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Title: Lord Randolph Churchill
Author: Churchill, Winston, 1874-1965
Language: English
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LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL
VOL I.
[Illustration: _Lord Randolph Churchill._
_1883._]
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL
BY
WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL, M.P.
AUTHOR OF
‘THE STORY OF THE MALAKAND FIELD FORCE, 1897’
‘THE RIVER WAR,’ ‘LONDON TO LADYSMITH VIA PRETORIA,’ ETC.
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1906
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1906,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1906.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
TO
CHARLES RICHARD JOHN SPENCER-CHURCHILL
DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH
THIS BOOK
IN ALL FAITHFUL FRIENDSHIP
IS INSCRIBED
_Deed of Trust Regulating the Papers of the late Lord Randolph
Churchill._
I, THE RIGHT HONOURABLE RANDOLPH HENRY SPENCER-CHURCHILL, P.C., M.P., of
50 Grosvenor Square in the County of London by these Presents send
Greeting WHEREAS I am possessed of various Political and State Documents
Correspondence and Papers which are now contained in Tin boxes deposited
in my name at the Westminster Branch of the London and Westminster Bank
Limited and in Tin boxes and Drawers at No. 50 Grosvenor Square
aforesaid NOW I BY THESE PRESENTS DO assign transfer and make over from
and after the date of my decease the above mentioned political and State
documents correspondence and papers unto George Richard Penn Viscount
Curzon M.P., of 23 Upper Brook Street in the said County of London and
Ernest William Beckett M.P., of 138 Piccadilly in the said County of
London UPON TRUST that they the said George Richard Penn Viscount Curzon
and Ernest William Beckett shall from and after the date of my decease
deal with and use the said Political and State documents correspondence
and papers for any purpose which they in their absolute discretion may
think well PROVIDED that no such Political or State documents
correspondence or paper relating either to the Department of the India
Office or the Department of the Foreign Office shall be printed
published or used in any way either directly or indirectly without the
written consent of Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for either of the
said Departments for the time being AND I HEREBY DECLARE that these
presents are executed by me in triplicate one Copy whereof is deposited
with the Right Honourable the Earl of Rosebery K.G., P.C., Her Majesty’s
Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the second Copy is
deposited at the Western Branch of the Bank of England, Burlington
Gardens in the name of my Solicitor Mr. Theodore Lumley and the third
Copy is retained by me
AS WITNESS my hand and seal this eighth day of March One thousand eight
hundred and ninety-three.
Signed Sealed and Delivered }
by the above named Randolph}
Henry Spencer-Churchill in } RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
the presence of }
THEODORE LUMLEY,
Solicitor,
37 Conduit Street, Bond Street, W.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
In the spring of 1893 Lord Randolph Churchill, feeling that he had
slender expectations of long life, placed all his papers, private and
official, under a trust-deed which consigned them at his death to the
charge of two of his most intimate political friends, Viscount Curzon
(now Earl Howe) and Mr. Ernest Beckett (now Lord Grimthorpe). As he made
a practice of preserving almost every letter he received, the number of
documents was sufficient to fill eleven considerable tin boxes. Subject
to the conditions prescribed in the trust-deed in regard to matters
affecting the India Office or the Foreign Office--which have, of course,
been strictly observed--these papers were placed in my hands by my
father’s literary executors in July 1902, for the purpose of my writing
a full account of his life and work. I am deeply sensible of the
confidence implied and of the honour conveyed in that commission, and
during the three and a half years which have passed since I accepted it,
I have diligently laboured--in spite of some political distractions--to
discharge it to the best of my ability.
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach (having consulted with the late Lord Salisbury)
and Lord Rosebery have expressed the opinion that the story of Lord
Randolph Churchill’s life may now be fully told without impropriety
towards individuals or the public. Indeed, it is high time to do so.
Lord Randolph’s part in national affairs is not to be measured by long
years of office. No great legislation stands in his name upon the
statute book. He was a Chancellor of the Exchequer without a Budget, a
Leader of the House of Commons but for a single session, a victor
without the spoils. No tangible or enduring records--unless it be the
Burma province--exist of his labours, and the great and decisive force
which he exerted upon the history of the Conservative and Unionist party
might be imperfectly realised by a later generation, unless it were
explained, asserted, and confirmed by the evidence of those who came in
contact or collision with his imperious and vivifying personality.
For a thing so commonly attempted, political biography is difficult. The
style and ideas of the writer must throughout be subordinated to the
necessity of embracing in the text those documentary proofs upon which
the story depends. Letters, memoranda, and extracts from speeches, which
inevitably and rightly interrupt the sequence of his narrative, must be
pieced together upon some consistent and harmonious plan. It is not by
the soft touches of a picture, but in hard mosaic or tessellated
pavement, that a man’s life and fortunes must be presented in all their
reality and romance. I have thought it my duty, so far as possible, to
assemble once and for all the whole body of historical evidence required
for the understanding of Lord Randolph Churchill’s career. Scarcely
anything of material consequence has been omitted, and such omissions as
have been necessary are made for others’ sakes and not his own.
Scarcely any statement of importance lacks documentary proof. There is
nothing more to tell. Wherever practicable I have endeavoured to employ
his own words in the narration; and the public is now in a position to
pronounce a complete, if not a final, judgment.
I have been fortunate in the abundance of the materials supplied me. In
addition to Lord Randolph Churchill’s tin boxes with their ample stores,
there was at hand an invaluable series of scrap-books, containing every
conceivable newspaper comment and cartoon, collected by his sister, Lady
Wimborne, and covering the whole period of his active political life.
But most of all I am indebted to those many friends, irrespective of
political party, who either by allowing their letters to be printed, or
by reading the proof-sheets, have enabled me to compile what may,
without presumption, be called an authoritative account. I accept, of
course, in the fullest sense, exclusive responsibility for whatever is
written here; but to Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, first of all, my grateful
acknowledgments are due, for not only has he with the greatest care and
pains thoroughly revised the whole book, but furnished me, besides, with
extensive memoranda in respect of those chapters with the events of
which he was specially concerned.
The biographer of an English statesman is often able to conduct his hero
prosperously through the recognised educational experiences, and to
instal him at an early age in some small office, whence his promotion in
due course is assured. It is otherwise with the life of Lord Randolph
Churchill. No smooth path of patronage was opened to him. No glittering
wheels of royal favour aided and accelerated his journey. Whatever power
he acquired was grudgingly conceded and hastily snatched away. Like
Disraeli, he had to fight every mile in all his marches. And this
account will, I think, be found to explain in almost mechanical detail
the steps and the forces by which he rose to the exercise of great
personal authority, as well as the converse process by which he
declined.
I have naturally been led to deal more fully with his public career than
with his private life. With the exception of the first two chapters and
the last, this story lies in a period of only ten years--from 1880 to
1890, and not less than half of its compass is concerned with the
succession of fierce political crises which disturbed the years 1885 and
1886. The epoch is brief; but so crowded is it with incident and
accident, so full of insights and sidelights upon the workings of party
and constitutional machinery in modern times, that it deserves the
closest examination. And I hope it may be attributed to the author’s
failings, and not to the actions and character of Lord Randolph
Churchill, if the reader is not attracted by an authentic drama of the
House of Commons.
WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL.
BLENHEIM PALACE, WOODSTOCK:
_November 1, 1905_.
CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME
CHAPTER I
1849-1874
EARLY YEARS
.....PAGE
Blenheim--Woodstock--Birth and parentage--Childhood--Cheam--Eton--The
family borough--Merton--The Blenheim harriers--Life at Oxford--Cowes
1873--Miss Jerome--The Woodstock election--Marriage.....1
CHAPTER II
1874-1880
MEMBER FOR WOODSTOCK
The Parliament of 1874--A maiden speech--A social quarrel--Ireland--At
the Little Lodge--FitzGibbon and Howth--The Historical Society--Irish
politics--Butt and Parnell--The beginnings of obstruction--An unguarded
speech--Irish education--The Eastern question--Correspondence with
Sir Charles Dilke--The County Government Bill--The Irish Famine
Fund--Ministerial embarrassments--Lord Beaconsfield’s letter to the
Duke of Marlborough--The General Election of 1880--Mr. Gladstone’s
triumph.....58
CHAPTER III
1880-1883
THE FOURTH PARTY
Position of parties--Tory depression--Bradlaugh--The origin of
the Fourth Party--The four friends--The Employers’ Liability
Bill--Fourth Party tactics--Differences with leaders--Sir Stafford
Northcote--Activities of the Fourth Party--The Fourth Party and
Lord Beaconsfield--Lord Salisbury at Woodstock--Correspondence with
Wolff--Joyous days.....119
CHAPTER IV
1881-1882
IRELAND UNDER STORM PAGE Outbreak of the storm--The Parnell
movement--Irish speeches--The Compensation for Disturbance Bill--The
winter of 1880--The Land League--The revolt of the Boers--Coercion--Mr.
Forster’s misfortunes--The Kilmainham Treaty--The Closure--Lord
Beaconsfield gone.....172
CHAPTER V
1883
ELIJAH’S MANTLE
The war in Egypt--The Conservative leaders--Minor tactics in the House
of Commons--Correspondence with Sir Stafford Northcote--The Beaconsfield
statue--Lord Randolph’s letter to the Times--Party displeasure--Elijah’s
mantle--The Affirmation Bill--The Primrose League--An Ishmaelite at
bay--His father’s death--An interlude.....224
CHAPTER VI
1882-1885
TORY DEMOCRACY
A period of crisis--Conditions in the House of Commons--Conservative
paralysis--The new champion--Power and popularity of Lord Randolph
Churchill--The Tory Democrat--A ‘Trilogy’ at Edinburgh--The
Blackpool speech--The Birmingham candidature--‘Peace, Retrenchment
and Reform’--Tory democracy and Fair Trade--Tory democracy and the
Constitution--The Church of England--The main achievement.....268
CHAPTER VII
1883-1884
THE PARTY MACHINE
A daring enterprise--The Fourth Party: final phase--The National
Union and the Central Committee--The conference at Birmingham--The
proceedings of the new council--Dispute with Lord Salisbury--Lord
Randolph elected chairman--The ‘charter’ letter--‘Notice to quit’--A
declaration of war--Close fighting--Lord Randolph resigns--Satisfaction
in the House of Commons--Dismay in the Conservative party--Intervention
of the provincial leaders--Lord Randolph reinstated--Progress of the
conflict.....302
CHAPTER VIII
1884
THE REFORM BILL
Embarrassments of the Ministry--‘Too late!’--The advent of the
Reform Bill--Divisions in the Conservative party--Lord Randolph and
reform--The ‘mud cabin’ argument--Power of Lord Randolph Churchill
in the House of Commons--The second vote of censure--The Reform Bill
in the Lords--Conflict between the two Houses--The conference of
the National Union at Sheffield--Lord Randolph’s victory--Agreement
with Lord Salisbury--The autumn campaign--Aston riots--The Aston
debate--Correspondence with Chamberlain--Differences with Gorst--An
Indian voyage.....332
CHAPTER IX
1885
THE FALL OF THE GOVERNMENT
1885-1785: a comparison--Increasing weakness and perplexities of the
Ministry--Lord Randolph returns--His authority over the Conservative
party--Penjdeh and the Vote of Credit--Correspondence with Lord
Salisbury--Lord Randolph’s attacks upon Mr. Gladstone and Lord
Granville--The Crimes Act--A mortal blow--Strange constitutional
situation--Relations with the Irish party--Defeat of the
Government--A threefold crisis--Formation of Lord Salisbury’s First
Administration--Lord Randolph refuses to join--The _Interregnum_--Lord
Randolph’s own account of these transactions--Appeals of various
kinds--At the Inns of Court--A Parliamentary incident--Sir Stafford
retires--Euthanasia of the Fourth party--_Moriturus te saluto_.....375
CHAPTER X
1885
THE ‘MINISTRY OF CARETAKERS’
Lord Salisbury’s difficulties--The last of the Woodstock elections--The
new ministry--A truce at Westminster--A legislative feat--‘Maamtrasna’
and its consequences--Lord Carnarvon’s opinions--The ‘empty house’
meeting--The Prime Minister’s reticence--The Conservative Cabinet and
Home Rule--The election campaign--General confusion--The ‘unauthorised
programme’--Parnell’s demand--The lines of battle--Lord Randolph’s
exertions and activities--A visit to Dublin--‘Come over and help
us’--Dispute with Lord Hartington--The ‘boa-constrictor’ speech--The
contest in Birmingham--Popularity of the Conservative Government--The
poll--Victories of Tory Democracy in the boroughs--The loss of the
counties--The Birmingham Election--‘Low water-mark’.....423
CHAPTER XI
1885
AT THE INDIA OFFICE
A serener sphere--The Council of India--Lord Randolph in office--Railway
development in India--Mr. Moore--The Russian crisis--The Afghan
boundary--Correspondence with the Queen--Increase of the British and
Native Armies in India--Appointment of Sir Frederick Roberts--The
Indian Budget in the House of Commons--Lord Randolph and Lord
Salisbury as letter-writers--The Bombay command--Resignation of Lord
Randolph Churchill--Correspondence--Lord Salisbury yields--Settlement
of the dispute--Conquest and annexation of Burma--The New Year’s
Proclamation.....474
APPENDICES
I. THREE ELECTION ADDRESSES, 1874, 1880, 1885.....527
II. FURTHER CORRESPONDENCE RELATING TO THE NATIONAL UNION OF
CONSERVATIVE ASSOCIATIONS.....537
III. LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL’S EXPLANATION OF HIS ACTION IN REGARD TO
THE REFORM BILL, 1884.....550
IV. LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL’S LETTERS FROM INDIA, 1885.....554
ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE FIRST VOLUME
.....TO FACE PAGE
1. Lord Randolph Churchill, 1886 (Photogravure).....Frontispiece
2. LORD RANDOLPH AT ETON AND AT OXFORD (_Photogravure_).....12
3. {LORD RANDOLPH AND HIS FATHER} (_Photogravure_) {LORD RANDOLPH AND
HIS MOTHER}.....28
4. LADY RANDOLPH CHURCHILL (_Photogravure_).....72
5. MEMBER FOR WOODSTOCK (_Photogravure_).....108
6. THE FOURTH PARTY (’_Vanity Fair_’), by Leslie Ward.....
7. ATHWART THE COURSE (_Cartoon from ‘Punch’_).....232
8. A DREAM OF THE FUTURE (_Cartoon from ‘Punch’_).....252
9. THE FIRST DIPLOMA OF THE PRIMROSE LEAGUE (_facsimile_).....260
10. THE WAITS (_Cartoon from ‘Punch’_).....472
‘Heard are the voices,
Heard are the sages,
The worlds and the ages;
“Choose well; your choice is
Brief and yet endless.
Here eyes do regard you,
In Eternity’s stillness:
Here is all fulness,
Ye brave, to reward you;
Work and despair not.”’
--_Goethe._
CHAPTER I
EARLY YEARS
The cumulative labours of Vanbrugh and ‘Capability’ Brown have succeeded
at Blenheim in setting an Italian palace in an English park without
apparent incongruity. The combination of these different ideas, each
singly attractive, produces a remarkable effect. The palace is severe in
its symmetry and completeness. Nothing has been added to the original
plan; nothing has been taken away. The approaches are formal; the wings
are balanced; four equal towers maintain its corners; and the fantastic
ornaments of one side are elaborately matched on the other. Natural
simplicity and even confusion are, on the contrary, the characteristic
of the park and gardens. Instead of that arrangement of gravel paths, of
geometrical flower-beds, and of yews disciplined with grotesque
exactness which the character of the house would seem to suggest, there
spreads a rich and varied landscape. Green lawns and shining water,
banks of laurel and fern, groves of oak and cedar, fountains and
islands, are conjoined in artful disarray to offer on every side a
promise of rest and shade. And yet there is no violent contrast, no
abrupt dividing-line between the wildness and freshness of the garden
and the pomp of the architecture.
The whole region is as rich in history as in charm; for the antiquity of
Woodstock is not measured by a thousand years, and Blenheim is heir to
all the memories of Woodstock. Here Kings--Saxon, Norman, and
Plantagenet--have held their Courts. Ethelred the Unready, Alfred the
Great, Queen Eleanor, the Black Prince, loom in vague majesty out of the
past. Woodstock was notable before the Norman Conquest. It was already a
borough when the Domesday Book was being compiled. The park was walled
to keep the foreign wild beasts of Henry I. Fair Rosamond’s Well still
bubbles by the lake. From the gatehouse of the old manor the imprisoned
Princess Elizabeth watched the years of Mary’s persecution. In the
tumults of the Civil Wars Woodstock House was held for King Charles by
an intrepid officer through a long and bitter siege and ravaged by the
victorious Roundheads at its close. And beyond the most distant of these
events, in the dim backward of time, the Roman generals administering
the districts east and west of Akeman Street had built their winter
villas in that pleasant, temperate retreat; so that Woodstock and its
neighbourhood were venerable and famous long before John Churchill, in
the early years of the eighteenth century, superimposed upon it the
glory of his victories over the French.
[Sidenote: 1849]
Randolph Henry Spencer-Churchill, commonly called Lord Randolph
Churchill, was born in London on February 13, 1849. His father was the
eldest son of the sixth Duke of Marlborough by his first wife, Lady Jane
Stewart, daughter of George, eighth Earl of Galloway. The Marquess of
Blandford, as he then was, had married on July 12, 1843, the Lady
Frances Anne Emily Vane (of whom more hereafter), eldest daughter of the
third Marquess of Londonderry, by whom he had five sons and six
daughters. Of these sons three died in infancy, the elder of the
survivors ultimately succeeded to the title, and the younger is the
subject of this account.
[Sidenote: 1857 ÆT. 8]
In his father’s lifetime Lord Blandford lived at Hensington House, an
unpretentious building outside the circumference of the Blenheim Park
wall and about half a mile from the palace. Here his numerous family
were brought up. Their childhood must have been a very happy one, with
such a fine and ample place for a playground, many dear playmates and
parents who watched over them with unremitting care. The boy grew up
with his brother and sisters, as little boys are wont to do; and when
his father became, in 1857, seventh Duke of Marlborough, they all moved
into the palace at the other end of the great avenue, and this became
for many years their home. Randolph was sent to Mr. Tabor’s school at
Cheam when he was eight years old. This was very young for one who had
so much space and happiness at home; but he seems to have been most
kindly treated and to have been quite content. He did not prove
exceptionally clever at his letters, though he made steady progress at
school. He had an excellent memory, and was fond of reading books of
history, biography, and adventure. But much more pronounced than any
liking for study were his passion for sport and his love of animals. By
the time he was nine years old he rode well, and even at that early age
he showed decision and determination in his ways. In those days the
telegraph was some miles distant from Blenheim and the telegraph boy
used to ride in with his messages upon a ragged, wiry little pony called
‘The Mouse.’ Once he had seen this pony, Lord Randolph wearied his
father and family with requests to buy it and never rested till it was
his own. After the pony was purchased, he trained it and called it his
hunter. The next step was to go hunting.
[Sidenote: 1860 ÆT. 11]
On an autumn afternoon in 1859 he waylaid Colonel Thomas, the tenant of
Woodstock House and an old and valued friend of the family, on his
return from a day with the Heythrop hounds, and, riding up to him,
persuaded him to ask his father’s permission to take him out hunting.
This was the beginning of a friendship between these two which lasted
through life. To the next meet of the Heythrop they accordingly repaired
together. The day was fortunate. Lord Randolph, carried to the front by
‘The Mouse,’ was in at the death in King’s Wood, was presented with
brush or pad, went through the ceremony of being ‘blooded,’ and returned
home in great delight, with glowing cheeks well besmeared with fox’s
blood. From that day he became passionately fond not merely of riding
to hounds but of hunting as an art.
A glimpse of his later days at Cheam has been preserved by a schoolboy
friend who, early in 1860, under the fostering wing of an elder brother,
was entered as the youngest and newest of sixty-two boarders at the
school. ‘Randolph Churchill,’ he writes, ‘was then very near, and before
he left I think he reached, the headship of the school. He and my
brother were “chums,” whereby I was brought into closer touch with him
than otherwise would have been the case. His good-natured and somewhat
magnificent patronage of my shivering novitiate has imprinted on my
memory a few incidents characteristic of his personality. At any rate,
he must have bulked large in my regard, as I have of him a far more
vivid recollection than of any other boy, through the whole six years of
my Cheam schooling.
‘From the nature of the case my recollections are not of the class room.
He was in “the first class,” as the top form was styled; I was in “the
sixth,” or lowest. The general muster in the big schoolroom, or the
recreations of the playground, were the scenes in which I chiefly saw
him; and, of course, whatever of his doings I noticed, are glamoured by
the small boy’s reverence for the big. I cannot “place” him in either
cricket or football; but there are some things with which he is in my
memory so closely associated that I cannot even now see their like
without recalling him in liveliest imagination. Thus I can never see
children playing at “horses” without the instant recollection of the
showy four-in-hand which Randolph Churchill “tooled” round the
playground, or of which he was an interchangeable part. Besides himself
the team and coachman consisted of Curzon, Suirdale (afterwards Lord
Donoughmore), and the two brothers Gordon (one of whom is now Lord
Aberdeen). The harness with which they were caparisoned belonged, I
remember, to the elder Gordon. But in my recollection Randolph Churchill
shares with him pre-eminence in the quintette. There was a large
magnificence about his Cheam days that impressed me with the idea that,
no matter how well another boy might acquit himself, Randolph Churchill
would always “go one better.”
‘He was always ready with some surprise in the Sunday texts and
exercises for which Mr. Tabor assembled us in big school on Sunday
afternoons. I can never open the book of Ecclesiastes without recalling
the breathless astonishment with which I heard him recite, with that
vehemence he always showed in speech, those eight verses which tell us
that “to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose
under the heaven.” For me Churchill achieved a wonder. No boy, and I
should think hardly a man, is likely to have much more than an abstract
and somewhat perfunctory interest in the Thirty-nine Articles. But I can
never glance at the sombre sentences of the Article on Predestination
and Election without the passages ringing with his declamation as he
repeated the whole, _ore rotundo_, without hesitation or the tremor of
an eyelash. At that time there was at Cheam one of those holy and
blameless boys who come sometimes to sanctify the rough brutalities of
schoolboy life. He was Mackworth Dolben, from Finedon, in Northants,
where his memory is still kept green. He used once a week to assemble in
his cubicle a few of us, with whom he would read the Bible and pray. He
had enrolled my brother in the _coterie_, and through my brother,
myself. Churchill was one of the little band; and I can see him now,
kneeling down by the bed, with his face in his hands resting on the
white coverlet, leading us in fervent prayer.
‘I have alluded to his vehemence of speech; but I should be wrong if I
were thought to mean violence of language. He always at that time spoke
open-mouthed, with a full voice and great rapidity of utterance, as if
his thoughts came faster than his words could follow; the impression
conveyed being that he was determined to overbear all opposition and
gain the mastery of argument.
[Sidenote: 1863 ÆT. 14]
‘Once when I had disfigured an Ovid which I had borrowed from my
brother, who came to reproach me in the playground, it was Churchill who
convinced me of the enormity of my offence, and it is his eager and
animated face that lives in my memory of the little scene. There was, I
think, in my boyish mind (I was little more than eight, and I never saw
him after he left Cheam) a distinct, if indefinite, sense of vigour,
fluency, masterfulness, and good-nature in his character. Living, as
boys do, in the present, I am sure that I had no idea of his
after-fame.’
When Lord Randolph was in his fourteenth year he went in due course to
Eton, where he was placed in the form known as ‘Remove,’ and in the
house of the Rev. W. A. Carter. A year later he was moved into Mr.
Frewer’s house, and there continued while at Eton. His career
henceforward was chequered, for he had already developed a will of his
own and a considerable facility in expressing it. I submit to the reader
the first extracts from the many letters which this story will
contain:--
_Lord Randolph to his Mother._
Eton College, Windsor, 1863.
I am very sorry I did not write you before, but I wrote one letter
to you and I cannot find it anywhere, and I have not had a bit of
time since, for I had to bring a hundred lines every day to Mr.----
for cutting my name on the new table in the new schools. Mr.---- is
such a horrid man; I had one or two punishments for him yesterday
and I put them in his pupil room and somebody must have taken them
away for he said he never saw them. He has been rude too; he called
me a ‘little blackguard’ the other day just because I was sitting
with my legs on the form, and he is always calling the fellows
names. I shall never do any good with him, he is so unjust.
There is smallpox in the barracks and half Eton is being
vaccinated. They offered to perform on me, but I declined. The
Queen came to Windsor from Osborne on Thursday night and rushed off
on Friday morning to Balmoral, which struck me as being rather
eccentric. There has not been much going on here, though they have
had a grand reformation of the rifle corps. They made everybody
re-enlist and they had to take a sort of oath and sign their names
to a lot of nonsense.
And another:--
_To his Father._
Eton College: March 11, 1863.
It was not my fault that my letter did not reach you before, for I
gave it to the servant the same day to post, and she forgot all
about it. I have written to you about the reception on Saturday; I
will now tell you about the fireworks on Monday and the wedding
yesterday.
On Monday night we were all ordered to be present in the
school-yard at nine o’clock. When we were all there we formed fours
and marched up Windsor with a large body of police before us (which
rather spoilt the fun) to clear the way. Then we got into the Home
Park by the South Western Station, just under the windows of the
State Rooms, and there we stood all the time the fireworks were
going on. I luckily had the forethought to take my great-coat, or
else I do not believe I should have got home, it was so dreadfully
cold. The fireworks were very pretty, only there was such an awful
lot of rockets and too few catherine-wheels and all that sort of
fun.
The Princess Alexandra having never seen fireworks before, they
were on Monday night instead of on Tuesday night, because she
wanted to see them. We did not get home till nearly twelve o’clock.
There was no illumination that night. Yesterday morning was a whole
holiday without any early school or chapel. We were all mustered in
the school-yard about eleven o’clock, and then marched up Windsor
into the Castle by Henry the VIIIth’s gate. There we had to stand
for a tremendous time without anything coming. (It luckily was fine
and not very cold.) At last the first procession came; it was the
King of Denmark and all those people. We had a beautiful view of
all the people. Then we had to wait about a quarter of an hour,
and then came the Princess Royal. She was sitting on our side, and
she bowed away as hard as she could go. (I think her neck must have
been stiff.) And then came the Prince; he looked extremely
gracious. I never saw him put his hat on, and he held it about an
inch from his head, and kept bowing, always in the same place. And
last of all came the Princess. And then there was such a row, in
spite of the Queen’s express commands that there was to be no
cheering. I never heard such an awful noise in all my life. I
think, if the Queen heard it, she must have had a headache for a
long time afterwards. We were not allowed to go into the chapel, or
into the courtyard by the chapel. A whole lot of us charged the
policemen and soldiers to get in, but it was no use; they managed
to keep us back that time. But we had our revenge afterwards. After
they had come back we went back into college. Then at three o’clock
we all came to see the Princess go away. She did not come till
about a quarter past four in the afternoon--the Prince and Princess
in an open carriage; and then came the squashing. We all rushed
after the carriage. (I was right in the front of the charge; it was
a second Balaclava.) Nothing stood before us; the policemen charged
in a body, but they were knocked down. There was a chain put across
the road, but we broke that; several old _genteel_ ladies tried to
stop me, but I snapped my fingers in their face and cried ‘Hurrah!’
and ‘What larks!’ I frightened some of them horribly. There was a
wooden palisade put up at the station (it was the Great Western),
but we broke it down; and there, to my unspeakable grief, I was
bereaved of a portion of my clothing, viz. my hat. Somebody knocked
it off. I could not stop to pick it up, I shrieked out a convulsive
‘Oh, my hat!’ and was then borne on. I got right down to the door
of the carriage where the Prince of Wales was, wildly shouting
‘Hurrah!’ He bowed to me, I am perfectly certain; but I shrieked
louder. I am sure, if the Princess did not possess very strong
nerves, she would have been frightened; but all she did was to
smile blandly. At last the train moved off while the band played
‘God save the Queen.’ I am sure I wonder there were no accidents,
we were all so close to the carriage. There I was, left in the
station, ‘hatless.’ I met Lord Churchill there, who told me Lady
Churchill was in waiting. I was introduced to lots of soldiers by
one of the masters who caught me. And then I began to search for my
hat; but it was in vain, for I never saw it again. I was told to
get another one, for I had no other to wear. At last I got home,
and in the evening we went out again to see the illumination. There
was not much to see. I think I have given you a full account of the
wedding and the reception.
Believe me ever to remain
Your affectionate son,
RANDOLPH CHURCHILL.
P.S.--My holidays begin on the 27th of March.
The letters which Lord Randolph received from his father during these
Eton years were affectionate and pleasant, and were evidently intended
to exert a considerable influence upon his education. Besides ordinary
family news and the accounts of sport, of partridges and pheasants, of
the health of dogs and ponies, of the exertions of the Heythrop
hounds--always industrious, and sometimes successful--there was
generally allusion to some more serious or public event, a political
opinion, an account of an election at Woodstock, or a few sentences
about Mr. Disraeli. Often the Duke would take pains to impart a lesson
in conduct under the guise of information. ‘Your aunt,’ wrote this
devout, yet not intolerant, man, ‘who is with us now is most unhappy;
for I fear she is a Roman Catholic at heart, and does not like to say
so. If this be true, it would be much better for her to declare her
mind; and then, of course, however we might be grieved, the matter
would never be alluded to in conversation.’ He encouraged his son always
to confide in him; nothing mattered so much as what could not be told;
and when it was necessary, as it often was, to reprove some schoolboy
misdemeanour--pert speeches to masters, an overbearing manner, the
unwarranted fagging of small companions, or the breaking of other
people’s windows--he never founded his rebukes upon authority; but
always upon reason, arguing the matter quite fairly with his son,
pointing out to him the consequences of his actions, and appealing to
his good sense, his self-respect, and the love and honour in which he
held his parents. The care and patience thus displayed were not
unrepaid, and both Lord Randolph and his elder brother, throughout lives
strongly marked by an attitude of challenge towards men and things,
preserved at all times an old-world reverence for their father.
Considering that mischief and a disposition to argue were the gravest
crimes imputed to the boy, the paternal rebukes were frequently rather
severe. They followed, if I may judge by old letters, a regular course.
First, on receiving the bad report, the father would, with much
deliberation, ask his son what he had to say in defence or in excuse.
Lord Randolph would reply with a long, carefully-written letter of
justification, defending himself with freedom and ingenuity. Next the
Duke, now duly in possession of both sides of the case, would take up
his largest pen and deliver majestic censure. ‘To tell you the truth,’
he wrote on one occasion, ‘I fear that you yourself are very impatient
and resentful of any control; and while you stand upon some fancied
right or injury, you fail to perceive what is your _duty_, and allow
both your language and manner a most improper scope.’ The third stage of
these estrangements would be a frank letter of submission and promises
for future improvement, after which complete forgiveness and the return
of sunshine.
[Illustration: _Eton_ _Oxford_]
These are simple chronicles, and I have tried, so far as possible, to
use the actual words in which they have come to me; but it is well to
notice how early a strong, masterful character develops. How much can
parents really do? One would think that the future lay in their hands.
They are at the beginning supreme. They control with authority, from
which there is no appeal, all early impressions and actions and every
avenue of experience. It would not be strange if they could shape and
mould the child according to their fancies. Is it not, on the contrary,
wonderful how comparatively powerless they so often are? The tiny child,
scarcely out of the cradle, asserts his personality. This schoolboy,
pausing unembarrassed on the threshold of life, has made up his mind
already. Nothing will change him much. Lord Randolph’s letters as a boy
are his letters as a man. The same vigour of expression; the same
simple, yet direct, language; the same odd, penetrating flashes; the
same coolly independent judgments about people and laws, and readiness
to criticise both as if it were a right; the same vein of humour and
freedom from all affectation; the same knack of giving nicknames, which
often stuck and sometimes stung--all are there. His mind, indeed, gained
knowledge and experience from instruction; but his essential character,
changing hardly at all by contact with the world, unfolded with
remorseless and unalterable persistency, as every seed brings forth in
its proper season its own peculiar flower.
‘He had,’ wrote his mother a few months before her death, ‘a wonderful
faculty for making firm friends, who remained through life devoted to
him. He was very constant and decided in his attachments, and
outspoken--often imprudently--in his likes or dislikes. He was always
pertinacious in his opinions. He never wavered in his plans, and,
whether right or wrong, he carried them out. This enabled him to succeed
in life, but also often brought him into trouble.... When I look back in
sadness to his youth, and remember his ready wit, his warm affection,
his bright spirits, and his energy in carrying out any undertaking, I
feel how great was the want of foresight and intellect on my part in his
training and management; for one of his most endearing qualities was
extraordinary affection for his father and me, and his constant interest
and pride in his family from his earliest days.... Alas!’ she wrote in
unmerited self-reproach, ‘had I been a clever woman, I must have had
more ability to curb and control his impulses, and I should have taught
him patience and moderation. Yet at times he had extraordinary good
judgment, and it was only on rare occasions that he took the bit between
his teeth, and then there was no stopping him.’
Lord Randolph himself seems to have dreamed no dreams at Eton. He lived,
with his faithful bull-dog, entirely in the present, obeying with
spontaneity the varied impulses of a boisterous yet amiable nature. ‘He
was,’ we are told, ‘an easy lower boy to catch, for his whereabouts
could be ascertained by his incessant peals of laughter. There was not a
boy in the school who laughed so much or whose laughter was so
contagious. There was scarcely one who was so frolicsome. His preferred
method of descending a staircase was to skate down it with a rush; and
if he had to enter the room of another lower boy, he would sooner bound
against the door and force it open with his shoulder than go through the
stale formality of turning the handle.’[1] He is furthermore described
as ‘very fond of collisions with “cads”’ when there was any event
drawing crowds at Eton or Windsor; but ‘he would single out antagonists
much older or bigger than himself.’
Two other fleeting impressions have been preserved.[2] ‘I can just
remember young Churchill,’ writes a well-known Eton authority, ‘as a
striking, whimsical personality, with full, large, round, astonished
eyes and a determined bull-dog type of face. He was addicted to dressing
loudly, and I vividly recollect his appearance one day in a daring
violet-coloured waistcoat. Botham’s Hotel was in those days a favourite
resort for Etonians, in the way of succession to Coningsby’s
“Christopher,” where the friends entertained each other at sumptuous
breakfasts and luncheons. A special feature of this hostelry, as well as
a powerful attraction to the younger boys, was a spacious fruit-garden,
celebrated for the size and flavour of its strawberries. During a
certain summer this Elysian enclosure was so pillaged as to cause the
proprietor to complain to the headmaster, Mr. Balston. As a consequence
Mr. Austen Leigh was despatched to watch, and, if possible, to catch the
offenders _in flagrante delicto_. That representative of the highest
Eton authority very soon flushed a large covey of juvenile depredators.
All of them, however, got away, except Randolph Churchill, who jumped as
far as he could towards the road with his pursuer close upon him. They
both fell together into the ditch, Mr. Austen Leigh uppermost. Lord
Randolph, seeing that any further attempt at escape would be useless,
crawled out, much scratched and bruised, into the middle of the road,
where, incensed at his own discomfiture, he deliberately sat down,
crossed his legs, glared at Mr. Leigh, and with all the vehemence of
enraged fourteen, exclaimed, “You beast!” How he escaped the birch after
this adventure tradition does not relate.’
‘I can recall him at Eton,’ wrote ‘J. S.’ in the _Realm_ of March 1895,
‘but only for one amazing moment. It was a summer evening, just before
“lock-up,” and the whole wall, the little old wall so fitted for the
height of small boys, which separates the public road from the borders
of Upper School, was thronged with youths, resting after the labours of
the day. Even they felt the charm of the stillness. There was no
drumming of heels on the wall, only chatter and occasional laughter. On
the other side of the road, gathered at the top of Keate’s Lane, where
in those days was an iron bar for the “seat of the scornful,” were the
“Swells.” Between these awe-inspiring _aristoi_ and us urchins
indiscriminate on the wall lay the empty road. Down the middle of that
road alone, ringing discordant music from a Volunteer’s bugle, marched a
boy in jackets. It was Churchill, wending homeward to Frewer’s. As I
recall the “Swells” of that time, this progress of a boy in jackets, on
his right a long line of his fellows, on his left, for one awful minute,
that sublime group at the corner, I feel once more the breathless wonder
at audacity so magnificent.’
I cannot set down with exactness the time when Lord Randolph’s parents
began to realise that their son possessed and was, underneath an
exuberance of animal spirits, developing character and qualities of an
unusual order; but, at any rate, before he left Eton they had begun to
hope that some considerable career lay before him. Henceforth they
neglected nothing that might stimulate his interest or his ambition. A
degree at Oxford in history and law, suitable and extended tours on the
Continent, frequent contact with men of affairs, seemed the most obvious
steps which were first required in preparation for political life. And
meanwhile the family borough of Woodstock was watched by the Duke with a
jealous and reflective eye. Its representation had lately caused him for
various reasons many heart-burnings.
Woodstock possessed a Parliamentary history of such curious distinction
that perhaps no other seat in England could rival the interest of its
chequered fortunes. From the earliest beginnings of popular
representation to the Reform Bill of 1832, it had returned, with some
intermission, two members to the House of Commons; and among these
William Lenthall, the famous Speaker, was its representative in the Long
Parliament; William Eden, afterwards the first Lord Auckland and
Governor-General of India, sat for it in the Parliament of 1774; Charles
Abbot, also Speaker, in 1802; Sir John Gladstone, father of the famous
Prime Minister, in 1820; and the great philanthropist, better known as
the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, from 1826 to 1830. Down to the time of
Queen Anne the members for Woodstock had most often been drawn from the
old families of the neighbourhood; but after the delivery of the Manor
of New Woodstock to John, first Duke of Marlborough, and the building of
Blenheim, the seat practically became the property of the Churchills and
its representatives were uniformly the nominees of the reigning Duke.
This dominion, though always maintained, was not seldom challenged; and
the bitter and unscrupulous contests which were fought when some Indian
nabob or other wealthy champion made an effort to wrest the borough from
the great local influences under whose shadow it reposed were an almost
incredible source of profit to the electors.
In April 1844 Lord Randolph’s father, then Marquess of Blandford, was
elected member. Although always a staunch Conservative, he immediately
developed progressive tendencies in social and economic questions and
became a steady supporter of Free Trade measures. This speedily brought
him into collision with the Duke, whose interest in the Corn Laws was by
no means theoretical; and since he remained altogether unyielding, he
was forced in April 1845 to apply for the Chiltern Hundreds and to
retire from Parliament. The vacancy was filled (May 1) by Viscount
Loftus, a trusty Protectionist; and on his becoming Marquess of Ely, in
December, Lord Alfred Churchill was brought forward without opposition
in his stead. The question of the Corn Laws having been swept into the
past by the decisions of Parliament in 1846, domestic differences were
once more composed, and at the General Election of 1847 Lord Blandford
was again elected, and continued to sit for the borough at the General
Elections of July 1852 and March 1857, until in July 1857 he succeeded
as seventh Duke of Marlborough.
[Sidenote: 1867 ÆT. 18]
Lord Alfred Churchill, his brother, now became again the member for
Woodstock. For two years all had been smooth and satisfactory; but after
the General Election of 1859, and during the year 1860, Lord Alfred
began to manifest an increasing sympathy with the Whigs and Liberals,
and finally became ranged with the supporters of Lord Palmerston. His
vote in favour of Mr. Gladstone’s famous Budget of 1860 was the first
definite step and it instantly drew a strong protest from the Duke, who
seems to have been less an admirer--after succeeding to great position
and estate--both of political independence and of Free Trade measures.
Lord Alfred explained that he considered his vote perfectly consistent
with his character as a Conservative. ‘I really should like to know,’
replied his brother severely, ‘by what change of terms a measure can be
called “Conservative” which substitutes direct for indirect taxation,
which has been prepared by Mr. Cobden, proposed by Mr. Gladstone, and is
the avowed policy of a Liberal Government.’ The correspondence was not
on either side so couched as to repair the differences which had opened
between the brothers, and Lord Alfred’s subsequent conduct produced a
complete estrangement. The Duke, a stalwart Churchman, had long been
warmly interested in the question of Church Rates. They were to him a
pet and special subject and he had publicly expressed on various
occasions a high Tory view. Lord Alfred now began to give Church Rates
his careful attention, and, as the result of his studies, he proceeded
to introduce into the House of Commons a Bill dealing with the whole
subject in an extremely Liberal--not to say Radical--spirit. He
expounded his plan with elaboration in a letter and forwarded it with
his Bill to his brother as a suggested ‘compromise’ greatly to be
desired in the public interest. This was decisive. The Duke replied that
he understood an affront was intended, and that he hoped, whatever line
of politics Lord Alfred might pursue in the future, he would not
consider it necessary to consult him upon it. Through the medium of
various persons it was presently arranged that, as no one could force
Lord Alfred to retire, he should be free to act as he pleased till the
General Election; and that at the election, as the Duke would once more
be the master of the situation, another candidate should be brought
forward. There the matter rested, to the extreme dissatisfaction of both
parties. So embittered were the relations between the brothers that,
when the departing Lord Alfred was entertained by his constituents in
Woodstock in 1864, the Duke would not attend the dinner, but sent Lord
Randolph in his place; and this schoolboy of fifteen, with impressive
gravity and unfaltering utterance, delivered--or, rather, recited--the
necessary speeches, and so made, under rather a lowering sky, his first
embarkation upon the uncertain waters of party politics.
In 1867 Lord Randolph left Eton in order to obtain some education from a
private tutor before going to Oxford. In spite of these precautions his
first attempt to pass the entrance examination was unsuccessful; and it
was arranged that he should work for six months under the care of an
accomplished clergyman, the Rev. Lionel Dawson Damer, who lived at
Cheddington, near Aylesbury.
_Lord Randolph to his Father._
Cheddington: March, 1867.
I wrote to you in my last that we did not intend to go to Oxford,
but we changed our minds and went yesterday. It was a horrid day,
snowing and blowing from the East, and dreadfully cold. As we were
getting into the train we met Mr.---- to whom you offered the
living at Waddesdon. He seemed really a charming man, so very
gentlemanlike and quiet. I am sure you would like him very much. He
tells me he had at first declined the living, but now, having seen
it, he thought that if certain things were done he would accept it,
if you had not offered it to anyone else already. He wants to get
back into this neighbourhood, and really I should think he would be
a capital person from all Mr. Damer says, and from what I saw. I
asked Mr. Damer to go and call upon Dr. Scott. I thought he might
find out something about me. Dr. Scott told him a different story
from what he told you. He said that my papers as a whole gave the
Dons the idea that I made tremendous guesses at everything, and
that they thought they could not on that let me in. He said nothing
about the essay at all. I do not think he is much to be relied on.
We also called upon Dr. Marsham. He was very civil and seemed to be
pleased at our calling. He was very glad he said at your taking
office, and said he would be able to offer me rooms in October, so
I think we did no harm by calling, but that he thought it very
civil. I only saw Dalmeny and Donoughmore, everyone else was out.
I think General Peel’s speech very clear and intelligible. I
suppose he will be a much greater loss than Lord Carnarvon or Lord
Cranborne. How very troublesome the Fenians are! I suppose you have
complete information now about it all. I am afraid the Whigs are
getting very disagreeable, but I hope their machinations will not
succeed. I think Dizzy gave it to Gladstone well.
I am going out with the Harriers to-morrow.
_Lord Randolph to his Father._
Cheddington: March, 1867.
I must say I think it very kind of Dr. Marsham letting us know so
soon that he can give me a room, for he said nothing about a chance
vacancy, so that I expect he has made some other arrangement.
I cannot tell you how delighted I was when you wrote and told me
that you had accepted the office of Lord President of the Council.
I think it is just the office that you would like best. Do you know
who is to be Lord Steward? Do you at all expect a split in the
Cabinet? I do hope you will be able to do something now, as it
seems perhaps that the Conservatives have been placed in rather a
humiliating position. I am so glad you are in the Cabinet; but Mr.
Damer and I look forward to a change in the Cabinet policy.
There has been very little to do here. I assisted Mr. Damer at some
penny readings the other night in the school here, as he had been
thrown over by a clergyman he had asked to come and read. I read
‘Reminiscences of Margot’ and the ‘Ingoldsby Legends.’ They were
very much applauded. Mr. Damer and I have got a charming plan, I
think you will approve of it. He says that after the 20th of June,
which is the Choral Festival at Aylesbury of which he has the
management, he will be quite free, and we thought we might make a
very pleasant trip abroad for two months, beginning about July to
the end of August, if you did not mind. I should have passed the
examination for Merton and just come back in time for the October
term. Mr. Damer says he would like it very much. But should you
mind?
Do you think you would be able to run down here some Saturday
afternoon and stay Sunday? I am afraid you will have a tremendous
lot to do now. I wish I could be your Secretary.
[Sidenote: 1868 ÆT. 19]
The Continental tour commended itself to the Duke, and Lord Randolph was
allowed to roam through Switzerland and Italy at his pleasure for two or
three months. On his return he matriculated and took up his residence at
Merton, under the tutelage of Dr. Creighton, afterwards Bishop of
London. It must have been with relief and satisfaction that he exchanged
the rough bigotry of school life for the free and generous atmosphere of
a famous University. At Eton he had gained neither distinction in games
nor profit from studies. He had learned to row and swim, without
aspiring to renown; and as for cricket and football, he heartily
detested them both. But Oxford opened opportunities of all kinds. Its
proximity to Blenheim enabled him to live practically at home. The happy
companionship of his family and the sporting possibilities of a landed
estate were both within easy and constant reach. His nature responded to
the glory and romance of Oxford; and in its cloistered courts, so rich
in youth and history, he found a scheme of life more varied, tolerant,
and real than any he had ever known.
Meanwhile Lord Randolph had long outgrown ‘The Mouse’; and even while an
Eton boy, upon a new and quickly distinguished animal called ‘Pillbox,’
with occasional mounts from his elder sisters, he had begun in his
holidays to acquire some glory in the Oxfordshire fields. He is
described at sixteen as ‘a very bold and good horseman, who also took
the greatest interest in the hunting.’ Aided as he was by the light
weight of youth and his native knowledge of the country, few in the hunt
could beat him. His love of the art of venery grew into worship. At
fifteen the ownership of two beagles, the gift of his father,
transported him with delight. They proved the humble forerunners of a
pack which is not yet forgotten in Oxfordshire. Within the next two
years he became possessed of ‘two or three hounds, kept in some pigsties
at the back of the gardens, under the care of a somewhat ragged and
disreputable “Boy Jim,” whom he called his “whipper-in,”’ and of an old
retired keeper--one of the Duke’s pensioners--who, with his wife,
discharged the duties of ‘feeder.’ But it was not till he went to
Merton, in the autumn of 1867, that he aspired to a higher state and
created, in all the serious purpose of nine couple of hounds and the
pomp of ‘a whip well mounted and in livery,’ the celebrated ‘Blenheim
Harriers.’ September 21, 1867, is the first entry in his hunting-book,
thenceforward kept with the utmost regularity throughout the three years
of his Oxford life.
+----------+--------+-------+--------------+---------+-------------+
|Date |Horses |Hounds |Weather |Meet |Hares Killed |
+----------+--------+-------+--------------+---------+-------------+
|Sept. 21, |Lady Di |7½ |Cloudy, |Bladon | 1 |
|1867 | |couple |rain overhead |toll-bar | |
+----------+--------+-------+--------------+---------+-------------+
‘_Remarks._
‘First time of taking out the hounds--rather wild and did not run
together.... Found in Margett’s grass field, and ran a ring with a
bad scent. Jumped up in the middle of the pack, and ran a straight
line across the Hensington Road and Taylor’s Farm, where three of
the hounds, getting away quietly (Resolute, Blameless, and
Careful), ran into her. Others got wrong. Cheerful not up at the
death. Did not find again, but went home at once. Fencer and
Blue-cap lame next day. Ground very hard. Scent very bad.--R. H. S.
C.’
And so on through many pages of neat, compact handwriting, with which,
since these episodes are more diverting in the enterprise than in the
chronicle, the reader need not be concerned. The reputation, the
popularity, and the fields of the Blenheim Harriers grew steadily. ‘I
became,’ wrote Colonel Thomas, ‘very proud of the way in which he hunted
his own hounds, as I never knew a more patient persevering Huntsman,
with great determination, self-confidence, and quickness in taking any
advantage that might occur.’ ‘Killed altogether last season,’ writes
Lord Randolph contentfully at the end of February 1868, ‘twenty-nine
brace of hares and one fox. Season commencing September 8, 1868.’
The harriers required attention in the summer, and the eye of the Master
was never long astray. The pack steadily improved in numbers and
quality. Some were bred at the Blenheim kennels, others were purchased.
One hound he bought from Lord Granville, who sent an amusing letter with
him, explaining that he was called ‘Radical.’ Lord Randolph’s
correspondence at this time seems to have been chiefly concerned with
these important matters. Here is a specimen letter:--
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Mr. Blake, one of
his father’s tenants._
_Gloster Hotel, Cowes, Isle of Wight._
Dear Sir,--You were kind enough in the spring to say that if you
could overcome Mrs. Blake’s objections you would bring up a puppy
for me. I have a very promising litter now by Dexter out of Crazy,
that are quite old enough to go out ‘to walk,’ and should be so
very much obliged to you if you would take care of one for me. I
have altogether seven couple of puppies, and shall have great
difficulty in finding walks for all of them. If you will let Mr.
Napier know you will take one, he will send you one, and by doing
so you will greatly oblige
Yours faithfully,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
Lord Randolph soon became one of the best-known and best-liked figures
in the county. He was tactful and considerate to the farmers, whose
hospitality he enjoyed, and courteous and composed with his field. Many
are the stories of merry lunches at farmhouses, of mournful tumbles into
muddy brooks, of jaunts and jollities and every varied chance or
mischance of the chase over all that pleasant countryside. Whenever the
responsibilities of the harriers permitted and a horse was fresh and
fit, he hunted besides with the Heythrop, the Bicester and other
neighbouring packs.
But the world did not always smile upon him. It is odd how often persons
who in private life, and indeed on all other occasions, are the mildest
and kindest of men, develop, when engaged in equestrian sport, an
unwonted severity and even roughness of manner. Tom Duffield, the Master
of the Old Berkshire Hounds, was, like so many good sportsmen, somewhat
addicted to the use of firmer language in the hunting-field than the
occasion always required. One day, early in the winter of 1868, when
Lord Randolph was nearly twenty years old, he had the misfortune to ride
too close to the Old Berkshire Hounds and to incur the displeasure of
their Master, who rated him in a very violent fashion before the whole
company. Lord Randolph was deeply offended. He went home at once; but,
as he said nothing at the moment, the incident was for a while
forgotten. Towards the end of the season, however, a hunt dinner was
held in Oxford, to which Mr. Duffield and many of the Old Berkshire
field were bidden, and at which Lord Randolph was called upon to propose
the toast of ‘Fox-hunting.’ He described himself as an enthusiast for
all forms of sport. Fox-hunting, he said, in his opinion, ranked first
among field sports; but he was himself very fond of hare-hunting too.
‘So keen am I that, if I cannot get fox-hunting and cannot get
hare-hunting, I like an afternoon with a terrier hunting a rat in a
barn; and if I can’t get that,’ he proceeded, looking round with much
deliberation, ‘rather than dawdle indoors, I’d go out with Tom Duffield
and the Old Berkshire.’ There was a minute of general consternation,
which the orator complacently surveyed. Then the company, overcome by
the audacity of the speaker, burst into laughter, led by Mr. Duffield
himself. The story has become a local classic, and, surviving the worthy
sportsman against whom it was directed, is still preserved among the
farmers from Banbury to Bicester.
