met early in 1881 a Coercion Act was passed first before the Land Act. Coercion would consign to prison anyone suspected of violence or intimidation.
Parnell’s attempt to stifle the Land Act, while at the same time vilifying Gladstone, earned him a cell in Kilmainham Prison, where he promptly assumed the role of martyr under the Irish Coercion Act. The problem seemed wholly insoluble except by underhand means. The tortuous process whereby Gladstone came to Home Rule would be worthy of Ariadne herself, but it seems likely that from his cell Parnell had offered to bring peace to Ireland on certain secret conditions. On 4 May Parnell and two others were released from prison on condition that they would support the Land Act and on the understanding that Gladstone would protect Irish tenants who had fallen behind in their rent. The Irish secretary, William Forster, promptly resigned in dismay, and Gladstone asked Lord Frederick Cavendish to take his place. Within a few hours of his arrival in Dublin Lord Cavendish was assassinated in Phoenix Park; the assassins hacked him and a companion with long surgical knives. The phoenix is the bird that is reborn in fire, and those of a mythical frame of mind might see the fate of Ireland fringed in flame.
The confusion in the cabinet was compounded in the last months of 1880 by an uprising of the Boers in the Transvaal, a territory that the British had annexed three years before. The dissension, as so often, had arisen over the question of fair or unfair taxation. An English force was caught in an ambush at the battle of Laing’s Nek at the end of January 1881, followed by a thorough defeat in the following month. The small army under General Colley was either captured or killed. Gladstone, who was suffering from a head injury, took to his bed. In effect he surrendered. At a convention in Pretoria Transvaal was declared to be independent but under British ‘suzerainty’. Words like that can mean little or nothing; they can also breed mischief, misunderstanding and eventually conflict. And so it proved in southern Africa.
The administration was acquiring a reputation for weakness, confirmed by the bombing of Salford army barracks in the middle of January by a group of Fenians; it was chosen because it had been the site of the execution of the ‘Manchester martyrs’ in 1867, when the members of the IRA were hanged for the murder of a police officer. It can be seen as one of the first ‘terror bombs’ in England. The ‘Clerkenwell Explosion’ at the end of 1867 must claim, if this is the right word, the primacy. Gladstone was now beginning to recognize the signs of ageing. He thought it could not be right that he ‘should remain on the stage like a half-exhausted singer, whose notes are flat & everyone perceives it except himself’. He ‘would be of no good to anyone’.
On New Year’s Day, 1881, the queen entered her own misgivings:
A poor Government, Ireland in a state of total lawlessness, and war at the Cape, of a very serious nature. I feel very anxious and have no one to lean on. I feel how sadly deficient I am, and how over-sensitive and irritable, and how uncontrollable my temper is, when annoyed and hurt. But I am so overdone, so vexed, and in such distress about my country, that that must be my excuse. I will pray daily for God’s help to improve.
God did not necessarily answer her prayers. Just days after the stabbings in Phoenix Park, Gladstone ordered a naval expedition to Alexandria. It was perhaps the most unlikely event of his political career, contradicting all his policies and beliefs on the blessings of non-intervention. The financial situation of Egypt was the fundamental cause. Their funds were under the dual control of the French and English, a humiliating position for Egyptian nationalists who instigated a series of small coups. In February 1882 the British government ordered the removal of a nationalist ministry, and as a result faced the wrath of anti-Western rioters. The fleet was sent in May and, since commanders abhor a vacuum, the bombardment of Alexandria began in July. It was then decided to send a military force, and the nationalist army was thoroughly defeated at Tel-el-Kebir on 13 September. The victory surprised the rest of Europe, and gave an illusion of success which the Second Boer War finally dissolved. The radicals under Gladstone’s nominal leadership were appalled by the Egyptian action. ‘Dizzy had never done worse than, or as bad as, this bombardment,’ John Bright told Rosebery. Rosebery tried to defend the prime minister, but Bright cut him off: ‘Say no more, it’s damnable!’ The opinion spread that Gladstone’s conscience was a movable feast, settling wherever his self-interest led him.
Gladstone realized the advantages, and disadvantages, of winning what was plainly an unholy war. It was a squalid affair, conducted entirely for money, even though he had gall enough to lend it a sense of missionary purpose. But what was to be done now, with Egypt occupied by the British? ‘We have done our Egyptian business’ – he made it sound like going to the lavatory – ‘and are an Egyptian government.’ Soon enough all would be thrown in doubt by an uprising in the Sudan which caused Gladstone more damage than any other event of his life.