[Illustration: _Lord Randolph & his Father_ _Lord Randolph & his
Father._]
For three successive seasons (1867-1869), with unimportant intervals
occasionally filled by study, Lord Randolph harried the hares of
Blenheim and enjoyed himself hugely. His brother, Lord Blandford, to
whom he was much attached, was serving in the Blues. His sisters were
growing up, and the eldest three were already ‘out.’ He became the
autocrat of the family circle, and, like a wise ruler, took an intense
interest in all that concerned his subjects. What balls they had been
to, whom they had danced with, and all the similar incidents of a girl’s
life were the constant objects of his inquiries; and upon all points he
expressed his approval or disapproval in the clearest possible terms.
Although the Duke might still assert a disciplinary control, there is no
doubt that his younger son was from this time forward increasingly
petted and beloved by his mother and sisters, to whom in return he
showed all the gay and affectionate sides of his nature. ‘He was,’ wrote
his mother, ‘the soul of wit and fun and cheerfulness in those happy
days.’ He made some good friends at Merton--not many in number, but
staunch and true. His Eton acquaintance with Lord Dalmeny (afterwards
Lord Rosebery) ripened at Oxford into a life-long friendship. Dalmeny’s
rooms in the Canterbury quadrangle of Christ Church were within a
stone’s-throw of Merton. The two young men were close companions in the
adventures and vicissitudes of undergraduate life and Lord Randolph used
often to bring his friend over to Blenheim. Here they met on many
occasions Mr. Disraeli, and the great Minister, who loved young people,
would talk and joke with them by the hour together. He seems to have
been delighted with both. His regrets were undisguised when, ten years
later, Lord Rosebery threw himself into the tides of the Midlothian
campaign. ‘I remember,’ wrote the Duchess of Marlborough, ‘that he first
told me (in 1869) that it rested with Randolph to become a distinguished
man. From that time he was ever friendly to him, and he watched with
interest his early efforts in Parliament, and always wrote to
congratulate me when he approved them.’
[Sidenote: 1869 ÆT. 20]
Besides the harriers, Lord Randolph’s greatest amusement at Oxford was
chess; and he soon acquired, for an amateur, more than ordinary skill in
the game. In conjunction with several friends he founded the University
Chess Club; and on the first visit of Mr. Steinitz, the champion
chess-player of the world, he conducted one of the boards at the
blindfold exhibition. Although his play necessarily lacked the strength
derivable from book knowledge and experience, it is described in this,
as in other affairs, as being ‘original, daring, and sometimes
brilliant.’ His game with Mr. Steinitz has been recorded; so that
competent persons may judge of his quality for themselves:--
Game No. 1 (published in the _Chess Players’ Quarterly Chronicle_,
vol. ii., p. 110).
ALLGAIER GAMBIT.
White. Black. | White. Black.
|
Mr. Steinitz. Lord Randolph | Mr. Steinitz. Lord Randolph
(blindfold) Churchill. | Churchill.
|
1. P--K 4 P--K 4 | 18. B × R Kt × B
2. P--K B 4 P × P | 19. R--K sq P--Q Kt 3 [d]
3. Kt--K B 3 P--K Kt 4 | 20. R × P (ch) K--Q sq
4. P--K R 4 P--K Kt 5 | 21. B--Q B 4 B--Q Kt 2
5. Kt--K 5 Q--K 2 [a] | 22. R--Kt 4 Kt--K Kt 3
6. P--Q 4 P--Q 3 | 23. P--R 5 Kt--K 2
7. Kt × Kt P Q × P (ch) | 24. R--K sq Q Kt--Q B 3
8. Q--K 2 P--Q 4 | 25. P--Q 5 Kt--Q Kt 5 [e]
9. Kt--K 5 Kt--K R 3 [b] | 26. P--Q B 6 B--Q B sq
10. Kt--Q B 3 B--Q Kt 5 | 27. R--K Kt 7 Kt--Q B 3
11. Q × Q P × Q | 28. P × Kt Kt × P
12. B × P Kt--K B 4 | 29. B--Q Kt 5 B--Q Kt 2
13. Castles B × Kt | 30. R--Q sq (ch) K--K sq
14. P X B Kt--Q 3 | 31. R × Q B P K--B sq
15. P--Q B 4 [c] P--K B 3 | 32. R--K B sq (ch) K--Kt sq
16. P--Q B 5 P × Kt | 33. B--Q B 4 (ch), and mates in a
17. B × P Kt--K B 2 | few moves.
[a] This was once a common defence to the Allgaier opening, but it seems
to entail the loss of the gambit pawn.
[b] B--R 3 would not have done, for White would then have exchanged
queens, and played B--Q B 4, &c.
[c] This move loses White a piece, but he obtains for it a full
equivalent.
[d] Black should have lost no time here in getting his pieces out; B--K
3, followed by K--Q 2 seems the best play.
[e] Kt--Q R 4 would be, perhaps, better; but in any case he must have
the worst of it.
It is not worth while to dwell on college scrapes, though of these some,
at any rate, have been recorded. Thus we learn that Lord Randolph
Churchill was fined ten shillings for the offence of smoking in his cap
and gown; that he broke the windows of the Randolph hotel; that he was
taken into custody by the police, with the rest of a noisy supper party,
and charged with being drunk; that, infuriated by such an accusation,
which was not sustained in court, he brought an action for perjury
against the police witness; that the college authorities appealed to the
Duke of Marlborough to stop the legal proceedings; that the Duke of
Marlborough replied that, on the contrary, they had his entire
concurrence; that learned counsel were brought by both parties from
London; but that in the end the summons was dismissed and the officer
exonerated of any wilful intention to deceive. We are also told that one
day he was sent for by the Warden to be rebuked for some delinquency. It
was winter, and the interview began with the Warden standing before the
fireplace and the undergraduate in the middle of the room. By the time
the next culprit arrived Lord Randolph was explaining his conduct with
his back to the fire and the Warden was a somewhat embarrassed listener
in a chilly corner. Such are the tales.
Until he was in his twentieth year Lord Randolph’s studies seem to have
been fitful. He had, indeed, enjoyed the ordinary education of an
English gentleman. He had consumed a vast number of hours at Eton and
elsewhere in making those intricate combinations of Latin words and
syllables which are perhaps as useful or as harmless a form of mental
training as youth can receive. He had--in addition to any acquaintance
with classical learning which these exercises may be supposed to impart,
and the wide but discursive reading of history and poetry that his
tastes had prompted--a peculiar, exact, and intimate knowledge (made
effective by an exceptional memory) of the Bible, Gibbon, and
‘Jorrocks.’ From these books--not so ill-assorted as they sound--he
could recite in an extraordinary manner whole pages at a time. In the
strong, simple, homely words and phrases, sonorous sentences, and veins
of rough spontaneous mirth which characterise the style and language of
his rhetoric and writings, the influence of these three varied
fountains, quaintly, yet not incongruously, intermingled, can be plainly
seen.
Although it is much better for the brain, and for the practical purposes
of life, to know and understand one book than to have read a hundred,
such an educational outfit was no title to academic distinction; and
after he had been three years at Merton Lord Randolph determined to work
seriously for an honours degree in history and law. He forthwith
proceeded to put away his ‘toys,’ as he called them; and the Blenheim
Harriers were given up without delay. The county gentlemen and farmers
who had followed their fortunes with pleasure, if not with profit,
determined to mark their appreciation of the pack and its youthful
Master by the customary British ceremony of a dinner. A banquet was
accordingly held at the Bear hotel in Woodstock at which Lord Randolph
was hospitably entertained and generally praised. He replied to the
toast of his health simply and briefly, as one speaking in his own place
to his friends and neighbours.
‘Now that the harriers are gone,’ he said, ‘the future seems rather a
blank. Perchance, in the course of time and events, I may find myself
separated from these scenes of my youth. But you may rest assured that
my Oxfordshire home and my Oxfordshire friends will ever be present and
dear to my mind; and that, in whatever quarter of the world I may find
myself, among whatever people, or pursuing whatever occupation, you,
gentlemen, who have asked me here to dinner this evening, the happy
hours I have spent among you, the fields and pastures of our well-known
and favourite hunting grounds, and, last but not least, the old pack of
harriers, will remain amongst those pleasant and gratifying
recollections of days that are gone by, upon which I shall at all times
delight to dwell.’
After this he began to work in earnest. The time which intervened before
the December examinations was all too short to repair the well-spent
idleness of previous years. It was fortunate that in these busy months
he came under the influence of that good and eminent man Dr. Creighton,
who took the greatest interest in him and aided and encouraged his
exertions by every means. ‘He was always amenable to expostulation, when
wisely administered,’ wrote Bishop Creighton in a letter to Mr. Escott
in 1895, ‘and consulted me with freedom on all matters relating to the
daily conduct of his life. At first he did not read much, having a habit
of going to sleep in his chair after dinner, often for hours, which he
only gradually overcame. But from the first I was interested to see his
growing appreciation of the value of history, especially on its legal
and constitutional side. He would take up a subject and talk about it
till he had reached its bottom. As his interest grew he read more....’
The Bishop proceeds to relate an incident which seems to have impressed
him. ‘My attention was called to his marked ability for practical
politics early in his career. Soon after he came to Merton he deemed it
his duty to write a letter in defence of his father, who had been
attacked on some question of Woodstock politics. Before sending the note
he brought it to me. I was greatly impressed by its dignity and its
dexterity--the former as the composition of a son about his father, the
latter in the administration of a reproof without leaving a loophole of
escape.’ Dr. Creighton advised him not to enter into political
controversy at his time of life. Lord Randolph’s answer was: ‘I have
thought it over, and decided that point for myself. What I came to ask
you was if you saw anything in the letter which you thought unbecoming.’
On this Dr. Creighton admitted, ‘If you are going to send a letter at
all, you could not send a better one.’
‘That incident gave me,’ writes the Bishop, ‘a real insight into
Churchill’s character, and showed me his capacity for practical
politics. He made up his own mind; having well reflected, he chose his
ground of attack, and then took every pains about the form of
expression. He sought no advice about what he was going to do, but was
anxious to do it “as well as possible.”’
[Sidenote: 1870 ÆT. 21]
_Dr. Creighton to the Duchess of Marlborough._
November 14, 1870.
I only wish that greater numbers took the same interest that you
and the Duke do in your son’s proceedings at Oxford, and then its
results might be greater than they are.
As regards Lord Randolph, I still think that he is wise in going in
for examination now rather than in the summer. It is, of course,
always difficult to predict the result of an examination; but I
think that it would be very improbable, so far as my experience
goes, that he should get any lower class than a second: some of his
subjects he knows remarkably well--quite up to the standard of a
first class--others he is not so much interested in. At present he
is quite in earnest with his work, and has vigour and freshness in
his treatment of it. He might no doubt, and probably would, be
better prepared in six weeks’ time; but the interval of six months
would be too long, and would give him temptations to listlessness
and idleness which might leave him in a worse position at the end
of that time than he is now.
I shall, however, require from him a rigorous account of what he
does in examination; and if I think he has not done himself
justice, I shall advise him to remove his name before the end, and
so put off his examination to the summer. Do not, however, suggest
this to him as a possibility. It is bad for anyone to have an
alternative before him, and it were better that I judged after the
event than that he thought of it during the process. At present I
certainly think he will get a second class at least.
Lord Randolph himself was hopeful:--
_Lord Randolph to his Mother._
Merton College: Tuesday.
I hope you won’t hope for too much when I tell you that yesterday
and to-day I have been doing much better in my examination, which
has been chiefly about what I have been reading this term; so I
have been able to do it. I am very much afraid Saturday’s work
will go against me. A great deal depends on how I do to-morrow
morning, which is the last day. There is no more writing work; it
is what they call _viva voce_ and that is the hardest. I hope that
I will have a little luck and be asked what I know best and then
perhaps it will come right, but even if it does the whole thing has
been a dreadful scramble and I see now, too late, that I had much
better have waited until June. However, I saw Creighton yesterday,
and he was all against my scratching, and thinks I shall get
through all right. I shall know by three or four o’clock to-morrow
and shall telegraph. I am not very sanguine, but shall be
dreadfully disappointed.
I shall not be able to come home until Saturday or Monday anyhow,
as I must keep my term. Poor little Wasp died yesterday. I am very
much distressed, for she was so nice and was the first dog I had
you did not object to. I do not think I shall get another, they all
seem to die.
Gladstone is safe to be beaten they say to-day. The Conservatives
are beginning to pick up a little now, but we shall be in a
shocking minority. I think Papa will be glad to get out of it
though, and that is the only thing that consoles me. The papers
seem to be in a dreadful fright for fear the Queen should send for
Lord Granville. How spiteful they are!
Dr. Creighton’s forecast was, however, justified by the result:--
_Dr. Creighton to the Duchess of Marlborough_,
December 15.
I must own I was sorry when I heard how narrowly Lord Randolph
missed the first class: a few more questions answered, and a few
omissions in some of his papers, and he would have secured it. He
was, I am told by the examiners, the best man who was put in the
second class; and the great hardship is, as your Grace observes,
that he should be in the same class with so many who are very
greatly his inferior in knowledge and ability.
It is rather tantalising to think he came so near; if he had been
further off I should have been more content. Still I am glad he
went in for examination this time. I think he would only have idled
the six months before the next examination.
On the whole I think he has learned a good deal during his time at
Oxford, and I do not think he regrets his residence here. I am
sorry to lose him.
After leaving Oxford Lord Randolph made (1870) another and much longer
tour in Europe. He liked few things better than to prowl about at his
leisure from one new place to another, seeing all the sights, the
galleries, the monuments, the circuses, and above all the zoological
gardens, with eyes that never lost their interest even for the smallest
trifles. Through France, Italy, and Austria he rambled light-heartedly;
and when, after an absence of nearly a year, he came back to Blenheim he
had enlarged his fancy and extended his education in various directions
beyond the limits of a University curriculum. Behold him now at
twenty-three, a man grown, markedly reserved in his manner to
acquaintances, utterly unguarded to his intimate friends, something of a
dandy in his dress, an earnest sportsman, an omnivorous reader, moving
with a jaunty step through what were in those days the very select
circles of fashion and clubland, seeking the pleasures of the Turf and
town.
This interlude was soon ended.
[Sidenote: 1873 ÆT. 24]
In August of 1873 Lord Randolph went to Cowes upon what proved to him a
memorable visit. In honour of the arrival of the Czarewitch and the
Czarevna the officers of the cruiser _Ariadne_, then lying as guard-ship
in the Roads, gave a ball, to which all the pleasure-seekers who
frequent the Solent at this season of the year made haste to go in boats
and launches from the shore and from the pleasure fleet. Here for the
first time he met Miss Jerome, an American girl whose singular beauty
and gifted vivacity had excited general attention. He was presented to
her by a common friend. Waltzing made him giddy, and he detested dancing
of all kinds; so that after a formal quadrille they sat and talked. She
was living with her mother and eldest sister at Rosetta Cottage, a small
house which they had taken for the summer, with a tiny garden facing the
sea. Thither the next night, duly bidden, he repaired to dine. The
dinner was good, the company gay and attractive, and with the two young
ladies chatting and playing duets at the piano the evening passed very
pleasantly. She was nineteen, and he scarcely twenty-four; and, if
Montaigne is to be believed, this period of extreme youth is Love’s
golden moment. That very night Miss Jerome told her laughing and
incredulous sister of a presentiment that their new friend was the man
she would marry; and Lord Randolph confided to Colonel Edgecumbe, who
was of the party, that he admired the two sisters and meant, if he
could, to make ‘the dark one’ his wife.
Next day they met again ‘by accident’--so runs the account I have
received--and went for a walk. That evening he was once more a guest at
Rosetta Cottage. That night--the third of their acquaintance--was a
beautiful night, warm and still, with the lights of the yachts shining
on the water and the sky bright with stars. After dinner they found
themselves alone together in the garden, and--brief court-ship
notwithstanding--he proposed and was accepted.
So far as the principals were concerned, everything was thus easily and
swiftly settled, and the matter having become so earnest all further
meetings were suspended until the Duke of Marlborough and Mr. Jerome,
who was in America, had been consulted. Lord Randolph returned to
Blenheim shaken by alternating emotions of joy and despondency. He had
never been in love before and the force and volume of the tide swept him
altogether off his feet. At one moment he could scarcely believe that
one so unworthy as he could have been preferred; the next he trembled
lest all his hopes should be shattered by circumstances unforeseen. Nor
indeed was his anxiety without reason; for many and serious obstacles
had yet to be encountered and smoothed away. From Blenheim he wrote to
his father.
_To his Father._
Blenheim: Wednesday, August 20, 1873.
I must not any longer keep you in ignorance of a very important
step I have taken--one which will undoubtedly influence very
strongly all my future life.
I met, soon after my arrival at Cowes, a Miss Jeannette Jerome, the
daughter of an American lady who has lived for some years in Paris
and whose husband lives in New York. I passed most of my time at
Cowes in her (Jeannette’s) society, and before leaving asked her if
she loved me well enough to marry me; and she told me she did. I
do not think that if I were to write pages I could give you any
idea of the strength of my feelings and affection and love for her;
all I can say is that I love her better than life itself, and that
my one hope and dream now is that matters may be so arranged that
soon I may be united to her by ties that nothing but death itself
could have the power to sever.
I know, of course, that you will be very much surprised, and find
it difficult to understand how an attachment so strong could have
arisen in so short a space of time; and really I feel it quite
impossible for me to give any explanation of it that could appear
reasonable to anyone practical and dispassionate. I must, however,
ask you to believe it as you could the truest and most real
statement that could possibly be made to you, and to believe also
that upon a subject so important, and I may say so solemn, I could
not write one word that was in the smallest degree exaggerated, or
that might not be taken at its fullest meaning.
I hope you won’t feel any annoyance with me for not having
consulted you before saying anything to her. I really meant to have
done so; but on the night before I was leaving Cowes (Friday) my
feelings of sorrow at parting from her were more than I could
restrain, and I told her all. I did not say anything to her mother,
but I believe that she did after I was gone; for she wrote to me
just as I was starting (I did not, after all, leave Cowes till the
Monday), and she said in her letter that her mother could not hear
of it. That I am at a loss to understand.
I told Mama when I got here and should have written at once to tell
you; but I was so wretched and miserable at leaving thus, I was
quite incapable of writing quietly.
I now write to tell you of it all, and to ask you whether you will
be able to increase my allowance to some extent to put me in the
position to ask Mrs. Jerome to let me become her daughter’s future
husband. I enclose you her photograph, and will only say about her
that she is as nice, as lovable, and amiable and charming in every
way as she is beautiful, and that by her education and bringing-up
she is in every way qualified to fill any position.
She had an elder sister, and one younger, who is not yet out. Mr.
Jerome is a gentleman who is obliged to live in New York to look
after his business. I do not know what it is. He is reputed to be
very well off, and his daughters, I believe, have very good
fortunes, but I do not know any thing for certain. He generally
comes over for three or four months every year. Mrs. Jerome has
lived in Paris for several years and has educated her daughters
there. They go out in Society there and are very well known.
I have told you all I know about them at present. You have always
been very good to me, and done as much and more for me always than
I had any right to expect; and with any arrangement that you may at
any time make for me I shall be perfectly contented and happy. I
see before me now a very happy future, almost in one’s grasp. In
the last year or so I feel I have lost a great deal of what energy
and ambition I possessed, and an idle and comparatively useless
life has at times appeared to me to be the pleasantest; but if I
were married to her whom I have told you about, if I had a
companion, such as she would be, I feel sure, to take an interest
in one’s prospects and career, and to encourage me to exertions and
to doing something towards making a name for myself, I think that I
might become, with the help of Providence, all and perhaps more
than you had ever wished and hoped for me. On the other hand, if
anything should occur to prevent my fondest hopes and wishes being
realised (a possibility which I dare not and cannot bring myself to
think of), how dreary and uninteresting would life become to me! No
one goes through what I have lately gone through without its
leaving a strong impress and bias on their character and future.
Time might, of course, partially efface the impression and
recollection of feelings so strong as those I have tried to
describe to you, but in the interval the best years of one’s life
would be going, and one’s energies and hopes would become blunted
and deadened.
I will not allude to her. I believe and am convinced that she loves
me as fully, and as strongly if possible, as I do her; and when two
people feel towards each other what we do, it becomes, I know, a
great responsibility for anyone to assist in either bringing about
or thwarting a union so closely desired by each.
Good-bye. I have written to you all I have done, all I feel, and
all I know.
Anxiously wishing for an answer from you,
I remain
Ever your most affectionate son,
RANDOLPH.
The Duke was very seriously disturbed at the news of his son’s intention
and declined to commit himself to any expression of approval until he
had made searching inquiry into the standing and circumstances of the
Jerome family. He deplored the precipitancy with which the decision had
been taken. ‘It is not likely,’ he wrote upon August 31, ‘that at
present you can look at anything except from your own point of view; but
persons from the outside cannot but be struck with the unwisdom of your
proceedings, and the uncontrolled state of your feelings, which
completely paralyses your judgment.’ His rebuke was supported by his
wife, who urged affectionate counsels of caution, patience, and
self-restraint, and was pointed by a set of witty and satirical verses
from his brother, Lord Blandford, setting forth the unhappy fate of
those who marry in haste and repent at leisure.
It will easily be understood how this attitude--most Americans being
proud as the devil--raised corresponding objections on the other side.
Mr. Jerome was himself in many ways a remarkable personality. He had
made and lost and made again considerable fortunes in the enterprise and
struggle of American life. He had founded the first two great American
racecourses, Jerome Park and Coney Island Jockey Club, and divides with
Mr. August Belmont the claim to be the father of the American Turf. He
owned and edited the _New York Times_. A vehement Federalist in the
Civil War, he was said to have subscribed nearly half his fortune to the
Federal war funds. When in 1862 the war party in New York was
discredited by the disasters of the campaign, and riotous mobs attacked
the _Times_ office, Mr. Jerome--having purchased a battery of cannon and
armed his staff with rifles--beat them off, not without bloodshed.
Altogether he was a man of force and versatility. He had at first,
indeed, written a conditional assent to his daughter’s engagement, but
he withdrew it with promptness as soon as he heard a murmur of
opposition. Mrs. Jerome and her daughters retreated to France; and all
interviews, and even communications, were forbidden by all the parents.
Randolph Churchill, however, knew his own mind in many things, and most
especially in this. Such was his vehemence that the Duke was soon
persuaded, for the sake of his son’s peace of mind and of his own
authority, to acquiesce--at any rate, provisionally--in a formal
engagement. But he insisted upon delay. Nothing, he declared, but time
could prove an affection so rapidly excited; and with this decision,
supported and emphasised by the Jeromes, the lovers had perforce to be
content.
The control of parents over grown-up children was in those unregenerate
days much more severe than now. Letters were indeed allowed to pass
freely between the lovers; but visits were grudged and restricted. Only
at intervals of a month, or even six weeks, were they permitted to see
each other, and in these circumstances it may be imagined that both pens
were busy. In this field the young lady had a great advantage. The
placid succession of the duties and amusements of country life--the
round of shooting parties, the varying totals of slaughtered hares and
pheasants, the mornings on the Woodstock bench, and descriptions of
relations and county folk--however vivacious, were inadequate materials
to set against days spent in Paris during the autumn of 1873, when the
gossip of the world was reviving after the gag of the war, when Bazaine
was upon his trial for his life, when Gambetta declaimed in the
Assembly, and when the drawing-rooms, even of foreigners, were full of
Royalist and Bonapartist whisperings. For the most part his letters were
strictly confined to the subject of main importance. They told over and
over again, in the forcible, homely English of which he was a natural
master, the oldest story in the world. Indeed, but for the contributions
of Miss Jerome the correspondence would certainly have lacked variety.
Towards the end of September the Duke committed himself with preciseness
to the opinion that one year’s delay was necessary. To this Lord
Randolph was far from agreeing and he conceived himself possessed of a
lever which might be used to shorten considerably this weary period of
waiting.
_To Miss Jerome._
Blenheim: Tuesday, September 23.
I cannot tell you what pleasure and happiness your letter gives me;
it makes me feel quite a different being, so you really must not
threaten me with a long silence. You certainly have great powers of
perception, and I cannot but own that there is a good deal of truth
in what you say about my being one moment very despairing and
another moment very sanguine. I cannot help it; I was made so.
My father has been away for a few days, and yesterday I got a
‘piece’ from him on the subject of his consent. After a good deal
of unnecessary rigmarole and verbosity he says:
‘The great question is still unsolved, whether you and the young
lady who has gained your affections are, or can be, after a few
days’ acquaintance, sufficiently aware of your own minds to venture
on the step which is to bind you together for life. What I have now
to say is that if I am to believe that your future is really bound
up in your marriage with Miss Jerome you must show me the proof of
it by bringing it to the test of time. I will say no more to you on
this subject for the present, but if this time next year you come
and tell me that you are both of the same mind we will receive Miss
Jerome as a daughter, and, I need not say, in the affection you
could desire for your wife.’
Now these are his words, but I do not mind telling you that it is
all humbug about waiting a year. I could, and would, wait a good
deal more than a year, but I do not mean to, as it is not the least
necessary; for though we have only known each other a short time, I
know we both know our own minds well enough, and I wrote a very
long and diplomatic letter to my father yesterday, doing what I
have never done before, contradicting him and arguing with him and,
I hope, persuading him that he has got very wrong and foolish
ideas in his head. You see, both he and my mother have set their
hearts on my being member for Woodstock. It is a family borough,
and for years and years a member of the family has sat for it. The
present member is a stranger, though a Conservative, and is so
unpopular that he is almost sure to be beaten if he were to stand;
and the fact of a Radical sitting for Woodstock is perfectly
insupportable to my family. It is for this that they have kept me
idle ever since I left Oxford, waiting for a dissolution. Well, as
I told you the other day, a dissolution is sure to come almost
before the end of the year. I have two courses open to me: either
to refuse to stand altogether unless they consent to my being
married immediately afterwards; or else--and this is still more
Machiavellian and deep--to stand, but at the last moment to
threaten to withdraw and leave the Radical to walk over. All tricks
are fair in love and war.
These desperate expedients were not, however, necessary. The parents on
both sides only wished to be assured that the attachment of their
children was no passing caprice, but a sincere and profound affection;
and as the weeks grew into months this conviction was irresistibly borne
in upon them. In October the Duke was willing to admit that the period
of probation might be considerably curtailed. But he still had strong
reasons for not wishing the marriage to take place immediately. The
dissolution was certainly in the air. By-election after by-election had
gone against Mr. Gladstone’s Government. Greenwich, Stroud, Dover, Hull,
Exeter, East Staffordshire, and Renfrewshire had renounced their
allegiance; Bath had been barely retained, and the Solicitor-General,
whose victory at Taunton had been a much-paraded compensation, was
threatened with a petition for bribery. It was most important that
Woodstock should be held for the Conservatives. No one could possibly
have so good a chance as the young cadet born and bred on the soil, who
knew half the farmers and local magnates personally, whose excursions
with the harriers had made him familiar with all parts of the
constituency, and whose gay and stormy attractiveness had won him a host
of sworn allies.
Yet he had often in words and in letters expressed a disinclination for
public life. It is curious to notice how even in the days of buoyant
unconquered youth, moods of depression cast their shadows across his
path. Although possessed of unusual nervous energy, his whole life was a
struggle against ill-health. Excitement fretted him cruelly. He smoked
cigarettes ‘till his tongue was sore’ to soothe himself. Capable upon
emergency of prolonged and vehement exertion, of manifold activities and
pugnacities, of leaps and heaves beyond the common strength of men, he
suffered by reaction fits of utter exhaustion and despondency. Most
people grow tired before they are over-tired. But Lord Randolph
Churchill was of the temper that gallops till it falls. An instinct
warned him of the perils which threatened him in a life of effort. He
shrank from it in apprehension. Peace and quiet, sport and friends,
agricultural interests--above all a home--offered a woodland path far
more alluring than the dusty road to London. The Duke felt, and with
reason, that unless Lord Randolph were member for Woodstock before his
marriage, not only would the borough be seduced to Radicalism, but that
the son in whom all the hopes and ambitions of his later life were
centred might never enter Parliament at all.
Lord Randolph was very grateful for the friendly attitude his family had
now assumed and was quite prepared to repay concession by patience in
one direction and by energy in another:--
_To his Father._
Blenheim: Thursday, October (?), 1873.
I write by an early post to acknowledge your letter and to thank
you very much for it. It is indeed a most kind letter and I am most
grateful to you, as it is all I could have expected. Mama tells me
that you got up early in the morning to write it, and indeed I
thank you very much indeed for writing to me as you have done, and
I only hope you did not tire yourself very much before your long
journey.
I go to London to-day and to Paris to-morrow. I enclose you a
letter from Hawkins about the registration, which seems to be
satisfactory. I am sure you need not fear my doing my very best to
get in, and therefore to be some credit to you. I feel that in this
you have acted very kindly to me and I feel very grateful to you,
although I know there are circumstances now which would have led
some people to very different conclusions. I am, however, perfectly
confident that ultimately you will never regret for a moment having
acted as you have done.
_To Miss Jerome._
Blenheim: Monday, October (?), 1873.
I was so happy to see your handwriting again; it is next best thing
to seeing you. As you will have seen from my letter of Friday, we
have no cause now to be disappointed or to be in bad spirits;
everything goes on as favourably as we could expect, and my father
does not wish, for a moment, to prevent my seeing you as often as I
can, and has promised to give his consent to our marriage when he
is sure we are fond of each other. As to the year, I have every
right to say that I do not think they will insist on it....
The clouds have all cleared away, and the sky is bluer than I have
ever seen it since I first met you at Cowes. It is exactly six
weeks to-morrow since we met on board the Ariadne, and I am sure I
seem to have lived six years. How I do bless that day, in spite of
all the worry and bother that has come since; and I am sure you
will not regret it. I have not had a further conversation with my
father since I wrote to you, for I think it is best to leave things
for the present as they are. Our early golden dreams of being
married in December won’t quite become realised, but still it won’t
be very long to wait; and I shall be able to see you from time to
time, and write as often as I like; in fact, we can be regularly
engaged, and all the world may know it....
It is curious what an effect books have on me; I have two old
favourites. When I feel very cross and angry I read Gibbon, whose
profound philosophy and easy though majestic writing soon quiets me
down, and in an hour I feel at peace with all the world. When I
feel very low and desponding I read Horace, whose thorough
epicureanism, quiet maxims, and beautiful verse are most
tranquillising. Of late I have had to have frequent recourse to my
two friends, and they have never failed me. I strongly recommend
you to read some great works or histories; they pass the time, and
prevent you from worrying or thinking too much about the future.
Novels, or even travels, are rather unsatisfactory, and do one no
good, because they create an unhealthy excitement, which is bad for
anyone. I wonder whether you will understand all this, or only
think me rather odd.
There are three new elections to come off, owing to death
vacancies; and if they go against the Government, as they very
probably will, we are sure to have a dissolution, and then I shall
become member for Woodstock. But, after all, public life has no
great charms for me, as I am naturally very quiet, and hate bother
and publicity, which, after all, is full of vanity and vexation of
spirit. Still, it will all have greater attractions for me if I
think it will please you and that you take an interest in it and
will encourage me to keep up to the mark.
I hope your sister is quite well, comforts you, and sticks up for
me when you abuse me to her or doubt me.
[Sidenote: 1874 ÆT. 25]
A fortnight later he insisted that he should be allowed to visit the
Jeromes in the middle of December; and this having been agreed to, the
process of counting the days began. But upon the eve of departure an
unexpected misfortune intervened. His aunt Lady Portarlington was taken
dangerously ill. The family were hurriedly summoned to Emo, and the
delightful anticipations of a fortnight in Paris under such
circumstances were exchanged for the melancholy reality of nearly a
month in Ireland, watching in daily uncertainty a painful and unavailing
struggle with death. It is easy to imagine the vexation of such delay
and the longings which possessed him to leave the house of mourning. But
the family leant on him and, while his presence was of real use and
value, he felt bound to wait wearily on from day to day. The course of
the illness was varied: once recovery seemed almost certain; but after
many relapses the end came in the middle of January. Immediately after
the funeral--which was celebrated with much Catholic pomp--Lord Randolph
tore himself away, crossed the Irish Channel the same night, and was
about to proceed the next evening to France, when another even more
imperative call arrested him. Parliament was dissolved.
This event, long looked for, often rumoured, had come at last with the
suddenness of surprise. But Woodstock was not unprepared. The Duke of
Marlborough had waited impatiently for the first General Election after
his brother’s lapse to regain his control over the representation of his
borough. When Parliament had been dissolved in July 1865, Lord Alfred
Churchill, according to his agreement, did not open his candidature; and
Mr. Henry Barnett, the Squire of Glympton Park, a well-known London
banker, was put forward as the Conservative candidate and (let it not be
overlooked) ducal nominee. A Liberal was found in Mr. Mitchell Henry,
afterwards better known as the Home Rule member for Galway; but the
Squire carried the election by 24 votes, and, having been again
successful in 1868, was the sitting member at the time when another
cadet of the great house had ripened to a Parliamentary age.
Mr. Barnett now, as it turned out, very conveniently, expressed an
earnest wish to relinquish the toils and responsibilities of public
life; and the ancient borough, with an imperturbable solemnity and a
conservative reverence for the form in which things should be done, was
prompt in sending a regular requisition for Lord Randolph’s services.
The electors, according to this document, declared that no one could
better champion their cause at this crisis, or more fitly represent
their views in the ensuing Parliament. They urged him to stand; and in
view of the fact that there happened to be that very afternoon a
coursing meeting in the Park which all the local farmers were expected
to attend, he had to set off for Blenheim without delay.
The series of letters to Paris was sadly broken into by the contest, and
for the most part only telegrams had to fill the gap: but here and there
a moment could be snatched.
_To Miss Jerome._
Blenheim: Monday.
It was perfectly impossible for me to get any letter off by last
night’s post, as I have not had a moment to spare. Since ten this
morning I went and saw several people at Woodstock, and had, on the
whole, satisfactory answers and assurances of support. It was a
most fortunate circumstance that the Annual Coursing Meeting, which
my father allows every year in the Park, had been fixed for to-day;
all the farmers were there, and as they had a good day’s sport were
all in great spirits. I took the chair at their dinner at the Bear
hotel, and you cannot imagine how enthusiastic they were for me.
They all go as one man. I hear nothing certain as to any
opposition; there are no end of rumours, but no one as yet has
appeared publicly; I suppose we shall know for certain to-morrow.
I am now off to a part of the borough four miles distant, to see
more people, and I have a large meeting of my committee at four in
Woodstock. I think I may say that for the present everything is
satisfactory. There are 1,071 voters, and I do not think more than
800 will poll; out of these I calculate at least on 460, which will
be enough. But this is, of course, mere guess-work; it is all still
very uncertain, and I am glad I lost no time in arriving.
Blenheim: Tuesday.
The radical candidate, Mr. Brodrick, arrived this morning; I made
his acquaintance, and we shook hands and were very friendly. The
contest will be a hard one and the result doubtful; it is
impossible to say how the labourers will go. However, I have made a
very good start, and have nothing to complain of as yet.
Blenheim: Saturday.
I am sure it is not necessary for me to excuse myself for not
writing to you; you would not believe what work it is. We had a
great meeting last night, which was very successful; we had a good
speaker down from London, and I made a speech. How I have been
longing for you to have been with me! If we had only been married
before this! I think the reception you would have got, would have
astonished you. The number of houses I have been into--many of them
dirty cottages--the number of unwashed hands I have cordially
shaken, you would not believe. My head is in a whirl of voters,
committee meetings, and goodness knows what. I am glad it is
drawing to an end, as I could not stand it very long; I cannot eat
or sleep.
I am now off again, 10 A.M., to see more people.
Blenheim: Sunday.
At last I have a pretty quiet day; but I have been very busy this
afternoon, and, in spite of its being Sunday, I have been active
among several little odd fellows whom it is important to pick up.
How this election is going I really can form no opinion, and the
excitement and uncertainty of it make me quite ill. Yesterday I was
canvassing all day in Woodstock itself. People that I think know
better than anybody, tell me it will be very close. You see, with
the ballot one can tell nothing--one can only trust to promises,
and I have no doubt a good many will be broken. Our organisation
and preparations for Tuesday are very perfect, and the old borough
has never been worked in such a way before. You have no idea how
this election gets hold of me. One can positively think of nothing
else except voters and committees, &c., till one’s brain gets quite
addled and in a whirl. I have a presentiment that it will go wrong.
I am such a fool to care so much about it. I hate all this
excitement.... I saw my opponent to-day in church. He looks awfully
harassed. I feel quite sorry for him, as all his friends here are
such a dreadfully disreputable lot; and as I have got the three
principal hotels in the town, he has nothing except a wretched,
low, miserable pot-house to stay in.
Unfortunate Mr. Brodrick! The result of the election in no way belied
the quality of his accommodation.
Ever since I met you everything goes well with me--too well; I am
getting afraid of a Nemesis. I always hoped I should win the
election, but that under the ballot and against a man like Brodrick
I should have that crushing, overwhelming majority [of 165 out of
973 voters] never entered into my wildest dreams. It was a great
victory--we shall never have a contest again. The last two
contests--‘65 and ‘68--were won only by 17 and 21 majorities; so
just conceive the blow it is to the other side. You never heard
such cheering in all your life. The poll was not declared till
eleven, and the hours of suspense were most trying; but when it was
known, there was such a burst of cheers that must have made the old
Dukes in the vault jump. I addressed a few words to the
committee--and so did Blandford--and was immensely cheered; and
then they accompanied us, the whole crowd of them, through the town
and up to Blenheim, shouting and cheering all the way. Oh, it was a
great triumph--and that you were not there to witness it will
always be a source of great regret to me....
There is nothing more to be done except to pay the bill, and that I
have left to my father.
The Woodstock election being out of the way, the road was cleared for
more important matters. The Duke, his political anxieties laid to rest,
journeyed to Paris, saw the young lady for himself, and, returning
completely converted, withdrew all remaining stipulations for delay. But
further difficulties presented themselves. The question of settlements
proved delicate and thorny. Mr. Jerome had strong and, it would seem,
not unreasonable views, suggested by American usage, about married
women’s property and made some propositions which Lord Randolph
considered derogatory to him. Although he was to benefit considerably
under the arrangement proposed, he refused utterly to agree to any
settlement which contained even technical provisions to which he
objected; and after an embarrassing discussion went off to prepare
determined plans to earn a living ‘in England or out of it,’ as fortune
should dictate, for himself and his future wife--‘a course in which,’ so
he wrote to his father, ‘I am bound to say she thoroughly agrees with
me.’
Face to face with this ultimatum--the first of any importance and not
the least successful in Lord Randolph’s forceful career--Mr. Jerome, who
after all only wished to make a proper and prudent arrangement,
capitulated after twenty-four hours’ consideration. A satisfactory
treaty was ratified, and it only remained to fulfil the conditions. The
negotiations had already extended over seven months and the ceremony was
appointed without further delay. The Duke, though unable to be present
himself, sent his blessing in a most cordial letter. ‘Although, my dear
Randolph, you have acted in this business with less than usual
deliberation, you have adhered to your choice with unwavering constancy
and I cannot doubt the truth and force of your affection.’ On April 15,
1874, the marriage was celebrated at the British Embassy in Paris, and
after a tour--not too prolonged--upon the Continent, Lord Randolph
Churchill returned in triumph with his bride to receive the dutiful
laudations of the borough of Woodstock and enjoy the leafy glories of
Blenheim in the spring.
CHAPTER II
MEMBER FOR WOODSTOCK
Minutely trace man’s life; year after year,
Through all his days let all his deeds appear,
And then, though some may in that life be strange,
Yet there appears no vast nor sudden change;
The links that bind those various deeds are seen,
And no mysterious void is left between.
CRABBE, _The Parting Hour_.
A profound tranquillity brooded over the early years of the Parliament
of 1874. Mr. Gladstone was in retirement. A young Irishman, Charles
Stewart Parnell, had been beaten at the General Election in his Dublin
candidature and did not enter the House of Commons or make a nervous
maiden speech till the spring of 1875. Mr. Chamberlain, a new though
already formidable English politician, had, as a Radical, vainly
attacked Mr. Roebuck, the Liberal member for Sheffield, and was not
returned as a representative of Birmingham till 1876. The Irish party
was led sedately along the uncongenial paths of constitutional agitation
by Mr. Butt; Radicalism was without a spokesman; and the Liberals
reposed under the leadership of Lord Hartington and the ascendency of
the Whigs. For the first time since the schism of 1846 a Conservative
Administration was founded upon a Conservative majority. The fiscal
period had closed. All those questions of trade and navigation, of the
incidence of taxation and of public economy, which had occupied almost
the whole lives of political leaders on both sides, were settled. New
strains, new problems, new perils approached--but at a distance; and in
the meanwhile the Conservative party, relieved from the necessity of
defending untenable positions, freed from controversies which had proved
to them so utterly disastrous, received again the confidence of the
nation and the substantial gift of power.
The reasons which had induced, or perhaps compelled Mr. Disraeli to
refuse to form a Government on the defeat of Mr. Gladstone’s Irish
University Bill early in 1873, seemed conclusive at the time. They were
certainly vindicated by the subsequent course of events. The Liberal
Ministry never recovered its credit. Nonconformist wrath at the
Education Act and Radical disdain continued fierce and enduring. Harsh
demands for social reforms began to come from Birmingham and grated on
the ears of the Whigs. The dissensions in the governing party cast their
shadows upon the Cabinet. Vexatious quarrels broke out among Ministers.
No reconstruction availed. Not even the return of Mr. Bright to the
Administration could revive its falling fortunes: by-elections were
adverse and the House of Commons was apathetic. The Government of 1868
had been in its day very powerful. Scarcely any Prime Minister had
enjoyed the support of such distinguished colleagues as Mr. Gladstone
had commanded in the noonday of his strength. Few Administrations had
more punctually and faithfully discharged the pledges under which they
had assumed office. The statute-book, the Army, and the finances bore
forcible testimony to their reforming zeal. But their usefulness and
their welcome were alike exhausted and the nation listened with morose
approval to the charges which Mr. Disraeli preferred. ‘For nearly five
years,’ he wrote to Lord Grey de Wilton, October 3, 1873, on the eve of
the by-election at Bath, ‘the present Ministers have harassed every
trade, worried every profession, and assailed or menaced every class,
institution, and species of property in the country. Occasionally they
have varied this state of civil warfare by perpetrating some job which
outraged public opinion, or by stumbling into mistakes which have been
always discreditable and sometimes ruinous.’
Yet it is alleged that a cause much more personal than political
precipitated the dissolution. Mr. Gladstone had at the late
reconstruction become Chancellor of the Exchequer as well as First Lord
of the Treasury. Had he therefore vacated his seat by accepting an
office of profit under the Crown? The Opposition was alert; the law
officers were as doubtful in their published opinion as the constituency
of Greenwich in its temper. The question lay outside the control of the
Government and their supporters. If Mr. Gladstone sat and voted when the
session opened, he could be sued in the courts for substantial
penalties; and none could forecast the decision. On the other hand, the
defeat of the Prime Minister, as the culmination of a long series of
ill-fated by-elections, would be at once a personal humiliation and a
political disaster. It must therefore be reckoned almost a fortunate
coincidence that the Estimates both of the Admiralty and the War Office
to some degree exceeded the limits within which Mr. Gladstone had hoped
to confine them and that the Ministers responsible for those departments
should have been reluctant to reduce them. Who shall pronounce upon the
motives of men--in what obscure and varying relations they combine or
conflict, in what proportion they are mingled? Something of the vanity
of a great man irritated by a personal difficulty, something of the
weariness that waits on generous effort not acknowledged, something of
physical revolt from the interminable wrangles and compromises of a
Cabinet, much consideration, let it be said, for the proud dignity of
which the British Government should never be divested, induced Mr.
Gladstone in the first days of 1874 to advise the dissolution of
Parliament.
The Conservatives reaped the advantage of their leader’s self-restraint.
A year before they had rejected office. They now appealed for power.
Instead of coming hat in hand, a defeated, discredited, and degraded
Ministry who had held their places for a few months in order to wind up
a session at the contemptuous toleration of a hostile majority, they
presented themselves with authority and reserve to the good opinion of
the public. The result was decisive. In vain Mr. Gladstone promised the
abolition of the income-tax, the diminution of local taxation, and the
reduction of burdens upon articles of general consumption. In vain the
financial and administrative triumphs of Liberalism were paraded. The
elections resulted in a Tory majority of fifty--‘really,’ according to
Mr. Gladstone, ‘of much greater strength’; and that strange prophet of
Israel who for thirty years had wandered in the wilderness of fiscal
heresy, led his astonished or doubtful followers back to the land of
place and promise.
Liberal recriminations occupied the morrow of disaster. Mr. Gladstone
was blamed for an impulsive and precipitate dissolution. Mr. Chamberlain
described his address and its financial allurements as ‘the meanest
public document that had ever, in like circumstances, proceeded from the
pen of a statesman of the first rank.’[3] Other critics asserted that
all would have been well had he waited till after the Budget with its
noble surplus, or till the genial weather of the summer-time, or till
some period still more remote. Under all ran a current of satire and
suggestion about the double office, the Greenwich election, and their
influence upon greater decisions. Mr. Gladstone for his part was not
backward in rejoinder. ‘Not from anger, but because it is absolutely
necessary to party action to learn that all the duties and
responsibilities do not rest on the leaders, but that followers have
their obligations too,’ he announced his retirement from the Liberal
leadership and his determination to secure some interval of private life
‘between Parliament and the grave.’ From this intention not the
consternation of his party, nor the appeals of his friends, nor the
taunts of his detractors could move him further than to promise a
limited and occasional leadership, which in the course of a session was
found to mean no leadership at all.
Notwithstanding the risk of being forced to form a future
Administration, several eminent men stepped forward to the gap; but the
issue quickly narrowed itself to a contest between Mr. Forster and Lord
Hartington. Mr. Forster had, it seemed, the advantage in talent and
authority and the gift of speech. He may be described as the first of
the Liberal-Imperialists and on more than one occasion--notably the
Crimean War, the Volunteer movement, and the prosecution of Governor
Eyre--he had come into sharp conflict with the Manchester school.
Although at heart one of the kindliest and most benevolent of men, his
personal independence, a certain Yorkshire roughness of manner and an
ill-concealed dislike of doctrinaire Radicalism had made him many
enemies; and not even the Ballot Act, which he had carried in the teeth
of Conservative opposition, could redeem the mortal offence his
Education compromise had caused the Nonconformists. His enemies
prevailed; and in the early days of 1875 Lord Hartington was duly
installed in the vacant place.
If the Opposition in 1874 were without a leader, the Government they
confronted was without a policy. The Conservatives owed their success at
the polls to the divisions and exhaustion of their opponents rather than
to any action or even to any promises of their own. The new Prime
Minister did not allow the violent attacks he had lately made upon the
conduct of his predecessors to lead him into any reversal of their
measures. The composition of the Cabinet was suited to a policy of
‘honest humdrum.’ With the exceptions of Lord Salisbury and Mr.
Gathorne-Hardy, Mr. Disraeli’s old colleagues were regarded as ‘safe’
rather than brilliant; and the one new man who joined them, Mr. Assheton
Cross, did not seriously alter the prevailing impression.
At the head of a victorious party, with a substantial majority and an
overflowing Exchequer, Mr. Disraeli could afford to be generous and was
inclined to be conciliatory. He took occasion on the Address to pay a
handsome tribute to Mr. Gladstone’s long public service and personal
fame. The Queen’s Speech announced little more than a continuance of the
non-contentious part of the programme of the late Liberal Government.
The administration of the Irish Viceroy and Lord Northbrook’s policy in
India were praised and endorsed. The Chancellors, new and old, consulted
together upon the reform of legal procedure. Sir Stafford Northcote bore
witness, in terms almost of panegyric, to the accuracy of Mr.
Gladstone’s financial anticipations; and Mr. Gathorne-Hardy accepted in
their entirety Lord Cardwell’s arrangements for the Army.
In this last instance at least some disappointment was caused to their
supporters by the complaisance of the new Ministers. The proposal to
make Oxford one of the new territorial military centres had agitated the
University ever since the adoption of the Cardwell scheme of Army reform
in 1872. In October of that year a memorial, signed by nearly the whole
of the teaching staff, had vigorously protested against a plan which it
was somewhat fancifully alleged would prove detrimental by example to
University discipline and undergraduate morality. Lord Salisbury, as
Chancellor, had initiated a debate in the House of Lords in June 1873;
and in May Mr. Auberon Herbert had moved in the Commons for a select
committee. Mr. Cardwell, however, explained that the site was to be two
miles from Oxford, that the number of officers and men to be stationed
there was small, and that other University towns contained garrisons;
and Mr. Auberon Herbert’s motion was defeated (May 23, 1873) by 134 to
90.
Upon the accession of a Conservative Government and especially of a War
Minister who had himself strongly supported Mr. Herbert only a year
before, the motion was renewed on May 22 by Mr. Beresford Hope--not
unreasonably, as it would seem--with greater expectations of success.
Lord Randolph Churchill, who had taken the oath and his seat at the
beginning of the session (March 6), seized the opportunity to deliver
his maiden speech. Unlike the usual form of such productions, it was
prepared at very short notice and was a rather crude debating effort.
The Secretary of State, Mr. Gathorne-Hardy, explained that, since the
land had been bought and the contractor was at work, he could not now
reverse the decision to which his predecessor had come. He was supported
by Mr. A. W. Hall, one of the members for Oxford City, who enlarged on
the advantages of the place as a military centre, and complained that
the University had already succeeded in keeping away the Great Western
main line and the railway works.
Lord Randolph spoke from the University point of view. The proposal, he
declared, amounted to the turning of an ancient University into
something like a modern garrison town, the mingling of learned
professors and thoughtful students with ‘roystering soldiers and
licentious camp followers.’ If it were adopted, Oxford might take the
place of Aldershot. The opinion of the City ought not to override that
of the University. The University of Oxford had made the City of Oxford.
The City depended for its very existence upon the University; and while
it could forget, it could not forgive, that fact. To save 52,000_l._ the
reputation and the future of the University were to be sold. What
comparison could be made between the University of Oxford and the
Universities of London, Dublin, and Edinburgh? Dublin was full of
soldiers ‘from the notorious disaffection and insubordination of the
Irish people’; London because it was the Metropolis of the United
Kingdom; and Edinburgh because it was the capital of Scotland. But the
Universities of Oxford and Cambridge were founded before standing armies
were known or garrison towns existed. The ablest and the most
experienced leaders of the University had boldly said that, if they
could prevent it, they would not have Oxford turned into a manufacturing
town; they had protested against the town being overrun with railway
roughs and navvies; they now objected to its being converted into a
military station crowded with disorderly soldiers. Leave their quiet
cloisters undisturbed and Oxford would remain the greatest University
city in the world.
Sir William Harcourt, who followed, complimented the new member upon the
ability of his speech. He professed himself greatly shocked that one who
bore a name so inseparably associated with the glories of the British
Army should have permitted himself to speak of ‘roystering soldiers,’ or
that one who was elected to the House by a majority all of whom did not
belong to the upper classes, should have spoken of ‘railway roughs.’ The
Lord Mayor of Dublin, who spoke later, complained of what he described
as an unfounded slander upon his constituents conveyed in the suggestion
that a large army was stationed in Dublin for the purpose of keeping
down a disloyal and disaffected population; and another member, a
graduate of Trinity College, protested against the sneers at Dublin
University which he said Lord Randolph’s speech had contained. The
motion was rejected by 170 to 91; and it is fair to say that none of the
evils anticipated have yet occurred. The barracks have proved too far
from Oxford to interfere practically with its life, though their
presence is a convenience to University candidates for the Army, and the
officers form a valuable addition to academic society.
Although it had chanced that Lord Randolph’s first speech was against
the Government, Mr. Disraeli hastened to write a friendly account of it
to the Duchess of Marlborough:--
2 Whitehall Gardens, S.W.: May 23, 1874.
Dear Duchess,--You will be pleased to hear that Lord R. last night
made a very successful _début_ in the House of Commons. He said
some imprudent things, which was of no consequence in the maiden
speech of a young man, but he spoke with fire and fluency; and
showed energy of thought and character, with evidence of resource.
With self-control and assiduity he may obtain a position worthy of
his name, and mount. He replied to the new Conservative member for
Oxford City, who also is a man of promise. I am going to Hughenden
this morning, and am very busy, or I would have tried to have told
you all this in person.
Yours sincerely,
D.
[Sidenote: 1875 ÆT. 26]
But the course of the session and of the years that followed offered few
opportunities to young members for winning Parliamentary distinction.
The waters of politics flowed smoothly and even sluggishly. The Public
Worship Regulation Bill brought Mr. Gladstone promptly from his
retirement with six resolutions and much moving eloquence. During its
passage political leaders were thrown into novel combinations and
discords and the ordinary lines of party cleavage altogether
disappeared. The House of Commons, with an unconscious disregard of its
own rules, wrangled over the debates in the House of Lords. The Prime
Minister described the Secretary of State for India as a ‘master of
gibes and flouts and jeers.’ Mr. Gladstone and Lord Salisbury on the one
hand confronted Sir William Harcourt and Mr. Disraeli on the other. But
with this exception the sessions were dull and formal. Now and then an
incident or a scene, like Mr. Plimsoll’s outburst or Mr. Biggar’s
four-hour speech, excited a momentary interest or irritation. The
purchase of the Suez Canal shares or the Royal Titles Bill or an
academic debate upon Home Rule produced from time to time interesting
discussions. The mild dissipation of Mr. Gladstone’s surplus by his
successor at the Treasury provoked a spurt of censure; but the
temperature of public life continued low and its pulse languid.
Even in a period of political activity there is small scope for the
supporter of a Government. The Whips do not want speeches, but votes.
The Ministers regard an oration in their praise or defence as only one
degree less tiresome than an attack. The earnest party man becomes a
silent drudge, tramping at intervals through lobbies to record his vote
and wondering why he came to Westminster at all. Ambitious youth
diverges into criticism and even hostility, or seeks an outlet for its
energies elsewhere. Lord Randolph took scarcely any part in the
Parliament of 1874. During its first three years he did not occupy more
than an hour and a half of its time or attention. If he spoke at all, it
was usually on matters connected with Woodstock. A question here and
there, a few uncontroversial words during the debates on the Public
Worship Regulation Bill, a sharp little impromptu speech on a motion for
the release of Irish State prisoners in protest against an unkind
comparison drawn by Mr. O’Connor Power between the soldiers who had
become Fenians and the conduct of the first Duke of Marlborough in
deserting William of Orange--these are almost the only references to his
existence that ‘Hansard’ contains.
At the end of May 1875 Sir Charles Dilke moved for a return of the
unreformed Corporations of England, making special reference to the
circumstances and behaviour of the excessively unreformed borough of
Woodstock. He attacked its self-elected corporation, which gave no
account of its dealings with its property and contributed apparently
only a small proportion to public purposes. He denounced its Mayor--the
landlord of a small public-house, let to him at an absurdly low rate by
the Corporation--who, having been summoned and convicted under pressure
from the inhabitants for permitting drinking on his premises after
hours, had said: ‘I have always had a great respect for the police, but
I shall never have again.’ This cruel indictment brought Lord Randolph
to the rescue in an amusing speech, in which he exhibited such
unexpected debating powers that it was alleged, and I dare say not
without some truth, that he did not hear Sir Charles Dilke’s speech for
the first time in the House of Commons. He explained that the Foresters
had met at the King’s Arms and that ‘their business had been so
important as to last beyond closing time.’ The application for the
summons, he said, had been delayed because the police had been kept busy
by the Shipton-on-Cherwell railway accident; the fines imposed had been
trifling, and the Mayor had really said, ‘I have always thought highly
of the police of Woodstock, and shall henceforth think more highly of
them than ever’--a version of his remarks which, it must be admitted,
would seem to have indicated a very high degree of civic virtue. Lord
Randolph then justified the expenditure of the Corporation, and
deprecated ‘the vivisection of an unfortunate Mayor and the persecution
of a few poor Aldermen.’ ‘The great beauty of this speech,’ said Sir
William Harcourt, in reply, ‘was that the noble lord, having admitted
all the most damaging facts against himself, persuaded the House that
they were of no importance whatever.’ But at any rate Lord Randolph was
successful in saving his constituents from inquiry, and the debate ended
amid much good-humour on all sides. Indeed, when Sir Charles Dilke
renewed his motion in the following year, there was quite a considerable
attendance of members who had laughed at the first dispute and wanted to
hear another sparring match.
For the first year after Lord Randolph’s marriage he and Lady Randolph
lived in a small house in Curzon Street and indulged in all the gaieties
and festivities of the London season, which in those days was much
fuller and more prolonged than it is now. Balls and parties at great
houses long since closed; Newmarket, Ascot, Goodwood, Cowes, and
Trouville; filled the lives of a young couple in merry succession.
Little else was thought of but enjoyment; and though the member for
Woodstock liked discussing politics and took an intelligent interest in
affairs, his attendances at the House were fitful and fleeting. The
winter at Blenheim was occupied in hunting with the Heythrop Hounds and
varied by occasional visits to Paris, where Lady Randolph’s family was
living. There he mixed in French society and met politicians and
writers, and it was at this time that he formed a friendship with M. de
Breteuil, which, like most of his intimate friendships, lasted the rest
of his life. It was also during these days that he cultivated a taste
for French novels, which ended by making him a fair French scholar, with
that comprehensive, peculiar, and correct knowledge of the subtleties
and idioms of the language which is often to be noticed in his letters.
[Illustration: _Lady Randolph Churchill_]
In the spring of 1875 Lord and Lady Randolph installed themselves in a
larger house in Charles Street, where they continued their gay life on a
somewhat more generous scale than their income warranted. Fortified by
an excellent French cook, they entertained with discrimination. The
Prince of Wales, who had from the beginning shown them much kindness,
dined sometimes with them. Lord Randolph’s college friend, Lord
Rosebery, was a frequent visitor. One night Mr. Disraeli was among their
guests, and an anecdote of his visit may be preserved. ‘I think,’ said
Lord Randolph, discussing with his wife their party after it had broken
up, ‘that Dizzy enjoyed himself. But how flowery and exaggerated is his
language! When I asked him if he would have any more wine, he replied:
“My dear Randolph, I have sipped your excellent champagne; I have drunk
your good claret; I have tasted your delicious port--I will have no
more”!’ ‘Well,’ said Lady Randolph, laughing, ‘he sat next to me, and I
particularly remarked that he drank nothing but a little weak
brandy-and-water.’ In August 1875, Lord Randolph went with his wife to
America to spend ten bustling days at the Philadelphia Exhibition; and
in the United States, as in Paris, he made the acquaintance of many
politicians and persons of public note.
Thus for two years his days were filled with social amusements and
domestic happiness.
’ ...All the world looked kind
(As it will look sometimes with the first stare
Which youth would not act ill to keep in mind).’[4]
[Sidenote: 1876 ÆT. 27]
He was embarrassed chiefly by the necessity, which time imposed, of
having to select from a superfluity of pleasures. The House of Commons
was but one among various diversions. His occasional attendances
contributed an element of seriousness to his life, good in itself,
attractive by contrast, that provided, moreover, a justification (very
soothing to the conscience) for not engaging in more laborious work. But
for the recurring ailments to which his delicate constitution was
subject and the want of money which so often teases a young married
couple, his horizon had been without a cloud, his career without a care.
But in the year 1876 an event happened which altered, darkened, and
strengthened his whole life and character. Engaging in his brother’s
quarrels with fierce and reckless partisanship, Lord Randolph incurred
the deep displeasure of a great personage. The fashionable world no
longer smiled. Powerful enemies were anxious to humiliate him. His own
sensitiveness and pride magnified every coldness into an affront. London
became odious to him. The breach was not repaired for more than eight
years, and in the interval a nature originally genial and gay contracted
a stern and bitter quality, a harsh contempt for what is called
‘Society,’ and an abiding antagonism to rank and authority. If this
misfortune produced in Lord Randolph characteristics which afterwards
hindered or injured his public work, it was also his spur. Without it he
might have wasted a dozen years in the frivolous and expensive pursuits
of the silly world of fashion; without it he would probably never have
developed popular sympathies or the courage to champion democratic
causes.
When Mr. Disraeli formed his Government, he had asked the Duke of
Marlborough to go to Ireland as Viceroy. But the Duke, whose income
could ill support such pretended magnificence, and who was quite content
at Blenheim, declined. In 1876 the Prime Minister renewed his offer, and
urged the special argument that if the Duke took his younger son with
him the resentment in London would the sooner blow over in Lord
Randolph’s absence. Thus urged, the Duke reluctantly consented. Blenheim
was handed over to housekeepers and agents and its household was bodily
transported to the Viceregal Lodge. His father hoped that Lord Randolph
could become the regular private secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant; but
various difficulties interposed, and in the end it was decided that the
appointment must be unofficial and unpaid. It was certain that his
acceptance of ‘an office of profit’ would involve the expense of another
election at Woodstock. It was uncertain whether, even after being
re-elected, that particular post could be held jointly with a seat in
the House of Commons.
_Sir Michael Hicks-Beach (Chief Secretary
to the Lord-Lieutenant) to the Duke of Marlborough_
Chief Secretary’s Lodge, Phœnix Park: Tuesday.
My dear Lord Duke,--The Irish Lord Chancellor is _very doubtful_
whether the office of Private Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant is,
or is not, a ‘new office.’ I believe it appears from old almanacks
that Lord-Lieutenants had private secretaries before the date of
the Act, as one would naturally suppose. But in one case a _Bishop_
appears to have held the appointment; and the Lord Chancellor
thinks that since that time there may have been such changes made,
either in the duties of the office or in the mode in which its
holder is paid, as technically to make it a ‘new office.’ This,
however, is to a great extent a question of fact; and I have
therefore asked Sir Bernard Burke, who is _the_ authority here upon
such things, to look into the point and let me have his views in
the shape of a memorandum, which I will forward to you.
Please let me know whether you have _quite_ settled to come over on
Monday night, 11th, reaching Dublin on Tuesday morning; as I must,
in that event, summon a Privy Council for Tuesday. And I hope you
have got the ‘Queen’s letter’ and your patent, or will have them by
that time.
Your Grace’s very truly,
M. E. HICKS-BEACH.
And again:--
Rockingham, Boyle: November 28, 1876.
My dear Lord Duke,--I fear you will think my letters a decided
nuisance; but it is not my fault if I have to convey unpleasant
intelligence.
At my request Lord Chancellor Ball has given me the enclosed
opinion as to Lord Randolph’s position. You will see that it does
not in so many words touch the question whether Lord Randolph, if
re-elected, could hold the office of your private secretary
together with a seat in Parliament; but it rather implies that he
could. I will, however, on my return to Dublin on Friday next, ask
the Lord Chancellor to look into this point also.
I am bound to say that I attach great importance to any view which
the Lord Chancellor may take on such a subject. Perhaps the only
lawyer in Ireland whose opinion on it might be more valuable is,
oddly enough, Mr. Butt. But his opinion could only be formally
taken, and it would be hardly wise to do this.
Believe me
Your Grace’s very sincerely,
M. E. HICKS-BEACH.
[Sidenote: 1877 ÆT. 28]
The state entry of the new Viceroy was conducted with its usual ceremony
on December 11, 1876. Lord Randolph, who with his wife and child
followed in the procession, made, amid the bustle and discomfort of this
day, a life-long friend. Mr. FitzGibbon filled in 1877 the peculiar
office of ‘Law Adviser’ at the Castle. The proper duty of the ‘Adviser’
was to answer legal questions put by justices of the peace all over
Ireland, but he had also to give advice and opinions to all and sundry
at the Castle, in the constabulary, lunacy, valuation, and a dozen other
of the queerly-conceived and oddly-entangled departments through which
the Government of Ireland is administered. ‘After the Duke’s public
entry,’ writes Lord Justice FitzGibbon, ‘the legal maid-of-all-work
attended with the rest of the officials in the throne room, to be
presented. When I had made my bow I went back to my “files.” Presently
the door opened, and Kaye, the Assistant Under-Secretary, came in with a
young man whom he introduced as “the Lord-Lieutenant’s son,” who “wanted
to ask the Law Adviser a question.” So he left us. A footman had
jibbed--I suppose he did not like the look of Dublin Castle--and Lord
Randolph wanted to know whether he could “sack” him without paving his
fare back to London. He wanted to do this “as a lesson.” I told him
that, whatever the law was, the Lord-Lieutenant’s son couldn’t do it;
and so began an acquaintance which ripened soon into a friendship that,
full though it was of almost constant anxiety and apprehension, is one
of the dearest memories of my life. How it grew so fast I can hardly
tell. I suppose electricity came in somewhere....’
Five minutes’ walk from the Viceregal Lodge, on the road to the
Phœnix Park, there stands, amid clustering trees, a little, long,
low, white house with a green verandah and a tiny lawn and garden. This
is the ‘Little Lodge’ and the appointed abode of the private secretary
to the Lord-Lieutenant. By a friendly arrangement with that gentleman
Lord Randolph was permitted to occupy it; and here, for the next four
years, his life was mainly lived. He studied reflectively the jerky
course of administration at the Castle. He played chess with Steinitz,
who was living in Dublin at this time; he explored Donegal in pursuit of
snipe; he fished the lakes and streams of Ireland, wandering about where
fancy took him; but wherever he went, and for whatever purpose, he
interested himself in the people and studied the questions of the
country. Disdaining the Ward Stag-hounds as not true sport, he hunted
earnestly each winter with the Meath and Kildare. Often on a summer’s
afternoon he would repair to Howth, where the east coast cliffs rise up
into bold headlands which would not be unworthy of the Atlantic waves.
Here in good company he would make the ‘periplus,’ as he called it--or,
in other words, sail round ‘Ireland’s Eye’--in the 16-foot boat of
FitzGibbon’s mate, Frank Lynch (the ‘Admiral’ of his letters), catch
lobsters, and cook and eat them on the rocks of the island. In the
evenings he played half-crown whist in Trinity College or at the
University Club or dined and argued with FitzGibbon and his friends. ‘He
was,’ writes FitzGibbon, ‘always on the move. He had the reputation of
an “_enfant terrible_.” Before long he had been in Donegal, in
Connemara, and all over the place--“Hail fellow, well met” with
everybody except the aristocrats and the old Tories; for he showed
symptoms of independence of view and of likings for the company of “the
Boys,” which led to some friction with the staunch Conservatives and
strong Protestants who regarded themselves as the salt of the earth.’
FitzGibbon’s Christmas parties at Howth--an institution justly
celebrated since, but misunderstood by many, as a gathering of notable
men--had begun in the bivouac of six close friends in a half-finished
house on Innocents’ Day, 1875. The number grew as the years passed by.
Lord Randolph came first in 1877 and was accepted as its youngest member
into a circle which included David Plunket, Edward Gibson, Baillie-Gage,
Webb-Williamson, Professor Mahaffy, Morris Gibson, Father James Healy,
Dr. Nedley, and other wise and merry Irishmen. The nights were consumed
with whist, chaff, and tobacco; and the intervening days spent in
climbing the Hill of Howth or listening to the ‘words of wisdom from
Morris’ which became one of the constant features of the entertainment.
These parties were always a great delight to Lord Randolph and during
the rest of his life nothing, which could by any effort be thrust aside,
was ever allowed to stand in the way of his visit.
Lord Randolph had not been very long in Dublin when he was invited to
move a resolution at the annual meeting of the Historical Society of
Trinity College. This was a function of no little importance. The
Historical Society may be said to correspond to the Oxford Union and
members of the one are honorary members of the other. But it is the
custom of the Irish body to inaugurate the session of each year with
special ceremony. The President of the year, the Auditor, as he is
called, presents and reads an address which he has himself prepared, and
this then forms the subject of the speeches, in which various
resolutions are moved. A distinguished company assembles. The platform
is occupied by the leading figures of the Irish Church, Bench and Bar,
and the body of the great dining-hall is filled to overflowing with
keen-witted and usually uproarious undergraduates. Before this
audience--the most critical outside the House of Commons he had yet
ventured to address--Lord Randolph was now called.
The Auditor of the year, Mr. C. A. O’Connor, had chosen for his address
‘The Relation of Philosophy to Politics,’ a subject not inappropriate in
a University that, as it proudly asserts, had ‘nurtured the philosophic
mind of Burke and cradled the patriotism of Grattan.’ The first
resolution, of which the Attorney-General had charge, was one of thanks
to the Auditor, and Lord Randolph was required to propose the second:
‘That the Auditor’s address be printed and preserved in the archives of
the society.’ He began by suitable acknowledgments of the honour of the
invitation and in praise of the address. The Auditor, he said, had
deprecated the slenderness of the connection between politics and
philosophy at the present day and looked forward to a time when politics
would be subservient to philosophy. Well, but philosophy was a very
comprehensive word, and one would like to know to what system of
philosophy the Auditor referred. There had been in the ancient world
three principal schools of philosophy: there was the school of the
Stoics--a most disagreeable school; the school of the Platonists--a most
unintelligible school; and the school of the Epicureans--a most
attractive school.
‘Perhaps,’ he continued, ‘I may be permitted to think that there is a
connection, almost an intimate connection, between the philosophy of the
Epicurean school and what is known as Conservative politics. To let
things alone as much as we can; to accustom ourselves to look always at
the brightest side; to legislate rather for the moment than for the dim
and distant future, gratefully leaving that job to posterity, and thus
making all classes comfortable--these are, as I understand them, the
maxims of what we know as Conservative politics.’ He went on to speak of
Ireland in 1877 and to praise ‘New Ireland,’ a book by Mr. A. M.
Sullivan, then lately published, which had excited much attention. All
this and more, delivered with much grace and humour, made a most
favourable impression on the assembly. The newspapers in their articles
and accounts the next day were flattering to the orator and the
confidence, which his Irish friends were beginning to feel in his
abilities, was sensibly increased.
Before Lord Randolph had been many months in Ireland he began to form
strong opinions of his own on Irish questions and to take a keen
interest in politics. He was soon in touch with all classes and parties.
He watched Irish administration from the inside, and heard what was said
about it out-of-doors. All the official circle were quite ready to
impart their information to the son of the Lord-Lieutenant. At Howth and
in FitzGibbon’s company he met all that was best in the Dublin world. He
became an active member of the Dublin University Club and a frequent
guest at the Fellows’ Table in Trinity College. His relations in
Ireland, the Londonderrys and Portarlingtons, impressed him with the
high Tory view. He became very friendly with Mr. Butt, who with Father
Healy often dined at the Little Lodge and laboured genially to convert
Lady Randolph to Home Rule. Indeed, he saw a good deal more of
Nationalist politicians than his elders thought prudent or proper. The
fruits of this varied education were not long concealed by its green
leaves.
A sentence at the end of a speech which he made during the session of
1877 on some small matter of Irish administration reveals the general
current of his mind. He expressed his regret for having said--in his
maiden speech three years before--that Dublin was ‘a seditious capital.’
‘I have since learned to know Ireland better.’ It was time indeed that
some Englishman should ‘learn to know Ireland better.’ Under a glassy
surface forces were gathering for a violent upheaval. Mr. Butt’s
leadership of the Irish party gave no pleasure to his countrymen. He had
united the various sections of Irish members in a policy of conciliatory
agitation for Home Rule. He had, indeed, invented the name ‘Home
Rule’--since become the very war-cry of prejudice--to soothe and
reassure British minds likely to be offended by the word ‘Repeal.’ His
authority was now to be seized by a young man of very different temper.
Parnell was a squire, reared upon the land, with all those qualities of
pride, mettle, and strength which often spring from the hereditary
ownership of land. Butt was a lawyer, and his world was a world of
words--fine words, good words, wise words--woven together in happy
combinations, adroitly conceived, attractively presented; but only
words. Butt cherished and honoured the House of Commons. Its great
traditions warmed his heart. He was proud to be a member of the most
ancient and illustrious representative assembly in the world. He was
fitted by his gifts to adorn it. Parnell cared nothing for the House of
Commons, except to hate it as a British institution. He disliked
speeches. He despised rhetoric. Butt trusted in argument; Parnell in
force. Butt was a constitutionalist and a man of peace and order;
Parnell was the very spirit of revolution, the instrument of hatred, the
agent of relentless war.
The conduct of English parties did not strengthen the position of Mr.
Butt. They listened to his arguments with great good-humour, and voted
against him when he had quite finished. He was regarded as an exemplary
politician and his Parliamentary methods were considered most
respectable. Ministers paid him many compliments. They and their
followers and their Liberal opponents contributed cogent and interesting
speeches to the Home Rule debates which he inaugurated year after year.
Mr. Disraeli in particular made a very brilliant and witty speech upon
the subject in 1874. But they conceded him nothing. No British
Government could have desired a more temperate, courteous, or reasonable
opponent. Never were courtesy and reason more poorly served. The Irish
legislation for which Mr. Butt pressed was neglected by the Government
and disdained by the House. Session after session proved barren. At
every meeting of Parliament Mr. Butt was ready with his programme. At
every prorogation he departed empty-handed. The debates on Wednesday
afternoons were so largely occupied with his proposals that the Cabinet
and the Conservative party were wearied with perpetual Irish
discussions. ‘What am I to say to this?’ asked the Law Officer, on one
of these occasions, of the Prime Minister. ‘Speak,’ replied Disraeli,
‘for fourteen minutes and say nothing’--a modest request well within the
compass of a semi-legal, semi-political functionary. This was typical of
the attitude of power towards Irish affairs.
In the session of 1876 nine Bills dealing with land, education, rating,
electoral reform, Parliamentary reform, judicial and municipal
reform--all burning Irish questions--were introduced by the Irish party.
Few were considered. All, except two of minor importance, were cast out.
The claims of Ireland upon Parliament were real and urgent. The Chief
Secretary pressed upon the Cabinet earnestly, but in vain, the necessity
for land legislation. Neither the Parliamentary force nor time could be
found. Mr. Butt introduced a Land Bill of his own--very tame by
comparison with subsequent enactments. It was rejected by 290 votes to
56. Nearly thirty measures dealing with the land question alone, brought
forward by Irish members between 1870 and 1880, perished in the
wilderness.
It should not be inferred that no Irish Bills were carried by the
Government. Indeed, some of the measures passed during this Parliament
are still the law on the matters to which they relate. But the Chief
Secretary was the youngest member of the Cabinet, and the Irish Tories
in the House, led by Mr. Kavanagh, being more numerous and even more
powerful than in our own time, were able to make anyone who displayed a
liking for change sensible of their severe displeasure. On one occasion
indeed, when Sir Michael Hicks-Beach had extended Government support to
the ‘Municipal Privileges Bill’ and to a Bill for assimilating the Irish
municipal franchise to the English, they lost no time in sending a
round-robin to the head of the Government requesting him to dismiss the
delinquent Minister. Disraeli returned a suitable reply to this; but the
Chief Secretary was forced to refuse the concessions he had desired to
make. And although from year to year he succeeded in passing a series of
Bills dealing with such subjects as Licensing, Public Health, Lunacy,
Jury Qualifications, Prisons, County Courts, and Intermediate Education,
he could not free Irish Parliamentary action from discredit in Irish
eyes.
Mr. Butt was patient; he believed in patience; he counselled patience to
his followers. The majority of them were willing to accept his views. He
was opposed to ‘a policy of exasperation.’ He thought that reason would
prevail and that violence of any kind would estrange ‘our best friends
in England.’ He believed, not without foundation, that to injure a
representative institution was to strike democracy at its heart.
‘Gentlemen first, patriots afterwards’ was the motto of his followers.
And in return they received that form of respect which, being devoid of
the element of fear, is closely akin to contempt. Had the Government of
Mr. Disraeli been gifted with foresight beyond the scope of ordinary
British Administrations they would by timely concessions, by some few
substantial gifts, have vindicated constitutional agitation. But they
went their way, living from hand to mouth and from week to week, meeting
their daily troubles with such expedients as came to hand. ‘If pure
advocacy--able, earnest, courteous--could have won the Irish cause,’
writes Parnell’s biographer, ‘Mr. Butt would have succeeded. It could
not, and he failed hopelessly.’[5] A new leader with new weapons was at
hand.
Judged by all the available standards, Mr. Butt’s position as leader of
the Irish party at the beginning of 1877 was secure. He was the most
brilliant Irishman in Parliament. He had defended, at much personal
sacrifice and with immense ability, the Fenian prisoners of the
‘sixties. He was the founder of the Home Rule League and apparently its
perennial president. The whole Irish party in the House of Commons was
at his back. Whatever of Parliamentary prestige can be enjoyed without
executive power supported him. Moreover, in all the personal relations
of life he had great advantages. He was genial, tolerant, and kindly,
with a smile and a handshake for all, and generous to a fault with his
personal friends. Parnell had nothing to offer. He was almost unknown
and, even so, distrusted as a landlord. He was a young man with a
forbidding manner and almost inarticulate. In a nation preternaturally
eloquent he could scarcely jerk out his most familiar thoughts. No
conflict could well have appeared more unequal in conditions or more
contrarily decisive in result than the duel between these two men.
Obstruction was an ugly novelty to the Parliament of 1874. Some ominous
improprieties had marked the resistance to the Irish Church Bill, the
Ballot Bill, and the Bill for the Abolition of Purchase in the Army,
during Mr. Gladstone’s Administration; but no serious deadlock had
arisen. Suddenly the House of Commons awoke to the fact that
half-a-dozen of its members were persistently and deliberately engaged
in paralysing its business. The procedure of those days offered a virgin
field. No closure terminated the debate. No Supply rule regulated
financial business. No restriction was imposed upon the right of members
to move to adjourn the debate or the House or to report progress in
Committee. The minority was restrained only by custom and awe. It now
appeared that a few members were resolved to destroy conventions which
had been consecrated by centuries of observance.
The mutineers were so few in number that they excited almost as much
surprise as irritation. Public reprobation, newspaper abuse,
Parliamentary disgust, were directed upon them in vain. The leaders of
the Opposition vied in terms of condemnation with Her Majesty’s
Ministers. The Irish party was shocked and silent. Nothing availed
against men whose only object was to inflict an outrage upon Parliament,
and who gauged their success by the indignation and sorrow they created.
At length, during one weary sitting, in an evil hour for his own
authority, Mr. Butt was persuaded to denounce the obstructives and to
declare, amid resounding English cheers, his deep detestation of their
tactics. But the censure which was so general in England awoke its
counter-cry across St. George’s Channel. The measure of British hatred
and contempt became the measure of Irish sympathy and partisanship.
‘Parliamentarianism,’ writes Mr. Barry O’Brien drolly, ‘was apparently
becoming a respectable thing. It might be possible to touch it without
being contaminated.’ The Fenian organisations, long disdainful of Mr.
Butt’s constitutional methods and confronted at every session with their
utter futility, turned with interest to the new man who moved with
unconcerned deliberation into the centre of the stage and dealt with
others as though it was his birthright to command and theirs to serve
him. Delicate and subterranean negotiations followed with secret
societies who were reluctant to compromise the purity of their
revolutionary creeds by any paltering with half-measures or
pseudo-constitutional agitation. Sympathetic acquiescence--if not,
indeed, actual co-operation--was at length almost unconsciously
conceded. In two years Mr. Butt was broken. The Home Rule Confederation
cast him off; his friends sorrowfully but unhesitatingly deposed him;
his followers enlisted with the conqueror. Mr. Butt’s end was
melancholy. Hunted and harassed by debt and illness, worn with prolonged
exertions and mortified by supersession and defeat, he lived only to see
his authority exercised by another and the land for which he had
laboured, not unfaithfully, darkened by famine and smouldering with
revolt. He died early in May 1879 and the usurper strode forward to
encounter many adventures and a still more tragic fate.
Lord Randolph Churchill was a silent, though not unmoved, spectator of
the early stages of this drama in the House of Commons, and in the
autumn, at the dinner of the Woodstock Agricultural and Horticultural
Show (September 18), he expressed his opinion upon them with unguarded
freedom, much to the astonishment and displeasure of his family. This
speech is the first which reveals the perfectly independent movement of
his mind and the shrewd insight which guided it. He could not vote for
Home Rule, he said, because without the Irish members more than
one-third of the life and soul of the House of Commons would be lost.
‘Who is it, but the Irish, whose eloquence so often commands our
admiration, whose irresistible humour compels our laughter, whose fiery
outbursts provoke our passions?’ Banish them, and the House of Commons,
composed only of Englishmen and Scotsmen, would sink to the condition of
a vestry. ‘I have no hesitation in saying that it is inattention to
Irish legislation that has produced obstruction. There are great and
crying Irish questions which the Government have not attended to, do not
seem to be inclined to attend to, and perhaps do not intend to attend
to--the question of intermediate and higher education, and the question
of the assimilation of the municipal and Parliamentary electoral
privileges to English privileges--and as long as these matters are
neglected, so long will the Government have to deal with obstruction
from Ireland.’ Truths, he said, were always unpalatable, and he who
spoke them very seldom got much thanks; but that did not render them
less true. England had years of wrong, years of crime, years of
tyranny, years of oppression, years of general misgovernment, to make
amends for in Ireland. The Act of Union was passed, and in the passing
of it all the arsenal of political corruption and chicanery was
exhausted, to inaugurate a series of remedial and healing measures; and
if that Act had not been productive of these effects, it would be
entitled to be unequivocally condemned by history, and would, perhaps,
be repealed by posterity. It was for these reasons that he should
propose no extreme measures against Irish members, believing as he did
that the cure for obstruction lay not in threats, not in hard words, but
in conciliatory legislation.
This speech attracted attention in various quarters. Mr. Parnell, who
spoke three days later in Paisley, alluded to it at some length and
declared that if the Government would pass certain measures dealing with
the questions mentioned, they would not be disturbed next session by
Irish obstruction. The _Morning Post_ expressed its displeasure in a
leading article. ‘This is the language of Mr. Parnell and his
colleagues, and it is the argument on which the Home Rule movement as
well as the Obstructionist movement is based.’ As to Lord Randolph’s
remarks about the Union--‘It is no exaggeration to say that neither Mr.
Parnell nor Mr. Butt could have used stronger language in support of
their respective lines of action. But it is not an Irish Rome [_sic_]
Ruler or an Irish Obstructive who has used it. It is the Conservative
representative of an English borough and the son of the Lord-Lieutenant
of Ireland.’ But it was Sir Michael Hicks-Beach who read Lord Randolph
with the greatest surprise. He lost no time in writing a remonstrance to
the Duke of Marlborough.
_The Duke of Marlborough to Sir Michael
Hicks-Beach._
Guisachan: September 25, 1877.
My dear Beach,--The only excuse I can find for Randolph is that he
must either be mad or have been singularly affected with local
champagne or claret. I can only say that the sentiments he has
indulged in are purely his own; and, more than this, I was as much
amazed as you in reading them, and had no conception that he
entertained such opinions. The conjuncture is most unfortunate and
ill-timed; but at the same time it must be remembered that though
my son, and occupying by leave P. Bernard’s house, he is not in any
way officially connected with me, and the assumption therefore that
he represented my opinions would be both unwarranted and unfair. I
quite appreciate your consideration in making no allusion to his
remarks, and perhaps, unless it should be absolutely required, the
less notice drawn to them the better. Should you, however, feel it
to be necessary to correct misapprehensions consequent on his
speech, I conceive you are perfectly entitled to do so. I can only
repeat that I am extremely annoyed at the folly of his utterance,
which I believe on reflection he will regret himself. Perhaps, if I
might suggest, a letter from yourself to him in your official
position and responsible for Irish business in Parliament might be
the best way of dealing with the occurrence.
Yours very sincerely,
MARLBOROUGH.
These chronicles do not record the explanations or rebukes which must
have followed; but Lord Randolph by no means withdrew or modified what
he had said, and is found writing a few days later to the _Morning Post_
in a most impenitent mood:--
Junior Carlton Club: September 22.
Sir,--In your article of this morning on my speech at Woodstock you
say: ‘But what is even more faulty in Lord Randolph Churchill’s
speech is the assertion, which he indirectly makes, that the Act of
Union had not been productive of those remedial measures which, as
he rightly contends, are the only justification of the means by
which it was passed.’ Owing to an omission in the report of my
remarks you have unintentionally misrepresented me. I said that the
Act of Union was intended to inaugurate, _and had inaugurated_, a
series of healing and remedial measures, and I intimated that
perseverance in a course of conciliatory legislation for Ireland
might be a sure cure for obstruction, and a still further defence
of the methods used to pass the Act of Union.
Again, you say I not only extenuated the conduct of the
obstructionists, but justified it. Nothing that I said at Woodstock
admits of this construction. I never even discussed the conduct of
the obstructionists; I merely discussed the remedies for
obstruction which had been proposed by many public men and by a
great portion of the English press. Surely you would not have said
that Liberal members, in advocating the Irish Land Act and the
Irish Church Act, were extenuating and justifying the Fenian
movement.
You remark, further, that what I called ‘unpalatable plain truths’
were certainly unpalatable, but were not true. Yet the
misgovernment of Ireland before the Act of Union, and the methods
used to pass that Act, are now matters of history. These were two
of my ‘plain truths’; and the third, that the great questions on
which Irish feeling is most deeply interested have been neglected
during the last four years, is in my opinion equally undeniable.
You accuse me of forgetting the Judicature Act, the improved
position of the National school teachers, the grant of 10,000_l._
towards the Irish fisheries. I do not for a moment forget them, but
would think it a mockery to say much of them to a people hungering
for moderate progressive reform, such as we have had in this
country, of their political, municipal, and educational
institutions.
It was because I hope that these questions may be settled by the
Conservative party, and not by the Liberal party or the Home Rule
party, that I made the remarks on which you have animadverted;
little dreaming, however, that the utterances of so obscure an
individual as myself, in the quiet rural locality of Woodstock,
would attract the attention of any portion of the Metropolitan
press. As, however, they have attracted your comments, I am
confident that you will, with your usual love of fair play, insert
this attempt of mine at explanation.
I remain, your obedient servant,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
As the differences between Butt and Parnell widened and developed into
the supremacy of the latter, Lord Randolph seems to have been more
amenable to his father’s influence; for in 1879 he voted _against_ a
resolution for the assimilation of Irish to English privileges, and
explained that, although the theoretic argument was overwhelming, the
immediate extension of the franchise in Ireland would destroy the
moderate and constitutional Home Rulers and secure the ascendency of the
more lawless and embittered classes.
During the winter of 1877 Lord Randolph devoted himself, with the
assistance of a young Dublin graduate, to the study of Irish
intermediate education. He took the question up deliberately, as the
first step in public life and a lesson in political work. He spared no
pains. He sounded every well of information. He consulted every shade of
Irish opinion. He questioned a host of Irish pedagogues and wrote to all
the headmasters of the English public schools. An evidence of his
activities is provided by a letter from him to the _Freeman’s Journal_,
published on the last day of the year, on the extinction of the Irish
diocesan schools. These had been set up by Queen Elizabeth under the Act
of 1570. They were ‘diocesan’ only because the diocese was a more
convenient division than a county and were not meant to be under Church
control. The masters were to be appointed by the Lord-Lieutenant and the
endowment was in the form of a charge on the property of the Church. But
the system had only been partially established and the Irish Church Act
of 1869 had, by a strange blunder, treated the schools as Church
property, and, as amended in 1872, it allowed the masters to compound
like incumbents, a proportion of the commutation money accruing to the
‘Church Surplus.’ Money had therefore actually been diverted from
education and Lord Randolph was intent on reclaiming an equivalent sum
for intermediate instruction.
[Sidenote: 1878 ÆT. 29]
But the main purpose of his labours was to draw up a pamphlet taking the
form of a letter to his friend Sir J. Bernard Burke, Ulster
King-at-Arms--who, it appears, had first interested him in this
question--and dealing completely with Irish intermediate education. This
letter was finished in the beginning of 1878, was published in Dublin,
and sold at 6_d._ It showed, on the evidence of various Royal
Commissions, that intermediate education in Ireland was positively
declining, yet that a system of intermediate education had existed since
the days of Elizabeth, in the shape of Royal Free Schools, the Diocesan
Grammar Schools, and the Erasmus Smith Schools, which only required
rearrangement and development. It proposed to extend the system of Royal
Free Schools and to provide more money out of the Church surplus. The
religious difficulty was to be surmounted by appointing lay Catholic
masters in Catholic districts and Protestant masters in Protestant
districts, with a conscience clause, control by local boards (chiefly
lay) and a scholarship system, so as to enable the religious minority in
any district to get education elsewhere. This plan, admirable in itself,
would probably have been found to underrate the religious difficulty and
especially the reluctance of the Roman Catholic Church, evinced in every
country, to tolerate education that it does not absolutely control.
Lord Randolph’s early efforts in the cause of Irish education were not
confined to Ireland or to pamphleteering. From the day when he took it
up to the close of his life, he never ceased his endeavours to promote
progress and reform and to satisfy real wants and aspirations in that
department. In the session of 1878, with a perseverance and persistence
which disgusted the Irish Tories, he brought forward a motion (June 4)
for a Select Committee of the House of Commons to inquire into the
condition and management of the endowed schools of Ireland, with
instructions to report ‘how far those endowments are at present
promoting, or are applicable to the promotion of, intermediate education
in that country, without distinction of class or religion.’ In support
of this he delivered a considerable speech, moderate and argumentative
in tone and crowded with figures and quotations, to prove the many
abuses and anomalies of the Irish education system and the urgent need
of co-ordination and reform.
He had induced Mr. Chamberlain, with whom he was already on friendly
terms, to second the motion; and the case unfolded in these two speeches
was sufficiently strong to impress the Government and the House. The
Irish Nationalists were profuse in their expressions of pleasure that
English members should display so keen an interest in an Irish question.
The O’Conor Don expressed his deep obligation and that of all the
members connected with Ireland, to Lord Randolph for the manner in which
he had introduced the motion. The Government, through its Chief
Secretary, Mr. Lowther (Sir Michael Hicks-Beach having by this time been
transferred to the Colonial Office), offered, in lieu of a select
Committee, a small Commission specially appointed to inquire into the
condition, management, and revenues of the schools; and this being
thought generally acceptable, the motion was withdrawn. The Commission
was duly appointed, Lord Rosse being Chairman and Mr. FitzGibbon and
Lord Randolph both among its members. It laboured zealously and Lord
Randolph travelled all over Ireland--north, west, and south--collecting
information and examining schools. In what manner its researches issued
ultimately, but not until 1885, in an Act of Parliament will presently
be related.
The session of 1878 was dominated by the Eastern Question. The Russian
armies were at the gates of Constantinople. The British fleet lay at
Besika Bay. The early months of the year were passed under the shadow of
imminent war. Resignations broke the Cabinet circle; patriotic choruses
resounded in the streets; the Reserves were called out, native Indian
troops were brought to Malta, and a vote of credit of six millions was
granted by the House of Commons. The course of British diplomacy and
action in Lord Beaconsfield’s hands was tortuous and dramatic.
Absolutely supreme in the Cabinet after Lord Derby’s withdrawal, the
Prime Minister led an enthusiastic party and a puzzled nation through
the Salisbury-Schouvaloff secret agreement and the Anglo-Turkish
Convention to the Congress of Berlin, to the acquisition of Cyprus, to
‘Peace with Honour’ and the Knightsbridge banquet. It is not my purpose
to comment on this or to compare it with that other note which now began
again to resound with ever-growing vehemence and intensity through the
land, until it broke in a storm of passionate appeal and triumphant
eloquence from Midlothian. Never in their life-long conflict were Mr.
Gladstone and his great antagonist so fiercely opposed. Their
differences cut down to the roots of thought. In policy, in principle,
in feeling, in aspiration, they clashed together at every point, large
or small, of political method or morality, and behind them all Britain
was divided into two furious camps. On both sides their colleagues in
Parliament faded into insignificance. On both sides their followers in
the country were whole-hearted in their allegiance. The Conservative
majorities in the House of Commons were tremendous and inflexible on
every issue. The great newspapers, the powers of fashion and clubland,
the pledged partisans in the constituencies, had never before found a
leader so much to their temper as Lord Beaconsfield. Outside Parliament,
with its baffled and divided Opposition and triumphant Ministry, the
Liberal electors hung upon Mr. Gladstone’s words as though he were, as
he often seemed, inspired. And while the imposing array of Toryism
marched proudly and confidently forward, enormous multitudes gathered
eagerly and not less confidently to encounter them.
It is perhaps only in these great stirrings of the national mind that a
man may discover to which of the main groupings of political opinion he
naturally belongs. In all this conflict Lord Randolph Churchill took no
public part. An occasional sarcasm used at some small function, an
unadvertised abstention from some important division, might have
revealed his personal inclinations. But he did nothing to attract public
notice and it is only from his private letters that we may learn how
decided were his sympathies and by what circumstances he was prevented
from action which might easily have altered his whole career.
Parliament met in January 1878, amid conditions of the keenest
excitement and of grave crisis, and the Government forthwith demanded
their vote of credit for six millions to make special naval and military
preparations. Having listened to Ministerial explanations Mr. Forster
moved a reasoned amendment amounting to a flat refusal.[6] After a
debate extending over a week, disturbed by the wildest reports from the
East, Mr. Forster was glad to withdraw his amendment, and, upon the
motion to go into Committee the Government, obtained a majority of more
than three to one (295 to 96).
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Sir Charles Dilke._
St. James’s Club, Piccadilly: February 7, 1878.
My dear Sir Charles Dilke,--As I suppose this debate will come to a
close with an enormous and disproportionate majority for the
Government, and as I think the Opposition have made their stand on
unfortunate ground, and that another fight might yet be fought with
far greater chances of commanding sympathy in the country, I want
to know whether, if an Address to the Crown, praying Her Majesty to
use her influence at the Conference in favour of the widest
possible freedom to Bulgaria, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Thessaly, and
Epirus, and in favour of totally and finally putting an end to
direct Turkish Government in these provinces, was moved by me from
the Tory side of the House, it would be supported by the Liberal
party. I think I could almost make sure of a strong Home Rule vote
on this. I think some Conservatives would support it. If Northcote
does not give some very clear information as to what is going to be
the policy of the Government, I think a motion of this sort should
be made on the Report. The real cry for the country is--not
sympathy with Russia, still less with Turkey, but complete freedom
for the Slav and Hellenic nationalities.
I am off to Ireland to-night. I don’t care enough for the
Government to vote for them.... I shall see Butt in Dublin and
shall sound him on what I have written to you. My address is
Phœnix Park, Dublin.
Yours truly,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
And the next day:--
The Castle, Dublin: February 8, 1878.
Many thanks for your two letters. As you say, while everything is
in such an uncertain state nothing can be done. The Government have
too great an advantage; but I think if we are led into taking any
decisive steps hostile to Russia a great effort should be made for
an authoritative declaration that the ultimate aim and object of
any move on our part is the complete freedom and independence of
the Slav nationality, as opposed to any reconstruction of the
Turkish Empire. This, I am sure, should be the line for the Liberal
party and not the ‘Peace-at-any-price’ cry, which it is evident the
country will not have. In this I shall be ready to co-operate
heartily as far as my poor efforts can be any good. It is just
possible that if any movement of this kind be made, it would be
better to originate it from the Conservative side of the House. I
regret to see so much excitement getting up among the masses. It is
dangerous material for Beaconsfield to work on. Will you think me
very foolish or visionary if I say I look for a Republican form of
government for Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Herzegovina as far more to be
preferred to setting up some Russian or German Prince as a puppet
under the name of a constitutional monarchy? Perhaps if these ideas
seem at all to your liking, and if you think they will command the
support of the Liberal party, you would advise me what would be the
most favourable moment for bringing them forward. I shall have some
conversation with Butt, and have great hope of securing a solid
Irish vote on any proposition which might seem to favour the
principle of self-government for nationalities.
A few days later, he telegraphed to Sir Charles Dilke:--
Careysville, Fermoy.
I shall be in London Monday morning. Am not ambitious of taking any
prominent part, unless it might contribute to the advantage of
ideas which we have in common, that a motion should be made from my
side of the House. I leave it absolutely to your judgment.
CHURCHILL.
On this, Sir Charles Dilke wrote to Lord Granville, who replied:--
18 Carlton House Terrace.
My dear Dilke,--Such a motion as Lord Randolph Churchill proposes,
supported by a certain number of Conservatives, might be well worth
consideration, but I doubt his getting any Conservative support,
and a contingent of Home Rulers would hardly justify us for making
another attack on Plevna just now, with the probable alternative of
a crushing defeat or withdrawal in the face of the enemy. I gather
that you are doubtful. What did Hartington think?
Yours sincerely,
GRANVILLE.
Meanwhile Lord Randolph wrote again:--
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Sir Charles Dilke._
February 15, 1878.
I have sent you a telegram which I think you will understand. I am
sure that my views, whatever they are worth, are in accordance with
your speech and Harcourt’s and Gladstone’s on the question of the
future policy of this country. I am convinced under the present
circumstances no motion should be unduly hastened on. There is lots
of time. If I were asked to move a resolution, my speech would be
an attack on Chaplin, Wolff, and the rest of the pro-Turkish party,
confidence in the Government, and an invitation to the Liberal
party to act as a whole. I feel I am awfully young to endeavour to
initiate such a motion; but I am so convinced of the soundness of
our view that I would risk a smash willingly to have that properly
brought forward. If only your party would agree as a whole to
support such a resolution moved from my side, the Government would
at the best have only a majority of 80 after 190; and that would be
a check. I shall see Butt before arriving in London and endeavour
to make him take up a position on this question. The Government
seem to be doing their level best to keep the peace, and perhaps
another debate would not be unwelcome to them.
Lord Hartington, however, agreed with Lord Granville that it would be
useless to attack again without assurance of substantial Conservative
support. Sir Charles Dilke accordingly pressed Lord Randolph as to who
might be expected to vote with him; but Lord Randolph could not be sure
even of one, though he hoped that Mr. Spencer Walpole, the ex-Home
Secretary, would do so. The question of balloting for a private
members’ night seems also to have been considered.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Sir Charles Dilke._
Castle Bernard, Bandon.
My dear Sir Charles,--I shall be over in London on the 26th
instant, and I think it will be time enough then to make my motion.
I should not like to make it unless it would command the support of
a large number of members. Such support could only come from your
side. I think the Conservative party are gone mad. Their speeches
are calculated to provoke war. As it is so uncertain whether we
shall go to war or a conference, I think I had better wait a little
as--though the motion should, I think, be made in any case--the
terms would vary very much according to either alternative.... I
know of no one but Forsyth whom I could ask to ballot for me. If it
commands much support, I should like to press it even to a
division. Cowen’s speech and the vociferous cheers of the
Conservative party evidently show that the idea of the integrity
and independence of the Turkish Empire is still predominant on our
side; and against that I would try to go a great way. I send a
sketch of the motion and I should of course be very glad if you
would second one of this nature.
Yours very truly,
Randolph S. Churchill.
_Draft of Motion._
That, in view of the extreme suffering so long undergone by the
Slav, Bulgarian, and Hellenic nationalities of Bosnia, Herzegovina,
Bulgaria, Thessaly, and Epirus, and considering that the Turkish
rule over these provinces has now been definitely put an end to,
the efforts of Her Majesty’s Government should in the opinion of
the House of Commons be principally directed towards the
establishment of complete freedom and independence for the
population of these provinces.
All this, however, remained unknown. The Conservative Administration
pursued their course, with the unbroken assent of their followers and
amid the acclamations of London Society, through a succession of
diplomatic sensations and Parliamentary triumphs, towards a vast
electoral disaster.
Devoted as he was to his party, Lord Randolph was by this time
thoroughly out of sympathy with them in their Irish and foreign policy.
The great Minister whose talk had fascinated him at Blenheim ten years
before inspired him no longer. He describes Lord Derby’s resignation as
‘a thunderclap.’ ‘I cannot,’ he writes to his father, ‘like the war
tactics. Calling out the Reserves is like throwing down the glove to
Russia, and I fear she will not hesitate to take it up.’ He was
irritated by the movement of Indian troops to Malta. His college friend,
Lord Rosebery--the partner of those early conversations--was now the
ardent supporter of Mr. Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign. A very little,
I think, at this time might have led Lord Randolph into open quarrel
with the Government. Indeed, it is not improbable, had he in fact moved
his resolution as he wished, that he would have been driven out of the
Conservative ranks altogether. When even Radicals and Liberals like
Cowen and Roebuck were proud and glad to swim with the stream, when
every man who stood against it, was liable to be called a ‘Russian’ or
even a traitor, a single Tory-Democrat must have been overwhelmed. Lord
Randolph no doubt realized this; for he must have felt that, unless he
could take striking and decisive action, it was useless taking any
action at all. But he seems to have looked for an occasion to strike at
the Government safely, and for a victim to appease his wrath. He found
the first in the County Government Bill and the second in Mr.
Sclater-Booth.
The rejection of this measure, which proposed to transfer county
government from Quarter Sessions to boards elected partly by the county
magistrates and partly by Boards of Guardians, was moved, upon its
coming into the Committee, by Mr. Rylands (March 7) from the Liberal
benches. Lord Randolph seconded the motion on totally different grounds
and in a different tone. Inspired by a strong hostility to the
Government, he made his attack from that quarter most dangerous to a
Conservative Minister. The Bill was contrary to Tory principles. The
Cabinet were not responsible for it. All their time had been taken up by
considering how they could possibly get the Fleet into the Dardanelles,
and now their whole time was taken up in considering how they could
possibly get the Fleet out of the Dardanelles. In these agitating
circumstances it would be highly unfair to hold them responsible for
‘the legislative freaks of a minor colleague.’
Wrath was concentrated on the President of the Local Government Board,
who would annihilate Quarter Sessions and descend in all the pomp of
Ministerial authority and ‘a double-barrelled name,’ so often associated
with mediocrity, upon some unfortunate and over-awed Board of
Guardians. A President of the Local Government Board might deal, if he
chose, with amendments to the Poor Law or with sanitary questions, or
with the salaries of inspectors of nuisances. He should not come down to
the House, with all the appearance of a great lawgiver, to reform
according to his own views and to improve in his little way the leading
features of the British Constitution. He urged the Conservative party
not to barter away the old institutions of the country for such
‘Brummagem trash.’ Lord Randolph professed himself utterly unable,
though he had ransacked the whole arsenal, to find words in which to
characterise the measure. In default he described it as ‘just the sort
of little dodge that would be proposed by a President of the Local
Government Board called upon to legislate on a great question;’ ‘another
of those futile attempts to make that impossible mixture of Radical
principles and Conservative precautions;’ and ‘to conciliate the masses
by the concession of principles dear to them, which concessions were
immediately nullified or modified by the details of the legislation.’