Disraeli’s natural successor as Conservative leader in the Lords was always to be Lord Salisbury. Not that he welcomed the appointment. He told the editor of The Times:
you are the first person who has come here to see me in the last few days who is not wanting something at my hands – place, or decoration, or peerage … Men whom I called my friends, whom I should have considered far beyond self-seeking, have come here begging for something, some for one thing, some for another, till I am sick and disgusted. The experience has been a revelation to me of the baser side of human nature.
At the election of 1880 the Liberals had gained 337 seats, with the Conservatives a distant second on 214 and the Home Rulers with a respectable 63. The size of the Liberal majority surprised all those who had not reckoned on the effects of the industrial slump and the agricultural distress. With no convenient benefit in mind, the Liberals turned to Gladstone as the harbinger of their good fortune, whereas Gladstone gave all the praise to God. It may have been piety, or determination, that obliged him to soldier on as prime minister for the next four years; for once, the phrase of soldiering is appropriate. Having attacked the Liberal grandees in his Midlothian campaign, he was obliged to include them in his cabinet for want of better; of the radicals, to whom his rhetoric appealed, only a few were chosen. Eight of the cabinet were tried and confirmed Liberals. Only Joseph Chamberlain and one or two others could be described as Radical. Chamberlain was an oddity. He sported a monocle even while he mocked ‘gentlemen’. But as president of the Board of Trade he managed to guide an Employer Liability Act for industrial accidents even as his radical fervour continued to circulate around South Africa, Ireland and Egypt. These were the great causes to be addressed.
Change was also close to hand. In 1881 H. M. Hyndman formed the Democratic Federation, which was soon known as the Social Democratic Foundation and can be described with only a little exaggeration as Marxism and soda water. But at least in a formal sense, Hyndman introduced socialism into England just at the time that land reform was being promulgated by the American reformer Henry George in Progress and Poverty (1879), where he announced: ‘We must make land common property.’ The spirit of reform spread. The Socialist League went its own way with William Morris in 1884, the year in which the Fabian Society was formed. George Gissing said of the Fabians that they were ‘a class of young men distinctive of our time – well educated, fairly well bred, but without money’. Most of their names are now quite unknown to the public, but without their constant intercessions twentieth-century English history might have taken a different course. The transition, from old radicalism to new socialism, was as important as the change from Whig to Liberal. It can be said, for example, to have promoted and justified state intervention on a scale never previously seen.
The state had in any case slowly acquired new powers. It had come to regulate factories, mines and lodging houses. Food and drink were more closely monitored, and minimum standards for education and public housing were also promulgated. A large number of officials and administrators now entered the service of what was becoming, to all intents and purposes, a modern state. The managers of it were now professional rather than amateur. This of course meant the gradual eclipse of the principle of laissez-faire which had been in the ascendant for most of the century. The Cobden Prize essay for 1880, A. N. Cumming’s ‘On the Value of Political Economy to Mankind’, reported: ‘we have had too much laissez-faire … the truth of free trade is clouded over by the laissez-faire fallacy … we need a great deal more paternal government – that bugbear of the old economists’. A Radical programme of the time noted the growing intervention ‘of the State on behalf of the weak against the strong, in the interests of labour against capital, of want and suffering against luxury and ease’.
Collective sports, with national cricket and football leagues, with public swimming baths, became the public pastime. Choral societies, and brass bands, and railway excursions, were the mood of the age in which the rules of collective conduct were paramount.
Collectivism can take many forms. In 1884 Randolph Churchill made a speech in which he declared:
Gentlemen, we live in the age of advertisement, the age of Holloway’s pills, of Colman’s mustard and of Horniman’s pure tea; and the policy of lavish advertisement has been so successful in commerce that the Liberal party, with its usual enterprise, has adapted it to politics. The Prime Minister [Gladstone] is the greatest living master of the art of personal political advertisement. Holloway, Colman and Horniman are nothing compared with him. Every act of his, whether it be for the purposes of health, of recreation, or of religious devotion, is spread before the eyes of every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom on large and glaring placards.
It is one of the first examples of the ‘media politics’ that emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century, a tendency that might conceivably have had its origins in the granting of the vote to urban artisans in 1867.