‘The Government think the populace will be deceived. They are themselves
the only dupes. “O infortunati nimium sua si mala norint.”’ ‘I have
raised,’ he concluded, ‘the last wail of the expiring Tory party. They
have undergone a good deal. They have swallowed an immense amount of
nastiness. They have had their banner dragged along many a muddy path.
It has been slopped in many a filthy puddle, until it is so altered that
nobody can possibly recognise it. I shall cry “No!” when this motion is
put from the Chair; and if I can only get any support--I care not whence
it comes or from what motive it is given--I should be prepared to offer
an opposition to this most Radical and democratic measure, this crowning
desertion of Tory principles, this supreme violation of political
honesty.’
Such language had not been heard in the House of Commons since Lord
Cranborne had fought the Franchise Bill, and, coming as it did from a
member who so seldom addressed the House, at a time when party
discipline was so good and the prestige of the Government so high, it
created quite a commotion. Mr. Chamberlain, in following, criticized the
Bill from the extreme Radical’s standpoint, but was markedly friendly in
his reference to Lord Randolph’s speech. By the time he had finished,
the surprise of the Ministerialists had subsided sufficiently to reveal
their wrath, and they protested at once against the attack. Mr. Chaplin,
whose political antagonism to Lord Randolph was fated to develop early,
retorted roughly that if such were his opinions he should ‘lose not a
moment in going over to the other side of the House’--advice which is
often given and sometimes accepted. The unfortunate Mr. Sclater-Booth
had hardly the spirit to reply. The Bill had passed its second reading
by a large majority. Its further progress was delayed by Nationalist
obstruction and Ministerial apathy. It was never again debated by the
House, and on July 15 was definitely dropped by the Government. The Duke
of Marlborough does not seem to have been very stern in his rebukes on
this occasion, and no doubt a large and influential section of the
Conservative party secretly rejoiced at the fate of the Bill. ‘I do not
think,’ wrote Lord Randolph to his father, ‘the Government is at all
ill-disposed towards me for my speech against them. I have found them
lately singularly civil. Nobody regrets the Bill, except Sclater-Booth,
who is unapproachable on the subject.’ Thus for the first time the House
of Commons had learned that this silent youth could bite.
[Sidenote: 1879 ÆT. 30]
[Illustration: _Member for Woodstock._]
For the rest of the Parliament Lord Randolph was mute. Scarcely a
mention of his name occurs in the ‘Debates.’ He was absent from many
important divisions. His relations and feelings towards the Government
seem somewhat to have improved as the Russian war crisis receded, and he
remained an impassive spectator of their doings in Afghanistan, in
Zululand, and the Transvaal. Meanwhile the reader may be reminded of the
swift passage of time and of the considerable period which this account
has already covered.
_To his Mother._
Ireland: April 15, 1879.
I write to wish you very many happy returns of your birthday
to-morrow, which is also, as perhaps you may remember, our
wedding-day; and having been married five years I begin to feel
highly respectable.
This weather is certainly very wintry and does not seem to lend
itself to anything congenial, while anything more odious or
unfortunate for fishing cannot be well imagined. I fished for two
days in the Suir and never moved a fish, nor did anyone else.
However, I have added another Irish county (Tipperary) to my
peregrinations in this island.
This is now the fifth birthday you have spent in Ireland and I am
sure it must be satisfactory to you to look back on the years you
have spent there. I do not think you can recollect a _contretemps_
or a cross; and I am sure, if I may say so, no one deserves a
pleasanter retrospect: and believe me, I sincerely hope next 15th
of April will find you as happy and untroubled as I hope you will
be to-morrow.
The wet summer of 1879 produced something like a ‘food and fuel famine’
in the South and West of Ireland. The potatoes failed, grain would not
ripen, and the turf could not be dried. The Government met the danger by
offering the landlords loans on easier terms than those recognised by
law, and cautioned the Irish Poor Law authorities to be ready to
administer additional relief. But official aid was wholly insufficient
without private charity and in these straits, the Duchess of Marlborough
came forward and appealed to the public. She was a woman of exceptional
capacity, energy, and decision, and she laboured earnestly and
ceaselessly to collect and administer a great fund. Its purposes were to
supply food, fuel, and clothing, especially for the aged and weak; to
provide small sums to keep the families of able-bodied men in temporary
distress out of the workhouse; and thirdly, while carefully guarding
against any kind of proselytism, to give grants to schools, so as to
secure free meals of bread and potatoes and, if possible, a little
clothing for the children attending them. The plan unfolded in her
letters to the _Times_ was welcomed not only by the Irish Conservative
press, but by the _Freeman’s Journal_, which then supported Mr. Butt’s
policy and which bore handsome testimony to the efforts made by the
Viceregal family to become acquainted with the Irish people, and to
their great popularity even in the disturbed district near
Portarlington, which was their country seat. The ultra-Nationalist
papers were less kindly, but the fund was warmly supported and grew
apace. The Queen sent 500_l._ and the Prince of Wales 250_l._ By the end
of the year 8,300_l._ had been subscribed; by March the receipts were
88,000_l._; and, before the Viceroy left Ireland (April 21) on the
change of Ministry, the fund was 117,000_l._ Although many subscriptions
were diverted to a separate fund raised by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, the
Duchess of Marlborough’s fund ultimately reached 135,000_l._ Its
administration was entirely free from sectarian or party influence,
Roman Catholics and Protestants being equally represented on the
Committee. Upwards of 80,000_l._ was distributed in relief to the local
committees, 37,000_l._ expended in seed, and 10,000_l._ upon clothing.
The working expenses were under 1,700_l._ In all this Lord Randolph bore
an active part. His whole time was given up to the work of organisation
and distribution and before he left Ireland in the spring of 1880 he had
visited nearly every Irish county and had come into intimate contact
with every class in Irish life. His knowledge of Ireland was soon to be
of service to him.
[Sidenote: 1880 ÆT. 31]
The Government of Lord Beaconsfield approached the election of 1880 with
some inward misgivings. Their party was united and contented. The
_Times_ declared that Mr. Gladstone’s language was extravagant and out
of proportion to any feeling that might exist in the country. The
by-elections were not especially unfavourable to Ministers. But
nevertheless there were causes for anxiety. The lustre had gradually
faded from the ‘spirited foreign policy’ and from the Imperialism of
Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Lytton. Taxation had been increased; deficits
had taken the place of surpluses; no legislative achievements could be
discovered. In India and South Africa useless bloodshed, clotted by
disaster, seemed to be the outcome of British activities. The policy of
the Government in the Near East was stridently asserted by its opponents
to be a failure, if not a fraud. Trade depression, as a reaction from
the ‘boom’ after the Franco-German war, was continuous. Revival was
delayed by the uncertainty of the European situation. Economic weakness
followed diplomatic strength and military exertion. There had been
serious strikes in 1878, and the winter of 1878-9 was marked by acute
distress. The elements of Nature were adverse. Agriculture was vexed
with wet summers and bad harvests and low prices. All Ireland was dark
with gathering storm. There was, no doubt, sufficient reason for
apprehension; but no one foresaw the extent of impending defeat.
‘Lord Beaconsfield,’ wrote Lord Randolph Churchill in 1883,[7] ‘was very
old and very worn when he got to the top of the tree, and he was but
indifferently served by some of his colleagues. Advancing years, an
enfeebled constitution, a singularly exhausting and painful form of
disease, had compelled him to give way to a disposition naturally
indolent and unsuited to the constant mastery of dry administrative
detail. He must often have thought that he had done nearly enough; that
he might with justice allow himself to seek in the distractions of
London society a pleasure and a repose to which, during most of his
life, he had been a stranger. Only the most captious mind could blame
him for this; but this it was, nevertheless, which greatly conduced to
the downfall of his Government. What time he gave to public affairs was
absorbed in studying, with the assistance of the Foreign Secretary, the
various phases of the Eastern complication. All else was neglected.
Finance was left entirely to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in whose
unaided hands deficits and floating debts grew apace. The other heads of
departments were all allowed to go their own way, doing what seemed good
in their eyes. There was no master mind pervading and controlling every
branch of the Administration. Election affairs and organisation went to
the dogs. The care, the experience, the personal supervision which Mr.
Disraeli, assisted by a few practised hands, had bestowed upon the
preparations for the General Election of 1874 disappeared. A weak but
wide-spreading centralisation enervated the vigour of the provincial
organisation. A stupefying degree of over-confidence, a foolish contempt
for the adversary, a fatally erroneous estimate of the revived
influence of Mr. Gladstone--these causes, and these alone, all of them
preventable, slowly but surely worked the ruin.
On March 8, 1880, Sir Stafford Northcote announced to the House of
Commons its approaching dissolution. The next morning there appeared in
the papers Lord Beaconsfield’s letter to the Duke of Marlborough,
assigning to Ireland the foremost place among the perils and
embarrassments of British dominion. The memorable and prophetic words of
this celebrated document, familiar though they be, require to be
recorded here:--
‘Nevertheless, a danger, in its ultimate results scarcely less
disastrous than pestilence and famine, and which now engages your
Excellency’s anxious attention, distracts that country. A portion of its
population is attempting to sever the constitutional tie which unites it
to Great Britain in that bond which has favoured the power and
prosperity of both. It is to be hoped that all men of light and leading
will resist this destructive doctrine. The strength of this nation
depends on the unity of feeling which should pervade the United Kingdom
and its widespread Dependencies. The first duty of an English Minister
should be to consolidate that co-operation which renders irresistible a
community educated, as our own, in an equal love of liberty and law.
‘And yet there are some who challenge the expediency of the Imperial
character of this realm. Having attempted, and failed, to enfeeble our
Colonies by their policy of decomposition, they may perhaps now
recognise in the disintegration of the United Kingdom a mode which will
not only accomplish, but precipitate, their purpose.
‘The immediate dissolution of Parliament will afford an opportunity to
the nation to decide upon a course which will materially influence its
future fortunes and shape its destiny.’
Members of Parliament were forthwith scattered to defend their seats and
above the tumult and babel which arose from so many contests little was
heard except the reverberating thunders of Midlothian. Lord Randolph
hurried back to Woodstock and arrived, as we may judge from the account
he gave his mother, none too soon. The Blenheim estates had suffered
from the absence of their owner and those dependent upon them felt
acutely the diversion to Ireland and Irish purposes of that personal
sympathy and care without which the administration of landed property
becomes so often at once wasteful and harsh.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to his Mother._
Blenheim: March 21, 1880.
I have to thank you very much for your many letters, which have
been so welcome to me. I have now been round the constituency and
seen everybody, except a few people in Woodstock whom I have not
yet seen, and a few in other parts who were not at home when I
called. I shall take them all up this week, but the work will be
easier now, and I shall have some time for writing to you.
I assure you it has been hard work, and I have not spared time or
trouble; every day this last week I was out by nine and not home
till eleven at night. The results of the canvass will be arrived at
to-morrow when the Chairmen of the various Committees hand in their
reports, but I have no doubt the result will be satisfactory to
you. Every day, however, confirms what I wrote last week; the
continual expression of the labourer in Stonesfield, Coombe,
Handborough, and Bladon is, ‘Yes, I voted for you last time, but I
have been very badly served since,’ and then follows half an hour’s
complaint. The other Party admit that they would never have tried
again, had it not been for these complaints of the labouring men
and the great scarcity of employment.
I know well how difficult, almost impossible, it is to please poor
people. Nor do I blame your agent for not doing all they ask or for
not finding employment for them; that no doubt was out of his
power. What I do blame him for, and what I am sure my father and
you will blame him for, is for having provoked against himself a
great deal of ill-will, and having treated these poor people, and
farmers, with rudeness and worse than rudeness, and this, too,
during your absence, and at a time when the greatest discretion and
temper were wanted for the management of a great estate.
You cannot think how people are looking forward to your return
here; they feel quite jealous of all you are doing and have done in
Ireland. You have made for yourself a great name among the Radical
working men, several of them have spoken to me about you. Several
of them who perhaps would have gone for Hall will vote for me, or
rather for you; but at the same time I feel as I never felt before
how greatly this place and all the neighbourhood depends upon your
care and my father’s attention.
I have a public meeting, probably the last, to-morrow night in
Kidlington. The election will be on April 2, but much work is
needed for the proper preparation and organisation for polling day,
so that the Liberals may this time get their ‘quietus.’
I hope you liked my speech at Woodstock. I was prepared for a row,
but though I had no one with me to help, and although the other
Party was there in great force, helped by a preacher and stump
orator, they heard me with the greatest patience for forty minutes.
The preacher asked some questions and made some remarks, but I am
told that what I said on the Foreign Policy and Home Questions
pleased them much, and that I was considered to have had the best
of the preacher.
I feel so sorry for all this expense coming on at such a time, but
I hope things are going to mend this year. The weather has been
perfect--fine, bright, cold days, worth pounds to the farmers, who
are cleaning their fields with great activity and advantage. A good
harvest this year will do much to set things going; but the serious
part of the matter is that the farmers are so much worse off in
point of capital, and in addition the land is four years to the
bad, suffering from weeds and reduced manure. I fear that even with
good harvests the future is full of difficulties to the landlords.
The outlook here at the outset was very alarming, but it is
clearing rapidly. I think I must attend more regularly this
session. Hall hit me rather hard on account of my slack attendance.
I think the Party will keep a fair majority, but they cannot expect
to have quite so many as they had nor do I think it would be a good
thing. I am afraid you will think I have become rather Jingo, but
any lukewarmness at such a moment would be most dangerous.
The election at Woodstock took place on the second day of the polling
(April 1), and Lord Randolph Churchill was returned--in a total
electorate of 1,060--by 512 votes to the Liberal candidate’s (Mr. W.
Hall, of Lancing, Sussex) 452. Thus Woodstock was snatched from the
burning; but throughout the kingdom general disaster overwhelmed the
Conservatives. In the first four days the Conservative majority had been
destroyed by their losses in the boroughs. The counties endorsed and
even emphasised the decision. When the returns were complete, Mr.
Gladstone had obtained a Liberal majority of 54 over all other sections
in the House. The dissolved Parliament had numbered 351 Conservatives,
250 Liberals, and 51 Home Rulers. The new Parliament assembled with 353
Liberals, 237 Conservatives, and 62 Home Rulers.
In two chapters two-thirds of Lord Randolph’s life have been described.
Starting with many advantages, he was still at thirty-one obscure. Four
or five speeches in as many years had made no particular impression, and
the House of Commons had scarcely formed an opinion about him. Stirred
on the one hand by liberal and pacific sentiments and restrained on the
other by affection for the Conservative party, to which he was bound by
so many ties of friendship and tradition and above all by respect for
his father, he was prevented during those years from taking any clear or
decided action which might have enlisted sympathy or commanded
attention. Out-of-doors among the people he was unknown. Adverse social
influences denied the recognition of such ability as he had shown. His
party was now humbled in the dust. His own family borough lay under the
shadow of an approaching Reform Bill. New Ministers and new measures
occupied the public mind. Grave and violent dangers beset the State and
no one troubled to think about an undistinguished sprig of the nobility.
Nevertheless his hour had come.
CHAPTER III
THE FOURTH PARTY
His birth, it seems, by Merlin’s calculation,
Was under Venus, Mercury, and Mars;
His mind with all their attributes was mixt;
And, like those planets, wandering and unfixt....
His schemes of war were sudden, unforeseen,
Inexplicable both to friend and foe;
It seemed as if some momentary spleen
Inspired the project and impelled the blow.
HOOKHAM FRERE, _The Monks and the Giants_.
Great expectations were entertained of the Parliament of 1880 by the
Liberal members who assembled at Westminster after the election. Indeed,
the position of their party was one of immense strength and advantage.
The Government enjoyed the support of a majority in the House of Commons
who outnumbered the Conservatives and the Irish combined by more than 50
votes and amounted for practical purposes to between 100 and 130. In the
House of Lords they could count upon the wealth and talents of the great
Whig houses, the influence of the Cavendishes and the Russells, the
experience of Lord Granville, and the eloquence of the Duke of Argyll.
They were led by the finest Parliamentarian of this or any other age,
whose incomparable powers had won him an almost superstitious
veneration; and around him were gathered a band of men of distinguished
ability, well known to the country, practised in public affairs and
yielding ready subordination to the genius of their chief. Upon the
Treasury Bench were seated statesmen like Mr. Bright, Mr. Forster, and
Lord Hartington. Sir Charles Dilke and Mr. Chamberlain represented the
growing Radicalism and the future hope of their party. And when the view
was extended from the walls of Parliament to the larger arena of the
electorate no less powerful resources were displayed. The tendency of
the day was strongly progressive. The ability and authority of the
Press--whether Metropolitan, provincial, or local--were ranged in
overwhelming preponderance upon the Liberal side. Scotland and London,
almost all the great cities, nearly every centre of active political
thought--Edinburgh, Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford,
Sheffield, Bristol--sent their representatives in vast majority to
uphold the new Administration; and a Reform Bill promised an almost
equal advantage in the counties. Many active and vigilant societies and
a multitude of political clubs stimulated the energies of the rank and
file; and the whole was bound together and directed to a common end by a
formidable and opulent organisation.
The position of the Conservative party, upon the other hand, was weak
and miserable in the extreme. The sympathies and the intellect of the
nation were estranged. Lord Beaconsfield, the only man who could touch
the imagination of the people, was withdrawn from the popular assembly.
Many of the Tory strongholds--family boroughs and the like--were
threatened by approaching Redistribution. The Front Opposition Bench,
cumbered with the ancient and dreary wreckage of the late
Administration, was utterly unequal to the Government in eloquence or
authority. The attendance of Conservative members, as in all dispirited
Oppositions, was slack and fitful.
Outmatched in debate, outnumbered in division, the party was pervaded by
a profound feeling of gloom. They had nothing to give to their
followers, nothing to promise to the people: no Garters for Dukes, no
peerages for wealth, no baronetcies or knighthoods or trinkets for
stalwarts. Although the new spirit created by Disraeli--_Imperium_
abroad, _Libertas_ at home--still lived in the Tory party, it had been
profoundly discouraged by the results of the election; and many of those
who swayed Conservative counsels could think of no plan of action except
an obstinate but apathetic resistance to change. Jeered at as ‘the
stupid party,’ haunted by profound distrust of an ever-growing
democracy, conscious that the march of ideas was leaving them behind,
these desponding counsellors could discern in the future no sign of
returning fortune and seemed to find the sole function of the
Conservative minority in delaying and restricting the movements of the
age by means of electoral inequalities, by Parliamentary procedure, and
through the prejudices of interest and of class.
What political prophet or philosopher, surveying the triumphant Liberal
array, would have predicted that this Parliament, from which so much was
hoped, would be indeed the most disastrous and even fatal period in
their party history? Or who could have foreseen that these dejected
Conservatives in scarcely five years, with the growing assent of an
immense electorate, would advance to the enjoyment of twenty years of
power? It needed a penetrating eye to discover the method, and a bold
heart first to stem and finally to turn the tide. Who would have thought
of breaking up the solid phalanx of Liberalism by driving in a wedge
between the Radicals and the Whigs; or dreamt of using the Irish to
overthrow the great apostle of reconciliation between peoples; and who
without the audacity of genius would have dared to force the
Conservative party to base the foundations of their authority with
confidence upon the very masses they dreaded and to teach those masses
to venerate and guard the institutions they had formerly despised?
The Liberal majority, who had arrived at Westminster in such excellent
spirits after their victory at the polls, were enabled quite early in
the session to take part in a Government defeat. The electors of
Northampton, which was in those days reputed the most Radical town in
England, had returned Mr. Bradlaugh as one of their representatives.
Charles Bradlaugh came to the House of Commons by strange paths of
thought and action. Forty-seven years before he had been born in a
religious family, the son of a very poor solicitor’s clerk. For a time
he was a teacher in an Evangelical Sunday-school; but he began to ask
many questions about his faith and its foundations, which appear to have
been indifferently answered by a clergyman to whom he applied. Later he
was a Chartist, and spoke often at open-air meetings, at first on the
Christian side; but after a public disputation with an anti-Christian
opponent he became a declared atheist and found shelter for a while in
an anti-Christian family. Harassed by poverty he enlisted in the East
India Company’s army, was exchanged into the British Service, served
with credit several years in the 7th Dragoon Guards, and bought his
discharge with a legacy that had come to him from an aunt. Next he was
an office-boy to a solicitor, whence he rose soon to manage the common
law department of the firm. These harsh and varied experiences had
inflamed his mind against many established institutions, human and
divine. As a bold and effective platform speaker, or under the pseudonym
of ‘Iconoclast,’ he was accustomed to set forth what occurred to him
against Christianity, the Bible, and the House of Brunswick, to the
severe displeasure of the more prosperous or more contented classes in
the nation. In the year 1877 he intruded upon still more dangerous
ground and made himself responsible for the republication of a pamphlet
about over-population, its evils and its remedies and other Malthusian
topics, which, being among the most tremendous of natural problems, have
long been judged unfit for public discussion. The pamphlet is said to
have attained a sale of 180,000 copies, and the publisher was sentenced
to six months’ imprisonment, from which he only escaped through the
timely discovery of some legal flaw. Mr. Bradlaugh’s struggles against
authority, penury, and obloquy were now to be transferred to a more
brightly-lighted stage.
On May 3, 1880, Charles Bradlaugh presented himself at the table of the
House of Commons and claimed to affirm instead of taking the oath. The
Speaker, whom he had acquainted with his intention some days earlier,
decided on his own responsibility to leave the question to the decision
of the House, and Lord Frederick Cavendish, representing the Government
in the absence of Ministers--whose seats had been vacated by taking
office--moved accordingly for a Select Committee of Inquiry. Sir
Stafford Northcote, the Leader of the Opposition, being as it appears
personally willing to substitute an affirmation for the oath, seconded
the motion. When the House met again (May 5) Sir Henry Wolff gave notice
that he would oppose the reference to a committee; and when it was
nominated he moved (May 11) ‘the previous question,’ on the ground that
to proceed to general business before the Queen’s Speech had announced
to members the reasons for which Parliament was summoned would be to
invade the Royal Prerogative. He was supported by Mr. Gorst, the member
for Chatham. A debate ensued, in the course of which some prominent
Conservatives deprecated Sir Henry Wolff’s motion, and several of the
Conservative leaders abstained from the division in which it was
defeated by 171 to 74. But the question had already begun to excite
attention. The delay was fatal to its settlement. If Mr. Bradlaugh had
been content to take the oath unostentatiously among a crowd of members
at the beginning of the session, it is almost certain that no question
would have been raised. He chose instead in the most public manner to
cast down a challenge. It was eagerly accepted. From the caprice that
prompted one private member to stir a smouldering fire and the chance
interposition of another who happened to observe him arose a protracted
and ferocious controversy, which, in Mr. Morley’s words, ‘went on as
long as the Parliament, clouded the radiance of the party triumph, threw
the new Government at once into a minority and dimmed the ascendency of
the great Minister.’
By a majority of one the committee decided against Mr. Bradlaugh’s claim
to affirm. He thereupon wrote to the newspapers that he considered it
his duty to accept the mandate of his constituents and that if to do so
he had to submit to a form less solemn than the affirmation, so much the
worse for those who forced him to repeat words which were to him sounds
conveying no clear and definite meaning. Having by this, as he no doubt
supposed, settled the matter to the extreme discomfiture of his
opponents, he repaired to the House on May 21--the third day of its
meeting for regular business--resolved to take the oath in the usual
form. But in the meantime Sir Henry Wolff had not been idle. With the
assistance of Mr. Grantham--now one of His Majesty’s Judges--he had
studied the legal aspect of the question and had drafted a resolution.
He had consulted with his friends and in particular with the young
member for Woodstock, with whom he had struck up a friendly acquaintance
in the last Parliament and of whose talents he had formed a high
opinion. Mr. Bradlaugh’s letter had, moreover, produced an astonishing
effect. The House--almost irrespective of party--was profoundly offended
and even outraged by his words and by the action he intended. Anger
flamed in the Lobbies. Ministers were justly apprehensive of the
difficulties that might arise if the question of Mr. Bradlaugh’s right
to take the oath was held to be one for the determination of the House.
They held a council in the Speaker’s Library, and proposed to meet the
hostile motion, which was now certain when Mr. Bradlaugh should present
himself, by moving ‘the previous question.’ But the Whips reported that
the feeling in the House was ‘uncontrollable.’ The Liberal majority
could not be relied on to support ‘the previous question’ and the Prime
Minister was forced to content himself with proposing a new committee to
search for precedents.
When the hour came, Mr. Bradlaugh advanced to the table to take the
oath. Thereupon Sir Henry Wolff sprang up and objected to its being
administered to him. Mr. Dillwyn, a Liberal member, intervened,
submitting that it was out of order to question the right of any member
to take the oath; but the Speaker, adhering to the intention he had
expressed in private, ruled--although in very doubting language--in
favour of Sir Henry Wolff. The Speaker directed the member for
Northampton to withdraw while Sir Henry Wolff explained his reasons.
These were, in short, that Mr. Bradlaugh’s declared opinions upon
religion and Royalty necessarily rendered any oath of allegiance that he
might take meaningless in form and valueless in fact.
The Prime Minister made an effort to narrow the issue to the simple
judicial question of whether a duly elected member could be prevented by
the House from fulfilling his statutory obligations and he proposed his
Select Committee. The debate which followed was long, serious, and
savage. Two views, both held with intensity, prevailed about the man:
first, that he was a blatant contumacious atheist who made a living by
blasphemy, republicanism, and indecent literature, and sought in
Parliamentary honours a fresh advertisement for his hateful trade; and,
secondly, that he was a martyr gone wrong, whose zeal and
convictions--honest, albeit pernicious--had caused him to suffer in
private prospects and public life. The unfavourable view predominated in
the House and was adopted with vehemence by the Conservative party.
There was a third view--that the House of Commons was no judge of such
matters, that it had received no evidence but common report, and even so
had no business to exclude members because of their opinions. But such
arguments, although urged by orators like Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright,
found little acceptance. Extracts were read from ‘The Impeachment of the
House of Brunswick’ and ‘The Fruits of Philosophy.’ Mr. Bradlaugh’s
declaration that an oath was to him an idle and meaningless ceremony was
repeated over and over again. Was the House to connive at an act of
blasphemy? Mr. Gibson from the Front Opposition Bench, taking the Bible
in his hands from the table on which it lay, read out impressively the
solemn words which were to be mockingly invoked. Mr. F. H. O’Donnell, a
militant Irish Catholic, spoke in unmeasured abhorrence of the Bradlaugh
doctrines, which he said would degrade human love and human wedlock to
something lower than union of beast with beast. The speech of Mr. Walter
of the Times, which, although favouring the appointment of a Select
Committee, declared that Mr. Bradlaugh could not be permitted to go
through the form of taking the oath, was regarded as representing an
important element of moderate Liberal opinion.
Partisanship was not slow to perceive its opportunity. Sir Stafford
Northcote and the whole Conservative party made haste to support Sir
Henry Wolff. Opposition speakers sought to identify the Liberal party
and Mr. Gladstone himself with the member for Northampton. He had been
their candidate, he was now their comrade. The division, according to
one gentleman, would be between those who were on the side of atheism,
disloyalty, and immorality and those who were not. Amid such fury many
very wise and worthy exhortations to preserve a judicial spirit were
overwhelmed. Lord Randolph Churchill resumed the debate on May 24. For
the first time he addressed a crowded House and was supported by the
cheers of a great party. There was in his character a strong element of
religious feeling. He spoke with a kind of half-restrained passion which
commanded attention. He opposed the appointment of a committee. The
matter was simple. Let it be decided by what Lord Beaconsfield had
called ‘the unerring instinct of the House of Commons.’ Like others who
had spoken, he quoted from the Bradlaugh writings. He stood at the
corner seat of the third bench below the gangway and when he had
finished reading the extract beginning ‘I loathe these small German
breast-bestarred wanderers,’ he cast ‘The Impeachment of the House of
Brunswick’ upon the floor and stamped upon it, to the surprise of the
assembly. Although this was his first entry into the dispute, he seems
at once to have been accepted as a principal. Henceforward, upon the
Bradlaugh question, he took his natural place as a leader and before two
years had passed he was credited by the public with having begun the
whole controversy.
Sir Henry Wolff’s motion was rejected in favour of the Ministerial
amendment proposing a committee by 214-289. There was another dispute on
May 28 over the names of the committee, Lord Randolph being ironically
or mischievously anxious that Nonconformists should be more numerous on
it. Mr. Gladstone, in reply, concerned himself almost entirely with the
arguments of Lord Randolph and Sir Henry Wolff. The committee was
appointed. Its search for precedents was barren. It reported that Mr.
Bradlaugh could not take the oath, but recommended that he should be
allowed to affirm at his own risk, in order that the matter might be
settled in the Courts. The Government accepted the view of the
committee. On June 21, therefore, Mr. Labouchere moved that his
colleague be permitted to affirm. Sir Hardinge Giffard, in the name of
the Conservative party, met this by an amendment which declared that Mr.
Bradlaugh should not be permitted either to affirm or swear. After two
days’ debate (June 21 and 22) the first great division of the new
Parliament was taken. Mr. Labouchere’s motion, although supported by the
whole Ministry, was rejected by 275 votes to 230 and Sir Hardinge
Giffard’s amendment was adopted in its stead. In the clamorous
excitement which followed the declaration of the numbers some have
discovered the joy of the Tory party at their first revenge for
Midlothian.
The account of this episode need not be pursued in detail. How Mr.
Bradlaugh presented himself the next day and claimed to swear; how the
Prime Minister, his solution having been rejected, refused his guidance
to the House; how the Speaker called upon Mr. Bradlaugh to withdraw; how
he resisted; how he was heard at the Bar; how he was expelled; how he
was committed to the Clock Tower upon the motion of the Leader of the
Opposition; how action was taken against him in the Courts for sitting
and voting without statutory qualification, are upon record. How he was
unseated and re-elected, and in what manner he finally took the oath,
must presently be described. The Bradlaugh case was inexhaustible in
scenes and sensations. It recurred almost month after month throughout
the Parliament, and whenever it occupied the stage the Government was
powerless; the leadership of the House was abandoned by its first and
greatest member; the overwhelming majority of the Midlothian campaign
became divided and untrustworthy. The credit of the Ministry was injured
in Parliament and in the country the Liberal party and its leaders were,
not unsuccessfully, represented as the champions of Bradlaugh and his
abominated doctrines.
The Fourth Party grew out of the Bradlaugh incident. To Wolff belonged
the merit of discovery. The others in coming to his aid had learned the
value of co-operation. They had seized an opportunity while regular
leaders hesitated. They had helped each other to use it with
determination. The whole party had in the end been glad to follow their
lead and great and admitted advantage had ensued. They resolved
forthwith to make permanent that comradeship which had proved so happy
on occasion. Three of them already sat on the Front Bench below the
gangway, and during the early days of the session Lord Randolph
abandoned his perch on the back benches and came forward to sit with
them. An old and respected member of the Conservative party had been
accustomed to sit in the corner seat. In a few weeks he departed to
serener quarters, saying to Sir Henry Wolff, ‘This is getting too hot
for me’; and Lord Randolph thenceforward was regarded as the rightful
owner of that coveted place. The compact which bound the ‘Fourth Party,’
as they were soon called by general consent, was simple and elastic. No
questions of policy or leadership arose. Each was free to act in perfect
independence; but it was agreed that, whenever one of them was attacked,
the others should defend him. Upon these conditions was created a
Parliamentary group which proved, in proportion to its numbers, the most
formidable and effective force for the purposes of Opposition in the
history of the House of Commons.
The four men who had thus come together were, each in his own way,
remarkable. The first mention of Sir Henry Wolff in Lord Randolph’s
letters occurs in 1879. ‘I am dining to-night at the Garrick with Sir
Henry Wolff and a large party of M.P.’s.’ Then again, a few months
later, ‘Wolff and I are going to London together in order that the
questions of the leadership of the party may be complicated by our
presence.’ When the Parliament of 1880 assembled they seem to have
become already fairly intimate friends. Sir Henry Wolff, the son of a
distinguished traveller and scholar whose name in the early ‘forties was
respected in many countries outside his own, had entered Parliament as
member for Christchurch in 1874, and had already, by his knowledge of
foreign affairs and diplomatic methods, gained a reputation in the
House of Commons. He was now member for Portsmouth. He was fifteen years
older than Lord Randolph and possessed a large and varied fund of
experience and information. Shrewd, suave, witty, and imperturbable,
versed in Parliamentary procedure, fertile in schemes, clever at
managing people, a master of smoothly-turned sentences and plausible
debating points, a ready speaker, an industrious politician, old enough
to compel respectful treatment from the House, young enough to love
fighting and manœuvres for their own sake, Sir Henry Wolff was, at
the beginning of 1880, just the kind of man to make a Ministry
uncomfortable. If he contributed notably to the strength of the Fourth
Party in public, he added still more to the gaiety of its secret
councils. He rallied generously to the chaff in which Lord Randolph
always delighted, and the comradeship which grew between them was
abiding. No cloud darkened, no conflict of interests or opinions
disturbed it. Of the intimate relations between these four allies, the
friendship of Lord Randolph and Sir Henry Wolff was the only one to
survive unimpaired the vicissitudes of political life.
Mr. Gorst possessed temper and talents of a different kind. His mood was
serious, his ability distinguished, his industry enormous. His career in
the past had been more noteworthy than that of any of his companions. He
was a rapidly rising lawyer. He had sat in Parliament as early as 1866.
He had been entrusted with the reorganisation of the Conservative party
machinery after the defeat of 1868, and Mr. Disraeli always regarded the
victory of 1874 as largely due to his arrangements, and treated him with
special favour and confidence. He probably knew more about politics,
public and secret, than all his three colleagues together, and his
knowledge of law proved on repeated occasions of inestimable value to
the rest. In conjunction with Lord Randolph Churchill his abilities
became doubly effective. A few years later Sir Henry James publicly
complained, in a Standing Committee, of such an alliance. It was, he
said, a poacher’s combination--a pointer to find game and a greyhound to
run it down.
The career of the remaining member of the Fourth Party is not yet
complete. Mr. Arthur Balfour in 1880 was an affable and rather idle
young gentleman, who had delicately toyed with philosophy and diplomacy,
was earnest in the cause of popular concerts, and brought to the House
of Commons something of Lord Melbourne’s air of languid and well-bred
indifference. How he came at all to be drawn into that circle of fierce
energy which radiated from Lord Randolph Churchill was a puzzle to those
who knew him best. In the early days of the Fourth Party no
one--certainly not his comrades--regarded him as a serious politician.
Lord Randolph, who delighted in nicknames, used to call him
‘Postlethwaite,’ and made him the object of much harmless and friendly
chaff. In private life he already exercised that personal charm and
fascination which in later years were curiously to deflect the course of
great events. But he seemed so lacking in energy, so entirely devoid of
anything like ambition, so slenderly and uncertainly attached to
politics at all, that his friends feared he would withdraw altogether,
and none recognised or imagined in this amiable, easy-going member for a
family borough the calculating, tenacious, and unwearying Minister who
was destined through so many years to control the House of Commons and
shape the policy of the State.
The Employers’ Liability Bill afforded the new confederacy a wide and
fertile field for their exertions. The law, as it had been formed by
judicial decisions, was, according to modern ideas, strangely harsh upon
the workman. The employer was liable for any injury done to third
parties by the negligence of his servants but not for injuries done by
one servant to another. If, for instance, there occurred at his mills an
explosion which killed and wounded both outsiders and his own workmen,
the employer might be sued for damages in respect of person or property
by the outsiders or their representatives, but injured fellow-workmen
had no legal claim because they were in what was called ‘common
employment.’ Complaint against this anomaly had been loud and long. Two
extreme remedies were proposed by the respective interests. On the one
hand, the employers desired to be free from all liability for injuries
done, except by themselves personally; on the other, the workmen
demanded the abolition of the doctrine of ‘common employment’ and an
assertion of the consequent liability of the employer to all alike. A
Bill had been introduced in the preceding Parliament by Mr. Brassey, a
private member, which proposed a middle course. It sought to extend the
liability of the employer by nullifying the plea of ‘common employment’
whenever the injury was caused by a defect in the machinery, by the
negligence of an authorised superintendent, or as the result of
obedience to the employer’s rules or bye-laws. When the new Ministers
assumed office the session was already advanced; and under a hasty
necessity for providing a certain legislative pabulum for the activities
of Parliament, the Government adopted, with very scanty examination, Mr.
Brassey’s Bill. The complications in which this plan involved them were
numerous. It had not originated in the great departments of the State
and was, both in principle and drafting, an amateurish suggestion which
might, indeed, sound very plausible and accommodating; but which had not
been clearly thought out in a scientific spirit with the advantages of
official information. No division was taken upon the second reading; but
the debate aroused the Ministers in charge of the measure to the
consciousness that they were committed to a confused and ill-considered
proposal. It was necessary to move that the Bill should be re-committed,
and before it reappeared it was almost entirely rewritten. Its general
character as a compromise was, however, preserved.
The Fourth Party held deep council as to their policy upon this
measure. They saw that a Bill had practically been thrown to the House
to be moulded into shape by debate. They resolved to address themselves
conscientiously to the task of perfecting the crude conceptions of the
Government. But they resolved further the direction in which their
influence should be exerted. The manufacturers and capitalists, who in
those days were numerous and influential in the Liberal party, were
already greatly perturbed at the extent to which their liability was to
be increased, and the Government was constrained to listen to their
grumbles. Sitting immediately behind Ministers, Sir Henry Mather Jackson
groaned forth his anxieties. Not so the Fourth Party. They approached
the question with open minds, as independent persons who desired only to
do right between man and man and cared nothing for the sordid interests
involved. Whereas Ministers had expected that Tory opposition would
naturally take the form of a defence of the employers’ position, the
Fourth Party proceeded to criticise the measure entirely in the
interests of the working class. This secured them two advantages, which
it may be presumed they desired equally. First, it was in accordance
with the spirit of Lord Beaconsfield’s progressive Toryism and would
really benefit the labouring people, for whose sake the Bill was
designed. Secondly, nothing could be more embarrassing to a Liberal
Government than Conservative opposition on the grounds that the Bill did
not go far enough. ‘Be thorough,’ exclaimed these Tories to the
Government. ‘Fulfil your election pledges. If you intend to deal with
industrial questions let it be in an honest and courageous spirit.’ The
Government was gravely disconcerted. They found themselves between two
fires. Below the gangway the Radicals stirred uneasily at such
unanswerable argument; and behind the Treasury Bench the wealthiest
supporters of the party were gnashing their teeth at such reckless
proposals.
Whenever the subject came before the House the four friends were in
their places. There was not a single sitting from which they were
absent, or a single clause which they did not amend, or seek to amend.
It is, moreover, true that many important alterations in the scope and
detail of the measure were conceded to their insistence and that many of
their proposals, though rejected by the Government of 1880, have now
become the law of the land. The unforeseen complexity of the measure
afforded an indefinite scope to their ingenious minds. All sorts of hard
cases were propounded, to which the Government could find no
satisfactory reply. An employer was to be liable for accidents which
occurred through his defective plant or stock. Did this include animate
as well as inanimate things? The Ministers in charge had not made up
their minds. They had contemplated in the word ‘stock’ a stack of timber
or bricks which might fall and cause injury through negligent stacking.
They were now invited to consider the case of live-stock. Lord Randolph
said that a farmer might have a horse which he knew perfectly well had
a disease of the foot and was liable to come down at any moment. Would
the workman riding home from plough and injured by the fall be secured
compensation under the Bill? ‘No,’ replied the law officers, ‘for the
disease of the foot would not be due to the negligence of the employer.’
‘But suppose,’ asked Mr. Balfour, ‘the employer had thrown down the
horse and broken his knees, and that on a subsequent occasion, in
consequence of the horse having been thrown down by his carelessness,
his servant was thrown and broke his arm, what then?’ And it then
appeared there might be liability.
And what was a defect in ‘stock’? The bricks or timber might be stacked
so as to cause injury and yet be themselves most excellent materials.
The defect was not in them but in the person who stacked them. Someone
recollected that the rays of the sun had ignited lucifer matches lying
in a shop window, which in turn set fire to gunpowder and produced a
serious explosion. Where was the defect? If anywhere, it was in the
glass which had concentrated the rays of the sun. Amid such questionings
and the utter confusion to which they led, Mr. Dodson and his friends
passed many uncomfortable hours. Lord Randolph and Mr. Gorst were very
profuse in regrets for the slow progress of the Bill. But when the
Government themselves did not understand their own measure it was
necessary to be very careful indeed--and, after all, there was plenty of
time; better sit till November than scamp public duties and pass
slovenly or unworkable legislation.
Another dilemma was supplied by the case of domestic servants. Mr.
Balfour and Lord Randolph together protested against their exclusion
from the benefits of the Act--‘merely because they had no votes.’ ‘What
is the special characteristic of footmen or chambermaids,’ asked the
latter, ‘which disentitles them to compensation?’ No answer could be
discovered except that the risks of such persons were not great. Lord
Randolph suggested the case of the man who worked both in the house and
in the stable: injured in the house, he received no compensation,
injured in the stable, it was his right. How could it be contended that
domestic servants ran no risks? ‘Suppose,’ inquired the member for
Woodstock, in a speech which caused keen irritation to the Ministers and
almost equal amusement to the House, ‘an explosion of gas. An employer
comes home late at night. He does not, perhaps, altogether know what he
is doing. He blows out the gas. An explosion results, and the servant is
seriously injured; ought he not to receive compensation?’ ‘And what of
lifts?’ chimed in Mr. Gorst. There were lifts in hotels as well as in
factories. Suppose through some defect in the machinery of the lift a
servant at a hotel was injured, why was his claim to compensation less
good than that of the workman injured through a similar defect in a
similar lift in a factory? To the reproach that zeal for the working
classes was a new-found virtue in the Tory party and had not been
apparent in the conduct of the late Government, Mr. Balfour replied
tartly that the late Government had not been formed from members below
the gangway, and that if it had the claims of the working classes would
no doubt have been met.
So through all the sultry days of August the discussion went forward
tirelessly. But it should not be supposed that these objections of
detail were advanced frivolously with no general purpose behind them.
Lord Randolph had, early in the debates, denounced the doctrine of
‘common employment’; and on the third reading Mr. Gorst moved the
re-committal of the Bill in the name of the Fourth Party, on account of
its multifold inequities and anomalies, and urged the recognition of
some simple general principle which would equally govern the rights of
all classes of outsiders, or workmen or servants, whether in factories,
private or Government employ, whether in or out of doors. This
conclusion is one which modern legislation has already largely secured
and which its progress must ultimately achieve.
As with the Employers’ Liability Bill, so with Hares and Rabbits, and so
with Burials, though the task of perfecting these two latter measures
seems principally to have been discharged by Mr. Balfour and Sir Henry
Wolff. At every point the Fourth Party were armed with facts and
arguments; on every question they had a plan, in all difficulties they
sustained each other. The Government were repeatedly exhorted to spare
no labour for the public weal. Legislation of an important character,
they were reminded, could not be passed in haste, or without proper
intervals for reflection on the part of those who were responsible for
it. Whenever the Government and their partisans showed signs of
impatience--and, judging by the interruptions which are sprinkled in the
columns of ‘Hansard,’ this was not infrequent--a motion, or the threat
of a motion, to report progress or to adjourn was found an admirable
weapon to employ; while all the time the House as a whole was kept in
subjection and often in good-humour, by the excellent quality of the
speeches, the wit by which they were adorned, the fertility of resource
which distinguished them and the reality of the arguments advanced.
Not content with discharging--however conscientiously--the functions of
criticism, the Fourth Party aspired to legislate constructively. With
the object of encouraging private thrift and ready-money transactions,
Lord Randolph introduced in 1881 a Small Debts Bill which sought to make
debts of under one hundred pounds irrecoverable after one year from the
date of their being contracted. Sir Henry Wolff carried a measure
satirically described by Sir William Harcourt as the ‘Bournemouth Reform
Bill,’ which enabled the inhabitants of seaside resorts to let their
houses for short periods without impairing their voting qualification.
In every Parliamentary incident, great or small, the four allies were
prominent, if not supreme. The question of erecting a monument in
Westminster Abbey to the Prince Imperial of France, killed in the Zulu
War, produced differences in the Government, and from the division by
which the proposal was rejected several Ministers abstained by
withdrawing to the two small rooms behind the Chair which are used for
the minor consultations of colleagues or opponents. Sir Henry Wolff at
once raised a debate upon this alleged impropriety and, although Sir
Stafford Northcote deprecated his action, a long wrangle followed, from
which the Government emerged with ruffled plumes. When Mr. Dodson, the
President of the Local Government Board, by an absurd mistake got
himself elected for a second constituency without having previously
applied for the Chiltern Hundreds, it was Lord Randolph Churchill who
drew attention to the irregularity; and as the procedure of the House
rendered it difficult to debate the matter without some artful device,
he himself moved for a new writ for the borough of Chester, while Mr.
Gorst--by collusion, as Mr. Gladstone unwarrantably asserted--gave
notice of an amendment which would have brought the discussion within
the bounds of order.
Nothing could excel the industry of the Fourth Party in Supply. They
presented themselves nightly as the vigilant guardians of the public
purse. No item of expenditure was too small to be criticised; no economy
too petty to be cherished. ‘If,’ said Lord Randolph Churchill, with a
paternal look at Sir Stafford Northcote and his colleagues, ‘the late
Tory Government had been more attentive to the principles involved in
paltry matters of expenditure, they might still be sitting on the
Treasury Bench.’ On one warm evening when the bulk of the Conservative
party was scattered on its holidays--in pursuit of grouse according to
tradition, indulging their wives and families at the seaside according
to fact--and when the weary Ministerialists gasped amid the parching
streets of London, Lord Randolph Churchill subjected to the most minute
examination the grants-in-aid accorded to various learned societies. He
inquired about the Meteorological Office and canvassed the value of
weather reports. He compared the weather forecasts of Greenwich with
those of America. Satisfied upon this, he turned to the Academy of Music
and raised further important points for the Minister, Lord Frederick
Cavendish, to explain. When the diplomatic vote was taken, Mr. Balfour
and Sir Henry Wolff were at hand with stores of knowledge and that keen
thirst for information which is only to be gained by personal
experience. With only seventeen men to go into the Lobby with them, the
Fourth Party were formidable and feared. Nothing could provoke them to
anger or to levity. Their dignity and politeness were undisturbed by
charges of obstruction. They desired only to further public business and
to aid the Government in their responsible duties; and they moved to
report progress lest ill-temper should result from the natural
impatience of weaker and less conscientious legislators. Under these
inflictions the Liberal party groaned and its champions grunted.[8]
It was inevitable that disagreements should spring up between the
official leaders on the Front Opposition Bench and the active group
below the gangway. At first, to the amusement of the House and later
somewhat to its irritation, the Fourth Party claimed to be totally
distinct from and independent of all existing parties. ‘There are two
great parties in the State,’ said a member one night. MR. PARNELL:
‘Three.’ LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL: ‘Four.’ (Laughter.) Fortified by this
assumption, the Fourth Party moved whatever amendments and took whatever
course seemed good to them, upon any and every question. As they did not
consult their leaders, it often happened that differences arose about
their tactics. And when, as we have seen, the influence of these
free-lances was so often employed in making Liberal Bills more Radical,
it was not surprising that the old Tories and ex-Ministers began to view
their busy allies with apprehension.
The leader of the Conservative party in the House of Commons was an old
and distinguished man. Sir Stafford Northcote had held high office,
first as Secretary of State for India, afterwards as Chancellor of the
Exchequer, under Disraeli in 1867 and in 1874. He had led the Commons
upon Mr. Disraeli’s retirement to the House of Lords. Upon finance he
enjoyed a reputation second only to that of Mr. Gladstone. He is said to
have possessed the common virtues in special excellence. Although Mr.
Gladstone, with that marvellous power great men acquire of looking at
things only from their own point of view, described him as ‘not strong
enough to convince his party that they were wrong,’ he also spoke of him
as admirable in good-temper, self-sacrifice, quickness, sound knowledge,
and general integrity. This eulogy was not undeserved at Mr. Gladstone’s
hands. Sir Stafford Northcote had in ancient Corn Law days, when Peel
was the honoured leader of the Conservative party, been private
secretary to Mr. Gladstone at the Board of Trade. The reverence in which
he held his former chief was undiminished by the passage of years, and
his natural amiability of character led him to express it and display it
on many suitable and unsuitable occasions. But the virtues of Sir
Stafford Northcote were not those most needed in the stormy times amid
which he closed his long career.
‘His gentle disposition and good intentions,’ said Lord Randolph long
afterwards, ‘would have saved anyone from attack except a leader of
Opposition.’ The very qualities which endeared him to his friends and
family and won him the compliments of his opponents, disheartened,
irritated, and paralysed his followers in the House of Commons. The
deference which he delighted to show to the Prime Minister, offended a
party which had just struggled back, smarting and reduced, from a
crushing electoral disaster. His lack of enterprising vigour was from
the first session of the new Parliament painfully apparent even to his
most faithful friends--and all of those who sat below the gangway were
not his friends. His speeches were tame and ineffective. When party
rancour festered to hate, when crisis at home followed hot on crisis
abroad, the mild expostulations with which Sir Stafford was accustomed
to conclude the debates, disappointed his followers. The Opposition,
always hopelessly outmatched in their official spokesman, were never
more plainly at a disadvantage than when their leader undertook to
encounter Mr. Gladstone. Sir Stafford Northcote’s character was
estimable, his talents were distinguished, his experience had been long;
but scarcely any Parliamentary chief has been more unequal to the
particular work he had to do. And yet though his strength failed year by
year and extraordinary physical disabilities oppressed him with
increasing severity, his fingers, nerveless for aught else, closed
tenaciously upon the reins of power. Unfit for any serious exertion or
important business even in private life, he was willing--not, indeed,
from any selfish or sordid motive, but from a high sense of public
duty--to fill the most arduous offices of State. In a condition when, as
a doctor, lawyer, or business man, he would have been unable properly to
discharge his duties, he was prepared to form Governments, to grapple
with Mr. Gladstone at the head of a great majority, and to guide the
Conservative party through the fiercest political tumult of a hundred
years. Heedless of the warnings of Nature and blind to the plainest
teaching of fact, he struggled gallantly forward until he died in
harness beneath burdens he was utterly unable either to relinquish or
sustain.
The Fourth Party were soon openly antagonistic to Sir Stafford Northcote
and took no especial pains to conceal their feeling. In private they
invariably called him ‘the Goat.’ This was at first a personal allusion
to his beard, but it was afterwards more generally applied to all
Conservatives who were thought to be ‘weak-kneed.’ They found themselves
hampered in their conflicts with Mr. Gladstone by those who should have
led the onset. They viewed the line of ex-Ministers on the Front Bench
with those feelings of impatience which are natural to able men who see,
or think they see, great opportunities of warfare cast away by persons
much less able. They suspected Sir Stafford himself of being anxious to
form a coalition with the Whigs; and, although they carefully preserved
in public an air of elaborate politeness towards their leader, their
true disposition was not in doubt.
Their opinions were held by many others in the Conservative party before
the session of 1880 was ended; and, as always happens under such
circumstances, there grew up a counter-faction in Sir Stafford
Northcote’s support. This was the beginning of strife. It would be
profitless to attempt to trace the petty differences upon which mutual
dislike was founded. But by the time the recess drew near disagreements
were rife. The Fourth Party decided openly to condemn the want of energy
and foresight which marked the leadership of the Opposition. The
opportunity presented itself at a party meeting held in the Carlton
Club on August 20. The plan was drawn up by the four colleagues in
convivial conclave at the Garrick Club. It was arranged that Mr. Balfour
should, in the name of his colleagues, indicate the failure of Sir
Stafford Northcote to lead the party in the House of Commons to the
satisfaction of its more active adherents. In pursuance of this Mr.
Balfour made a very clever speech, in which he contrived to deliver a
most damaging criticism of Sir Stafford Northcote’s methods without
actually mentioning his name or using any discourteous phrase. He
obtained a considerable measure of assent from the meeting.
On the same day Mr. Balfour, by arrangement with his three friends,
attacked the Government for their conduct of public business. His
indictment had been carefully drawn up by the four partners, and
involved a comprehensive survey of the whole session. He complained that
the attempt of Ministers to cram too much into a limited time had
resulted in general confusion and in the most improper invasion of
private members’ rights, and he moved that it was inexpedient that
‘important measures should be brought under the consideration of the
House at a period of the session when it is impossible that they should
receive adequate discussion.’ Mr. Gladstone was absent through illness
and Lord Hartington undertook to reply to these reproaches. He read out
to the House some figures, which had been prepared, of the activities of
the Fourth Party during the four months since the dissolution. From this
it appeared that Mr. Gorst had spoken one hundred and five times, and
had asked eighteen questions; that Sir Henry Wolff had made sixty-eight
speeches and had asked thirty-four questions; and that Lord Randolph
Churchill had made seventy-four speeches and had asked twenty-one
questions. This statement caused much amusement; and after Sir Stafford
Northcote had defended the Conservatives at length from the general
charge of obstruction which had been urged on behalf of the Government,
Lord Randolph rose to vindicate the honour of the Fourth Party. He had
prepared himself for this not unexpected duty by a careful study of an
article written by Mr. Gladstone when in Opposition in 1879, justifying
or at any rate excusing obstruction. Some of the quotations were very
effective. ‘The public,’ wrote Mr. Gladstone, ‘has lately heard much on
the subject of obstruction in the House of Commons.... But to prolong
debate even by persistent iteration on legislative measures is not
necessarily an outrage, an offence, or even an indiscretion. For in some
cases it is only by the use of this instrument that a small minority
with strong views can draw adequate attention to those views.... There
are abundant instances in which obstruction of this kind has led to the
removal of perilous or objectionable matter from legislative measures,
and thus to the avoidance of great public evils.’ Lord Randolph
proceeded to read a sentence which seemed to have been specially
conceived in advance to protect the Fourth Party. ‘Now, if a great party
may obstruct, it is hazardous to award narrower limits to the small
one; for it is precisely in the class of cases where the party is small
and the conviction strong that the best instances of warrantable
obstruction may be found.’ Lord Randolph declared that these passages
would be the charter of himself and ‘those who acted with him.’ He
deplored the absence from the House of the Prime Minister and pleaded
that, acting upon the sanction of his great Parliamentary experience,
the Fourth Party ought to have escaped Lord Hartington’s rebuke. He
ended by exhorting the Government to cultivate ‘the magic of patience.’
The last appearance of the Fourth Party in the session of 1880 was upon
the third reading of the Appropriation Bill, which was not reached till
September 4. Notwithstanding the heat of the season and the exhaustion
of the House, the member for Woodstock and his friends preserved an air
of unrelenting vigilance. Lord Randolph Churchill moved an amendment
dwelling on the gravity of the defeat at Maiwand, which he sought to
prove, by an elaborate argument based upon the Blue Books, to have been
‘mainly attributable to want of foresight, of military knowledge and of
caution on the part of the Indian Executive.’ His criticisms drew from
Lord Hartington a reasonable and weighty reply. Both Sir Henry Wolff and
Mr. Balfour spoke at later stages in the debate, and thus the session
reached its close. ‘The rise of a small body of Conservative free-lances
below the gangway,’ said the _Times_ (September 7), in its review of the
session, ‘of whom Lord Randolph Churchill and Mr. Gorst are the chiefs,
is a curious incident, and has originated the half-serious nickname of
the “Fourth Party.”’
Such were the circumstances attending the rise of the Fourth Party in
the beginning of the new Parliament. It must be admitted that Mr.
Gladstone was at once their most powerful antagonist and their mainstay.
His quick eye discerned very early in the session the menace that was
growing below the gangway, and he hastened to respond to the challenge.
Perhaps, if he had not been a great and famous Parliamentarian, he would
have tried to treat with disdain the arguments of unproved or youthful
opponents. He would have left the House during their speeches or,
ignoring their criticisms altogether, have contented himself with
replying only to the ex-officials on the Front Bench. But his nature
prompted him to meet the strongest opposition from whatever quarter it
might be offered. His generous care for the life and vigour of the House
of Commons drew from him a frank recognition of talent wherever or
however displayed. He had his favourites on both sides of the House, and
he rallied with measureless good-temper and all his most formidable and
glittering weapons of debate to the attacks of the Fourth Party and
especially of their leader. Often and often he riddled them and crushed
them and pulverised them or reasoned with them patiently or cast them
aside with a stern rebuke; and as often they returned by other paths
unwearied to the attack.
The Prime Minister was indeed on various occasions the innocent cause
of delaying his own legislation. He was always delighted to expound
obscure or difficult questions for the benefit of friends or opponents.
Of this amiable weakness Lord Randolph and his friends took, we may be
sure, the fullest advantage whenever the pace of Government business
seemed to be undesirably rapid. In his most insinuating manner the
member for Woodstock--‘Woodcock,’ it was irreverently called on one
occasion--would rise in his place and request the Prime Minister to
explain some clause or subsection of a Bill to the Committee. Mr.
Gladstone would invariably respond to this invitation with evident
alacrity and frequently at considerable length. The wealth of fact and
argument with which in a single unpremeditated speech he often enriched
the debate served lesser mortals with new ideas. When these were
exhausted, Mr. Gorst would get up and thank the Prime Minister for his
lucid exposition, which he would say had made everything perfectly
intelligible to him, with the exception of one point, upon which he
would be most grateful to receive further information. When Mr.
Gladstone had made a second lengthy speech upon this, it was Sir Henry
Wolff’s turn to state how clear all had been made to his comprehension
also--with a single exception. ‘If you speak again,’ growled Sir William
Harcourt, a sterner partisan, on one celebrated occasion to his chief,
‘we shall be here till morning.’ But it should not be supposed from this
account that Mr. Gladstone lost by his invariable practice of giving his
best to the House. Although now and then his opponents may have
snatched some trifling advantage from the superabundance of his
strength, no qualities but his own could have surmounted the amazing
perplexities of the ‘80 Parliament or have guided the Liberal party
through its perils. So long as his light lasted the House of Commons
lived, and amid the fiercest passions and even scenes of violence
preserved its hold upon the sympathies and the imagination of the whole
world; and at his death it sank at once, perhaps for ever, in public
esteem.
The proceedings and progress of the Fourth Party in the House of Commons
did not escape the attention of Lord Beaconsfield and that great man
regarded them from the first with high approval. Sir Henry Wolff had
already consulted him upon the Bradlaugh controversy. He had known Lord
Randolph since Oxford days. He was on friendly terms with all the four
friends; but it was Mr. Gorst with whom his relations were most
intimate. He took a keen interest in all their Parliamentary
manœuvres. He liked to feel himself in touch with the new men and
especially with the young men whom the Parliament was bringing into
notice and, so far from frowning on their independence, he encouraged
them with advice and approbation. He did not often revisit the House of
Commons after his elevation to the peerage; but one of these rare
excursions was for the purpose of watching the Fourth Party at work and
to hear Lord Randolph speak. He made particular inquiries as to what was
thought of the Fourth Party in Ministerial circles. In the early spring
of 1881, immediately before the commencement of his last illness, he met
Sir Henry James at a dinner given by Sir William Harcourt. ‘Well,’ he
said, ‘what do you think of Randolph?’ Sir Henry James praised his
Parliamentary instincts and aptitude. ‘Ah, yes, you are quite right,’
rejoined Lord Beaconsfield, ‘when they come in they will have to give
him anything he chooses to ask for and in a very short time they will
have to take anything he chooses to give them.’ During the autumn Lord
Beaconsfield invited Mr. Gorst to visit him at Hughenden, and talked to
him with much freedom about the policy and influence of the Fourth
Party, about Ireland and the general political situation.
‘Lord B.,’ wrote Gorst to Lord Randolph Churchill (November 9), ‘was in
his talk anything but Goaty: he generally expressed great confidence in
us, thought we had a brilliant future before us, and promised to help
and advise us as much as he could. I can in a letter only state
dogmatically what the oracle said, without giving all his arguments:--
‘1. We ought _not_ to pledge ourselves to support the Government in
any coercive measures for Ireland. They have encouraged agitation:
they have adopted dilatory and inefficient proceedings: and they
don’t deserve the confidence of Parliament. We should therefore
hold ourselves free to take what course we think best when the
Government lay their proposals before us. B. will prevent
Northcote, if he can, from making any more pledges. Meanwhile our
attitude may be ostentatiously one of reserve. There is a precedent
for suspending the Habeas Corpus to suppress Ribbon outrages in the
Westmeath Act of 1871. ‘2. B. himself broached the idea that
Gladstone may buy off the Irish landlords. He thinks this would be
to us a very dangerous move. But there is no use in talking about
it either in public or private. Nor can we say how the matter
should be dealt with till the move is made. B. has always been in
favour of the purchase by the tenant under Bright’s clauses: Lord
Salisbury has always supported an extension of this.
‘3. He scouted the idea of Northcote thinking of coalition or being
inclined to Derby; and did not bear out what Wolff said about his
supporting Derby in the late Cabinet. We need not consult Northcote
when Parliament is not sitting. It would be good policy to abuse
Government for not summoning Parliament to consider the state of
Ireland, and to say that their object in not doing so was to
conceal their Eastern policy. We should always courteously inform
N., through the Whip, of any step we are about to take in the House
of Commons, and listen with respect and attention to anything he
may say about it; his remarks, even when we disagree with him, will
be well worth attention. But just at present _we need not be too
scrupulous about obeying our leader_. An open rupture between us
would, however, be most disastrous; but Lord B. thinks if we are
courteous and firm Northcote will make no open rupture, and will
not throw us over....
‘4. Upon alteration of the rules of the House there is to be the
most absolute and unyielding resistance. Cairns has agreed to this,
and they will force N. to be firm. There was a committee on the
subject twenty years ago, which took some very interesting
evidence, including that of M. Guizot on the _clôture_, which we
ought to look up.’
Mr. Gorst was not the only member of the Fourth Party who was encouraged
by the Tory leader. ‘Lord Beaconsfield,’ writes Sir Henry Wolff, ‘whom I
had known nearly from my childhood, having asked me to call, I went in
the autumn of 1880 to the house in Curzon Street where he was then
living and where the next year he died. We discussed the situation and I
explained how the action of the Conservative party was crippled by the
over-caution--not to say indecision--of Sir Stafford Northcote, which
led him constantly to throw us over. He replied almost word for word as
follows:--
‘When Mr. Gladstone announced his withdrawal from public life I fully
believed his statement, which was confirmed to me from special sources
in which I placed the most implicit reliance. I thought that when he was
gone Northcote would be able to cope with anyone likely to assume the
lead on the other side, and I wanted rest. I now much regret having
retired from the House of Commons, as Mr. Gladstone, contrary to my firm
persuasion, returned. I fully appreciate your feelings and those of your
friends; but you must stick to Northcote. He represents the
respectability of the party. I wholly sympathise with you all, because I
never was respectable myself. In my time the respectability of the party
was represented by * * * a horrid man; but I had to do as well as I
could; you must do the same. Don’t on any account break with Northcote;
but defer to him as often as you can. Whenever it becomes too difficult
you can come to me and I will try to arrange matters. Meanwhile I will
speak to him.’
The countenance and kindness thus shown to a rebellious group by so
great a man as Lord Beaconsfield filled the hearts of the Fourth Party
with a sense of elation. They reflected with satisfaction upon the
events of the session. With astonishing rapidity they had risen to a
position of influence in Parliament; their action attracted every day an
increasing interest from the public. They commanded the serious
attention of the Conservative party and enjoyed the favour of its famous
leader. Ministers and ex-Ministers eyed them with equal apprehension.
Older members were inquisitive about their plans. They looked forward to
the brightest future. Yet there were already gathering clouds.
Jealousies in a numerous troop had followed closely on success. Their
own contemporaries in the party were quick to resent the formation of a
clique and still more the prominence which was accorded to it. The great
Tory newspapers laboured assiduously to ignore their existence and, when
compelled, alluded to their proceedings only with a sneer. The life and
soul of the Tory Opposition, they were freely represented as hostile to
its interests. Sir Stafford Northcote seems from the beginning to have
scented danger. ‘I am inclined to think,’ he wrote complacently to
Gorst, as soon as Parliament had risen (September 15, 1880), ‘that the
Fourth Party has done enough for its fame, and that it will be the wiser
course for its members now quietly to take their places in the main
body, where they will have work enough and to spare.’ Gorst, in reply,
descanted on the advantages of combination. Each member of the Fourth
Party felt stronger for the support and wiser for the counsel of his
friends; and he assured Sir Stafford that together they would form a
weapon of political warfare which could not fail to be formidable ‘in
his hands.’
Thus Mr. Gorst to his leader. But the next day a new plan presented
itself to him and this he imparted half in fun to his friends. It was in
effect that Sir Stafford’s proposition should be solemnly embraced, that
the Fourth Party should after mature deliberation, at his request, give
up the idea--which they had never seriously entertained--of a separate
party and ‘take their places in the main body,’ by sitting immediately
behind their leader on the second bench above the gangway. From this new
position, adopted at Sir Stafford’s special desire, Mr. Gorst thought
that the conduct of the Opposition could be much more effectively
directed than from below the gangway and that its leader would very soon
fall completely under the control of the masterful men behind him. Lord
Randolph Churchill and Sir Henry Wolff both scouted this proposal and
supplied a number of reasons against it. Sir Henry Wolff was greatly
perturbed at the idea of relinquishing ground which seemed to give the
right to treat with party leaders, as he described it, _de puissance à
puissance_; and he pointed to Sir Stafford’s anxiety as a proof of the
advantages of independence. Mr. Balfour’s argument was single,
substantial, and conclusive. The length of his legs made it
indispensable to his comfort that he should sit upon a Front Bench and
nothing would induce him to change his quarters. So the matter was
settled accordingly; but it is curious that in after-years Lord
Randolph used often to relate this story as an instance of Mr. Gorst’s
Parliamentary knowledge and shrewdness and would frankly admit that if
his advice had been followed all legitimate objects might have been
attained without the friction and disturbance that ensued.
The Fourth Party had other friends beside Lord Beaconsfield.
_Sir Henry Wolff to Lord Randolph Churchill._
Cromwell House, Putney: September 29, 1880.
My dear Randolph,--After you left yesterday I received two very
handsome tributes to the Fourth Party--one from Lord Cadogan, who
said that he would look with dread at its being done away with, as
being the only portion of the Conservative party that did any good
at all--the other was from a man whose name I cannot recollect, and
who came up to me in St. James Street to say he had been staying
with Chenery, the Editor of the _Times_, who had expressed himself
very warmly as to the future of the Fourth Party. I shall try and
see Chenery; and as Burrows was sent to the Wali’s forces I shall
endeavour, I hope with better success, to confirm his fidelity,
Ever yours sincerely,
H. D. W.
While opinions were thus divided it was not unnatural that Lord Randolph
and his friends should wish to give some public demonstration of their
influence and to show that they were not without friends in high places.
Mr. Balfour became their ambassador and Lord Salisbury, probably after
consultation with Lord Beaconsfield, accepted an invitation to address
a meeting at Woodstock. Just outside the Woodstock gate of Blenheim Park
the road passes through a considerable courtyard, surrounded on every
side by lofty walls and pierced only by the gateway. A temporary roof of
tarpaulins erected over this converted the highway into a spacious hall;
and here on November 30, 1880, Lord Salisbury and Lord Randolph
Churchill first appeared together in political association. The meeting
attracted much notice in the country and the attitude of the Tory
leaders in the House of Lords towards the independent group which had so
severely hustled their colleagues in the House of Commons was, of
course, the subject of much comment and speculation. This delicate topic
was, however, handled with dexterous caution by the principal speakers.
Lord Randolph Churchill, who took the chair, enlarged upon the loyalty
of himself and his friends to Lord Beaconsfield but avoided all mention
of Sir Stafford Northcote’s name. Lord Salisbury, on his part, was
careful to pay an ample tribute to the ‘sagacious guidance’ of Sir
Stafford early in his speech and then he proceeded to praise the energy
and ability of the member for Woodstock. The meaning of the
demonstration was variously interpreted by the newspapers. The Liberal
organs regarded it as a further proof of the growing power of the Fourth
Party. The Conservative papers believed, or affected to believe, that
the rebellious partnership was now dissolved and that the erring friends
had been welcomed back to the party fold. ‘It appears,’ said the
_Times_, ‘that Lord Randolph Churchill and Sir Henry Wolff are not bent
on forming a new party with the assistance of Mr. Balfour and Mr.
Gorst.’
The correspondence of the Fourth Party is extensive and would be highly
diverting to anyone who knew the Conservative side of the House of
Commons in the early ‘eighties. Lord Randolph’s private letters do not
lend themselves to publication as readily as those of some other eminent
persons. They are spontaneous and scrappy. They deal with the little
ordinary commonplaces of the writer’s life. They reflect his mood at the
moment. They are full of personal allusions which would be pointless
without names and much too pointed with them. He abominated priggishness
in all its forms. No one ever wrote to his friends with less regard to
ceremony or with more unaffected frankness. Any piece of gossip, any
quaint conceit or joke or piece of solemn drollery, any sharp judgment
that occurred to him, went upon the paper without an after-thought.
Every passing shadow or gleam of sunlight which fell upon him marked his
pages with strong contrasts of feeling often extravagantly and
recklessly expressed. Nevertheless his correspondence with Sir Henry
Wolff has an air of gay and generous friendship, strong with an
attractiveness of its own. But there runs through it a recurring sense
of weariness and of disgust at politics, which seems to have alternated
with his periods of great exertion even during these most merry and
successful years of his life.
[Sidenote: 1880-1884]
He delighted in receiving Wolff’s letters at all times: ‘The only fault
I find with them is that they are too short; I should like several
volumes.’ ‘Your letters are to me like a glass of the best
champagne--exhilarating and stimulating.’ ‘You have such an entrancing
style, even when writing about the simplest matters, that one recognises
at once the statesman and the man of letters.’ ‘It is only your
versatile and brilliant genius which could produce such lively
correspondence in the dull season.’ He paints his own oratorical
achievements in glowing colours: ‘I had a most warm welcome at Oldham.
The meeting numbered some six hundred--all working men. I spoke for
fifty-five minutes--quite entrancing (my speech). What would you have
given to have heard it!!! I will, however, declaim it to you when we
meet. Fair Trade and taxing the foreigner went down like butter. How the
latter is to be done I don’t know....’ (September 10, 1881.)
[Sidenote: 1880-1884]
And a few weeks later: ‘Well! Hull was a triumph. I never had such a
success with a large audience. Every point told surprisingly. In my
second speech my reference to your successful contest with Bradlaugh
provoked the greatest enthusiasm. I was received yesterday at the
Carlton _à bras ouverts_. I see the Radical provincial press is beside
itself with indignation’ (November 3, 1881). ‘I received the Glasgow
invitation--most politely worded it is, and I have accepted it. I only
hope it may turn out well, and that you are not trying me _au dessus de
mes forces_. It seems a presumptuous thing to go and preach to a lot of
Scotchmen on home politics, which they probably understand much better
than I do. However, _de l’audace_, &c.’ (October 24, 1882.)
When Lord Randolph was abroad--as he often was for his health, or in
1883 during his retirement after his father’s death--Wolff kept him
informed about political things. These did not always allure him. ‘All
your news,’ he wrote in January, 1882, from Monte Carlo, ‘about your
conversation with various distinguished people concerning myself is very
pleasant reading, but my disinclination to return to England for the
meeting of Parliament grows stronger every day and I seem to have lost
all interest in things political. I am happy in Capua, and the thought
of once more engaging with Goats and Gibsons _et hoc genus omne_ makes
me sick. Old * * * came and bored me yesterday for more than an hour,
and I had a providential escape from * * * the other day; and yet it is
this class of individual of whom the great Tory party is mainly
composed. I think I shall copy Gladstone and take to reading Dante and
Homer--after,’ he adds prudently, ‘I have got through one or two French
novels I have by me.’
He always followed his friend’s doings with attention. ‘I have just
risen,’ he writes July 31, 1883, ‘in a state of singular emotion after
perusing your Demosthenic oration at Portsmouth’; and again, ‘I wonder
how things are going to-night. I dare say you are delivering a telling
speech. (It is the dinner hour, 8.30 P.M.!) How I wish I was there to
listen and cheer!’ And again (August 17, 1883): ‘You appear to have been
sustaining the whole weight of Opposition. I hope you mean to take a
good holiday when it is all over. I am quite clear that W. E. G. has
been very much bothered by your Suez Canal questions.’ At another time
he counsels reserve: ‘I read with interest both your speeches at Banbury
and at Portsmouth, and think that they were as good as the occasion
admitted of or demanded. At the same time I wish I could convince you of
what Chief Justice Morris calls “the energy of silence.”... Gorst and I
took a walk on Sunday on Hampstead Heath. I have never been there
before. There is a capital inn there called “Jack Straw’s Castle,” where
Gorst and I agreed the Fourth Party ought to go for Saturday and Sunday
during the Session to recruit their strength’ (October 2, 1882). He was
bitterly offended by the opposition which on various grounds--partly, no
doubt, to annoy him--was threatened against his brother’s candidature
for the Carlton Club. ‘I am more vexed,’ he wrote from Gastein, ‘than I
can tell you about this business of Blandford and the Carlton Club. I
wrote to Dyke before starting, particularly enjoining on him the
necessity of making no move unless the consent of the committee was
assured. And now how can anyone occupy a more unpleasant position than
Blandford does? He has publicly changed his politics, to please me more
than for any other reason, and owing to H. Chaplin’s action his
overtures to the Conservatives are spurned.... H. Chaplin and Baron de
Worms together will soon make the Tory party too hot to hold me. I shall
certainly take my name off the Carlton when I return to town, and a very
little would make me consummate H. C.’s and B. de W.’s joy by retiring
altogether from the party and Parliament. They do not know how easy it
would be to get rid of me. I am sick of politics, which only play the
dickens with one’s health, and are a dreadful tie. I think the party
occupies a worse position now than it did in 1880. But its leading
members are so purblind, so given over to the most utter infatuation,
that I believe they are of opinion that the country would replace them
in power. I only trust, for the sake of the country, that they are as
mistaken as I believe them to be.’ (August 8, 1883.)
Here is the account of a most famous event of which Gastein was the
scene:--
‘You will be glad to hear that the Emperor of Germany had the honour of
being introduced to me on Saturday last at a tea-party at Count
Lehndorff’s. This Count, I must tell you, is a Prussian who owns the
_bicoque_ which I am inhabiting with my suite. He waited on us on
Saturday afternoon, and with almost Oriental deference begged that we
would honour the Emperor by meeting him. I write all this, lest you
should see garbled accounts in the newspapers. The Emperor, I must
admit, was very guarded in his conversation, which was confined to
asking me how long I had been here and whether I had come for my health.
I imitated his reserve. My wife, however, sat by him at tea, and had
much conversation, which, I have ascertained, was confined to the most
frivolous topics. I have reason to believe, though it is humiliating to
confess it, that the fame of the Fourth Party has not yet reached the
ears of this despot. I must say he is a very fine old fellow, and the
Germans seem really to love him. There were several other Prussians and
Austrians present; but I was rather bored on the whole and so was my
wife. They wanted us to go the next night, when they had arranged some
_tableaux_ for the old boy; but I sent an excuse on the ground that I
was in deep mourning. We did not come here to kowtow to monarchs.
* * * * *
‘I have just been reading a book on cribbage and I find that in all the
games we have played together we have played wrong. The non-dealer at
the commencement has the right to mark three holes as compensation for
his not having the crib. This you have never allowed me to do. Please
therefore send me, by return of post, a cheque for 25_l._, being the
amount you have unjustly and illegally taken from me.’ (November 14,
1883.)
Sometimes his letters take a graver tone:--
Blenheim Palace: October 30, 1883.
My dear Wolff,--Your suspicions of intrigues are apparently so
deep-rooted that they do not even exclude me from the range of
their operations. I have not seen or heard of Chenery since he
dined with me last June, nor should I at any time have any
communication with him of which you would not be fully cognisant.
I cannot explain the sentence in Saturday’s _Times_ which seems to
have exercised you so much; but, in any case, I wonder that you do
not see that these recurring speculations or statements anent the
Fourth Party, as to whether it is alive or dead, whether it is
united or disrupted, is a strong testimony to its value as a
political instrument, and as to the proof of the interest and
curiosity of the public in its proceedings. The more Chenery or
others in the Press make statements about it, the more I am
pleased. I will be at the Carlton at eight o’clock on Thursday.
Yours ever,
RANDOLPH S. C.
And here is a rebuke:--
Blenheim Palace: December 31, 1883.
My dear Wolff,--I have had a very curious letter from the Queen,
which I will not show you when we meet.
Yours ever,
RANDOLPH S. C.
Blenheim Palace: January 2, 1884.
My dear Wolff,--You are not generally slow to take a hint,
therefore your failure to understand my letter which you received
on New Year’s Day is, I think, a pretence. In political friendships
confidence must be mutual, and measure for measure the rule. You
wrote to me that you had received a very curious letter from Lord
S., and that you would show it to me when we met. When I receive
‘very curious letters from political personages’ I have hitherto
sent them to you without delay. Your cautious behaviour about Lord
S.’s letter seemed to call for similar caution on my part. I
therefore wrote to you that I had received a very curious letter
from the Queen, which I should not show you when we met, and I
shall not.
Yours ever,
RANDOLPH S. C.
[Illustration:
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL SIR HENRY WOLFF MR. BALFOUR. MR. GORST.
THE FOURTH PARTY.
_Reproduced from Leslie Ward’s Cartoon, December 1st, 1880, by
permission of the proprietors of “Vanity Fair.”_]
Lord Randolph’s correspondence with Sir Henry Wolff has carried the
reader somewhat in advance of the regular course of the narrative. His
letters in 1883 and 1884 belong to a region of more serious disputes
than those with which this chapter deals. The swift unravelling of
events was to bring varied fortunes and many adventures to the four
friends who now delighted to ‘act together.’ They were to play a
decisive part in great affairs. Yet it is probable that the early
sessions of their comradeship were the joyous days of the Fourth Party.
‘Politics,’ wrote Lady Randolph, ‘seemed more like a game of chess than
the life-and-death struggle it was so soon to become for some of them.’
Plots and ambuscades prepared with severe impartiality, amid fun and
laughter, against both Front Benches; stormy battles in the House;
generous comradeship and glorious discomfiture of foes; miniature
Cabinet Councils; toy whitebait dinners, filled the years with merry
excitement. One single enormous sofa could contain the whole
party--leaders and followers--at once. They were cartooned together in
_Vanity Fair_--Lord Randolph speaking from his famous corner seat, the
others and Mr. Balfour (who travelled from Scotland in order to be
painted) sprawling on the Bench beside him. Dinner with the Fourth Party
was regarded as a rare distinction and justly restricted in its scope.
Their political action was not always the result of long premeditation.
‘On one occasion,’ writes Sir Henry Wolff, ‘Balfour gave a dinner at his
house, to which he invited the Fourth Party and some other members of
Parliament, amongst them Sir R. Cross and Mr. Pell. Someone at length
said, “We must return to the House on account of the Bill,” of which I
do not remember the subject. Randolph said, “We will all go and all
speak.” Cabs were sent for, and the one I drove in was a few minutes
later than his. When I arrived at the House he was already speaking.’
Sometimes their fiercest opponents, Sir William Harcourt or Sir Charles
Dilke, shared their board; though not, it is presumed, their secrets.
Nay, Mr. Chamberlain himself was invited, though this greatly shocked
the Duke of Marlborough, who did not understand how his son could
cultivate social relations with a person of such pernicious opinions,
and was quite sure House of Commons traditions must have greatly changed
since he succeeded. One member of the Government, mentioning to the
Liberal Whips that he was dining with the Fourth Party, was told that
‘so long as he kept those four fellows away he could stay any length of
time he liked.’ Lord Randolph’s house, in St. James’s Place, was _next
door_ to Sir Stafford Northcote’s; but luckily the walls were thick; and
here we see the Fourth Party gathered in festive council round the
dining-room table, amid the haze of countless cigarettes. Wolff has
discovered some new intrigue among the ‘Goats’ or the Radicals or the
Parnellites. Gorst has a plan for meeting it. Their leader examines it
all with a gay and brilliant vivacity which made his companionship
precious to those to whom it was frankly given; and in the background,
rather silent, ready enough with chaff and counsel, but difficult to
rouse to action, sits Arthur Balfour, dreamily revolving longer
calculations of his own.
Here, then, for the present we may leave them and their leader, happy in
the enjoyment of active and pugnacious irresponsibility, tasting the
first pleasures of success and fame and displacing with the haughty
assertions of youthful ardour the tame acceptances of age. It is time to
turn to those grave events which marched in crowded and uninterrupted
procession from almost every quarter of the Queen’s dominions, to the
embarrassment and perplexity of her Ministers.
CHAPTER IV
IRELAND UNDER STORM
‘Your oppression taught them to hate--your concessions to brave
you; you exhibited to them how scanty was the stream of your
bounty, and how full the tribute of your fear.’--LORD JOHN RUSSELL
(_Speech_, Feb. 7, 1837).
The decision of the constituencies in 1880 had no reference to Ireland.
Lord Beaconsfield’s warning letter was regarded as a somewhat
transparent attempt to divert attention from the record of his
Government. Politicians were absorbed by controversies upon foreign and
colonial affairs, upon Turkish atrocities, Afghan disasters, and South
African annexations. The Prime Minister seemed to be under the
impression that the Irish Question had been settled, so far as he was
concerned, by the Church Act of 1869 and the Land Act of 1870. The
Queen’s Speech contained no suggestion of Irish Land legislation; and
the supporters of the Ministry had assembled at Westminster eager to
discuss every subject--from the Treaty of Berlin to the shooting of
hares and rabbits--except the subject of Ireland. They soon found
themselves debating little else. ‘I frankly admit,’ said Mr. Gladstone
four years later, ‘I had had much upon my hands connected with the
doings of the Beaconsfield Government in almost every quarter of the
world, and I did not know the severity of the crisis that was already
swelling upon the horizon and that shortly after rushed upon us like a
flood.’
For more than three years Irish conditions had been growing steadily
worse. The yield and value of the crops had dwindled under three
successive bad seasons and the number of evictions had increased. There
was a deep and general feeling of unrest and discontent among the
peasantry. All the permanent elements of revolt were nervously awake. A
new man had seized upon the national leadership; a new movement was
gathering behind him. The Fenian societies and the Clan-na-Gael had long
been hampered in practical action by the purity of their principles.
Armed insurrection for the sake of national independence is a spirited
and uncompromising creed, but the opportunities in which it can be
carried into actual practice must necessarily be rare. Meanwhile it
blocked the way of less heroic expedients. The Fenians contained within
their ranks many men who were willing, ‘when the time came,’ to risk or
cast away life and liberty in their country’s cause. They could not be
accused of insincerity. But ‘the hour’ lagged; the time did not come;
and nothing remained but to keep alive from year to year, in all its
orthodox integrity, the Fenian doctrine.
The process, when maintained over a considerable period, of professing
opinions and intentions for the execution of which no occasion is
afforded, is apt to become artificial. The most blood-curdling oaths and
sentiments tend to degenerate into ritual. They may preserve in all
their vivid squalor the hateful memories of the past; they cannot be
said to exert much influence upon the politics of the present. Had the
flag of Ireland been unfurled in civil war, the Fenian societies would
have assumed a gigantic importance. Pending that event, they stood aside
and allowed the English Government to proceed on its path unmolested.
They had long despised Parliamentary agitation. They regarded the House
of Commons, not without reason, as a school for Anglicising Irishmen.
They expelled from their order any man who took the Parliamentary oath.
They abhorred constitutional methods, however effective they might be,
as involving some tacit recognition of British institutions. They paid
no attention to social movements or to agrarian conflicts. Looking with
profound distrust upon all who would not go the whole way with them,
they remained a great, secret, silent army, gathered around the
watch-fires of unquenchable hatred, morosely forecasting the chances of
a battle on which the day would never dawn.
The rise of Parnell in Parliament and the anger which his obstructive
tactics evidently excited in England filled these fierce dreamers with a
new interest. The impression which his reserved yet commanding
personality made upon all who were brought into contact with it, was
intense. The deepening discontent and distress of the peasantry seemed
to herald the approach of a new opportunity. Fenian opinion was
perplexed and divided. Some scorned the hateful alliance with
constitutionalism. ‘Freedom comes from God’s right hand.’ A pretence of
loyalty, but in reality treason all along the line, would dishonour a
national movement and end in sham loyalty and sham treason. Others urged
with Davitt that unless the Fenians threw their hearts into the real
stirrings of the Irish people, and helped them in their immediate and
material need, they would cease to represent the life of their country.
In 1879 the principles of doctrinaire treason were preferred. In 1880 a
more practical view prevailed and the ‘new departure’ was sanctioned.
The situation was not brought into being by any deliberate or definite
action on the part of individuals. It developed of itself in the
mysterious unravellings of events. First came Mr. Butt with his
organised party of constitutional Home Rulers, then Parnell with his
band of fighting obstructives, then Michael Davitt with his schemes of
‘agrarian agitation,’ and finally the failure of the potato and the
cruel severity of the winter of 1879. Economic well-being often takes
the heart out of racial animosities. The cause of nationality may excite
the educated revolutionist; but the pinch of famine is required before
the humble tiller of the soil can be enlisted in his thousands. A
political movement to be dangerous must find its substance in social
evil. It was the combination of agrarian with national aspirations and
the gathering together of all their several forces in one determined
hand that imparted sinister and terrible a complexion to Ireland in
1880. Scarcity and poverty supplied the impulse, and misery brought
forth her progeny of outrage.
All this formidable movement had already become defined and was rapidly
developing when the change of Government occurred. The elections in
Ireland had returned sixty pledged Home Rulers to the House of Commons,
and a majority of these elected Mr. Parnell as their leader. Mr.
Forster, the new Chief Secretary, found many causes for anxiety in the
accounts which were given him at the Castle. The sufferings of the
winter of 1879 had roused a spirit of violent discontent among the
people. The numerous tenant defence societies had been formed by Michael
Davitt into the one great organisation of the Land League. Mr. Parnell,
after some hesitation, had thrown in his lot whole-heartedly with the
agrarian agitation. In his speeches at Westport and Limerick he had
urged the farmers to keep ‘a firm grip on their homesteads’ and not to
allow themselves to be dispossessed. One thousand and ninety-eight
evictions, or more than double the number of 1877, had been carried out,
amid scenes of riot and misery, in 1879. A furious animosity against the
landlords convulsed the tenantry; and the Fenian and Parliamentary
leaders openly declared their intention of using the driving power of
the land movement as the means by which national independence was to be
achieved.
In the face of these facts the first decision of the new Minister, or
that forced upon him by his colleagues in the Cabinet, was singularly
ill-judged. The Peace Preservation Act which had been passed in 1870,
and continued amended by the late Government in 1875, would expire on
June 1. It was a mild but not ineffective measure which provided for the
compulsory attendance of witnesses, for taxing localities with the
payment of compensation, for the suppression of seditious newspapers;
and prohibited the carrying of arms in party processions--and other
similar regulations. Certainly nothing in the state of Ireland disclosed
by every channel of official information, either in regard to agrarian
discontent or secret associations, justified its being allowed to lapse.
The draft of the Bill for its renewal, prepared by his predecessor,
confronted the new Minister on his arrival at the Castle. Out of
sixty-nine resident magistrates consulted, sixty-one had declared the
re-enactment indispensable and eleven of these had asked for further
powers. The growth of agrarian crime told its own tale. But Lord
Beaconsfield’s letter, though it had not produced much impression on
British electors, had at least had the effect of throwing the Irish vote
in the English boroughs solidly on to the Liberal side. Many sympathetic
speeches and friendly offices had been exchanged between Liberal
candidates and Irish politicians, many lofty sentiments about the rights
of nationalities had been uttered, and all had proceeded together to the
poll as the equal friends of freedom. It would have been awkward after
this--as the late Government in fixing the date of the dissolution may
have uncharitably foreseen--to inaugurate the new era for Ireland by
‘exceptional legislation in abridgment of liberty.’ The Royal Speech
accordingly announced that the Peace Preservation Act would not be
renewed and that the Government would rely ‘upon the provisions of the
ordinary law, firmly administered, for the maintenance of peace and
order.’ Thus, at a time when measures of exceptional precaution,
together with large remedial legislation, were both indispensable, the
existing securities of the law were relaxed and remedial legislation was
entirely neglected. The failure to deal with so vast and complicated a
question as Irish land on the part of Ministers who had just taken
office may be understood. The abandonment of the Peace Preservation Act
in the face of growing danger cannot be defended. It was immediately
condemned in the House of Lords by the Duke of Marlborough fresh from
his Lord-Lieutenancy, and it was generally believed that the Cabinet had
not come to their decision without considerable misgivings.
All illusions as to the comparative unimportance of Irish troubles were
quickly dispelled as the session advanced. The state of the country grew
worse from day to day. The Irish members maintained an unrelenting
clamour in the House of Commons. The good harvest of 1880 left the
peasantry still hampered with arrears and in many cases quite unable to
pay the rents demanded of them. More than a thousand evictions had
already been effected during the first six months of 1880. In June a
‘Compensation for Disturbance Bill’ was introduced by Mr. Forster with
the object of staying, or at least diminishing, the other evictions
which were threatening in hundreds all over the country. This Bill--‘a
ten minutes’ Bill, if ever there was one,’ as Lord Randolph Churchill
called it--‘an after-thought, not a deliberately counselled measure; an
inspiration, but not from above’--could be justified only by the acute
and imminent danger of the Irish situation. And as yet public opinion in
England was not sufficiently impressed with that danger. The Bill was
fiercely disputed in the House of Commons, the Fourth Party ever in the
forefront of the battle; and although Lord Hartington supported it in a
speech of exceptional power, many Liberals were absent from the division
when it passed and more than twenty voted with the Conservative party.
It was summarily rejected by the House of Lords.
Upon this measure Lord Randolph delivered the first of those Irish
speeches which, in the course of the next three years, were to win him
acceptance as an authority upon Irish questions. The importance of
enterprise and pertinacity in the conduct of Parliamentary Opposition
cannot be underrated when Ministers have to be harassed and minorities
inflamed. But mere activity, however bold and tireless, will never by
itself make a Parliamentary reputation, and the readiest tactician in
the House of Commons will lack real influence unless he is master of
some important subject upon which he can add to the information and
distinction of debate. Lord Randolph’s training in Ireland--official and
unofficial alike--equipped him as scarcely any other English member was
equipped for the discussion of the one vast and predominant question of
the day. He took rank almost at once among those to whom Parliament
would most gladly or most gravely listen upon Irish affairs, and in his
speeches he revealed a range of thought, an authority of manner, and a
wealth of knowledge which neither friends nor foes attempted to dispute.
‘I happened,’ he said (July 5), ‘for a period of ten weeks, when the
distress was at its height, to be associated with a committee that was
relieving that distress on a very vast scale, and my work in connection
with it occupied me from eight to ten hours a day. I was in constant
communication with the Local Government Board and its inspectors and
with the inspectors employed by the committee and with chairmen of
boards of guardians in all parts of the country. If any person, free
from official responsibility and perfectly unprejudiced, had an
opportunity of ascertaining the extent of the distress, I was that
person; and I do not hesitate to say that, although it was severe at
times and in certain districts, and would have been disastrous but for
the timely relief afforded; yet it never at any time justified, and does
not now warrant, the introduction of a Bill of this kind. Not only was
food distributed in enormous quantities, but clothes and bedding, and
excellent seed which would contribute to prepare for a return of former
prosperity. But although the distress was great, the fraud and imposture
which sprang up alongside of it were also great. If Ireland, under God’s
providence, is this year favoured with a good harvest, the Irish people
will, I believe, be able to extricate themselves from their
difficulties, without recourse being had to any such legislation as is
now proposed.’
Having described the Bill as ‘the first step in a social war,’ and
criticised it in correct and elaborate detail, he made an attack on the
Chief Secretary as true as it was unkind. ‘When the right honourable
gentleman took office, he somewhat rashly accepted the popular verdict
that in so doing he conferred a great honour upon Ireland. He seemed to
be under the impression that his acceptance of the post would change the
face of the country and the nature of the people; that from the mere
fact of his disembarkation at Kingstown would result a state of things
in which the inhabitants of the country would be found contented, and
that law, order, property, and life would become immediately secure. He
declared that with himself at the helm, legislation of a coercive nature
was no longer necessary, that he could with ease carry on the government
of Ireland by means of the ordinary law. His conduct seems to resemble
the conduct of a miner going into a fiery and explosive mine and
declaring that safety lamps were unnecessary, that an ordinary tallow
candle was good enough for him. Meeting with difficulties at the
outset, the Chief Secretary came to the conclusion that the best thing
to do was to repair to the House with a policy of appeals. He appealed
to the Protestants and Catholics of Ireland to unite in an hysterical
embrace in celebration of his accession to office. He made a pathetic
appeal to the Irish members and landlords to help him; the whole burden
of the business being, “For God’s sake, keep the country quiet, or what
trouble I shall be in!” The policy of appeals not proving altogether
satisfactory, the Chief Secretary produced the policy of bribes--a
policy which was marked by the generosity which is characteristic of
people who are dealing with the property of others. I fear that the next
phase of the Government policy will be one of repression.’
The rejection of this Bill, although not unexpected, was a heavy blow to
Mr. Forster and the signal for a fierce accession to the Irish
agitation. The Government pocketed the affront which had been offered
them and had perforce to content themselves with promising a Land Bill
next session. Most disquieting reports continued to come from Ireland.
Evictions led to riots; tenants who took the places of evicted occupiers
were assaulted, their ricks were burned, their beasts were mutilated;
arms were stolen from a vessel in Queenstown Harbour; and rumours of
secret brotherhoods and of dynamite conspiracies were rife. So the
Parliamentary session came to an end.
The winter of 1880-1 was cruel. In the very beginning, in a speech at
Ennis (September 19), Mr. Parnell prescribed the methods of the Land
League. ‘Depend upon it,’ he said, ‘the measure of the Land Bill next
session will be the measure of your activity and energy this winter.’ He
then explained his new invention; ‘better than any 81-ton gun,’ as it
was afterwards described by enthusiastic followers. ‘When a man takes a
farm from which another has been evicted, you must _show_ him on the
roadside when you meet him [a voice ‘shun him’], in the streets of the
town, at the shop counter, in the fair, in the market place, and even in
the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into
a moral Coventry, by isolating him from his kind as if he were a leper
of old--you must show him your detestation of the crime he has
committed.’
The advice was taken. Three days later Lord Erne’s agent, a certain
Captain Boycott, served ejectment notices upon a number of tenants. His
servants left him. The local shopkeepers refused to serve him. The
blacksmith and the laundress declined his orders. His crops remained
ungathered on the ground. He was ‘left severely alone.’ The tale of
these doings spread to Ulster. One hundred Orangemen offered to march
with arms to his relief and to the rescue of his crops. The Government
consented. Under protection of infantry, cavalry, and two field guns,
and amid the taunts of the cottagers, the harvest was gathered in and
the process of ‘boycotting’ was advertised to the whole world. It
spread throughout Ireland. Nothing was more unexpected than the
precision with which an impulsive and undisciplined peasantry gave
effect to this new plan. Whole counties conspired together to make it
complete. Every class in the population acquiesced. Public opinion
supported the Land League and no moral force sustained the government of
the Queen.
Behind and beneath this strange system of excommunication came outrages
of various kinds upon property, upon animals, and upon life. There were
in 1880 10,457 persons evicted compared with 2,177 in 1877, and 2,590
agrarian crimes compared with 236 in the earlier year. ‘It rained
evictions,’ says Mr. Parnell’s biographer; ‘it rained outrages. Cattle
were houghed and maimed; tenants who paid unjust rents or who took farms
from which others had been evicted were dragged from their beds,
assaulted, sometimes forced to their knees while shots were fired over
their heads, to make them promise submission to the popular desires in
future. Bands of peasants scoured the country, firing into the houses of
obnoxious individuals. Graves were dug before the doors of evicting
landlords. Murder was committed. A reign of terror had in truth
commenced.’[9]
‘I must say,’ wrote General Gordon, who visited the West of Ireland in
1880, ‘that the state of our fellow-countrymen in the parts I have
named, is worse than that of any people in the world, let alone Europe.
I believe that these people are made as we are; that they are patient
beyond belief; loyal, but broken-spirited and desperate; lying on the
verge of starvation in places where we would not keep cattle.’
Amid such grim and gloomy surroundings the Lord-Lieutenant and his Chief
Secretary passed the winter. As early as October they were asking the
Cabinet for special powers. Strong reinforcements of troops were moved
into the island. In the first days of November a State prosecution was
instituted against Mr. Parnell and other leaders of the Land League.
Late in that same month the Viceroy, Lord Cowper, intimated that, unless
power was taken to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, he must resign. In
December he reiterated his intention and pressed that Parliament should
be called together. National and even international attention were
riveted upon Ireland. Cabinets were frequent, protracted, vexatious, and
indecisive. The harassed Chief Secretary hurried to and fro between the
two capitals.
‘What more lamentable and ridiculous spectacle,’ exclaimed Lord Randolph
Churchill at Preston (December 21, 1880), ‘has ever been presented than
this great Liberal statesman from Bradford, tossed like a shuttlecock
from the Irish Executive on to the English Government, tossed back again
contemptuously by the English Government on to the Irish
Executive--arriving in Dublin and being immediately seized by that
horrid, choking nightmare, Revolution--flying back to London and,
finding himself amongst its peaceful citizens and busy streets, fancying
that he had been the victim of a bad dream, laughed out of his
convictions by his sneering colleagues--and tearing back again to
Dublin, only once more to become a prey to hideous realities!’
The two Ministers who were responsible for Ireland united in a demand
for the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act and eventually, after
struggles which nearly broke up the Cabinet, they procured the assent of
their colleagues. The remedy was desperate, unwarranted, and ill-chosen.
Shocking as were the outrages, they were the least part of the dangers
that threatened the fabric of society. They were, moreover, much
exaggerated by the official figures. Only seven persons were actually
murdered during the winter. The statistics were swollen by 1,300
outrages which proved on examination to consist merely of threatening
letters and notices. Many more were trivial annoyances. What rendered
them formidable were the temper of the people and the constant
apprehension of some fearful outburst. Boycotting was the weapon of the
Land League, and indeed it may be said that its sinister efficiency was
in great measure a preventive of worse crime. In one fashion or another
evictions were greatly diminished. Landlords did not dare to assert
their rights. The unwritten law of the Land League, supported by public
opinion, superseded the law of the land, backed as it was only by
physical force.
It was not easy in 1880, though the science of Coercion has made some
progress since, to discover what remedies Mr. Forster should have
chosen. It is certain that the remedy he chose was wrong. He seems to
have imagined that the agitation depended for its vitality upon certain
local leaders; that a comparatively small number of ‘village ruffians,’
against whom no legal proof existed, but the strongest moral suspicion,
were the indispensable and irreplaceable agents of the whole movement.
If they were removed, he believed the whole apparatus of terrorism would
collapse. If he could obtain power to arrest these men, who were
notorious, peace and order would ensue. No greater misreading of the
situation was possible. In dealing with a movement which was formidable
only because of its almost universal character, he struck at individuals
of minor prominence. He encountered profound communistic stirrings,
bitter racial hatred, and intense national aspirations by methods which
might have been effective against the rowdy larrikins of a slum. In face
of widespread lawlessness, principally petty in its character, the head
of the Irish Executive fell back on that supreme abrogation of civil law
which authorises arrest and imprisonment without trial. Staking his
official existence upon a demand for the suspension of the Habeas Corpus
Act, he prevailed upon a shivering and reluctant Cabinet.
Parliament was summoned to meet on January 7. ‘How,’ asked Lord Randolph
Churchill (Preston, December 21), in a speech which, from the fact that
it was the first of his speeches to be reported _verbatim_ in a
Metropolitan newspaper, attracted much attention, ‘will this Government,
who have been only eight months in office, meet Parliament; and what
will be the message which they will have to announce? They will have to
acknowledge the fact that Ireland is in open and successful rebellion;
that another government, which knows not the Queen, has supplanted the
Government which the English and Scotch people recognise; that this
alien government is now, with impunity, directing the destinies of
Ireland, issuing its decrees to the Irish people, and has, for six
months or more, suspended the liberties, confiscated the property, and
imperilled the lives of hundreds and of thousands of the Queen’s
subjects. They will have to announce that this alien government has its
own revenues, its own executive, its own courts of justice, in which
persons are arraigned, tried, and condemned, and that persons who are
not provided with the passports of that government and who have not
enrolled themselves as its subjects, are unable to obtain the
necessaries of life and are cut off root and branch from the society of
their fellows. They will have to acknowledge that this alien government
is the growth of the brief period during which they have held office;
that nothing like it has yet been seen in the history of Ireland; and
that, before it, the Government of the Queen recoils paralysed and
impotent.’
The turbulent course of Irish affairs and Mr. Forster’s policy laid the
Government open to damaging attack from every quarter. Of this their
regular opponents took the fullest advantage and among them no one was
more prominent than Lord Randolph Churchill. It was not difficult for a
Conservative--or, indeed, for an economist--to find fault with the
Compensation for Disturbance Bill of 1880, or the Land Bill of 1881; and
the Fourth Party encountered both with zeal and ingenuity. But the
repressive measures, involving as they did immense abridgments of
liberty and wholesale suspension of the most elementary civil rights,
offended deeper instincts in Lord Randolph’s nature. If as a party man
he disliked the Government, he hated Coercion for its own sake; and this
double tide of antagonism carried him to lengths which, for a time,
disturbed and even destroyed the harmony of the Fourth Party.
‘People sometimes talk,’ he said, ‘too lightly of Coercion; it means
that hundreds of Irishmen who, if law had been maintained unaltered and
had been firmly enforced, would now have been leading peaceful,
industrious, and honest lives, will soon be torn off to prison without
trial; that others will have to fly the country into hopeless exile;
that others, driven to desperation through such cruel alternatives, will
perhaps shed their blood and sacrifice their lives in vain resistance to
the forces of the Crown; that many Irish homes, which would have been
happy if evil courses had been firmly checked at the outset, will soon
be bereaved of their most promising ornaments and support, disgraced by
a felon’s cell and by a convict’s garb; and if you look back over the
brief period which has been necessary to bring about such terrible
results, the mind recoils in horror from the ghastly spectacle of
murdered landlords, tenant-farmers tortured, mutilated dumb animals,
which everywhere disfigure the green and fertile pastures of Ireland.
It is to me, and many others who, like myself, have had the good fortune
to live amongst the people of that country, to discover their high
qualities and their many virtues, and to know that, under a firm and
statesmanlike government, immense prosperity must have been their lot,
as it is their due--it is, I say, appalling to reflect that all this
promise has been for a time blotted out, all progress arrested, and all
industry thrown back by one reckless and wanton act on the part of a
Government who, at the outset of their career and in the heyday of their
youth and of their strength, knew no higher object and had no nobler aim
than to obtain at any cost a momentary and apparent advantage over their
opponents.’