Gladstone was not helped, however, by the group of Tories under the leadership of Randolph Churchill himself. Churchill and his cohorts combined the contempt and bad manners of youth with the vigour of unfulfilled ambition. They paraded the virtues of something known as ‘Tory Democracy’, but when Churchill was asked what it was he replied: ‘to tell the truth I don’t know myself what Tory Democracy is, but I believe it is principally opportunism. Say you are a Tory Democrat and that will do.’ They were, in other words, painfully naive, and not even the name of Churchill could save them from obloquy.
They became known as the ‘Fourth Party’, and were eager to eject the ‘Old Gang’ of Conservative grandees such as Stafford Northcote, who liked nothing better than to cause a fuss. Still some bills struggled exhausted on to the Statute Book, among them a Bankruptcy Act and a Patents Act in 1883; the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act of the same year was designed to eliminate fraud and intimidation.
There was one other piece of unfinished business to do with the franchise. It had been a slow process. Disraeli’s wizardry with the Second Reform Act in 1867 was followed five years later by the Ballot [or Secret Ballot] Act whose name is its nature. The Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 was followed, in 1884, by the Representation of the People Act which applied the same franchise to the counties as to the boroughs. The Third Reform Act, as it became known, extended the vote to agricultural labourers, thereby increasing the electorate threefold. Of course it did not imply universal suffrage; all women and 40 per cent of men were still excluded from the electoral process.
Nevertheless, a great political storm was rising over a new redistribution bill of the following year. A wider franchise was considered to be ‘a good thing’, but for the Conservatives it had to be guarded by a wholesale redistribution of seats to protect the Tory interest. Tory Lords and Liberal Commons fought like stags in the rutting season, yet after some discreet pressure from the queen the two sides met at a house in Arlington Street to ponder over the redistribution of seats, in which manoeuvres Salisbury was the master tactician. The franchise of some seventy-nine towns, with populations under 15,000, was swept away. The rule now was for single-member constituencies to be carved out from the larger towns and cities: 160 seats were abolished and 182 were created. Two million extra voters were enfranchised. The great metropolitan conurbations were divided into roughly equivalent constituencies and great swathes of suburban seats were grouped around them. It was considered to be hubristic. Was not a larger franchise enough? In truth very few people understood the arithmetic of the calculations. If it were done, was the common cry, let it be done quickly.
Salisbury had stood his ground. Gladstone agreed to his terms, and Salisbury’s daughter recorded: ‘My father’s prevailing sentiment is one of complete wonder … we have got all and more than we demanded.’ Salisbury proved himself to be an excellent negotiator, seat by seat. He managed a number of compromises, with consequences which could not have been foreseen. His philosophy was essentially a simple one. ‘Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.’ It may be placed beside another of his maxims: ‘Parliament is a potent engine, and its enactments must always do something, but they very seldom do what the originators of these enactments meant.’ The point was that Salisbury’s conservatism was tacit or unstated. It was the Conservatism of silence as perhaps invoked in ‘the silent majority’. The Redistribution of Seats Act of 1885 in fact created a flood of single-member seats which now dominated the parliamentary process. The country seat was now as potentially powerful as the town or the city seat; the miner and the agricultural labourer had now obtained the vote. As a consequence the landed proprietor lost much of his power of patronage. ‘Media politics’ was accompanied by the makings of a mass electorate.
An unexpected and welcome ally in nursing the new electorate was providentially found in the Primrose League, which had sprung up in 1883. The name was taken from Disraeli’s supposed favourite flower (he probably preferred the orchid), and soon became the largest voluntary society in England, with half a million members by 1887. It was inclusive and heterogeneous, barring only ‘atheists and enemies of the British Empire’. Members (who were known as knights, dames or associates according to the annual subscription fee they paid) swore allegiance to the sovereign, and declared their readiness to maintain ‘religion … the estates of the realm, and the imperial ascendancy of the British Empire’. The league was largely organized by women and became notable for its tea parties, garden parties and bicycle outings. Summer fetes, held at stately homes and attended by prominent Conservative MPs, were the highlight of its social programme. MPs also contributed to the Primrose League Gazette, the organization’s weekly newspaper. With its strong emphasis on hierarchy, honours, imperialism, archaic titles and rituals, the League inculcated in its members the values of deference, nationalism and respect for tradition. As the organization attracted a million less affluent, associate members, by the early 1890s, it might be said to have grafted the Conservative party upon the roots of the middle class and the lower middle class. It represented the growth of imperialist sentiment also, confirmed by the establishment of the Imperial Federation League in 1884. Imperialism, however, had its own disadvantages.