The troubles of the Ministry did not come singly. The storm in South
Africa, like the storm in Ireland, was gathering fast when the change of
Government occurred. In both countries the new Ministers were the heirs
of error or neglect; in both their own policy was unfortunate. The
freedom of races was perhaps the main inspiration of Midlothian. The
annexation of the Transvaal in 1879 had been denounced by Mr. Gladstone
again and again in terms of eloquent and indignant candour: ‘A free
European Christian republican community “transformed” against the will
of more than three-fourths of the entire people’ into ‘subjects of a
monarchy.’ ‘Is it not wonderful,’ he asked (December 29, 1879), ‘to
those who are freemen and whose fathers have been freemen and who hope
that their children will be freemen and who consider that freedom is an
essential condition of civil life and that without it you can have
nothing great and nothing noble in political society, that we are led by
an Administration ... to march upon another body of freemen and against
their will to subject them to despotic government?’ These were important
declarations, and they had been unmistakably approved by the nation. Was
it strange that the Boers were led to expect from a Government headed
and controlled by the man who had uttered them the restoration of the
liberties of which they had been deprived?
Moreover, much could be urged in favour of the annexation of 1879 which
could not be urged in favour of its continuance. While the Transvaal and
Natal alike lay under the shadow of the great Zulu power, it may have
been a practical necessity to assume some control over the dealings of
the Boers with their terrible neighbour, lest a quarrel recklessly or
wrongfully provoked should not only bring massacre into the Transvaal,
but also upon those who dwelt within the Queen’s dominions. Great
Britain was perhaps forced, in the interests of the white man in South
Africa, to afford protection to the Boers, and where she extended
protection she had a right to claim obedience. But the danger was now
removed; the Zulu power was broken; Cetewayo was a prisoner and his
armies and military system destroyed. With the close of the Zulu War the
all-important argument for annexation disappeared.
The British Government had already carried forward a considerable
account with the Boers. ‘They are,’ said Mr. Gladstone, ‘a people
vigorous, obstinate, and tenacious in character, even as we are
ourselves.’ Driven ever northwards--across the Orange, across the Sand,
across the Vaal, by abiding dislike of British rule and organised
Government; retreating, like the game they hunted, from the noise of the
township and the whistle of the train, the huge white tilted ox-waggons
with their nimble horsemen had found a resting-place in a wilderness
more savage, more perilous, than any into which the white man had
broken. For nearly forty years they had lived alone--fierce, ignorant,
and devout, with no law but their rifles, no books but their Bibles and
scarcely any occupation but the chase. Gradually, in the valleys, by the
drifts of the rivers, under the shelter of gigantic boulders, farms and
tiny villages had crept into being. Gradually the long arm of the
detested Government, tampering, protecting, enfolding and at last
controlling, had embraced them--even here. Was it to be borne? Boer
prejudices, Boer sullenness, Boer obstinacy, were bywords. Boer
marksmanship was as yet unknown.
To give back the country to the Boers would no doubt have provoked a
noisy conflict in Parliament. But the Minister was, partly for that
reason, provided with a large majority. The policy of retrocession was
right in principle; it would have proved eminently wise in practice; and
had Mr. Gladstone’s Government acted in office up to the spirit of their
declarations in Opposition, South Africa might have escaped a long
concatenation of disasters.
Ministers were ill served by their agents. On November 19, 1880, Sir
Owen Lanyon, in a despatch to the Colonial Office, stated that
three-fourths of the population were secretly in favour of the continued
annexation and that the excitement was the work of a few agitators.[10]
Less than a month afterwards nearly the whole male population of the
Transvaal was in arms. On December 20 the deadly rifle-fire at Bronker’s
Spruit proclaimed the beginnings of serious war. The few regular troops
available hurried to the scene, were badly led and soundly beaten. What
the Government had denied to justice, they conceded to force. During a
series of small combats negotiations were actively pressed and reached a
successful termination a few days after the flight of the British
detachments from Majuba Hill (February 27, 1881). By this arrangement
all the disadvantages of every conceivable policy--and all abounded in
disadvantage--were combined. Territory was abandoned; reconciliation was
not achieved. The Boers owed little gratitude to the great Power from
whom they had shaken themselves free. They rejoiced in the victory of a
chosen race over the Midianites. Their Dutch kinsfolk throughout the
Colony were naturally proud of their unexpected victories. The British
settlers were everywhere humiliated. The British flag was in South
Africa associated only with surrender. The loyalists who had fought and
risked their all in faith of British power and justice were left to
shift for themselves. The attempt to make a virtue of necessity failed
ignominiously. And at home in England powerful classes, smarting under
insult and unaccustomed shame, sat down to nurse revenge.
These errors or misfortunes were hardly to be retrieved. Time might have
healed all scars--was already, after fifteen years, in a fair way to
heal them--but a more tragic and tremendous history awaited South
Africa. When the Transvaal and its rugged inhabitants would have been
forgotten, they became famous. The rocks of their wilderness turned, in
the perversity of fortune, to gold and diamonds, and a scattered folk
who beyond all others shunned the eye of civilisation were thrust into
the very centre of the world’s affairs. Their notoriety revived a
slumbering shame. Their new-found wealth armed at once their own
resentful ambition and directed upon them the envy and the malevolence
of their British neighbours; and from an unjust annexation and a
dishonoured peace there hung an unbroken chain of ever-expanding and
ever-darkening events.
The circumstances of the military operations and of the Majuba peace
were vehemently denounced in Parliament by the Conservative party. Lord
Randolph Churchill seems to have taken little part in these debates.
Three years afterwards he condemned the Boers in strong terms for their
treatment of the natives, and when the Majuba peace had passed out of
the circle of real and burning questions and had become part of the
ordinary stock-in-trade of party patter and recrimination, he seems to
have bestowed upon it more than one passing taunt. But at the time,
vigilant as he was to seize every foothold for attacking Mr. Gladstone’s
Government, he neglected this large opportunity. His silence finds an
explanation in the following curious letter to Sir Henry Wolff, written,
be it remembered, at a time when England was ringing with denunciations
of Boer ‘treachery’ in the ‘massacre’ at Bronker’s Spruit:--
University Club: December 27, 1880.
I attach the greatest importance to this news from South Africa,
and am of opinion that the question of reducing the Boers will
divide the Liberal party by a sharper and more insuperable line
than any Irish question. The arguments that formerly were of force
for the annexation of the Transvaal, can no longer be used with
effect. The Zulus are broken, and Secocoeni and his tribe gone, and
there is no danger of a native irruption into Natal. The Boers, on
the other hand, cannot be said to have ever ceased to be an
independent nationality, and are showing now their perfect fitness
to take care of themselves.
Your natural and marvellous ingenuity will show you how the
strength of this position may be developed. Courtney, if he decides
to oppose the ‘coercion’ of the Boers, will have a great following
of Liberals and the entire Irish party. The Fourth Party are
individually and collectively unpledged to the annexation of the
Transvaal, and it occurs to me one of us (like a thunderbolt in a
clear sky) should on the Address pronounce for the independence of
the Boers, and protest against British blood and treasure being
wasted in reducing a gallant nationality which is perfectly able to
take care of itself, taking into consideration the immense
difficulties which beset the Home Government in Ireland, the East
of Europe, Afghanistan, and Basutoland. Think this over in your
‘anxious mind,’ and consider the numerous advantageous features
which the position offers.
Sir Henry Wolff was not to be persuaded into such a course. He reminded
his friend of the events of 1857, when Palmerston, confronted on the
China War by an adverse majority of Radicals and Conservatives, raised
the cry of the ‘Honour of England,’ dissolved Parliament, and was
returned to power by ‘a rattling majority.’ His counsels prevailed, and
the thunderbolt remained unexpended; but the sentiments expressed by
Lord Randolph, although partly concealed under the form of partisan
tactics, are not to be mistaken. And even the forecast that ‘the
question of reducing the Boers will divide the Liberal party by a
sharper and more insuperable line than any Irish question’ was in the
end to prove not wholly unfounded. His opinions seem to have been
strengthened by time, and ten years later, when he visited South Africa,
Lord Randolph wrote[11]:--
[Sidenote: 1881 ÆT. 32]
‘The surrender of the Transvaal and the peace concluded by Mr. Gladstone
with the victors of Majuba Hill were at the time, and still are, the
object of sharp criticism and bitter denunciation from many politicians
at home--_quorum pars parva fui_. Better and more precise information,
combined with cool reflection, leads me to the conclusion that had the
British Government of that day taken advantage of its strong military
position and annihilated, as it could easily have done, the Boer forces,
it would indeed have regained the Transvaal, but it would have lost
Cape Colony.... The actual magnanimity of the peace with the Boers
concluded by Mr. Gladstone’s Ministry after two humiliating military
reverses suffered by the arms under their control became plainly
apparent to the just and sensible mind of the Dutch Cape Colonist,
atoned for much of past grievance, and demonstrated the total absence in
the English mind of any hostility or unfriendliness to the Dutch race.
Concord between Dutch and English in the Colony from that moment became
possible.’
Lord Randolph could not foresee in 1891 the Raid of 1896 or the greater
catastrophe that lay behind it. Yet the forces which produced both were
steadily, though subterraneously, at work; and the Jameson
incursion--surprising, detached, eccentric though it appeared at the
time--was itself only one vicious consequence of a fatal past.
Let us return to the session of 1881.
Before Parliament met it was known that Ministers had prepared a
Coercion Bill and that the Houses were summoned to meet as early as the
first week in January for the express purpose of passing it. But the
nature of the powers for which Mr. Forster would ask, was a well-guarded
secret. The Fourth Party took counsel together betimes. Lord Randolph
proposed that they should move an amendment limiting the duration of the
Act to one year. The plan was audacious. It would have enabled all the
forces opposed to the Government--from whatever cause--the Irish
Nationalists, the Conservative party, the dissentient Radicals and
Liberals, to vote together. The passage of the Bill must have been
rendered more difficult and protracted than ever. And as in all
probability Mr. Gladstone would have had to submit to a yearly limit as
a compromise, the whole grim business must have been undertaken again in
the next session, after hanging like a sword over the Government in the
intervening months. On the other hand, it was a dangerous policy for a
Conservative party of law and order to adopt. The matter was long
debated by the four partners. It was at length decided to consult Lord
Beaconsfield; and Mr. Gorst, entrusted with this mission, laid the plan
before him on the last day of December 1880. Lord Beaconsfield at first
seemed not at all unfavourable. He listened attentively, and
acknowledged the idea to be shrewd and good. He asked for time to
consider it and promised to send a definite answer in a few days. On the
eve of the session the four friends dined together in state and, as no
negative reply had arrived, Lord Randolph was full of hope that his plan
would be adopted by the official leaders of the Conservative party.
Great was his disappointment when the next day Lord Beaconsfield decided
that the proposal, however good in itself as a Parliamentary
manœuvre, was not practicable for a Conservative Opposition.
The Fourth Party accepted Lord Beaconsfield’s decision as final; not so
Lord Randolph. He had manufactured what he called ‘political dynamite.’
He knew it to be deadly. With or without Lord Beaconsfield’s approval,
he was prepared to go on. But he failed to persuade the others and in
the process their disagreement developed into a regular quarrel. He
seems at length to have been prevailed on by his father to give up the
idea and, although he said (February 4) in debate that he was very
strongly in favour of the Act being allowed to expire in 1882, by which
time the Coercion measures of the Government, coupled with their
remedial legislation, should have pacified the country, no such
amendment ever appeared on the order paper. But for the first three
months of the session of 1881 the Fourth Party, greatly to the
satisfaction of the Government, practically ceased to exist as a
political force or even as a friendly association. Not until the renewal
of the Bradlaugh debates was their comradeship restored.
The Queen’s Speech of 1880 had contained only a passing reference to
Ireland and the intention of the Government to rule without exceptional
legislation. The Queen’s Speech of 1881 referred to little else but
Ireland and the intention of the Government to adopt measures of
Coercion. The course of the session followed the lines of the gracious
speech. Ireland monopolised attention. Coercion Bills were forced
through the House of Commons in the teeth of frantic Nationalist
opposition. Scenes and suspensions were the order of the day. A
forty-one hours’ sitting was terminated only by the arbitrary and
extraordinary intervention of the Speaker. New rules of procedure,
lopping off Parliamentary liberties cherished for ages, were devised.
The Land Bill took four months to pass. Armed with his new powers,
which enabled him to lock up everyone and anyone he pleased, Mr. Forster
swept several hundred alleged ‘village ruffians’ into Kilmainham, where
they lived together in great comfort, consulted freely, received visits
from their friends, transacted their business, and even wrote letters to
the newspapers. They thus achieved cheaply-won martyrdom, often crowned
with Parliamentary honours, and their places were eagerly filled by
others. The land agitation increased in vehemence and outrages in
number. The measure, to obtain which so much had been sacrificed, proved
utterly futile.
Through all this turmoil Lord Randolph pursued his wayward course alone.
After the Speaker’s _coup d’état_ (February 2) he spoke in support of
the Nationalist motion for adjournment, because, as he said, ‘one
section of the House was greatly irritated, another section greatly
fatigued, and a third greatly alarmed’ by what had happened. On this Mr.
Balfour at once declared his intention of voting with Sir Stafford
Northcote in the Government Lobby, though he contrived to defend Lord
Randolph from the criticisms which his speech drew upon him from the
highly strained nerves and tempers of the forces of law and order. On
the 4th Lord Randolph spoke on the first of the Coercion measures--the
Protection of Persons and Property Bill.
‘I support this Bill,’ he said, ‘with reluctance and distrust. I am
confident that a proper and vigorous administration of the ordinary law
last summer and last autumn would have saved us from this Bill. I
cannot with satisfaction entrust extraordinary powers to a Minister who
has proved unequal to the administration of the ordinary law of the
land. I know that those powers require to be administered with firmness
and decision. The more these qualities abound, the sooner the necessity
for extraordinary powers will cease; but I fear that we shall have
indecision and timidity and consequently injustice and protracted
Coercion.’
On the 15th he supported an amendment to provide every person arrested
under the new Acts with a copy of the warrant and a statement of the
crime or crimes of which he was suspected, making at the same time a
contemptuous reference to ‘members who still called themselves Liberals,
while they supported a Bill for the suspension of the liberties of the
Irish people.’ On the 16th he voted for an amendment providing that
persons arrested on mere suspicion should be treated differently from
ordinary prisoners while incarcerated without trial. This was conceded
by the Government after much discussion. On the 18th he urged that the
arrest of members of Parliament under special legislation should in all
cases be reported to the House. Indeed, throughout these discussions his
conduct was considered very reprehensible and shocking.
If Mr. Forster’s policy was unfortunate, his position, although
supported by overwhelming majorities of both great parties, was
certainly unenviable. It is hard to cope with revolution; but to attempt
to do so without offending the susceptibilities of a Liberal Cabinet or
a democratic party surpasses the wit and patience of man. The reports
which reached him every day from magistrates and police, were alarming.
His office table at the Castle was littered with letters of fierce and
tragic reproach. Indignant landowners claimed imperiously that
protection for life and property which even the basest of civilised
Governments have rarely denied. The widow wrote from beside the body of
her murdered husband, declaring that his blood was upon the head of the
recreant Minister. The country seethed with sedition. Tales of tyranny
and terror lacerated the warm heart of the Chief Secretary; and although
police and detectives dogged his steps, his life was in constant
jeopardy. In Parliament he was the object of frantic and virulent abuse
from the Nationalist members. Many Chief Secretaries have faced that
form of attack since then. English ears have become accustomed to
it--and even deaf to it. But Forster was the first example, and an
impression was produced that he was a man specially repugnant to Irish
feeling. He was exposed to galling attack from every quarter.
‘It is unfortunate for Ireland,’ observed Mr. Parnell, ‘that the Tories
are not now in office. If they were, Parliament would not have seen this
measure of Coercion, because in that case the Irish would have had the
assistance of the united Whig and Radical parties. We should have had
all those platitudes as to the love of liberty which the Liberal party
entertain and all those stock phrases which do Liberal Cabinets such
good service when they are out of office. The two great parties are now
united, but only for one purpose--namely, to crush, put down, and bully
a poor, weak, and starving nation....’ But although the Government were
supported in their repressive legislation by both parties and openly
opposed by scarcely any English or Scottish members, the dissatisfaction
against them on both sides of the House grew steadily as the session
advanced. The regular Opposition neglected nothing that could discredit
the Ministry, whether by accusing them of being responsible for the
disorder, or by cavilling at their remedies and pointing out how
inconsistent these were with their principles.
Although he allowed himself to be persuaded against making a hostile
motion, Lord Randolph’s detestation of the Coercion Bill grew as he
watched its course. ‘This Bill,’ he said (March 11, 1881), ‘is now
passing away from the House, and with it disappears all that
liberty-destroying machinery--urgency, _clôtures_, _coups d’état_, and
dictatorships--never, I hope, to return again. We shall now be told to
turn our attention to remedial legislation. I make no remark beyond
this--that remedial measures which are planted under the shadow of
Coercion and watered and nourished by the suspension of the
Constitution, must be from their nature poor and sickly plants of
foreign origin, almost foredoomed to perish before they begin to grow.
It was upon their capacity to give contentment and happiness to Ireland
that the Liberals relied to gain for themselves immortal credit and to
secure a perpetual lease of power. The Chief Secretary went to Ireland
in April last, bearing with him the hopes and blessings of an
enthusiastic and victorious party. He gave us all to understand that he
was to become an emancipator greater even than O’Connell; and within
twelve months of office he has come to the House to ask for powers more
stringent and more oppressive than were ever granted to or demanded by
Lord Castlereagh, the Duke of Wellington, or Lord Grey. I wish the Chief
Secretary joy of these beautiful Bills; but I may tell the right
honourable gentleman that he has acquired by them the undying dislike
and distrust of the Irish people. While I have never denied that some
measure of this kind, owing to the conduct of the Government, and that
alone, was only too necessary for Ireland--and while I have always
admitted that as to the nature and extent of that measure her Majesty’s
Government, who were the culprits, must be the judges--I still
recollect, with unqualified satisfaction, that Coercion is a
double-edged weapon and has before now fatally wounded those
Administrations which have been compelled by their own folly to have
recourse to it.’
Sir William Harcourt, as Home Secretary, was put forward by the
Government to reply to this. ‘It is difficult,’ he said, ‘to treat the
noble lord the member for Woodstock as a serious politician, or to
discover to which of the four parties he belongs. He once belonged to
his own--the Fourth Party; but he has managed by his conduct during the
discussion of this Bill to dissolve that minute party; and his feats in
that respect only afford a fresh illustration of the infinite
divisibility of matter.’ Sir William went on to say, amid general
approval, that, being no more leader of the Fourth Party, Lord Randolph
had become adviser to the Third Party (the Nationalists).
But, for all that, the undercurrents of disapproval of Ministerial
policy flowed ever more strongly in Parliament, and nothing less than
Mr. Gladstone’s unparalleled authority and skill could have sustained
the Irish Secretary through the session. His colleagues in the Cabinet
were doubtful, and some actively hostile. There was a feeling of
suppressed resentment in the Liberal party against the Minister who had
been responsible for forcing them into courses so obnoxious to their
principles and so damaging to their reputation. Radicals below the
gangway became increasingly outspoken in their attacks. A considerable
section of the party press was openly hostile. Under these many
anxieties and embarrassments the hair of the Chief Secretary grew
visibly grey.
Whatever may have been the demerits of the Land Bill of 1881, it was
sufficiently large and effective to threaten to take the agrarian wind
out of the sails of the revolutionary movement. Unable to oppose openly
a measure which conferred real benefits upon the tenants, Parnell
resolved to obstruct its working and to prevent the tenants from
resorting to the Land Courts. So soon as this intention was made clear
the Government seem to have decided upon his arrest. The Prime Minister
delivered a preparatory onslaught upon him at Leeds, where he charged
the Irish leader with ‘standing between the living and the dead--not,
like Aaron, to stay the plague, but to spread it’; and he hinted that
the resources of civilisation were not exhausted. Parnell replied
savagely at Wexford. ‘If you are arrested,’ inquired apprehensive
friends, ‘who will take your place?’ ‘“Captain Moonlight” will take my
place,’ replied Parnell. Two days later he was imprisoned in Kilmainham.
In the ten months preceding the Coercion Act (March-December 1880) the
number of outrages was 2,379; in the ten months which followed, 3,331.
The gravest increase was in crime affecting life. Murders and attempts
to murder were more than trebled. The Land League, when suppressed, was
replaced by an even more sinister and even less responsible
organisation. The failure of Mr. Forster’s repressive measures was
signal.
[Sidenote: 1882 ÆT. 33]
The arrest of Mr. Parnell may be regarded as a single exception. As the
months slipped by the prisoner at Kilmainham began to grow uneasy. He
had regular and perfect information of the state of the country. He
found the control of the agitation passing from his hands into those of
unknown and desperate people. Captain Moonlight was exercising and
delegating his sovereignty. New associations, secret and deadly in their
purposes, were sprouting. Parnell required his liberty, and he resolved
to treat. Nothing could exceed the satisfaction of the Prime Minister
when this was conveyed to him. The mood of the principals being
agreeable, ambassadors were found on both sides to arrange conditions.
Upon the basis that no sort of agreement existed, Mr. Gladstone
undertook to introduce an Arrears Bill and the Irish leader promised to
‘slow down the agitation.’ A delighted Cabinet ratified the non-existent
bargain. Parnell and his colleagues were released; the Lord-Lieutenant,
Earl Cowper, and the Chief Secretary, who remained stubbornly
unconvinced, resigned. Such was the Kilmainham Treaty. Parnell, free
once more, set to work to gather up the threads of authority. It was too
late. He was released on May 2. On the 6th, the day of Earl Spencer’s
entry as Lord-Lieutenant, Lord Frederick Cavendish, the new Chief
Secretary, and Mr. Burke, the Permanent Under-Secretary, were murdered
in the Phœnix Park.
Mr. Forster’s political fate was reached with the inexorable precision
of Greek tragedy. If ever a good man was overwhelmed with successive
waves of adversity, it was he. Called at a moment’s notice to an office
with which he had no special acquaintance, and confronted with dismal
alternatives, he had chosen wrongly at the first. An evil fortune dogged
his steps. Had he assumed power a year earlier he might have guarded
against the outbreak; a year later he would have been free to stem it
without any accusation of responsibility for its cause. As a Tory Chief
Secretary he might have achieved a glorious reputation as a Coercionist.
As a Liberal Minister he was ruined. His errors of judgment were not
small. He was, wrote Mr. Gladstone, ‘a very impracticable man in a
position of great responsibility.’ The style and tenor of his letters
lend some sanction to this opinion. But, whatever may be thought of his
wisdom or, what is of more importance in politics, of his instinct, the
courage and integrity which he displayed, command the tribute of all who
review, however briefly, his public conduct. What a worthy Englishman
might do, he did. No labour was too exacting; no peril deterred him. He
faced obloquy and assassination with equal calmness. He chased away the
vigilant guards by whom he was surrounded. Almost alone and unprotected
he penetrated the most distracted regions, talking to the people face to
face and striving with hopeless optimism to allay by argument the
passions of centuries.
‘If I had thought,’ he said in the House of Commons in introducing his
Coercion Bill, ‘that this duty would devolve on the Irish Secretary, I
would never have held the office; if I could have foreseen that this
would have been the result of twenty years’ Parliamentary life, I would
have left Parliament rather than have undertaken it.’ ‘If you think,’ he
wrote to Mr. Gladstone, April 4, 1881, ‘that _from any cause_ it would
be for the advantage of the public service or for the good of Ireland
that I should resign, I place my resignation in your hands. You might
come to this opinion ... without any disagreement with my official
action; and I earnestly beg of you not to allow yourself to be
influenced, for a moment, by any personal consideration for me of any
kind whatever. For instance, I must request you to pay no regard to the
fact that I should probably appear discredited--to have failed,’ &c.,
&c. On the morrow of the tragedy in the Phœnix Park he offered to
return to Ireland and fill his old place, so speedily made vacant. But
the Prime Minister had come to the conclusion that Ireland was no place
for his talents or his virtues. He passed for ever out of the Ministry,
to become during the rest of the Parliament one of its most dangerous
and vigilant opponents. He was neither the first nor the last able man
to be crushed between Irish national passions and English party needs.
In all these moving events Lord Randolph bore little part. At the
beginning of the session of 1882 he was in his place with his three
allies, all thoroughly reunited and intent upon the Government’s
misdeeds. Upon the Address the Fourth Party made a combined attack, in
which Mr. Forster was accused, with a good deal of evidence, of having
illegally transgressed even the wide limits of executive power which the
special legislation had assigned him. On February 21 there was another
Bradlaugh scene. The member for Northampton, advancing suddenly to the
table, produced a book, said to be a Testament, from his pocket, and
duly swore himself upon it, to the consternation of the members. Lord
Randolph was the first to recover from the surprise which this act of
audacity created. He declared that Mr. Bradlaugh, by the outrage of
taking in defiance of the House an oath of a meaningless character upon
a book alleged to be a Testament--‘it might have been the “Fruits 1882
of Philosophy”’--had vacated his seat and should be treated ‘as if he
were dead.’ In moving for a new writ he implored the House to act
promptly and vindicate its authority. Mr. Gladstone, however, persuaded
both sides to put off the decision till the next day. On the 22nd
therefore a debate on privilege ensued. Sir Stafford Northcote merely
moved to exclude Mr. Bradlaugh from the precincts of the House, thus
modifying Lord Randolph’s motion for a new writ. Lord Randolph protested
against such ‘milk and water’ policy and urged the immediate punishment
of the offender. After a long discussion, in which the temper of all
parties was inflamed by Mr. Bradlaugh’s repeated interruptions, Sir
Stafford substituted for his simple motion of exclusion a proposal to
expel Mr. Bradlaugh from the House; and this being carried the seat for
Northampton was thereby vacated.
Lord Randolph seems to have gained much credit in Tory circles for the
promptness and energy with which he had acted; but it was to be almost
his last intervention in the debates of the session. At the end of
February he was afflicted with a long and painful illness and lay in
bed--at first at Wimborne House and afterwards at a little cottage near
Wimbledon--for nearly five months. His absence was a grievous loss to
the Opposition during the Irish crisis. The public announcement that the
imprisoned members had been released was accompanied by a well-founded
rumour of some political bargain between the Government and Mr. Parnell.
Mr. Forster’s explanations exposed the fact that the Kilmainham
negotiations, whatever their nature, had been conducted independently of
the Irish Secretary by Mr. Chamberlain. Upon all this came the terrible
news of the murders in the Phœnix Park. The new Minister, ‘an
innocent man’ even to the fiercest Fenians, a man honoured and liked by
all who knew him, the envoy of peace and reconciliation, was stabbed to
death on the very day of his landing. The excitement throughout England
was tremendous. After the dead had been buried with every circumstance
of national grief and indignation the ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ came under
pitiless review. The Fourth Party headed the attack. They pointed out
Mr. Chamberlain as the mysterious ‘Number One’ of the Fenian inner
circle; and Mr. Balfour, speaking with altogether unexpected power,
denounced the ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ as ‘an infamy.’ This was the first
speech he ever made that commanded general attention, or gave any
promise of his future distinction. So intense was the feeling in the
House that it was freely stated, and acknowledged even on the Liberal
benches, that had Lord Randolph Churchill been at hand to strike the
blow the Government might have fallen.
It was not until the autumn that he was strong enough to return to the
House of Commons. Irish obstruction had reached its inevitable
conclusion; and Parliament was assembled for a renewal of the session at
the end of October to effect a drastic revision in its procedure. Mr.
Gladstone’s ‘new rules’ were ingenious and comprehensive. All sorts of
liberties and privileges of debate were ruthlessly lopped off or
deformed in the attempt to destroy the abuses by which they had been
encumbered. There were restrictions upon dilatory motions of all kinds
and devices for checking irrelevance or repetition in debate; but the
Closure--_clôture_, as its opponents called it with elaborate foreign
accent--was the most formidable instrument upon which the Government
relied. Into the discussion of all these grave and novel questions Lord
Randolph threw himself with a recuperated strength. The members had no
sooner met together than he was in possession of the House with a
constitutional protest--based on precedents going back to ‘the ninth
year of King Henry the Fourth’--against the impropriety of taking
Government business after the Appropriation Act for the year had been
passed. And thenceforward, late and early, on small matters and on
great, he and his nimble friends were the tyrants of debate.
Before the session was a week old it was everywhere admitted that the
whole conduct and temper of the Opposition had undergone a change and
that that change was ultimately connected with Lord Randolph’s return.
Mr. Gladstone had barely had time to offer him some courteous
congratulations upon his recovery when they were engaged together in the
liveliest of disputes. He contrived over and over again, by repeated
allusions to the ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ (an expression which Mr. Gladstone
always regarded with extreme disfavour), or to the course of affairs in
Egypt (to which reference will presently be made), to provoke the Prime
Minister into indignant declamation. He jeered at the Liberal party--who
had been exhorted by their Whips not to take too much part in the
discussion--‘for assisting in the capacity of mutes at the funeral
obsequies of free speech.’ Irritated by various motions for adjournment
upon Irish and Egyptian affairs, the supporters of the Ministry covered
the notice paper with ‘blocking notices,’ then a newly discovered
device, relating to almost every conceivable subject. Lord Randolph
deliberately described these as ‘bogus motions put down to prevent
discussion of _bona-fide_ motions.’ ‘Oh!’ said Mr. Labouchere, much
shocked, ‘I move that those words be taken down.’ ‘I second that,’
rejoined Lord Randolph instantly, and forthwith proceeded to repeat the
expression. The usual squabbles, unavoidable perhaps--certainly not very
earnestly avoided--soon sprang up between the solemn elders of the Front
Opposition Bench and the clever energetic men who impelled them forward
while they were supposed to follow. One night Mr. Gibson voted against
an amendment, proposed by the Fourth Party, to prevent the debate on
motions for adjournment being confined solely to the question of whether
the House should or should not adjourn. When, on the very next day, the
restricting rule having been passed with his concurrence, he was himself
called to order for breaking it, Lord Randolph’s joy was unconcealed.
But a more serious difference arose on the question of the closure.
Lord Randolph Churchill wished the Conservative party to meet this with
an utterly uncompromising resistance. He wrote (November 4) a fiery
letter to the _Times_ urging the Opposition, under the euphonious phrase
of making ‘a determined use of the rights of Parliamentary minorities,’
to bring about a dead-lock before their powers were for ever destroyed
by the new rules, and so to force Mr. Gladstone to appeal to the country
against a Conservative cry of ‘freedom of speech for the Commons.’ ‘It
is not altogether astonishing,’ observed the _Times_ (November 6), ‘that
the prospect of fighting a stout battle with ten times as many followers
as Mr. Parnell ever commanded should have a fascination for the ardent
spirit of Lord Randolph Churchill.’ The leaders of the Conservative
party, however, resolved to assume a temperate and reasonable manner in
the hopes of obtaining larger concessions from the Government. In this
praiseworthy spirit Mr. Gibson moved an amendment, not challenging the
principle of the closure, but requiring the vote of two-thirds of those
present to make it operative. Lord Randolph delivered on this occasion
(November 1) one of those speeches by which his Parliamentary reputation
was established. At the moment it commanded absolutely the attention of
the House and its conclusions have been sustained by the practice of all
the years that have followed.
‘The _clôture_,’ he said, ‘has been called an innovation--a foreign
practice--but it appears to me that a proportionate majority, or what is
called a two-thirds _clôture_, is a much greater innovation than the
_clôture_ itself, and is absolutely foreign to all our principles,
ideas, or customs. I know of nothing in the history of this country, or
in its laws, or in its Constitution, which can be adduced as a precedent
or as an analogy for the proposal in the amendment that the House should
require two-thirds of its members to affirm any proposition. We do not
require proportionate majorities for the election of our
representatives, nor would any proposition to that effect have the
slightest chance of being accepted by the country. London, Manchester,
Liverpool, Birmingham, and Glasgow can return members to this House for
a period of seven years by simple majorities, and the member so returned
is as fully and as firmly the member of that constituency as if he had
been elected unanimously. And I think that the election of a member for
a great constituency for a period of seven years is a much more
important matter and would seem to require a much stronger title, than
the closing of an occasional debate in the House of Commons. We know,
moreover, that many of the greatest reforms in our laws have been
carried by majorities which did not number double figures; and it is
undoubtedly, in theory, in the power of Parliament, by a majority of
one, to change the Constitution of this country from a monarchy into a
republic--which, again, I should say, would be a much more important
matter than the closing of an occasional debate. I own I am a firm
believer in the general infallibility of simple majorities: they have
practically governed the British Empire from time immemorial; and I
must express my surprise that the Tory party, or the Constitutional
party, which recoils with horror from the Radical innovation of the
_clôture_, should propose with eagerness, with anxiety, almost with
desperation, the much greater Radical innovation of a two-thirds
majority....
‘I imagine that many of those who support this amendment are animated by
a secret conviction that the palmy days of Tory government are over, and
that the Tory party have nothing to look forward to but a long period of
endless opposition, perhaps occasionally chequered by little glimpses of
office with a minority. I believe that view to be not only incorrect,
but absurdly incorrect. That it is held by many I have no doubt, and
those who hold it propose by this amendment to build, as it were, a
little dyke, behind which they fancy that they will be able to shelter
themselves for a long time to come. A more hopeless delusion never
before led astray a political party. How many times does anyone in this
House think that the present Prime Minister would permit the Tory party
to refuse him the necessary two-thirds majority for getting on with his
business? I think he might allow it twice, perhaps three times; but, as
sure as he sits there, after the third time, he would come down to this
House and declare that the state of public business was deplorable, that
the session was one of discomfort and disaster, and that the two-thirds
majority must be exchanged for a simple majority; and within a
fortnight or three weeks from the date of that declaration this precious
little dyke, which was to shelter the Tory party for a long time to
come, this little exotic which was so carefully introduced, nurtured,
and protected so that the Tory party might repose under its shade, would
be abolished, cut down, and swept away into the great dustbin of all
modern constitutional checks. The best protection, the best
constitutional check against a Liberal Minister which the Tory party can
look to is the House of Lords; yet how often does the House of Lords,
with its centuries of prescription, with all its vast territorial
influence, venture to stand in the way of a Liberal majority? And yet,
with this historic caution, not to say timidity, on the part of the
House of Lords in your minds, and before your eyes, does anyone really
seriously imagine that this wretched device, this miserable safeguard of
a two-thirds majority, could for one moment arrest the tide of popular
reform, a safeguard compared with which Don Quixote’s helmet was a
miracle of protection, or Mrs. Partington’s mop a monster of energy and
strength?
‘But let us look a little further ahead. No one will deny that there are
great and burning questions coming on rapidly for settlement--questions
relating to the franchise and to the representation of the
people--questions relating to the revenue and to trade--questions
relating to the land and agriculture--questions affecting the relations
between Great Britain and Ireland. Is the Tory party prepared--is it
determined--to abdicate and renounce all title to the initiative of
legislation on these great questions? Is the attitude of the great Tory
Democracy, which Lord Beaconsfield’s party constructed, to be one of
mere dogged opposition? And is it true, what our foes say of us, that
Coercion for Ireland and foreign war is to be the ‘be-all and the
end-all’ of Tory Ministries? I think not; and yet it is on the ability,
and not only on the ability, but on the rapidity, with which, in the
face of unscrupulous opposition, you may be able to legislate on these
questions that your title to power and that your tenure of office will
mainly depend. Nevertheless, here you are, under the influence of an
Hibernian legal mind, elaborately and laboriously endeavouring to forge
for yourselves an instrument which, if you do come into office, will
paralyse you so effectually that your power will be as tottering as a
house of cards, your tenure of office as evanescent as a summer’s day.
No, sir, oppose the _clôture_ if you will; defeat it if you can; resort
for that purpose, if you have the courage, to all those forms and
privileges which a Parliamentary minority still possesses, in order, if
possible, to compel the Prime Minister to abandon his project, or to
appeal to the country to decide between you and him; but, whatever you
do, for Heaven’s sake do not be seduced by interested counsels into
following foreign fancies, and do not be persuaded by any desire to
think only of the moment, and to disembarrass yourselves of all care for
what is to come.’
There was great discontent among the Conservative party at this speech.
Its force was undeniable, and the members recognised reluctantly and
uneasily that they had been led, in support of a vicious compromise, on
to ground equally unsuited for defence or attack. All the more were they
inclined to resent the proof of their leaders’ unwisdom. Mr. Balfour
lost no time in making it clear that he disagreed with Lord Randolph
Churchill, and when he rose next day to renew the debate he declared
himself definitely in favour of the principle of the two-thirds majority
to enforce the Closure. Mr. Goschen had praised Lord Randolph’s
arguments and Mr. Balfour, after alluding to the ‘portentous coalition
between a discontented Whig and an independent Tory,’ devoted his speech
entirely to refuting them. In this he was, according to Sir Stafford
Northcote, very successful. ‘My noble friend, the member for Woodstock,’
said the leader of the Opposition naïvely, ‘has somehow or other managed
to elevate himself into a position from which he finds himself capable
of looking down on the Front Benches on both sides and of regarding all
parties in the House of Commons with an impartiality which is quite
sublime. I do not know what can have taken my noble friend into such
heights, or whether he went there to consult the angel Gabriel, or, what
is sometimes suspected, to look for the lost principles of the Liberal
party--some of which have gone to the planet Saturn and some to the
planet Mars--but, whatever may have become of them, his argument seems
to me to have been completely answered by the honourable member for
Hertford, who sits near him, and I do not think it necessary to dwell
further upon it. It certainly seems to me that my noble friend has
overlooked, from the great heights from which he regards these matters,
the real importance of those safeguards which he treats as little lights
which would be very quickly swept away. I can only say that if he is
right, and if they would be quickly swept away, we would not be in a
worse position than if we never had them at all.’
Even this rejoinder could not sustain the fortunes of the debate. The
division showed how ill-conceived the Opposition tactics had been. The
Irish party, who naturally looked upon a Closure which required a
two-thirds majority as a device specially directed against them, voted
in a body against the amendment. The Whigs were somewhat divided, but
the greater number followed Mr. Goschen into the Government lobby. The
Fourth Party, consisting of three persons, abstained. Mr. Gibson’s
amendment was therefore defeated by 322 to 288, or nearly double the
majority that had been generally expected. Thus, against their will and
in spite of their leaders, the Conservative party became possessed of
that great engine of government by which during nearly twenty years of
power they were to silence and overcome their political opponents.
Ever since then, obstruction and Closure have struggled against each
other in a warfare which has respected no neutral boundaries and
recognised no public law. Scarcely any Parliamentary custom or privilege
has escaped their joint depredations. Every device or formality designed
in the careful wisdom of former ages to safeguard the rights of a
minority has been recklessly exploited by the one faction and ruthlessly
demolished by the other. The historic procedure of the House of Commons
has been reduced to the rigid framework which had hitherto served a
purpose only in Continental or Colonial imitations. The whole theatre of
war has been devastated. Almost everything within the range of the
combatants that was destructible has perished--and has perished beyond
repair. So long as the House of Commons contains no body of opinion
which, because more or less independent of party organisations, is
capable of being won or estranged by argument or conduct, the vicious
conflict must run its appointed course. The end is, however, in sight.
The majority must prevail. An elaborate and comprehensive time-table,
fixed no doubt with some impartiality, may soon assign immovable limits
to all debate. The victory of Closure will be complete. Obstruction will
disappear through being at once unnecessary and impossible. But the
remedy may prove more painful than the disease and the strength and
reality of representative institutions may very easily disappear as
well. Certain it is that if the House of Commons is ever to regain its
vanished freedom and to preserve its vanishing authority, it will be by
new and original treatment and not by belated attempts to revive the
systems of the past. A larger and more generous freedom in choosing the
subjects to be discussed might compensate for the mechanical regulation
of the time allotted to discussion. The delegation of financial and
legislative detail to Committees, and the devolution upon local,
provincial, or national bodies of much contentious business proper to
their respective jurisdictions, would abundantly increase the total time
available. And perhaps those more complicated but more scientific
methods of Parliamentary election, generally described as ‘Proportional
Representation,’ will some day secure that detached, august, impartial
element in British councils whose influence and favour all factions
would strive to win.
Lord Beaconsfield’s death early in the year 1881 had been a heavy blow
to the Fourth Party. Great men at the height of their power often, to
their cost, refuse to recognise the ability of new comers. Peel had
scorned Disraeli. Gladstone never understood Mr. Chamberlain’s capacity
till he faced him as a foe. Smaller persons, called from time to time to
the conduct of public affairs, exhibit the same failing in an aggravated
degree with greater regularity and more disastrous results to
themselves. The jealousy and dislike with which the leaders of the
Conservative party in the House of Commons regarded the activities of
Lord Randolph and his friends, had been apparent even before the session
of 1880 had come to an end. From all such feelings Lord Beaconsfield was
free. His character and the hard experiences of his earlier years made
him seek eagerly for the first signs of oncoming power. He was an old
man lifted high above his contemporaries and he liked to look past them
to the new generation and to feel that he could gain the sympathy and
confidence of younger men. If he liked youth, he liked Tory Democracy
even more. He had, moreover, good reason to know how a Parliamentary
Opposition should be conducted. He saw with perfect clearness the
incapacity above the gangway and the enterprise and pluck below it. Had
his life been prolonged for a few more years the Fourth Party might have
marched, as his Young Guard, by a smoother road, and this story might
have reached a less melancholy conclusion. He stood above personal
rivalries. He was removed from the petty vexations of the House of
Commons. Surely he would not have allowed these clever ardent men to
drift into antagonism against the mass of the Conservative party and
into fierce feud with its leaders. He alone could have kept their
loyalty, as he alone commanded their respect; and never would he have
countenanced the solemn excommunication by dulness and prejudice of all
that preserved the sparkling life of Toryism in times of depression and
defeat. But Lord Beaconsfield was gone; and those whom he had left
behind had other views of how his inheritance--such as it was--should be
divided.
CHAPTER V
ELIJAH’S MANTLE
‘Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand
judgment.’--JOB. xxxii. 9.
[Sidenote: 1883 ÆT. 34]
For nearly three eventful years Mr. Gladstone’s Administration had held
power. In the country the popularity and prestige of the great Minister
were still immense. His authority was as unquestioned by the rank and
file of his party as on the morrow of the Midlothian triumph. He was
still ‘the people’s William’ to the crowd. But in Parliament and in the
Cabinet difficulties had arisen which scarcely any other leader could
have stemmed. Bradlaugh, Majuba, Kilmainham, were names full of gloomy
significance to the Liberal party, that promised renewed vexation and
discredit in the future. Colleagues had dropped off one by one. Lord
Lansdowne had left the Government as early as the Compensation for
Disturbance Bill. The Irish Land Act had cost the Prime Minister the
Duke of Argyll. Mr. Forster had fallen rather than consent to the
release of Parnell. A new question was at hand, opening a broad
indefinite vista of embarrassment and disaster and involving at the
outset a far more serious secession.
[Sidenote: 1882-1883]
The gradual withdrawal of European Powers and final retreat of France
left Great Britain alone to confront the growing anarchy in Egypt. A
medley of conflicting impulses and incidents--moral obligations,
material interests, the Suez Canal, the coupons of the Egyptian debt,
Arabi’s national movement and the massacre of June--culminated in the
bombardment of Alexandria on July 11, 1882, by the British fleet. Mr.
Bright resigned from the Cabinet; but the House of Commons broke into
general cheering at the news and only eight Radicals testified to their
principles by their votes. Large military operations followed.
Twenty-five thousand British soldiers descended upon Egypt. Arabi and
his national movement were stamped out under the heavy heel of the
British Grenadier and England became responsible for the fortunes of the
Nile Valley.
Their intervention was to carry the Government further than they
expected. The misrule which had produced in Egypt the national movement
of Arabi had created the rebellion of the Mahdi in the Soudan. The
inhabitants of vast regions were aflame with military fury and religious
fervour. Yusef Pasha had been overwhelmed. The army of General Hicks was
being collected for its fatal effort. The Khedival garrisons were
everywhere cut off and besieged. Khartoum almost alone was accessible
from the north. Inch by inch and hour by hour the Liberal Government was
dragged deeper and deeper into the horrible perplexities of the Egyptian
riddle and the Soudan tragedy. At each detested step they resolved to
go no further. Every act of interference was to be their last. Every day
they looked forward to an early evacuation. To get out of the country in
the shortest possible time and upon any conceivable justification was
their constant and controlling desire; and after every struggle to
escape they found themselves more hopelessly and inextricably involved.
To Lord Randolph Churchill the whole policy of intervention seemed a
flagrant political blunder and a crowning violation of Liberal
principles. He had sympathised from the beginning with the revolt of
Arabi Pasha. He subscribed fifty pounds to the expenses of his defence
before the Egyptian Court Martial. He believed that the popular soldier
and Minister had been the head of a real national movement directed
against one of the vilest and most worthless Governments in the world.
That England should use her power to stamp out that movement, to crush
the army which sustained it, to banish the leader on whom all depended
and to hand back the wretched Egyptians to the incapacity of Tewfik and
the extortions of his creditors, was to him an odious crime. The war
was--in his eyes--a wicked war, an unjust war, ‘a bondholders’ war.’ And
as he felt, so he spoke. While the fighting was actually in progress
criticism was necessarily ineffective; but at the beginning of 1883 the
excitement of Tel-el-Kebir and Kassassin had begun to subside and
Egyptian affairs became a leading subject of Parliamentary debate.
While these embarrassments preoccupied the Ministry, the Conservative
Opposition was disturbed by questions of leadership. Who was to be Lord
Beaconsfield’s successor? Sir Stafford Northcote, as the leader in the
House of Commons, seemed to have the most natural and formal claims.
Lord Salisbury had not then obtained any large measure of public
confidence. He was generally regarded as representing a form of Toryism
highly orthodox and respectable in principle, but rather too rampant and
unyielding for the practical necessities of the political situation. The
epigrams and epithets which slipped so easily from his tongue and pen
had won him the reputation of being rash and violent by nature. His
comparison of Lord Derby to Titus Oates was not soon forgotten; and, for
all the respect in which his character was held, Disraeli’s celebrated
description of him had gained a very wide acceptance. Even in the House
of Lords there had been at first some doubt as to his leadership. Lord
Cairns, the Duke of Richmond and the Duke of Marlborough seem all at
times to have been considered as safer alternatives. Since his authority
had been conceded or asserted in the Upper Chamber some mistakes in
tactics had been made, and Lord Salisbury was thought on more than one
occasion to have committed his party further in resistance to Liberal
legislation than its strength warranted. For two years, however, the
leadership of the party as a whole had been in commission. A kind of
‘dual control’ had been jointly exerted by the leaders in both houses.
Between Sir Stafford Northcote and Lord Salisbury the most pleasant
personal relations prevailed and it will be shown in this account that
they behaved to each other, in many difficult and delicate
circumstances, with unquestionable loyalty. At the same time the great
prize and honour of supreme control, with its almost certain reversion
of the Premiership, lay between them, and only one could win it. As very
often happens in such circumstances, the good faith and good feeling
observed between the principals did not extend to their respective
supporters; and Lord Salisbury’s excellent relations with Sir Stafford
Northcote did not prevent the growth of two sulky and jealous factions
to support their rival claims.
The Fourth Party stood for a long time apart from these activities and
were individually divided as to the course to take. Mr. Balfour’s
opinion was from the outset clear; and his evident wish that Lord
Salisbury, and not Sir Stafford Northcote, should head the Conservative
party may have been his chief reason for associating himself with the
free-lances below the gangway. Mr. Gorst, on the other hand, was much
more friendly to Sir Stafford Northcote. He did not altogether agree
with Lord Randolph Churchill in his very adverse estimate of Sir
Stafford Northcote’s qualities and capacity as a Parliamentary leader,
which is generally reflected in these pages. Between these two choices
Lord Randolph seems long to have hung in doubt. He was much disquieted
by several of Lord Salisbury’s actions in the House of Lords, which
seemed to indicate an attitude of uncompromising resistance to
democratic legislation. On the other hand, the Fourth Party came into
constant disagreement with Sir Stafford Northcote in the House of
Commons, and chafed keenly under his guidance.
The evils of the ‘dual control’ were increasingly displayed as time went
by. The Arrears Bill in 1882 ended in the complete collapse of the
Opposition in both Houses. Lord Salisbury was for rejecting it in the
House of Lords on the second reading and courting a dissolution. In this
course he was supported by an enthusiastic meeting of Peers at his house
in Arlington Street. The leaders in the Commons dissuaded him from such
an extreme measure. It was agreed that the Bill should not be rejected,
but materially amended, and that the amendments should be fought for at
all risks. Lord Salisbury accordingly amended the Bill in the House of
Lords. But Sir Stafford and his friends in the Commons failed to support
him with the necessary vigour. A division of opinion grew rapidly in the
Conservative ranks. At a time when union and decision were both vital to
the success of the operations, neither was to be found. No great effort
was made to rally the party in the House of Commons. Grave doubts were
expressed as to the wisdom of provoking a conflict between the two
Houses. The word ‘dissolution’ seemed full of evil omen. Only 157
Conservatives out of 242 voted in the decisive division for the Lords’
amendments and they were defeated by the crushing majority of 136. The
panic spread to the House of Lords. Lord Salisbury, deserted by the
Peers, was left in a very ignominious position; and, in spite of the
definite arrangement on which he had acted, the party Press resounded
with praise of Sir Stafford’s prudence and blame of Lord Salisbury’s
rashness. The need of a single supreme leader was, through the
occurrence of such incidents, very widely recognised at the beginning of
1883; but whether Lord Salisbury or Sir Stafford Northcote should be
chosen was still a matter of doubt and controversy. The prevailing
opinion inclined strongly towards Sir Stafford Northcote.
Lord Randolph began the session of 1883 in great activity, and the
Fourth Party, with or without the assistance of Mr. Balfour, was
prominent, if not predominant, in almost every Parliamentary event. As a
leader of free-lances, Lord Randolph was for ever seeking for a chance
to drive a wedge into the Ministerial array. To split the Government
majority by raising some issue on which conscientious Radicals would be
forced to vote against their leaders, or, failing that, by some question
on which the Minister concerned would be likely to utter illiberal
sentiments, and bound to justify a policy or a system which the Liberal
party detested, was his perpetual and almost instinctive endeavour. Such
had been his method during the debates on Irish Coercion; it was his
plan upon ‘Parliamentary procedure’; it would have been his course, had
he not been dissuaded therefrom, in regard to the suppression of the
Boer revolt; it was afterwards to be his attitude in much greater degree
upon the unending tangles of affairs in Egypt. If the tactics he pursued
were adroit, the sentiments he expressed were congenial. Alike from
conviction and partisanship he was drawn continually to the more Radical
view of political disputes. No one understood better than he the
difficulties with which Mr. Gladstone had to contend, or the stresses
which paralysed the Cabinet and racked the Liberal party.
‘You are no doubt aware,’ he told a Manchester audience (December 1,
1881), ‘of a curious fact in natural history--that there is an animal
more useful than picturesque, generally to be found in our farmyards,
which cannot swim. Owing to its ungraceful conformation, whenever it is
called upon to swim, it cuts its own throat with its feet; and the
spectacle of the Radical party attempting to govern reminds me
irresistibly of that animal trying to swim. The Radical party are
prevented from governing by what they are pleased to call their
principles; and in the act of governing they invariably commit suicide.
They are unable to govern Ireland because it was by stimulating disorder
that they attained power. They were unable to suppress the revolt of the
Boers, because it is their most sacred principle that any portion of the
Empire must be sacrificed rather than that they should incur the charge
of “blood-guiltiness.” They were unable to retain the valuable
possession of Candahar, which had been gained at a cost of eighteen
millions, because another of their most sacred principles is that we
must rely on “moral barriers.” Their Government is without an ally in
Europe because this is their diplomatic maxim--that foreign policy is
nothing more than an alternate succession of insults and apologies.
They are unable to conclude a treaty of commerce, vital though it be to
this country, because they have gratuitously tied themselves down to the
fetish of limiting Customs duties to six articles of foreign import. So
you see, gentlemen, that whenever they attempt to move in the ordinary
paths of government one of these so-called principles immediately rises
up, paralyses their action, and makes them an object either of mockery
or of compassion.’
He took a grim delight in compelling the Under Secretary for the
Colonies--‘this humanitarian Minister’--and even Mr. Gladstone himself,
to defend or palliate the use of dynamite by the Boers in their warfare
with the natives. When Mr. Evelyn Ashley was stung by much sarcastic
comment into condemning ‘the ill-regulated impulses of humanity’ which
appeared to prompt the Opposition attack, Lord Randolph replied that he
had passed the gravest censure on the Prime Minister, whose whole career
had consisted in giving way to such ‘ill-regulated impulses’ and
persuading the nation to agree with him. Now, as always, he was an
economist. He subjected the Civil Service Estimates to an unremitting
scrutiny. The repair of Royal Palaces, the up-keep of the Royal Mews and
Parks, formed the subject of protracted debate. He attacked the Royal
Buckhounds--‘’Arry’s Hounds,’ as he called them--and declared that only
a Cockney who did not know the difference between a field of oats and a
field of wheat, and no true sportsman, would take part in the pursuit
of a tame animal kept in captivity for the purpose of being hunted over
and over again. Against such criticisms the Liberal Ministers could
furnish no reply satisfactory to their own supporters.
[Illustration: _Reproduced by permission of the proprietors of ‘Punch.’_
ATHWART THE COURSE.
R-ND-LPH CH-RCH-LL. (_an aggravating Boy_): ‘In the way again! ’ooray!!’
_Punch_, July 7, 1883.]
Some of Lord Randolph’s maxims in Opposition are well known. He is often
credited with, though he cannot rightly claim, the authorship of the
phrase, ‘The duty of an Opposition is to oppose.’ Lord Salisbury
condemned early in 1883 ‘the temptation, strong to many politicians, to
attempt to gain the victory by bringing into the Lobby men whose
principles were divergent, and whose combined forces therefore could not
lead to any wholesome victory.’ ‘Excellent moralising,’ observed Lord
Randolph, ‘very suitable to the digestions of country delegates, but one
of those Puritanical theories which party leaders are prone to preach on
a platform, which has never guided for any length of time the action of
politicians in the House of Commons, and which, whenever apparently put
into practice, invariably results in weak and inane proceedings.
Discriminations between wholesome and unwholesome victories are idle and
impracticable. Obtain the victory, know how to follow it up, and leave
the wholesomeness or unwholesomeness to critics.’ His second maxim was
as follows: ‘Take office only when it suits you, but put the Government
in a minority whenever you decently can’; and his third, ‘Whenever by an
unfortunate concurrence of circumstances an Opposition is compelled to
support the Government, the support should be given with a kick and not
with a caress and should be withdrawn on the first available moment.’
Lord Randolph always declared that in such things he was sustained by
the example of Mr. Disraeli. In 1852 Mr. Disraeli put Lord John Russell
in a minority by allying himself with Lord Palmerston. In 1857 he put
Lord Palmerston in a minority by allying himself with Mr. Gladstone and
the Radical party. In 1858 he put Lord Palmerston in a second minority
by following the lead of Mr. Milner Gibson and the Radicals. In 1866 Mr.
Disraeli, with the assistance of Lord Cranborne, placed Mr. Gladstone in
a minority by allying himself with the Whigs. Again, in 1873 Mr.
Disraeli placed Mr. Gladstone in a minority by making a temporary
alliance with the Radicals and with the Irish. Fortified by these
examples, the leader of Tory Democracy pursued his devious and
unexpected course, to the bewilderment of his friends and the
discomfiture of his foes.
The chronic friction between the Front Opposition Bench and the corner
seat below the gangway developed in the first few weeks of the session
of 1883 a considerable degree of heat. Lord Randolph’s opinion of the
worthies at the head of his party was not good, and the efforts which he
made to conceal it, were not apparent. They complained of the irritating
laugh with which he would sometimes mark his dissent from their tactics.
He spoke of them collectively in private as ‘the old gang.’ One by one
he fastened upon them nicknames which clung like burrs. Sir Stafford
Northcote had always been ‘the Goat.’ Mr. W. H. Smith and Sir R. Cross
were described as ‘Marshall and Snelgrove.’ Mr. Gibson was ‘the family
solicitor of the Tory party.’ The smoking-room of the House of Commons
was always laughing over some new witticism or sharp saying, faithfully
carried by mischief-makers from one to another till it reached its final
destination and roused the wrath of the potentate concerned. But while
in his conversation Lord Randolph was scarcely restrained by the limits
of decorum, he remained himself perfectly unapproachable. No man dared
to take any liberties with him, and party officials or ex-Ministers who
addressed themselves to him found themselves confronted by a suave and
formal courtesy through which it was impossible to break.
A sharp and open difference with Sir Stafford Northcote grew early in
March out of some small incident of House of Commons tactics:--
_Sir Stafford Northcote to Lord Randolph Churchill._
_Private._
House of Commons: March 9, 1883.
Dear Lord Randolph,--I understand that a good many of our friends
are annoyed at the appearance of a kind of _communiqué_ in the
morning papers yesterday to the effect that if I were to move the
adjournment of the House (as some persons supposed I intended to
do) the ‘Fourth Party’ would not support the motion by rising in
their places.
You will, I am sure, understand that any steps taken with the
apparent purpose of marking out a separate party within the general
body of the Conservatives must be prejudicial to the interests of
the whole, and I therefore call your attention to the matter in
the hope of preventing similar embarrassments in the future.
I remain
Yours very faithfully,
STAFFORD H. NORTHCOTE.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Sir Stafford Northcote._
2 Connaught Place, W.
Dear Sir Stafford Northcote,--In reply to your letter I have to
remark that members who sit below the gangway have always acted in
the House of Commons with a very considerable degree of
independence of the recognised and constituted chiefs of either
party, nor can I (who owe nothing to anyone and depend on nobody)
in any way or at any time depart from that well-established and
highly respectable tradition.
I am not aware of any _communiqué_ on the matter about which you
write and I must decline to be responsible for the gossip of the
Lobby which may find its way into the daily or weekly Press. I
would suggest, however, that ‘similar embarrassments’ would be
avoided for the future, if the small party of Conservatives who sit
below the gangway were to be occasionally informed beforehand of
your intentions on any particular matter. They consider that they
have, during the whole of this Parliament, worked harder in the
House of Commons than any other members of the party, and they know
that a very considerable body of public opinion in the country
approves entirely of the course of action which they have adopted.
There would be less danger of ‘marking out a separate party within
the general body of the Conservatives,’ if you would use your
influence with some of your late colleagues so as to induce them to
abstain from holding my friends and myself up to ridicule and
dislike by their speeches in the country, or covertly by inspiring
that portion of the daily Press which is notoriously under the
influence of the Front Opposition Bench to attack and denounce us,
whose only fault is that at all times and by all means we have
never ceased from attacking, denouncing, and embarrassing the
present Government. I spoke on this point to Mr. Rowland Winn very
freely at the end of the autumn session, and I regret to find that
my so doing seems rather to have increased than modified the
mischief.
I have the honour to remain
Yours very faithfully,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
_Sir Stafford Northcote to Lord Randolph Churchill._
_Private._
30 St. James’s Place, S.W.: March 10, 1883.
Dear Lord Randolph,--I am very sensible of the zeal and ability
which you and your immediate friends show in your Parliamentary
work. But to turn your work to the best account you really ought to
consider the first principles of party action, and, unless you mean
absolutely to dissever yourselves from the main body, you ought to
act heartily with it except upon occasions when you feel yourselves
bound to differ from it; and when those occasions arise, you ought
frankly but amicably to tell the leaders what your difficulties and
your intentions are. You may be well assured that I am only too
glad to confer with all members of the party on these terms, and
with yourself as frankly as with anyone. What I must object to is
the apparent maintenance of a distinct organisation within the
party. It produces infinite soreness and difficulty.
I remain
Faithfully yours,
STAFFORD H. NORTHCOTE.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Sir Stafford Northcote._
2 Connaught Place, W.: March 11.
Dear Sir Stafford Northcote,--I beg to acknowledge the receipt of
your letter. I do not see my way to complete acquiescence in the
views which you have been kind enough to express to me. Since I
have been in Parliament I have always acted on my own account, and
I shall continue to do so, for I have not found the results of such
a line of action at all unsatisfactory. It is not in the power of
any Conservative, however hostile towards me he may feel, to throw
the slightest doubt upon the orthodoxy of my political views, and
with respect to what may conduce to the ultimate benefit of the
Tory party I conceive that the widest latitude of opinion at the
present moment is not only allowable but, indeed, imperative.
You have not thought it necessary to allude to the remarks I made
in reply to your first letter concerning the censure, the intrigue,
the dislike, open or imperfectly concealed, of several of those who
appear to be deeply in your confidence, and who may possibly be
comprised amongst those whom you designate as ‘leaders.’ These are
matters on which I am perfectly informed and equally unconcerned,
but at the same time their existence rather weakens the effect of
the second letter which I have received from you. The parties I
allude to have a past to get rid of; I have not; and the numerous
letters which I have for some time received, and which I continue
to receive, from all parts of the country, and from all sorts of
individuals and bodies, enable me to be confident that my political
actions and views are not so entirely personal as you would seem to
imagine.
In conclusion, I would observe that I did not commence this
correspondence, but that, as you have done me the honour to
communicate to me your opinions on my attitude in Parliament, I am
under the impression that it would not be respectful to you if I
were not to avail myself of this opportunity to place clearly
before you what that attitude will continue to be. It will be the
same in the future as it has been in the past; and as I have no
particular personal object to gain, and therefore nothing to lose,
I can await the result with very considerable equanimity.
I have the honour to remain
Yours very faithfully,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
This correspondence heralded a state of war. The Tory leaders affected
to regard Lord Randolph Churchill as a contumacious fellow who
represented no one but himself, and pushed inordinate pretension with
boundless impudence. They continued wilfully blind to the ever-growing
movement in his favour of popular opinion among their own party all over
the country. Lord Randolph, on his part, was not slow or reluctant to
assert his power. In December 1882 he had been visited by a deputation
of the principal Conservatives of Manchester, inviting him to be their
candidate for the then undivided representation of that great city. He
complained openly to the deputation of the feeble conduct of the
Opposition, and these serious gentlemen did not hesitate to greet with
unmistakable approbation censures which he passed upon their own
leaders.
‘I see no good object,’ he said, ‘to be gained by concealing my opinion
that the constitutional function of an Opposition is to oppose and not
support the Government, and that this function has during the three
sessions of this Parliament been either systematically neglected or
defectively carried out. More than once since the present Government
came into office legitimate opportunities have arisen for conflict,
which ought to have resulted in the overthrow of the Ministry or in
great damage thereto; and those opportunities have been allowed to pass
by unavailed of. I would venture to lay down with confidence the
principle that the healthy vitality of a party is not to be estimated by
great speeches in the country, but only by its action in Parliament;
and if its action in Parliament is observed to fall considerably below
the level of its great speeches in the country, depend upon it there is
something or other not altogether satisfactory in its constitution.’
A more decisive declaration was soon to be required. The statue of Lord
Beaconsfield was now finished, and April 19, as the anniversary of his
death, had been fixed for its unveiling. Towards the end of March the
programme of the ceremony was made public and it was found that the
principal part of unveiling the statue and pronouncing the eulogy had
been assumed by Sir Stafford Northcote, while to Lord Salisbury was
relegated the very secondary function of proposing a vote of thanks to
Sir Stafford for his speech. The general, if tacit, acquiescence of the
Conservative party in these dispositions could only mean that Sir
Stafford Northcote was their recognised and adopted leader and would be
the head of any Conservative Government which might come into being.
Lord Randolph Churchill was so persuaded of the futility of such an
arrangement that he determined at any risk to make a protest, which
should at least prevent its unanimous acceptance. On March 29 a letter,
which was assigned especial prominence and attracted much attention,
appeared in the _Times_, from ‘A Tory,’ complaining that Sir Stafford
Northcote was to unveil the statue and denouncing his selection as the
triumph of a ‘faction’ over the more numerous adherents of Lord
Salisbury. Two days later (April 2) Lord Randolph struck his blow.
He had prepared his statement with deliberation and he showed it
privately to several intimate friends. All, with the single exception of
Mr. Chenery, the Editor of the _Times_, who had a journalist’s eye for
‘copy,’ disapproved of its terms and tone. Some urged him not to publish
it. One such appeal lies before me as I write. ‘Let me beseech you to
stop your letter. I may be presumptuous; I may be importunate; but I am
sincere--so listen to me. Your letter is a libel on your own party; it
lacks finish; it will offend the _whole_ party; it will offend the
public. You impute as an offence the attention paid to tradesmanlike
counsellors. What will the tradesmen think of you? They will be
challenged to reject you, inasmuch as you despise them.... You are now a
power in the party; you have pressed heavily on the leaders; you do so
to-day, and may continue to do so if you will husband your resources.
They don’t like it. If they can blow you out of the way they will, and
your letter gives them the chance they have been waiting for.... You are
attacking them at the wrong moment. Your victim has been ill, sent off
to recruit his strength, is back again at his post supported by good
wishes and receiving sympathy from all. Are you wanting in generosity?
No. _I_ say, “No”; but will the public, will your enemies say “No”?...
Such a letter could only be justified by its success. It will be a
failure. Your best friends will be unable to prove you right; and when
once the tyrant-throne you have raised for yourself, and by yourself,
begins to lose the support of the outside public, your enemies within
the party will hurry to overwhelm you in its ruins.’
The letter was published forthwith. ‘The position of the Conservative
party,’ wrote Lord Randolph,[12] ‘is hopeful and critical. Everything
depends upon the Liberals keeping their leader, and upon the
Conservatives finding one. An Opposition never wants a policy; but an
Opposition, if it is to become a strong Government, must have a leader.
The country, though it may be disposed to dispense with Mr. Gladstone
and his colleagues, is not likely to exchange them for an arrangement
which would practically place the Premiership in commission. The
Conservative party must decide at once upon a name. This is more
important with the modern electorate than a cry; but at the present
moment, when the battle may be joined any day, we have fixed upon
neither.’
Yet the Conservative party had an ample choice. ‘Lord Salisbury, Lord
Cairns, and Sir Stafford Northcote all possess great and peculiar
qualifications. If the electors are in a negative frame of mind they may
accept Sir Stafford Northcote; if they are in a cautious frame of mind
they may shelter themselves under Lord Cairns; if they are in an English
frame of mind they will rally round Lord Salisbury.’ He proceeded to
review the conduct of the Opposition during the last three sessions.
‘Such a series of neglected opportunities, pusillanimity, combativeness
at wrong moments, vacillation, dread of responsibility, repression and
discouragement of hard-working followers, collusions with the
Government, hankerings after coalitions, jealousies, commonplaces, want
of perception on the part of the former lieutenants of Lord
Beaconsfield, no one but he who has watched carefully and intelligently
the course of affairs in Parliament, can adequately realise or
sufficiently express; and if it be the case that Ministers have lost
ground in the country, they have only themselves to blame, nor have they
the slightest right to cherish feelings of resentment against the
regular and responsible Opposition in the House of Commons.
‘There are many, I know well, among the Conservative party out of the
House of Commons who are convinced that if the present opportunities for
success are neglected or inadequately turned to account, the days of the
Tory party, as we know it, are in all probability numbered; who are
convinced, further, that if these opportunities are handled by
third-rate statesmen, such as were just good enough to fill subordinate
offices while Lord Beaconsfield was alive, they will be neglected or
inadequately turned to account. Many of the party in the country are
determined that their efforts and their industry shall not result merely
in the short-lived triumph and speedy disgrace of _bourgeois_ placemen,
“honourable” Tadpoles, hungry Tapers, Irish lawyers. The Conservative
party was formed for better ends than these....
’ ...Lord Salisbury alone among those who have endeavoured to guide the
action of the Conservative party, has agitated Scotland and arrested the
attention of the Midlands. His name and influence in Lancashire are more
than sufficient to counterbalance any advantages which may have accrued
to the Liberal party from the adhesion of Lord Derby. Even his opponents
admit that he has projected a policy rightly conceiving and eloquently
expressing the true principles of popular Toryism. Against him are
directed all the malignant efforts of envious mediocrity, and it is
essential to the future well-being of the Tory party that these
machinations should no longer be permitted to obscure the paramount
claims of the one man who is capable, not only of overturning, but also
of replacing Mr. Gladstone, and who--partly from a magnanimous trust in
the good faith of others, partly from a very high, perhaps an
exaggerated, idea of political loyalty--is in danger of being sacrificed
to the internecine jealousies of some of the most useless of his former
colleagues.’
The publication of this letter excited, as his friends had foreseen, an
outburst of indignation against Lord Randolph Churchill. All sections of
the Conservative party--including many members who were thoroughly
dissatisfied with the conduct of their leaders--united in disowning him
and his opinions. When he went down to the House on the morrow of his
letter scarcely a member would speak to him, and he sat, alone and
abandoned, hunched up in his corner seat. When Sir Stafford Northcote
rose to address some questions to Ministers he received a tremendous
ovation. Even Mr. Gorst publicly signified his allegiance to him on
April 4. On the same day Mr. W. H. Smith denounced Lord Randolph’s
letter as an attempt to sow discord in the Conservative ranks and as a
foul wrong to both Lord Salisbury and Sir Stafford Northcote. Mr.
Chaplin, Mr. Northcote (speaking with the authority of his father), and
Mr. Lowther meted out their heavy and righteous censures. Tory and
Liberal newspapers vied with each other in wrathful or derisive comment.
Two hundred members of the Conservative party attached their names to a
memorial expressing their trust and confidence in Sir Stafford, which
memorial was duly presented to him by one of their most valued
representatives, Sir John Mowbray. Lord Salisbury preserved a golden
silence. Never was politician so utterly isolated, so totally
repudiated, so signally rebuked, by all of those persons of influence
and position upon whose support he must depend.
But the results were curiously barren. The intense irritation at
Westminster and in the Carlton found no encouragement in the
constituencies. The vehement attacks to which Lord Randolph was
subjected aroused no echo in the great provincial centres. Country
newspapers were restrained in their criticism. The _Times_ gave him a
cautious, left-handed, but effective support. Manchester showed no wish
to withdraw its invitation. The working-class electors declined to have
their indignation manufactured from the London clubs and offices; and
the conviction steadily gained acceptance and assertion that, whatever
might be thought of his methods, on the merits of the case ‘Randy was
right.’ So, indeed, he was. In rough but perfectly unmistakable language
he had proclaimed a vital truth. He had declared that which most men
knew in their hearts, even though they would not or dared not admit it.
No amount of memorials or party demonstrations, no loud disclaimers,
could prevail against facts which were every day becoming more flagrant.
For a week Lord Randolph remained silent and solitary in his corner
seat. Then, just as the storm showed signs of abating, just when the
worthies were asking themselves whether, after all, they had not been
too hard on a young man who could be, if he only chose, a powerful ally,
he published his second letter in the _Times_. In this he described the
utter breakdown of ‘the dual control’ by which the Conservative party
was afflicted, how Lord Salisbury had been deserted on the Arrears Bill
and how Sir Henry Wolff had been actually impeded in his original
opposition to Mr. Bradlaugh by Sir Stafford Northcote. ‘The differences
of principle which sever the Conservatives from the Radicals are even
greater and more vital to the future of the nation than those which
agitated the times of Pitt and Fox, or the more recent days of the Duke
of Wellington and Lord Grey. The questions of the continuation of the
monarchy, the existence of an hereditary legislature, the preservation
of a central government for the three kingdoms, the connection between
Church and State, are all more or less rapidly coming within the range
of practical politics.... On all these and such like questions the
Conservative party hold strong opinions, and if these opinions are to
prevail it is essential that they should be represented by, and
identified with, a statesman who fears not to meet and who knows how to
sway immense masses of the working classes and who either by his genius
or his eloquence, or by all the varied influences of an ancient name,
can “move the hearts of households.” Without such a leader the
Conservative party is beaten even before the battle is begun....
’ ...I am not in the least alarmed,’ the writer concluded, ‘by the
violence of the replies to the letter which you were good enough to
insert a week ago. I know well that many of those who are expressing
with so much heat and indignation their disagreement with my views have
themselves on many occasions during the present Parliament been loud in
their condemnation of the apathy and irresolution of the Opposition and
of the fatal influence exercised by one or two of those who surround the
leader. It is because of my belief that the maintenance of the
Constitution and the existence of a strong, resolute, intelligent and
active Tory party are inseparably connected with each other that I have
referred to the incidents of the past with the object of averting grave
disaster in the future. If that object is even approached by my letters
to you, I am only too happy to bear the brunt of a little temporary
effervescence and to be the scapegoat on which doomed mediocrities may
lay the burden of their exposed incapacity....’
Mr. Chenery was very doubtful about this letter and urged Lord Randolph
not to publish it. ‘You have produced,’ he wrote, ‘a great effect by the
first letter, which this, in my opinion, would only undo.’ But Lord
Randolph persisted and the letter was printed. On April 19 Sir Stafford
Northcote unveiled the Beaconsfield statue. Lord Randolph wrote for the
_Fortnightly Review_ of May a reflective description of this event. He
called the article, from which various quotations have already been
made, ‘Elijah’s Mantle.’ He cannot claim in any special degree the gift
of letters. In private he wrote exactly as he would have spoken to his
friends. His public writings were for the most part speeches set forth
on paper. But ‘Elijah’s Mantle’ shows a higher degree of literary
excellence than any other record he has left behind him. In its
picturesque presentment, in its well-chosen words, in the lucidity and
force of the argument, it proved not unworthy of the almost universal
attention which the personality of the writer drew upon it from the
political world.
Lord Randolph described the unveiling of the statue ‘under a murky sky
and amidst splashing rain’; the melancholy change which a few years had
effected in the position and prospects of the once mighty party Lord
Beaconsfield had led; the imposing majority of 1874, now transferred
bodily to the Liberal side; and the sudden and stunning nature of the
catastrophe of 1880. What a surprise it was to the placemen, the rank
and file and ‘the old men who crooned over the fires at the Carlton’!
‘That some malign and venomous genius must suddenly have possessed the
mind of the people’ was their only explanation. And on all this Lord
Beaconsfield’s death--‘the crowning blow sent by a mischievous and
evil-minded fortune.’ While ‘the Chief’ lived, hope had lived too. But
from the hour of his death every Tory, in and out of Parliament, high or
low, rich or poor, had exclaimed, muttered or thought: ‘Oh, if Lord
Beaconsfield were alive!’ That was a monument to the departed leader
more enduring than the bronze on the Abbey Green. Was it not also a
criticism, pointed and unanswerable, upon the conduct of affairs since
his death, which ‘no amount of memorials of confidence, no number of
dinners in Pall Mall, no repetitions, however frequent, of gushing
embraces between the Lord and the Commoner,’ could gainsay?
Lord Randolph thought that Lord Beaconsfield’s career could be painted
in a single sentence: ‘Failure, failure, failure, partial success,
renewed failure, ultimate and complete triumph.’ The victory of 1874 had
given a golden opportunity to the Tories; but owing to the natural decay
of Lord Beaconsfield’s physical vigour, that opportunity had been
wasted. Would it return? ‘The Liberals can afford better to sustain
great disasters than the Conservatives, for there is a recuperative
power innate in Liberal principles--the result of the longing of the
human mind for progress and for adventure--which enables them to recover
rapidly and unexpectedly from misfortunes which would seem to be fatal.
The Tories, though possessing many other advantages, fail in this
respect. As time goes on, their successes will be fewer and separated
from each other by intervals of growing length; unless, indeed, the
policy and the principles of the Tory party should undergo a surprising
development; unless the secret of Lord Beaconsfield’s theory of
government is appropriated, understood, believed in, sown broadcast
amongst the people; unless the mantle of Elijah should fall upon some
one who is capable enough and fortunate enough, carrying with him a
united party, to bring to perfection those schemes of Imperial rule and
of social reform which Lord Beaconsfield had only time to dream of, to
hint at, and to sketch.’
Lord Randolph then proceeded to outline for the first time the
conception of Tory Democracy which had now possessed his mind.
‘Some of Lord Beaconsfield’s phrases will bear any amount of microscopic
examination. Speaking at Manchester in 1871, by the alteration of a
letter in a quotation from the Vulgate he revealed the policy which
ought to guide Tory leaders at the present tune: “Sanitas sanitatum,
omnia sanitas.” Such was the quotation, in which a careful mind will
discover a scheme of social progress and reform of dimensions so large
and wide-spreading that many volumes would not suffice to explain its
details. By it is shadowed forth, and in it is embraced, a social
revolution which, passing by and diverting attention from wild longings
for organic change, commences with the little, peddling Boards of Health
which occupy and delight the Local Government Department, comprises Lord
Salisbury’s plans for the amelioration of the dwellings of the poor,
carries with it Lord Carnarvon’s ideal of compulsory national insurance,
includes Sir Wilfrid Lawson’s temperance propaganda, preserves and
reclaims commons and open spaces--favoured by Mr. Bryce--constructs
people’s parks, collects and opens to the masses museums, libraries,
art-galleries, does not disdain the public washhouses of Mr. Jesse
Collings. Public and private thrift must animate the whole, for it is
from public thrift that the funds for these largesses can be drawn and
it is by private thrift alone that their results can be utilised and
appreciated. The expression “Tory Democracy” has excited the wonder of
some, the alarm of others, and great and bitter ridicule from the
Radical party. But the “Tory Democracy” may yet exist; the elements for
its composition only require to be collected and the labour may some day
possibly be effected by the man, whoever he may be, upon whom the mantle
of Elijah has descended.’
Lord Randolph’s letters had aimed at establishing the leadership of Lord
Salisbury and had constituted an appeal to him to come forward and head
the ‘New Tories.’ They also intimated with tolerable plainness that if
Lord Salisbury were unable or unwilling to don the mantle, there was
another who would not hesitate to assume it. References to ‘a statesman
who fears not to meet, and who knows how to sway, immense masses of the
working classes,’ and who ‘by all the varied influences of an ancient
name can move “the hearts of households,”’ although directly applied to
Lord Salisbury, were obviously capable of an alternative interpretation.
The suggestion was perfectly understood by all and in political circles
a hearty, concerted, but deplorably unsuccessful attempt was made to
laugh it out of existence.
By the end of April it was evident that the outburst against Lord
Randolph Churchill had in no wise injured his position in the country.
In order to meet the difficulties of the Bradlaugh case and the repeated
explosions of passion to which it gave rise, the Prime Minister had
introduced the Affirmation Bill, which would enable persons of no
religious belief to affirm, like Quakers, instead of taking the ordinary
oath. On this Mr. Gladstone delivered one of his most magnificent
orations. When Lord Randolph replied (April 30) he was heard with severe
and respectful attention in all parts of the House. He spoke long and
thoughtfully, and, although no one could maintain the elevation to which
Mr. Gladstone had raised the debate, it was felt that the Minister’s
arguments had been not inadequately met.
[Illustration: _Reproduced by permission of the proprietors of ‘Punch,’_
A DREAM OF THE FUTURE.
LITTLE LORD R.: ‘Ah! they’ll have to give me a statue--some day!!’
_Punch_ April 28, 1883.]
‘The present Bill,’ he said, ‘is not for the benefit of the whole
nation; it is for the benefit of one man, and it is brought in in
deference to clamour and violence. Let us consider for a moment who
are the classes outside which are opposed to the representative of
atheism. They are the religious, the moral, the law-abiding, and the
industrious. Who are the personal supporters of atheism outside this
House? For the most part they are the residuum, the rabble, and the scum
of the population; the bulk of them are persons to whom all
restraint--religious, moral, or legal--is odious and intolerable. Why
are we so anxious to give these latter a victory and a triumph over the
former?
‘I take this Bill of the Government and I strip it of all those flimsy
disguises with which the Prime Minister so ingeniously but so uselessly
clothed it and I place it naked before the Parliament and before the
country--a Bill for the admission of avowed atheists into the House of
Commons--and I say that this is a fundamental change in the Constitution
of such vital and momentous importance that the people of this country
will not hastily ratify it and that the opinion of the country must be
ascertained before the Parliament can assent to it.
‘We must not only think of the relief of Mr. Bradlaugh, or of the relief
of this House from a slight difficulty; we must think what would be the
effect on the people of this State of a recognition of unlawful
doctrines, and of giving place in the immediate governing body to a man
who professes and who preaches that the Christian religion, on which our
law has been founded, is false, its morality defective, and its promises
illusory. Shall we not be giving to those doctrines a tremendous
impetus by altering the Constitution of this country, in order that they
may be officially represented in our Councils and may influence our
decisions? Can we contemplate without alarm the revulsion that such an
act might occasion among those masses of the people who, with some hope
of a happier state hereafter, are toiling their weary way through the
world, content to tolerate for a time their less fortunate lot--the
revulsion that would occur if they inferred from the action of the
Legislature that it was even possible for their faith to be false?
Surely the horrors of the French Revolution should give some idea of the
effect on the masses of the State recognition of atheism! It is from
disasters such as those that we have been very probably preserved by the
Christian characteristics of the community. Let me quote the words of
Lord Erskine: “The religious and moral sense of the people of Great
Britain is the sheet-anchor which alone can hold the vessel of State
amidst the storms that agitate the world.”
‘The peculiarity of the English Constitution is that it is founded upon
and incorporated with the Christian morality. It is a characteristic
which is possessed by no other nation, however free or however great;
and does it not occur to you that the extraordinary prosperity and
duration and apparent future of our Empire is not, perhaps, unconnected
with this famous characteristic?
‘You,’ he concluded, pointing to the Liberal party, ‘proudly claim the
task of carrying the cause of religious liberty to its furthest
imaginable limits; be it ours, I reply, nor is it less noble, to
endeavour to restrain your aspirations within the bounds of reason and
of policy.’
The division produced a great excitement. When the numbers were declared
it was found that the Affirmation Bill had upon its second reading been
cast out by a majority of three (292--289).
The satisfaction of the Tory party and of some of the best and worthiest
people in it at this result was enormous. In the House of Commons very
largely, and outside in the Press and among the electors almost
entirely, the credit of the victory was assigned to Lord Randolph. ‘The
best speech he has ever made’ was Sir Henry James’s comment. The _Punch_
cartoon of the week represented him as Ariel urging his hounds to the
pursuit and expulsion of Caliban. Once again he was the hero of the
hour. One among many letters of approval and congratulation must have
given him especial pleasure, and may be quoted here. ‘Though it is years
since we met,’ wrote Dr. Creighton (May 1, 1883), ‘and though I only
live as a vague memory in your mind, I cannot help writing you a few
lines to say how much I admired your speech last night. As an observer
of the course of politics who tries to give them an historical value, I
watch your career with growing interest. It seems to me that you combine
in a remarkable degree the real principles of statesmanship with an
attention to the conditions under which our political life has to be
carried on. It is easy to be a doctrinaire; it is easy to be a purely
party politician; it is not easy to combine the two into a distinct line
of policy. I recognise with admiration your increasing success in this
direction and your genuine devotion to the serious pursuit of politics.’
‘It is indeed a pleasure to me,’ wrote Lord Randolph in reply, ‘to know
that you have not forgotten your former rather unsatisfactory pupil and
that you follow, not without interest and perhaps with some hope, a
course of which Fate has not yet determined the form or the end.’
The ceremony of April 19, 1883, was the origin of a new idea destined to
spread and flourish over an ever-widening area during all the years that
have followed. The Fourth Party had grown spontaneously out of the
Bradlaugh controversy. The Primrose League sprang from the unveiling of
Lord Beaconsfield’s statue. Sir Henry Wolff did not attend in his place
to hear Sir Stafford Northcote’s speech and Lord Salisbury’s vote of
thanks, and he arrived at the House of Commons late in the afternoon.
The well-known superintendent of the members’ cloak-room, Mr. Cove, said
to him, ‘You must have a primrose,’ and gave him one. Thus adorned, Sir
Henry entered the Chamber and found the whole Conservative party
similarly decorated with Lord Beaconsfield’s favourite flower. The fact
impressed him vividly and he said to Lord Randolph Churchill as they
walked home together, ‘What a show of Primroses! This should be turned
to account. Why not start a “Primrose League”?’ Lord Randolph was
instantly interested. ‘Draw up a plan,’ he said, ‘to carry out your idea
and we will see what can be done.’
Sir Henry Wolff set to work at once. He looked for his models to the
Orange Society which was influential in his constituency of Portsmouth,
and to the numerous benefit societies--Foresters, Oddfellows, Good
Templars, and the like--with which he was acquainted. He saw how popular
the badges, grades, and honorary distinctions of these bodies were with
the working classes who supported them. He resolved that the Primrose
League should be inferior to none of these in the variety of its regalia
or the magniloquence of its titles. He discussed all this at length with
Lord Randolph Churchill from day to day; but it was not until the autumn
that anyone else was admitted to their councils. During October and
November the first practical steps were taken. Lord Randolph Churchill,
Sir John Gorst, Sir Henry Wolff, and Sir Alfred Slade met together to
form ‘a new political society which should embrace all classes and all
creeds except atheists and enemies of the British nation.’ All four were
members of the Council of the National Union. They had exceptional
knowledge of the state of Conservative organisations. They saw quite
clearly the failure of the existing Conservative and Constitutional
Associations to suit the popular taste or to succeed in joining all
classes together in defence of the essential doctrines of Toryism. The
constitution of the League, its objects and its machinery were settled
even in detail at meetings held during these two months. Specimen badges
were made. The declaration to be signed by every member of the League
was drawn up by Sir John Gorst in the following terms: ‘I declare, on my
honour and faith, that I will devote my best ability to the _Maintenance
of Religion_, of the _Estates of the Realm_ and of the _Imperial
Ascendency of the British Empire_, and that, consistently with my
allegiance to the Sovereign of these Realms, I will promote with
discretion and fidelity the above objects, being those of the Primrose
League.’ Finally on November 17, in the card-room of the Carlton Club,
these four gentlemen resolved themselves into the Ruling Council of the
League with power to add to their number.
The circle was then gradually increased by the addition of Lord
Randolph’s closest political allies. Colonel Burnaby, Mr. Percy Mitford,
Mr. Dixon Hartland and Sir Algernon Borthwick attended the next few
meetings. Great efforts were being made by the leaders of the
Conservative party in Birmingham to induce Lord Randolph to stand for
that city. Mr. Joseph Rowlands and other prominent Birmingham men were
frequently in London on that errand; all were pressed into the League.
Lord Randolph Churchill’s numerous relations were enlisted. A Ladies’
Grand Council was formed, of which Lady Randolph and Lady Borthwick were
members and the Duchess of Marlborough the President. A humble office
was taken on a second floor in Essex Street, Strand, and the first
public announcement was made December 18, 1883, in the advertisement
columns of the _Times_ and the _Morning Post_, as follows:--
THE PRIMROSE TORY LEAGUE.--Gentlemen wishing to be enrolled in the
Primrose Tory League must apply in writing to the Registrar,
Primrose League, care of Messrs. Lacy, Hartland & Co., Bankers,
London, E.C., or Messrs. Hopkinson & Sons, Bankers, 3 Regent
Street, London, by whom all information will be supplied.
The new political society was in its beginnings viewed with sour
distrust by all Conservatives who were officially orthodox, virtuous and
loyal. It was regarded as a dodge of the Fourth Party and a new weapon
of schism. The struggle on the council of the National Union during the
year 1884, which must soon be described, intensified these feelings. The
early Primrose knights and dames wore their badges everywhere in public
and faced in consequence the keenest ridicule. The _Morning Post_ was
their only substantial ally. The statutes and ordinances of the League
excited the derision of almost all of those who, a few years later, were
proud to subscribe to them. The idea in itself was vital; but only the
personality of Lord Randolph Churchill and the hopes and enthusiasms
which he excited, prevented it from being smothered during its first few
months of existence. As it was, only 957 members--including, however,
many persons of influence--had enrolled themselves by the end of 1884,
and 11,366 by the end of 1885. The Home Rule struggle raised these
numbers to 237,283 in 1886 and 565,861 in 1887. A million members was
reached in 1891 and the League claims at the present time, twenty-one
years after its foundation, to have 1,703,708 knights, dames, and
associates upon its rolls; and although its merits as a national
institution must necessarily be variously appraised, its power and
utility as a political engine have never been questioned.
As the session drew on, the warfare in the House of Commons became
fiercer. Day after day Lord Randolph and his friends assailed the
Government with amazing variety and increasing violence. The Prime
Minister was repeatedly forced to defend himself and his colleagues from
reproach and his encounters with Lord Randolph Churchill were of almost
nightly occurrence. ‘You will kill Mr. Gladstone one of these days,’
said some one to Lord Randolph. ‘Oh, no!’ he rejoined, ‘he will long
survive me. I often tell my wife what a beautiful letter he will write
her, proposing my burial in Westminster Abbey.’
[Illustration: Primrose League Diploma of Knighthood certificate]
In all this fighting the hostility of the Front Opposition Bench to the
Fourth Party was very plainly marked. Sir Stafford Northcote repeatedly
dissociated himself from Lord Randolph, repudiated him, rebuked him, and
even supported the Government against him. A Treasury minute had been
issued forbidding Civil Servants to petition the Government through
members of Parliament. Forthwith Lord Randolph announced that on a named
day he would present 250 petitions signed by over 2,000 Civil
Servants. Although Ministers took no action against the signatories,
Lord Randolph raised the whole matter in the House as a question of
privilege. In his speech he attacked extravagantly Mr. Algernon West,
who, as Chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue, had signed the
offending circular. He condemned the practice of Cabinet Ministers--Sir
Stafford Northcote as well as Mr. Gladstone--of appointing their former
private secretaries to important posts in the Civil Service. The
training of a private secretary--‘among the backstairs intrigues and
dirty work of office’--was no fit preparation for departmental
employment. An attack on a public servant ‘who cannot defend himself’ is
always resented by the supporters of a Government. On this occasion Mr.
Gladstone and Sir Stafford Northcote vied with each other in terms of
reprobation. Sir Stafford said he had never heard so many misstatements
in a single speech. Mr. Gladstone regretted that Lord Randolph should
degrade his Parliamentary position by such conduct. The House indulged
itself in that pleasant warmth which comes from righteous indignation.
Lord Randolph had persuaded himself, upon a mass of evidence collected
for him by Mr. Wilfrid Blunt and others in Egypt, that the Khedive
Tewfik was indirectly responsible for the massacre of June 11, 1882,
which he believed had been instigated from the palace in order to
compass the ruin of Arabi and the national movement, and provoke
decisively the intervention of the European Powers. Having adopted this
opinion, he held tenaciously to it, and thrust it upon Parliament with
earnestness and even with passion. Although in the first instance he had
supported the pension to Lord Alcester for his services in bombarding
Alexandria, on the ground that it was a reward to the naval profession
as a whole, he availed himself of the passage of the necessary Bill
(June 8) to bring forward his charges against the Khedive. The House was
astonished at his vehemence. The Prime Minister’s reply was, however,
curiously guarded. He did not absolutely deny the charge. All he said
was that the information in the possession of the Government afforded
not the least confirmation of it. It was a ‘tremendous charge,’ and the
Government would be glad to examine the evidence on which it was based.
Indeed, it was Sir Stafford Northcote who used the hardest language.
While admitting that he considered the warlike intervention in Egypt
wrong and unjustifiable, he expressed ‘extreme regret’ at Lord
Randolph’s attempt to raise such an issue on the vote for a naval reward
to a distinguished officer. ‘I decline,’ he said, ‘to be led by the
noble lord, and I trust the House will decline to be induced by the
noble lord to accept a position which I consider would be degrading to
its honour.’ This, as Mr. Gorst said later in the debate, was a
statement which would have been better made by the Prime Minister than
by the leader of the Opposition, who, however he might view the opinions
of Lord Randolph Churchill, should leave it to opponents to attack him.
The affair proceeded further. One of Arabi’s officers, Suleiman Sami,
was brought before a courtmartial on the charge of burning Alexandria.
The witnesses demanded by the defence were not allowed to appear; the
trial was unexpectedly curtailed; and the prisoner was sentenced to
death. Lord Randolph exerted himself to procure at least delay before
the sentence was executed, in order that the irregularities at the trial
might be exposed. He declared that Suleiman Sami was himself a witness
whose death would be ‘a god-send to the Egyptian Government.’ Plied with
questions and appeals, the Government undertook to make inquiries; but
before any satisfactory information was obtained and while the House was
still under the impression that the matter was in suspense, Suleiman
Sami was hanged. On this being known the feeling in the Conservative
party was so strong that Sir Stafford himself moved the adjournment of
the House to discuss the conduct of Ministers in regard to the
execution, which Lord Randolph furiously described as ‘the grossest and
vilest judicial murder that ever stained the annals of Oriental
justice.’ In this attack the Fourth Party were supported by the great
mass of Conservative members.
At Mr. Gladstone’s invitation, Lord Randolph laid before him a quantity
of evidence which he had obtained in support of his assertions. This
evidence was examined by Ministers and officially rejected; but it is
remarkable that the Government took no steps, by rebutting it in detail,
to discredit their pertinacious assailant. They could not tell how far
a fearless and impartial inquiry into the labyrinth of sanguinary
intrigue which had cumbered the field of Egyptian politics before the
British intervention might carry them. They wrapped themselves in a
silence of prudence or disdain, and Lord Randolph continued to repeat
his statements with undiminished assurance. He forwarded formally to Sir
Stafford Northcote, among others, a copy of the evidence he had sent to
the Prime Minister. The style and superscription of the acknowledging
letter afford a key to their relations at this period:--
30 St. James’s Place: July 1, 1883.
Dear Lord R. Churchill,--I am much obliged to you for sending me a
copy of the papers you have submitted to Mr. Gladstone.--I remain
faithfully yours,
STAFFORD H. NORTHCOTE.
The Bill for the Suppression of Corrupt and Illegal Practices at
Parliamentary Elections brought the Fourth Party together almost for the
last time. As it passed through the Committee stage in the beginning of
July, all the four friends spoke frequently upon it and supported each
other. One night, July 3, having dined together at Lord Randolph’s
house, they descended upon the House of Commons rather late and, not
having heard the early part of the discussion, demanded with perverse
audacity that the Chairman should read the clause, as it stood amended,
from the Chair. Sir Henry Wolff was the first to make the request and he
threatened to move to report progress unless it was granted. Mr.
Gladstone--always in attendance on the House--did not deny the right of
members to make such a demand; but hoped that an evil precedent would
not be established. Lord Randolph appealed to the Chair. The Chairman
intimated that, having read the clause twice, he would read it no more.
Mr. Balfour then made a conciliatory speech, proposing that as a
compromise the Attorney-General, Sir Henry James, should read the
clause. Sir Henry James refused. Sir Henry Wolff thereupon moved to
report progress. By this time the House was very full. Sir Stafford
Northcote supported the Government and urged Sir Henry not to persist.
Lord Randolph then, under repeated interruptions from Ministerialists,
amid growing excitement, attacked the Government and Mr. Gladstone and
Mr. Herbert Gladstone ‘brought in to cheer the Prime Minister’ and all
their works; but to Sir Stafford he was very polite and deferential and
he expressed in modest language the hope that the leader of the
Opposition would, after all, support them in their protest. The appeal
was, however, fruitless.
On one occasion about this time Lord Salisbury himself seems to have
expostulated with Sir Henry Wolff. But the member for Portsmouth had his
own methods of defence. ‘I do not understand,’ said Lord Salisbury as
they walked together one day, ‘what your real political position is.’
‘Oh, I am a “Smithite,” Lord Salisbury,’ replied Sir Henry
reverentially,--‘a convinced “Smithite” in politics.’ ‘But what is your
object?’ inquired the Tory leader. ‘To do good,’ was the bland
response,--‘simply to do good’; and the conversation passed on to other
topics.
From these contentions Lord Randolph was suddenly withdrawn by a solemn
and unexpected event. On June 28 the Duke of Marlborough persuaded the
House of Lords to reject by a narrow majority (145--140) the Deceased
Wife’s Sister Bill upon its third reading. His speech was perhaps the
best he had ever made. It was also his last. On the night of July 4,
when he went to bed, he seemed in the best of health and spirits. Early
the next morning he was found dead by his servants, struck down by that
same swift, unheralded affection of the heart which was a few years
later to end the life of his heir. Lord Randolph was profoundly shocked
and grieved by his father’s death. He passed many hours reading over his
father’s letters, all carefully preserved from his boyhood days. That
strong religious strain in his nature to which reference has already
been made, afforded him consolation in this season of trouble and,
though always a devout man, he became much more regular in devotional
exercises than at any other period of his life. He had in his hands the
threads of half a dozen political enterprises, for the success of which
his constant presence in the House of Commons was necessary. He cast
them all away from him and retired at once to Blenheim. Many appeals
were made to him to return to the arena, where his absence was instantly
felt and regretted even by those in his own party who were antagonistic
to him. But nothing would induce him to go near Parliament for the rest
of the year. ‘You are very kind,’ he wrote to Wolff, ‘wanting me to come
back to the House; but it is quite impossible. I am not up to it
physically or mentally, and am longing to get away abroad.... It is very
melancholy here--sad recollections at every moment. Nothing can be nicer
than Blandford to everyone.’
The two brothers were very closely drawn together by their common
mourning, and all bitterness faded at once out of the political world.
Sir Stafford Northcote wrote, in the gentle courtesy of his nature, a
generous and affectionate letter of sympathy and regret and a private
correspondence followed between them which stands in pleasant contrast
to the general course of their relations and shows that in modern times
personal kindness and good feeling lie never very far below the sullen
surface of English politics.
Lord Randolph hurried away with his wife and son to Gastein before the
month was out and here his spirits gradually regained their usual
buoyancy. His brother joined him late in August and they dawdled home
together through Switzerland, visiting its beautiful places, climbing
the Rigi ‘like the meanest and commonest of Tow Rows,’ and so back to
Blenheim. During the autumn and winter the Duke of Marlborough persuaded
Lord Randolph to start again his pack of harriers; and this
pursuit--together with the project, about which the new master of
Blenheim was keenly excited, of bringing the railway from Oxford to
Woodstock--proved so absorbing that politics seem for a time to have
been almost abandoned.
CHAPTER VI
TORY DEMOCRACY
‘The Tory party in this country is the national party; it is the
really democratic party of England. It supports the institutions of
the country, because they have been established for the common
good, and because they secure the equality of civil rights without
which, whatever may be its name, no government can be free, and
based upon which principle every government, however it may be
styled, is, in fact, a democracy.’
B. DISRAELI: _A Vindication of the English Constitution_.
[Sidenote: 1882-1885]
The conditions of British politics during the Parliament of 1880,
whether in the House of Commons or abroad in the country, were
peculiar--perhaps unprecedented. Mr. Gladstone’s Administration,
outwardly so powerful alike in the capacity of its members and the
number and fidelity of its supporters, was divided by zig-zag, oblique,
inconsistent yet fundamental dissensions. Nor were these disturbances
the temporary or accidental effect of particular men or measures. There
were important measures. There were earnest, ambitious men. But
something more lay behind the unrest and uncertainties of the day. Not
merely the decay of a Government or the natural over-ripeness of a party
produced the agitations of 1885 and 1886. It was the end of an epoch.
The long dominion of the middle classes, which had begun in 1832, had
come to its close and with it the almost equal reign of Liberalism. The
great victories had been won. All sorts of lumbering tyrannies had been
toppled over. Authority was everywhere broken. Slaves were free.
Conscience was free. Trade was free. But hunger and squalor and cold
were also free; and the people demanded something more than liberty. The
old watchwords still rang true; but they were not enough. And how to
fill the void was the riddle that split the Liberal party. It happened,
moreover, that at this very time, already so critical, a Liberal
Government had been forced to deal with all kinds of affairs for the
efficient conduct of which their formulas furnished no clue. They were
compelled to intervene by force of arms in Egypt, to repress popular
movements, to banish popular leaders, to hang revolutionaries, to devise
ingenious instruments of Coercion, to mutilate Parliamentary procedure
and to curtail the freedom of debate. And thus, while half the Cabinet
were ransacking the past for weapons of Executive authority, others were
groping dimly towards a vague Utopia.
All this confusion was still worse confounded by the imminence of a
further extension of the franchise. The ‘ten-pounder’ and the
‘householder’ had been stages of growth. The evolution was now to be
completed, or practically completed. The government of a world-wide
Empire was, for the first time in human experience, to be thrown
unreservedly to the millions. And no man could predict the results of
that experiment. There seemed to be no reason to assume that any large
body of working-class electors would ever vote Tory. Who could possibly
have foreseen that whether from conscious choice between men and parties
or from the unsuspected operation of irresistible forces till then
latent, the millions would peacefully hand back their powers to
political organisations and so to established authority; that
enfranchised multitudes would constitute themselves the buttresses of
privilege and property; that a free press would by its freedom sap the
influence of debate and through its prosperity become the implement of
wealth; that members and constituencies would become less independent,
not more independent; that Ministers would become more powerful, not
less powerful; that the march would be ordered backward along the beaten
track, not forward in some new direction; and that after a period of
convulsion and flux, twenty years of Tory Government would set in? Who
would have listened to such paradox with patience?
The differences of mood and aim which racked the Ministerial party were
reflected, only less vividly, in the Tory ranks. A Conservative
Opposition smarting under what they regarded as most undeserved defeat
and hampered by leaders to whose defects no one could be blind, had been
forced constantly to support their antagonists upon the main issues of
their policy. They found the Liberal Government engaged in assertions of
authority, at home and abroad, with which all their deepest instincts
inclined them to sympathise. The enforcement of the sternest forms of
Coercion in Ireland, the suspension and suppression of disorderly
members at Westminster, the launching of great warlike enterprises
across the sea, were all public objects which upon the highest patriotic
grounds commanded Tory assent. Upon the other hand they hated with the
fiercest animosity of faction the Ministers who directed these affairs.
They knew that a crisis was approaching. They feared--not without
reason--the formidable union of Gladstone and democracy. They believed
that he was ruining the country and was prepared to dishonour the
Empire. Yet they found themselves repeatedly compelled to vote with him;
and even when opportunities of legitimate attack were offered, no one of
their champions seemed able to strike the blow.
The hesitancy and incompetence which marked the conduct of the
Conservative Opposition--although to some extent due to very lofty
motives of public duty--filled with exasperation the militant Tories in
the country. Members of Parliament, confronted week after week by
definite issues on which votes had to be recorded, found themselves
drawn inch by inch into supporting whole spheres of Governmental action.
Their friends outside took a more general view. They saw what they took
to be a succession of feeble surrenders before Mr. Gladstone’s prestige.
They saw their representatives, bewitched by his authority and
eloquence, in the same Lobby with their arch-enemy. They saw the
Liberal Government staggering ponderously forward, in spite of
disunion, difficulty, and peril, through a succession of mismanaged
warlike undertakings to a series of pernicious domestic reforms. And no
man apparently to stand in their path! And then, all of a sudden, a man
arose alone, or almost alone, to do battle on their behalf. They watched
him struggling day after day against overwhelming odds, overthrown a
score of times, deserted and even tripped up by those who should have
sustained him; yet always returning with inexhaustible activity to the
attack and gaining from month to month substantial and undoubted
successes.
The Conservative party outside Parliament had as little real liking for
much that Lord Randolph Churchill said about Ireland and Egypt as their
leaders and representatives in the House. They could not find any
sympathy for the followers of Mr. Parnell. They did not enjoy being told
that British troops had been used in Egypt to collect the bondholders’
debts, or the description of such thrilling episodes as the bombardment
of a city by an ironclad fleet, a cavalry charge by moonlight, or the
storming of an entrenched position as ‘tawdry military glories.’ They
could not join whole-heartedly in eulogies of a Pasha whom British
justice had condemned to life-long exile, or in attacks upon the
morality and humanity of a Khedive whom British bayonets had replaced
upon his throne. All this, even while they cheered, seemed to them
unpatriotic. But they could not overlook the commotion which Lord
Randolph Churchill’s denunciations wrought in the Gladstonian ranks, or
the embarrassments in which they involved the Radical supporters of the
Ministry. They loved their country much, but they hated Gladstone more;
and they consoled themselves with the belief (which did Lord Randolph
Churchill less justice than he deserved) that he did not really mean all
he said; that it was only his way of beating the Grand Old Man; and
that, after all, he was Jingo and True Blue at heart.
During the years which had passed since the new Parliament had met, the
working-class supporters of the Conservative party, particularly in the
great towns, had come to look with especial favour upon Lord Randolph
Churchill. To these were added a considerable defection from those who
had hitherto counted themselves Liberals. He touched the imagination of
the English people; and he appealed especially to their youth. ‘The
young men of England,’ he exclaimed, ‘are joining the Tory party in
great numbers. The youth of England is on our side.’ He was, indeed,
soon forced to defend himself from the assumption ‘that any expression
of opinion from a person who has no claim to the monumental age of 101,
is a breach of decorum, almost an act of indecency, and an indication of
incurable vice.’ ‘Youth,’ he said (Edinburgh, December 20, 1883), ‘is no
doubt a great calamity, and it appears to excite all the worst passions
of human nature among those who no longer possess it. But we may, I
think, chase away such depressing reflections by remembering that youth
is a calamity which grows less bitter and less poignant as the years go
by, and that by the sheer and simple process of living and survival we
must, each in our turn, approach the summit of the wave.’
By the end of 1882 he was already unquestionably the most popular
speaker in the Conservative party. In 1884 and 1885 he equalled, if he
did not surpass, Mr. Gladstone himself in the interest and enthusiasm
which his personality aroused. Wherever he went he was received by
tremendous throngs and with extraordinary demonstrations of goodwill. In
times when good Conservatives despaired of the fortunes of their party
under a democratic franchise and even, making a virtue of necessity,
regarded it as almost immoral to court a working-class vote, and when
the chiefs of Toryism looked upon the resisting powers of small shop and
lodging-house keepers, of suburban villadom, and of the genial and
seductive publican as almost the only remaining bulwarks of the
Constitution, Lord Randolph Churchill boldly enlisted the British nation
in defence of Church and State. At a time when Liberal orators and
statesmen, ‘careering about the country,’ as Lord Randolph described
them, ‘calling themselves “the people of England,”’ were looking forward
to an election which should relegate the Conservative party to the limbo
of obsolete ideas, they were disconcerted by the spectacle, repeatedly
presented, of multitudes of working men hanging upon the words of a
young aristocrat; and Radicals, bidding higher and higher to catch the
popular fancy, heard with disgust the loudest acclamations of the crowd
accorded to Lord Randolph Churchill as he denounced ‘the Moloch of
Midlothian’[13] or ‘the pinchbeck Robespierre’[14] for war and tyranny
beyond the sea, profusion and misgovernment at home.
Abuse was retorted on his head in vain. ‘“Yahoo Churchill,”’ ‘Little
Randy,’ ‘Cheeky Randy,’ ‘the music-hall cad,’ ‘the Champagne Charley of
politics,’ were designations which measured at once his popularity and
the rising fury of his foes. His fierce moustache and ‘note of
interrogation’ head lent themselves to caricature. He was drawn as a
pigmy, a pug dog, a gnat, a wasp, a ribald and vicious monkey, so
habitually, that nearly everyone, who had not seen him in the flesh,
believed that his physical proportions were far below the common
standards of humanity; but the contrast between his reputed stature and
the majestic outlines of Mr. Gladstone and Sir William Harcourt only
enhanced his fighting qualities in the public eye. ‘Give it ’em hot,
Randy,’ cried the crowds in the streets and at the meetings, till he
himself was forced to complain that he was expected to salute his
opponents with every species of vituperation. But, to tell the truth, he
responded to the public demand with inexhaustible generosity. He spared
no one. Neither persons nor principles escaped an all-embracing
ridicule. The most venerated leaders of the Liberal party, famous in the
great days of its rise, fared no better at his hands than the crudest
and most violent of the New Radicals. One by one Mr. Bright, Mr.
Gladstone, Lord Hartington, Lord Granville, Sir Charles Dilke, Mr.
Chamberlain, Mr. Bradlaugh, and Mr. Schnadhorst were summoned before
that irreverent tribunal and exhibited to popular censure and derision.
His speeches were effective far beyond the circles of his hearers. As
early as the spring of 1881 the _Morning Post_ began to report him
_verbatim_. Mr. Chenery, always a firm believer in his genius, followed
this example almost immediately. Instead of that paragraph of mutilated
misrepresentation with which so many eminent Ministers and ex-Ministers
have to remain dissatisfied, column after column of the _Times_ was
filled with the oratory of an unproved stripling of thirty-two. The
remonstrances which jealousy suggested did not discourage Mr. Chenery;
for, indeed, Lord Randolph’s speeches were the best of ‘copy.’ His
wonderful memory enabled him to make the most elaborate preparations.
His earlier speeches were almost all written out beforehand and learned
by heart. He had the knack of being able to foresee the occasion and he
wrote not an essay or an argument, but just the kind of harangue that
would fit the mood of his audience. His style was essentially
rhetorical, and much more spontaneous than his peculiar methods of
preparation would imply. He seems to have written with scarcely a single
correction and without hesitation of any kind, as fast as he could set
pen to paper. Indeed, I fancy that he wrote his speeches chiefly for an
exercise of memory and to fix them clearly in his mind and did not by
any means make them up with a pen in his hand. Once written, they could
be repeated almost without notes and quite without alteration. But in
this laborious process they gained a logical sequence which, while it
did not in the least detract from the delivery, added vastly to their
virtues in reproduction.
Above all, they were entirely fresh and original. Wit, abuse, epigrams,
imagery, argument--all were ‘Randolphian.’ No one could guess beforehand
what he was going to say nor how he would say it. No one else said the
same kind of things, or said them in the same kind of way. He possessed
the strange quality, unconsciously exerted and not by any means to be
simulated, of compelling attention, and of getting himself talked about.
Every word he spoke was studied with interest and apprehension. Each
step he took was greeted with a gathering chorus of astonished cries. As
Tacitus said of Mucianus: ‘Omnium quae dixerat, feceratque, arte quadam
ostentator’ (‘He had the showman’s knack of drawing public attention to
everything he said or did’). Before the end of 1882 a speech from Lord
Randolph Churchill had become an event to the newspaper reader. The
worthy, pious, and substantial citizen, hurriedly turning over the pages
of his _Times_ or still more respectable _Morning Post_, and folding it
to his convenience, crouched himself in his most comfortable chair and
ate it up line by line with snorts of indignation or gurglings of mirth.
‘Look what he says about Gladstone. I wonder the _Times_ prints such
things. How lowering to the dignity of public life! I can’t think why
they pay so much attention to this young man. Randolph Churchill,
indeed--preposterous! Give me the paper back, my dear.’
Speeches are--next to leading articles--the most impermanent of
impermanent things. But the character and conceptions of that political
movement to the stimulation of which Lord Randolph Churchill devoted his
life, and by which he was now to be so swiftly carried forward, cannot
be better explained than in his own words; and, moreover, the reader is
entitled to have some opportunities of judging for himself. The winter
at Blenheim, with its diversions of the Harriers and the Woodstock
Railway, seems to have refreshed Lord Randolph’s mind and added to his
stores of fancy. He emerged from his retirement to plunge into a
vehement political campaign. On three successive days in December he
delivered at Edinburgh what he called a ‘trilogy’ of speeches. The first
was upon Egypt. Here are its keynotes:--
The Court of Chancery repudiates loans made by money-lenders to
infants even though they may have actually received and spent the
money. Far more ought this country, acting as a great Court of
Equity, to protect the Egyptians in any efforts they may make to
free themselves from this frightful burden [of debt] which is
strangling the life out of them--these Egyptians whom Sir Evelyn
Wood so eloquently calls the infants of centuries: this burden for
the contraction of which they are absolutely innocent, forced upon
them by the great money-lenders of the Stock Exchanges of London
and Paris. The other day the poor Egyptians were very near
effecting a successful revolution; they were very near throwing off
their suffocating bonds; but, unfortunately for Mr. Gladstone, the
Prime Minister of Great Britain--Mr. Gladstone, the leader, the
idol, the demi-god of the Liberal party--Mr. Gladstone, the member
for Midlothian, came upon them with his armies and his fleets,
destroyed their towns, devastated their country, slaughtered their
thousands, and flung back these struggling wretches into the morass
of oppression, back into the toils of their taskmasters. The
revolution of Arabi was the movement of a nation; like all
revolutions, it had its good side and its bad; you must never, for
purposes of practical politics, criticise too minutely the origin,
the authors, or the course of revolutions. Would you undo, if you
could, the Revolution of 1688, which drove the Stuarts from the
throne, because of the intrigues of the nobles and of the clergy?
Would you undo the French Revolution because of the Reign of
Terror? Would you undo the Revolution of Naples because Garibaldi
might not be altogether a man of your mind? You know you would not;
you know that those revolutions were justified by atrocious
Governments.
* * * * *
I advocate, in the first place, the expulsion ‘bag and baggage’ of
the Khedive Tewfik, with all ‘his Turks and his Circassians, his
Zaptiehs and his Mudirs, his Bimbashis and Yuzbashis, his Kaimakams
and his Pashas’[15]--no great number of them in all; two or three
ships would hold the lot. I advocate the recall of the exiles from
Ceylon, the resuscitation of the national party, the formation of a
genuine popular Government, at the head of which shall be placed a
Prince--either native or European, as you will--who shall be indeed
and in truth constitutional, enlightened, and just. I advocate a
great re-arrangement and reduction of the Egyptian national debt
and a clean sweep of the debts of the victimised, the bankrupt, and
the ruined fellaheen. I advocate the placing of Egypt under the
guarantee and guardianship of united Europe, so that no one single
Power shall be able to exercise there superior influence to
another, so that collective authority shall restrain individual
ambition. In a word, I advocate--I plead for--the real emancipation
of an historic land and the true freedom of an ancient race.
* * * * *
You will be told that Egypt is the high-road to India, and that
Britain must hold it at all costs. This is a terrible and a
widespread delusion. Similar delusions have before now led astray
the foreign policy of this country. At one time it was ‘the balance
of power’: that has passed away. At another time it was ‘the
integrity of the Ottoman Empire’: that has tumbled into an
abandoned and forgotten grave; and now we have ‘the high-road to
India’ will-o’-the-wisp, which in time will vanish too. Egypt is
not the high-road to India. The Suez Canal is a commercial route to
India, and a good route, too, in time of peace; but it never was,
and never could be, a military route for Great Britain in time of
war. In time of war there are no well-marked high-roads to and fro
across the British Empire. The path of Britain is upon the ocean,
her ways lie upon the deep, and you should avoid as your greatest
danger any reliance on transcontinental communication, where, at
any time, you may have to encounter gigantic military hosts.
(Edinburgh, December 18, 1883.)
The second speech dealt with the question of the extension of the
franchise, and must be considered in its place. The third foreshadowed
the advent of the Home Rule struggle:--
[Sidenote: 1884 ÆT. 35]
Develop, if you like, in any way you may, the material resources of
Ireland. Advance public money on the easiest terms for railways,
tramways, canals, roads, labourers’ dwellings, fisheries, and
objects of that kind. We owe the Irish a great deal for our bad
government of them in the past; and if we are not stingy, there are
few injuries, however deep, which money will not cure. But do not,
if you value your life as an Empire, swallow one morsel more of
heroic legislation. By giving a continuous support to the Tory
party, let the Irish know that, though they cry day and night,
though they vex you with much wickedness and harass you with much
disorder, though they incessantly divert your attention from your
own affairs, though they cause you all manner of trial and trouble,
there is one thing you will detect at once, in whatever form or
guise it may be presented to you, there is one thing you will never
listen to, there is one thing you will never yield--and that is
their demand for an Irish Parliament, and that to their yells for
the repeal of the Union you answer an unchanging, an unchangeable,
and a unanimous ‘No.’ (Edinburgh, December 20, 1883.)
A month later he spoke at Blackpool. Perhaps this speech affords the
best example of his rhetorical methods. Certainly it filled Tory
Lancashire with merriment and satisfaction:--
Mr. Chamberlain a short time ago attempted to hold Lord Salisbury
up to the execration of the people as one who enjoyed great riches
for which he had neither toiled nor spun and he savagely denounced
Lord Salisbury and all his class. As a matter of fact, Lord
Salisbury from his earliest days has toiled and spun in the service
of the State and for the advancement of his countrymen in learning,
in wealth, and in prosperity; but no Radical ever yet allowed
himself to be embarrassed by a question of fact. Just look,
however, at what Mr. Chamberlain himself does. He goes to Newcastle
and is entertained at a banquet there, and procures for the
president of the feast a live earl, no less a person than the Earl
of Durham. Now Lord Durham is a young gentleman who has just come
of age, who is in the possession of immense hereditary estates,
who is well known on Newmarket heath and prominent among the gilded
youth who throng the corridors of the Gaiety Theatre, but who has
studied politics about as much as Barnum’s new white elephant, and
upon whose ingenuous mind even the idea of rendering service to the
State has not yet commenced to dawn. If by any means it could be
legitimate, and I hold that it is illegitimate, to stigmatise any
individual as enjoying great riches for which he has neither toiled
nor spun, such a case would be the case of the Earl of Durham; and
yet it is under the patronage of the Earl of Durham and basking in
the smiles of the Earl of Durham, bandying vulgar compliments with
the Earl of Durham, that this stern patriot, this rigid moralist,
this unbending censor the Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, flaunts
his Radical and levelling doctrines before the astounded democrats
of Newcastle.
After Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Gladstone:--
‘Vanity of vanities,’ says the preacher, ‘all is vanity.’ ‘Humbug
of humbugs,’ says the Radical, ‘all is humbug.’ Gentlemen, we live
in an 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 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, or 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. For the
purposes of an autumn holiday a large transatlantic steamer is
specially engaged, the Poet-Laureate adorns the suite and receives
a peerage as his reward, and the incidents of the voyage are
luncheon with the Emperor of Russia and tea with the Queen of
Denmark. For the purposes of recreation he has selected the felling
of trees; and we may usefully remark that his amusements, like his
politics, are essentially destructive. Every afternoon the whole
world is invited to assist at the crashing fall of some beech or
elm or oak. The forest laments, in order that Mr. Gladstone may
perspire, and full accounts of these proceedings are forwarded by
special correspondents to every daily paper every recurring
morning. For the purposes of religious devotion the advertisements
grow larger. The parish church at Hawarden is insufficient to
contain the thronging multitudes of fly-catchers who flock to hear
Mr. Gladstone read the lessons for the day, and the humble
parishioners are banished to hospitable Nonconformist tabernacles
in order that mankind may be present at the Prime Minister’s
rendering of Isaiah, or Jeremiah, or the Book of Job....
He proceeded to describe Mr. Gladstone’s method of receiving a
deputation at Hawarden Castle:--
It has always appeared to me somewhat incongruous and inappropriate
that the great chief of the Radical party should reside in a
castle. But to proceed. One would have thought that the deputation
would have been received in the house, in the study, in the
drawing-room, or even in the dining-room. Not at all. That would
have been out of harmony with the advertisement ‘boom.’ Another
scene had been arranged. The working men were guided through the
ornamental grounds, into the wide-spreading park, strewn with the
wreckage and the ruins of the Prime Minister’s sport. All around
them, we may suppose, lay the rotting trunks of once umbrageous
trees: all around them, tossed by the winds, were boughs and bark
and withered shoots. They come suddenly on the Prime Minister and
Master Herbert, in scanty attire and profuse perspiration, engaged
in the destruction of a gigantic oak, just giving its last dying
groan. They are permitted to gaze and to worship and adore and,
having conducted themselves with exemplary propriety, are each of
them presented with a few chips as a memorial of that memorable
scene.
Is not this, I thought to myself as I read the narrative, a perfect
type and emblem of Mr. Gladstone’s government of the Empire? The
working classes of this country in 1880 sought Mr. Gladstone. He
told them that he would give them and all other subjects of the
Queen much legislation, great prosperity, and universal peace; and
he has given them nothing but chips. Chips to the faithful allies
in Afghanistan, chips to the trusting native races of South Africa,
chips to the Egyptian fellah, chips to the British farmer, chips to
the manufacturer and the artisan, chips to the agricultural
labourer, chips to the House of Commons itself. To all who leaned
upon Mr. Gladstone, who trusted in him, and who hoped for something
from him--chips, nothing but chips--hard, dry, unnourishing,
indigestible chips....
Gradually the tone changed as the speaker passed from ridicule to
serious attack:--
The other startling advertisement I wish to allude to was as
follows: ‘Hawarden Castle.--The Prime Minister attended divine
service this morning. He was guarded as usual’ ‘Guarded as usual!’
‘As usual!’ Gracious Heavens! what a commentary on Liberal
government in those two words, ‘as usual’! Do you know that from
the days when first what is called a Prime Minister was invented to
the present, there has been no Prime Minister about whom such a
statement could be made? Many Prime Ministers have come and gone,
good, bad, and indifferent; but the best and the worst have never
been guarded by aught else save the English people. And has it come
to this? Are the times so terrible, are bad passions so rife and
unrestrained, after four years of Liberal rule, that the apostle of
freedom, the benefactor of his country, the man for whom no
flattery is too fulsome, no homage too servile, cannot attend
divine service in his parish church without being ‘guarded as
usual’? Surely a world of serious reflection is opened up; surely
the art of government must have sunk to a very low ebb when the
first servant of the Crown has to be watched night and day by
alguazils armed to the teeth. I hope and pray that they will guard
him well, for it would be an indelible stain on our name and our
fame if a man who has spent fifty years of his life in the service
of the State, were to be the victim of an infamous assassin. But I
ask myself, are we to blame humanity for this state of things? Is
our civilisation all in vain? Is Christianity but a phantom and a
fiction? Is human nature the awful and incurable cause? Surely not.
It is more natural to blame the policy of the statesmen who, to
possess themselves of power, to overthrow a hated rival, set class
against class and race against race; who use their eloquence for no
nobler purpose than to lash into frenzy the needy and the
discontented; who for party purposes are ready to deride morality
and paralyse law; who, to gain a few votes either in Parliament or
in a borough, ally themselves equally with the atheist or with the
rebel, and who lightly arouse and lightly spring from one delirium
of the multitude to another in order to maintain themselves at a
giddy and a perilous height. (Blackpool, January 24, 1884.)
[Sidenote: 1884 Æt. 35]
A few days later it became known that Lord Randolph Churchill had
accepted the invitation of the Birmingham Conservatives to contest that
city with Colonel Burnaby at the General Election against Mr. Bright and
Mr. Chamberlain. This unfurling of the Tory flag in the very heart and
centre of militant and organised Radicalism and against the most famous
and the most active of Radical leaders aroused the keenest interest
among Conservative working men all over the country. The Tories of
Birmingham had long been powerless under the rule of their opponents.
For years they had scarcely been allowed to hold a political meeting.
Almost every avenue of civic life and even of municipal employment was
closed against them. Now the fighting leader of Tory Democracy was
coming to their deliverance. It is impossible to describe the enthusiasm
which his bold challenge excited, or the encouragement which it spread
through the mass of the Conservative party. The newspapers were filled
with cartoons of ‘Jack the Giant-killer’ or of a diminutive David going
forth to battle with a vast screw-bearing Goliath. The mention of his
name, or any reference to the contest on which he had entered, drew
forth the loudest cheers at every Tory meeting. Letters of gratitude,
resolutions of confidence and support, poured in upon him from all parts
of the country.
Before actually descending upon Birmingham he sounded a trumpet-call of
defiance from Woodstock. He attacked Mr. Bright and Mr. Chamberlain with
an impartial and unmeasured ferocity:--
The battle which Mr. Bright has rashly challenged shall be fought
_sans trève ni merci_. The savage animosity which Mr. Bright has
breathed into his speeches, has raised a corresponding spirit among
his opponents. The robe of righteousness with which he and his
confederates have clothed their squalid and corrupted forms shall
be torn asunder; naked and ashamed shall they be beheld by all the
intelligent public, and all shall be disclosed which can be,
whether it be the impostor, and the so-called ‘people’s tribune,’
or the grinding monopolies of Mr. Chamberlain, or the dark and evil
deeds of Mr. Schnadhorst.
A positive fury was excited in Radical Birmingham by these and similar
words. The political predominance of the Liberal party had been
overwhelming and absolutely unbroken in the whole history of the city
since the Reform Bill had enfranchised it. All kinds of criticism had
been suppressed in all kinds of ways and those who had attempted to
voice the opinion of the minority, had found it best to do so with a
prudent politeness. Here was insult in profusion, gross, elaborate, and
designed. ‘The mode of warfare,’ observed Lord Randolph, ‘of the Radical
party resembles that adopted by savage tribes who endeavour to terrify
their opponents by horrid yells and resounding exclamations. I observe
that the reports of the speeches of Mr. Bright and Mr. Chamberlain on
Tuesday were interspersed with “loud and prolonged groans,” “groans,”
“hisses,” “renewed hisses,” and “roars of laughter” and such like. These
resources will no doubt frighten any person of weak nerves and are
calculated to make old women and children run away. But the Tory party
in Birmingham, many thousands strong, will preserve its composure and
the candidate whom they have put forward, will not be intimidated one
little bit.’
Upon April 15 Lord Randolph Churchill opened his campaign in Birmingham
in two speeches delivered on successive nights. He was a man of many
styles. The arguments which he submitted to the electors were the
sincere expression of his deepest convictions; they were in perfect
harmony with the whole of his political life and work, but they were
strange arguments for a Tory to employ:--
I am not here to deny the services which the Radical party have
rendered to English civilisation. I believe that the present
generation is considerably indebted to the struggles which were
carried on five-and-twenty and thirty years ago by those who were
then designated the Philosophical Radicals. They enlarged the
boundaries of freedom, they removed religious and civil
disabilities, they brought the Constitution into the home and the
cottage of the artisan, and they taught the people that there were
in the political life of monarchies and nations higher and nobler
aims than the perpetual waging of wars or constant striving after
territorial aggrandisement. The student of English history, fairly
recognising these lofty results, will not be concerned to discover
or disclose the faults and the follies--and, indeed, I may say the
absurdities--which the Philosophical Radicals mingled with their
creed. Here in Birmingham, amongst your fathers and forefathers,
those men found their home, their mainstay, and their trusting
friends. But parties, like Empires and like all human combinations,
wax and wane. The law of perpetual change, which is the motive
principle of the Radical, exercises its fatal effect upon the
Radical himself....
What was the great motto which expressed all their principles,
which enabled the Radical party of old days to guide and control
the course of events, to make and unmake Ministers and Governments,
to win and retain the confidence of mighty cities such as yours?
‘Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform!’--in other words,
Non-intervention, Rigid Economy, and genuine Progressive
Legislation. And so long as they adhered to those great rocks with
the tenacity of limpets, so long was their good name secure--so
long was their wisdom undoubted; and year by year they could appear
before you with clean hands and clear consciences to ask from you a
renewal of your confidence. Chancellors of the Exchequer,
Secretaries to the Treasury and of public departments, groaned
under the tyrannical economy of Mr. Hume, but were uncommonly
careful to give him as little handle as possible for what they
arrogantly called his cheese-paring mania. The genius and influence
of Mr. Cobden exercised a diminishing effect upon the estimates of
the War and Navy Ministers; and Mr. Bright and Mr. Milner Gibson
either averted or effectually censured unjust and unnecessary war.
The Radical party of those days, he went on, was few in number, with no
representatives in the Government and no Caucus in the country. ‘It was
their great principles,’ exclaimed the speaker, ‘which gave them power,
and which they asserted with obstinacy, irrespective of party, on all
occasions, small or great.’ And now--with half a dozen Radicals in the
Ministry and nearly a hundred members in the House--What had been the
course of events? In 1880 a war in Afghanistan protracted for a whole
year under a Liberal Government; in 1881 the revolt of the Boers, ‘with
which every Radical in England was bound to sympathise,’ met by force of
arms, disgracefully and unsuccessfully applied; in 1882 ‘the struggle
for Egyptian freedom undertaken by Arabi Pasha, suppressed by Liberals,
great towns destroyed, bloody battles fought; and estimates swollen nine
millions beyond those of Lord Beaconsfield’s Administration.’
And what would be the policy of the Conservative party if power were
placed in their hands?
I have no right, a humble member of the rank and file of the Tory
party, to declare to a great meeting like this what will be their
policy. I do not know what will be the policy of the Tory party. I
am not the least bit in the confidence of the leaders, and I must
admit that I do not enjoy the high honour of their friendship. Only
the other night one of them accused me in the House of Commons of
being in secret and fraudulent alliance with the Prime Minister for
the destruction of the Tory party. I have not been able to gather
from their speeches or their acts what would be the policy they
would adopt if the responsibility of government was placed upon
them. They have preserved a prudent, perhaps an over-prudent,
reticence. But though I cannot tell you what their policy will be,
I think I can tell you what their policy ought to be--and in
general terms what I will try and make it to be--if ever I should
represent this powerful constituency. It shall be a policy of
honesty and courage. It shall be a policy which will grapple with
difficulties and deal with them, and not avoid them or postpone
them. It shall be a popular policy, and not a class policy. It
shall be a policy of activity for the national welfare, combined
with a zeal for Imperial security.
The Tory democratic movement in the English boroughs was powerfully
aided by and largely interwoven with the spread of Fair Trade doctrines.
In Lancashire especially the persuasive arguments of Mr. Farrer Ecroyd
had gained a wide acceptance, and twenty years have not effaced the
effects of his exertions. Lord Randolph Churchill, eager to attack the
Liberal Government, began in 1881 by urging the Fair Trade cause with
characteristic vigour and happy irresponsibility. As his influence and
knowledge increased, his assurance upon fiscal matters diminished; and
at Blackpool in 1884 he would not commit himself beyond an ‘inquiry into
the present condition of British industry and as to how it is affected
by our present methods of raising revenue for the service of the State.’
But certainly no one could have painted in more vivid colours the
shocking and melancholy condition of British trade. The words have been
often quoted:--
What is the state of things in the world of British industry? We
are suffering from a depression of trade extending as far back as
1874, ten years of trade depression, and the most hopeful either
among our capitalists or our artisans can discover no signs of a
revival. Your iron industry is dead, dead as mutton; your coal
industries, which depend greatly on the iron industries, are
languishing. Your silk industry is dead, assassinated by the
foreigner. Your woollen industry is _in articulo mortis_, gasping,
struggling. Your cotton industry is seriously sick. The
shipbuilding industry, which held out longest of all, is come to a
standstill. Turn your eyes where you will, survey any branch of
British industry you like, you will find signs of mortal disease.
The self-satisfied Radical philosophers will tell you it is
nothing; they point to the great volume of British trade. Yes, the
volume of British trade is still large, but it is a volume which is
no longer profitable; it is working and struggling. So do the
muscles and nerves of the body of a man who has been hanged twitch
and work violently for a short time after the operation. But death
is there all the same, life has utterly departed, and suddenly
comes the _rigor mortis_. Well, but with this state of British
industry what do you find going on? You find foreign iron, foreign
wool, foreign silk and cotton pouring into the country, flooding
you, drowning you, sinking you, swamping you; your labour market is
congested, wages have sunk below the level of life, the misery in
our large towns is too frightful to contemplate, and emigration or
starvation is the remedy which the Radicals offer you with the most
undisturbed complacency. But what produced this state of things?
Free imports? I am not sure; I should like an inquiry; but I
suspect free imports of the murder of our industries much in the
same way as if I found a man standing over a corpse and plunging
his knife into it I should suspect that man of homicide, and I
should recommend a coroner’s inquest and a trial by jury.
(Blackpool, January 24, 1884.)
In any case, even, if free imports were a wise policy, he would not
allow Mr. Bright and the Liberal party the credit of the discovery:--
Mr. Bright advised his audience at Birmingham to read over again
the speeches of Mr. Charles Villiers on Free Trade made fifty years
ago. I advise them to do nothing of the kind, because if they do
they will lose every shred of veneration and respect which they
still may feel for the name of Mr. Bright. They will find that the
great battle of Free Trade, of which Mr. Bright has never been
tired of boasting loud and long, was fought by Mr. Charles Villiers
long before Mr. Bright made his appearance in public; that Mr.
Charles Villiers bore the burden and heat of that protracted and
lengthened contest; and when Mr. Villiers had won the day Mr.
Bright and his dear friend Mr. Cobden stepped in and tried to rob
him of all his glory. All those who read Mr. Charles Villiers’s
speeches will find that Mr. Bright and his dear friend Mr. Cobden
were nothing more nor less than two plundering cuckoos, who
shamefully ejected Mr. Charles Villiers from the nest which he had
constructed, and who reared therein their own chattering and silly
brood. (Woodstock, January 31, 1884.)
After all this the Fair Traders were not unnaturally inclined to
complain when in 1887--three years afterwards--Lord Randolph Churchill
having acquired a responsible position, having studied the report of the
Commission on Trade appointed largely at his insistence in 1885, having
reflected upon the voting of the counties in the General Election, and
surveyed the problems of finance from the Treasury chambers, poured
buckets of cold water on their cherished schemes and declined to make
any exertions in their support.
But the central proposition of the Tory Democratic idea was that the
Conservative party was willing and thoroughly competent to deal with the
needs of democracy and the multiplying problems of modern life; and that
the British Constitution, so far from being incompatible with the social
progress of the great mass of the people, was in itself a flexible
instrument by which that progress might be guided and secured.
The Whigs are a class with the prejudices and the vices of a class;
the Radicals are a sect with the tyranny and the fanaticism of a
sect.... The Whigs tell you that the institutions of this kingdom,
as illustrated by the balance of Queen, Lords and Commons, and the
Established Church, are but conveniences and useful commodities,
which may be safely altered, modified, or even abolished, so long
as the alteration, modification, or abolition is left to the Whigs
to carry out. The Radicals tell you that these institutions are
hideous, poisonous, and degrading, and that the divine Caucus is
the only machine which can turn out, as if it was a patent
medicine, the happiness of humanity. But the Tories, who are of the
people, know and exclaim that these institutions, which are not so
much the work of the genius of man, but rather the inspired
offspring of Time, are the tried guarantees of individual liberty,
popular government, and Christian morality; that they are the only
institutions which possess the virtue of stability, of stability
even through all ages; that the harmonious fusion of classes and
interests which they represent corresponds with and satisfies the
highest aspirations either of peoples or of men; that by them has
our Empire been founded and extended in the past; and that by them
alone can it prosper or be maintained in the future. Such is the
Tory party and such are its principles, by which it can give to
England the government she requires--democratic, aristocratic,
Parliamentary, monarchical, uniting in an indissoluble embrace
religious liberty and social order. And this party--this Tory party
of to-day--exists by the favour of no caucus, nor for the selfish
interests of any class. Its motto is--‘Of the people, for the
people, by the people’; unity and freedom are the beacons which
shed their light around its future path and amid all political
conflict this shall be its only aim--to increase and to secure
within imperishable walls the historic happiness of English homes.
(Blackpool, January 24, 1884.)
Again and again in these years of strife Lord Randolph Churchill
returned to this central idea:--
The foundation [of the British Constitution] is totally new, purely
modern, absolutely untried. You have changed the old foundation.
You have gone to a new foundation. Your new foundation is a great
seething and swaying mass of some five million electors, who have
it in their power, if they should so please, by the mere heave of
the shoulders, if they only act with moderate unanimity, to sweep
away entirely the three ancient institutions and put anything they
like in their place, and to alter profoundly, and perhaps for a
time altogether ruin, the interests of the three hundred million
beings who are committed to their charge. That is, I say, a state
of things unparalleled in history. And how do you think it will all
end? Are we being swept along a turbulent and irresistible torrent
which is bearing us towards some political Niagara, in which every
mortal thing we now know will be twisted and smashed beyond all
recognition? Or are we, on the other hand, gliding passively along
a quiet river of human progress that will lead us to some
undiscovered ocean of almost superhuman development? Who can
tell?... My state of mind when these great problems come across
me--which is very rarely--is one of wonder, or perhaps I should
rather say of admiration and of hope, because the alternative state
of mind would be one of terror and despair. And I am guarded from
that latter state of mind by a firm belief in the essential
goodness of life, and in the evolution, by some process or other
which I do not exactly know and cannot determine, of a higher and
nobler humanity. But, above all, my especial safeguard against such
a state of mental annihilation and mental despair is my firm belief
in the ascertained and much-tried common sense which is the
peculiarity of the English people. That is the faith which, I
think, ought to animate and protect you in your political future;
that is the faith of the Tory democracy in which I shall ever
abide. (Cambridge University Carlton, June 6, 1885.)
* * * * *
‘Trust the people’--I have long tried to make that my motto; but I
know, and will not conceal, that there are still a few in our party
who have that lesson yet to learn and who have yet to understand
that the Tory party of to-day is no longer identified with that
small and narrow class which is connected with the ownership of
land; but that its great strength can be found, and must be
developed, in our large towns as well as in our country districts.
Yes, trust the people. You, who are ambitious, and rightly
ambitious, of being the guardians of the British Constitution,
trust the people, and they will trust you--and they will follow you
and join you in the defence of that Constitution against any and
every foe. I have no fear of democracy. I do not fear minorities; I
do not care for those checks and securities which Mr. Goschen seems
to think of such importance. Modern checks and securities are not
worth a brass farthing. Give me a fair arrangement of the
constituencies, and one part of England will correct and balance
the other. (Birmingham, April 16, 1884.)
And in later years, after the battle had been won, and when the Tory
leaders had already begun to look upon their new supporters as if they
were an inalienable asset:--
I cannot but feel that we have nearly realised what was some years
ago apparently only a dream, the dream of Tory Democracy. You
remember with what scoffs and scornings and with what sneers and
ridicule the phrase ‘Tory Democracy’ was received when I first made
use of it in the House of Commons in the year 1882. Nothing was too
bad, nothing was too taunting, nothing was too absurd to apply to
the idea or to those who dared to sustain such an idea in public.
You in Birmingham were the first publicly to associate yourselves
with the policy which is contained in the phrase ‘Tory Democracy.’
What is Tory Democracy? Tory Democracy is a democracy which
supports the Tory party; but with this important qualification,
that it supports a Tory party, not from mere caprice, not from
momentary disgust or indignation with the results of Radicalism,
but a democracy which supports the Tory party because it has been
taught by experience and by knowledge to believe in the excellence
and the soundness of true Tory principles. But Tory Democracy
involves also another idea of equal importance. It involves the
idea of a Government who in all branches of their policy and in all
features of their administration are animated by lofty and by
Liberal ideas. That is Tory Democracy. (Birmingham, April 9, 1888.)
One more quotation--Lord Randolph’s defence of the Established
Church--shall close this chapter. The speech from which it is taken was
delivered in the course of his Birmingham campaign and comprised a
general vindication of the British Constitution. Let it be remembered
that in those days the demand for organic change was real and fierce.
The vast unsounded problems of Collectivism and Individualism, the
intricate and varying relations between Capital and Labour, the almost
limitless power of combined or accumulated wealth and the racial
deterioration produced by civilised poverty, were issues which might be
considered by philosophers or fought out between master and man but
which approached only remotely the Parliamentary and political arena.
Disputes about forms of government still absorbed the activities of
democracy; and the hall-mark of a good Radical in the ‘eighties was
secular republicanism:--
I see in the Church of England an immense and omni-present
ramification of machinery working without cost to the people--and
daily and hourly lifting the masses of the people, rich and poor
alike, from the dead and dreary level of the lowest and most
material cares of life, up to the comfortable contemplation of
higher and serener forms of existence and of destiny. I see in the
Church of England a centre and a source and a guide of charitable
effort, mitigating by its mendicant importunity the violence of
human misery, whether mental or physical, and contributing to the
work of alleviation from its own not superfluous resources. And I
urge upon you not to throw that source of charity upon the
haphazard almsgiving of a busy and a selfish world. I view the
Church of England eagerly cooperating in the work of national
education, not only benefiting your children, but saving your
pockets; and I remember that it has been the work of the Church to
pour forth floods of knowledge, purely secular and scientific, even
from the days when knowledge was not; and I warn you against
hindering the diffusion of knowledge, inspired by religion, amongst
those who will have devolved upon them the responsibility for the
government of this wide Empire.
But I own that my chief reason for supporting the Church of England
I find in the fact that, when compared with other creeds and other
sects, it is essentially the Church of religious liberty. Whether
in one direction or another, it is continually possessed by the
ambition, not of excluding, but of including, all shades of
religious thought, all sorts and conditions of men; and, standing
out like a lighthouse over a stormy ocean, it marks the entrance to
a port where the millions and the masses of those who are wearied
at times with the woes of the world, and troubled often by the
trials of existence, may search for and may find that peace which
passeth all understanding. I cannot, and will not, allow myself to
believe that the English people, who are not only naturally
religious, but also eminently practical, will ever consent, for the
petty purpose of gratifying sectarian animosity, or for the
wretched object of pandering to infidel proclivities--will ever
consent to deprive themselves of so abundant a fountain of aid and
consolation, or acquiesce in the demolition of an institution which
elevates the life of the nation, and consecrates the acts of the
State. (Birmingham, April 16, 1884.)
‘The work of inspiring a beaten and depressed party with hope and
courage,’ wrote Mr. Jennings in 1888,[16] ‘was substantially left to one
man.’ What had become meanwhile of the acknowledged leaders of Toryism?
Where were the names which in after years were to fill the newspapers
and the Government offices? It is curious to reflect that all this time,
while Lord Randolph Churchill was straining every nerve in the service
of his party, he was the object of almost passionate jealousy and
dislike in its high places. The world of rank and fashion had long been
hostile to him. The prominent people and party officials who formed and
guided opinion at the Carlton Club, on the Front Opposition Bench, and
in the central Conservative offices, regarded him with aversion and
alarm. They could not understand him. Still less could they explain his
growing influence. He was as unwelcome and insoluble a riddle to them as
ever Disraeli had been. To them he seemed an intruder, an upstart, a
mutineer who flouted venerable leaders and mocked at constituted
authority with a mixture of aristocratic insolence and democratic
brutality. By what warrant did he pronounce in accents of command on all
the controverted questions of the day, when men grey in the service of
the State, long installed in the headship of the party, held their peace
or dealt in platitude and ambiguity? By what strange madness of the hour
had this youth who derided Radicals for abandoning their principles and
preached Liberalism from Tory platforms, gained acceptance throughout
the land? The Conservative benches were rich in staid, substantial
merchants and worthy squires. They had their blameless young men of good
family and exemplary deportment who never gave the party Whips an
anxious moment and used their talents only to discover what ‘older and
therefore wiser’ people would wish to have them say. Why was no honour
shown to them? Did not they address meetings in the provinces? Did they
not utter sentiments to which every sensible and patriotic man might
listen with unruffled contentment? And no one marked them! Was there
not enough in these evil days to bear from Mr. Gladstone and his
legions, without this turbulent uprising in their own ranks?
In truth, at this crisis in their fortunes the Conservative party were
rescued in spite of themselves. A very little and they would never have
won the new democracy. But for a narrow chance they might have slipped
down into the gulf of departed systems. The forces of wealth and rank,
of land and Church, must always have exerted vast influence in whatever
confederacy they had been locked. Alliances or fusions with Whigs and
moderate Liberals must from time to time have secured them spells of
office. But the Tory party might easily have failed to gain any support
among the masses. They might have lost their hold upon the new
foundation of power; and the cleavage in British politics must have
become a social, not a political, division--upon a line horizontal, not
oblique.
There are, without doubt, some who will be inclined to think that no
element of the heroic enters into these conflicts, and that political
triumphs are necessarily tarnished by vulgar methods. The noise and
confusion of election crowds, the cant of phrase and formula, the
burrowings of rival Caucuses, fill with weariness, and even terror,
persons of exquisite sensibility. It is easy for those who take no part
in the public duties of citizenship under a democratic dispensation to
sniff disdainfully at the methods of modern politics and to console
themselves for a lack of influence upon the course of events by the
indulgence of a fastidious refinement and a meticulous consistency. But
it is a poor part to play. Amid the dust and brawling, with rude weapons
and often unworthy champions, a real battle for real and precious
objects is swaying to and fro. Better far the clamour of popular
disputation, with all its most blatant accessories, hammering out from
month to month and year to year the laboured progress of the common
people in a work-a-day world, than the poetic tragedies and violence of
chivalric ages. The splintering of lances and clashing of swords are not
the only tests by which the natural captains and princes among men can
be known. The spirit and emotions of war do not depend upon the weapons
or conditions of the conflict. A bold heart, a true eye--clear, plain,
decided leading--count none the less, although no blood is spilled. ‘To
rally the people round the Throne,’ cried Lord Randolph Churchill, ‘to
unite the Throne with the people, a loyal Throne and a patriotic
people--that is our policy and that is our faith.’ Much of the work that
he did, was turned to purposes very different from his own. His
political doctrines were not free from error and contradiction. But he
accomplished no mean or temporary achievement in so far as he restored
the healthy balance of parties, and caused the ancient institutions of
the British realm once again to be esteemed among the masses of the
British people.
CHAPTER VII
THE PARTY MACHINE
‘There is rarely any rising, but by a commixture of good and evil
arts.’--BACON.
In the spring of 1883 Lord Randolph Churchill had invited Lord Salisbury
to come forward and head the Tory Democratic movement. In the autumn he
determined to persevere alone. The enterprise which he had matured
during his retirement at Blenheim was perhaps the most daring on which
he ever embarked. It has been stated that he cherished no smaller design
than the ‘wholesale capture of the Conservative party organisation.’ How
far in his secret heart he was determined to go cannot be known; but it
is certain that he now set to work deliberately upon a twofold
plan--first, to obtain the control of the National Union of Conservative
Associations; and secondly to secure for that body substantial authority
and financial independence.
Nothing but Lord Randolph Churchill’s undisputed predominance in debate
and his unequalled popularity in the country could have sustained him
against the forces which he had determined to engage. From one motive
or another, from conscientious and perfectly intelligible distrust, from
vulgar jealousy, from respect for discipline and authority, from a dull
resentment at the disturbance he created, nearly all the most
influential Conservatives in the House of Commons and the Carlton Club
were leagued against him. Lord Salisbury was hostile to him. Sir
Stafford Northcote had good reason to be so. All the old men who had sat
in the late Cabinet, were alarmed; all the new men who hoped to sit in
the next, were envious of his surprising rise to power. Scarcely a name
can be mentioned of those who had held office in the past or were to
hold it in the future, which was not at this time arrayed against him.
And with all of them he was now to come into violent collision.
With the beginnings of this intricate conflict around the party
machinery the Fourth Party entered upon its final phase. It had grown
out of a House of Commons comradeship amid the Bradlaugh debates. It had
soon become the centre and soul of opposition to Mr. Gladstone’s
Government. It had next been drawn into a vehement effort to displace
Sir Stafford Northcote from his primacy in Conservative councils and
instal Lord Salisbury in his stead. In all this Mr. Balfour may be said
to have worked with the Fourth Party more or less formally and to have
sympathised generally and even cordially with their aims. But in the
process of fighting several unexpected things had happened. A new
political situation was created; new forces had been awakened; a new
leader was at hand.
Mr. Gorst and Sir Henry Wolff declared themselves ready to follow Lord
Randolph Churchill further. Mr. Balfour immediately diverged. Although
during the fight for the party machine he continued nominally to act
with the Fourth Party and remained on friendly terms with its members,
he now began to oppose Lord Randolph Churchill. He spoke against him in
the House of Commons. He canvassed against him in the National Union
Council. It has been suggested[17] that Mr. Balfour’s course at this
time was open to the reproach of disingenuousness. Certainly Lord
Randolph Churchill’s correspondence lends no support to such a charge.
He liked Mr. Balfour as a companion. He did not consider him formidable
as an opponent. He was delighted to bear the evils of his antagonism for
the pleasure of his society. Moreover, he saw quite clearly that Mr.
Balfour’s main political sympathy was inseparably attached to Lord
Salisbury. To come into conflict with Lord Salisbury was to come into
conflict with Mr. Balfour. The difference was natural, inevitable, and
legitimate; and no doubt, while it lasted, Lord Randolph was careful to
confine his conversation with his friend only to those subjects upon
which they were still able to cooperate.
After the electoral disaster of 1880 a meeting had been held at
Bridgewater House, under the auspices of Lord Beaconsfield, to examine
the causes of defeat. A committee, formed chiefly of members of the
Carlton Club, had been appointed to consider various methods of
reforming, popularising, and improving the party organisation. This
committee was never dissolved. It continued to exist, and under the
title of the ‘Central Committee’ assumed the direction and management of
all party affairs and controlled the large funds subscribed for party
purposes. The National Union of Conservative Associations, upon the
other hand, was a body formed on a basis of popular representation. Its
branches had spread all over the country and its membership included
many of the more active local leaders of the Conservative party in the
great towns. It was, however, deprived of all share in party government
by the Central Committee and jealously excluded from possessing any
financial independence. Mr. Gorst was already its Vice-President and had
long exercised an influence sustained by an unrivalled knowledge of
party machinery. Sir Henry Wolff was one of its original members. But
Lord Randolph Churchill’s election by co-optation to a seat upon that
body in 1882 had led to an unprecedented division of opinion. His
personal antagonists had banded themselves together and attacked him
upon various ingenious pretexts. One gentleman undertook to prove from
elaborately prepared and complicated statistics that the member for
Woodstock was a Fenian. Another endeavoured to convince the Council
that he was a devoted slave of Mr. Chamberlain--apparently on the
curious ground that he had voted against a plan for making a Channel
Tunnel. When the Council had divided, the numbers for and against him
were exactly equal. The duty of giving a casting-vote fell upon the
Chairman. Although consistently hostile to Tory Democracy in all its
forms and representatives, Lord Percy refused to use his vote to exclude
a distinguished opponent and Lord Randolph Churchill had thus been
elected.
The three faithful members of the Fourth Party were thus brought
together. They were not alone or unsupported. The discussions of a year
had disclosed unmistakable discontent on the part of a powerful section
of the National Union. Many active local politicians--men claiming to
speak upon the Council in the name of some of the greatest cities in
England--were profoundly dissatisfied both with the conduct of the
Opposition and the organisation of the party. They resented their utter
lack of influence over either. Themselves above, or at least outside,
the jealousies and cabals of the House of Commons, they regarded the
free-lances below the gangway as the best fighting men in the
Conservative ranks and they looked with enthusiasm to Lord Randolph
Churchill as the one man who could revive the failing fortunes of their
party and beard the majestic authority of the Prime Minister. It was by
the unwavering support of a majority of these gentlemen that Lord
Randolph’s power upon the Council was maintained through the struggles
that followed.
‘The National Union,’ writes Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, ‘was galvanised
into life by a desire very prevalent in the party outside the House of
Commons--or, at least, in the democratic part of it--to support the more
active policy in Opposition of which Lord Randolph was the type, and by
the personal differences which were necessarily connected with that
subject.’
During the year 1883 Lord Randolph’s position on the Council had been
one of influence but not of power. The selection of Birmingham as the
scene of the Conference of 1883 was a circumstance especially favourable
to him. He resolved to seize the opportunity. ‘I have seen Gorst,’ he
wrote (September 28, 1883) to Sir Henry Wolff, ‘and arranged with him
that at the meeting of the delegates at Birmingham I am to declare war
against the Central Committee and advocate the placing of all power and
finance in the hands of the Council of the National Union. This will be
a bold step--the Austerlitz of the Fourth Party; but I fancy I may be
able to put my views in a manner which will carry the delegates.’
These anticipations were fully sustained at the Conference on October 2.
Lord Randolph laid his case before the delegates with the utmost
candour. He reminded them of the differences his former election to the
Council had occasioned. He wished them quite clearly to understand what
his course would be if he were elected again. He denounced the Central
Committee, which he justly declared had arrogated to itself powers, it
was never intended to possess and was incompetent to exercise. He
described the National Union as kept by this committee ‘in a state of
tutelage, if not of slavery,’ and its delegates as ‘solemnly invited
year by year to elect a Council which does not advise and an Executive
which does not administer.’
‘I wish,’ he said, ‘to see the control and guidance of the organisation
of the Tory party transferred from a self-elected body to an annually
elected body. I wish to see the management of the financial resources of
our party transferred from an irresponsible body to a responsible body.
I say that this so-called Central Committee is an irresponsible and
self-elected body and that the Council of the National Union is a
responsible and an annually elected body, and I wish the control of the
party organisation to be in the hands of the National Union and taken
out of the hands of the Central Committee. There is no instance in
history of power, placed in the hands of a self-constituted and
irresponsible body, being used otherwise than unwisely at first and
corruptly at last.... I hold it is of the last importance that all
finance should be collected and administered by your Council. The
corrupt practices at the last General Election on our own side, when the
organisation was directed by a secret and irresponsible Committee, were
so grave and flagrant that our party in Parliament were absolutely
prevented from exposing the graver and more flagrant corrupt practices
of the Liberal party.... I should like all the finances of the Tory
party to be open for inspection for anyone who may wish to look at them,
be he friend or foe. Where you allow secret expenditure you will
certainly have corrupt expenditure; and where you have corrupt
expenditure you will have vitiated elections, disfranchised boroughs,
party disgrace, and public scandal....
‘There is another point. The great bulk of the Tory party throughout the
country is composed of artisans and labouring classes. They are directly
represented here to-day; they are always directly represented on your
Council; no party management can be effective and healthy unless the
great labouring classes are directly represented on the Executive of the
party. I hope before long to see Tory working men in Parliament....
[Sidenote: 1883 ÆT. 34]
‘Now some of our friends in the party have a lesson to learn which they
do not seem disposed to learn. The Conservative party will never
exercise power until it has gained the confidence of the working
classes; and the working classes are quite determined to govern
themselves, and will not be either driven or hoodwinked by any class or
class interests. Our interests are perfectly safe if we trust them
fully, frankly, and freely; but if we oppose them and endeavour to drive
them and hoodwink them, our interests, our Constitution, and all we love
and revere will go down. If you want to gain the confidence of the
working classes, let them have a share and a large share--a real share
and not a sham share--in your party Councils and in your party
government....
‘I would bespeak your earnest consideration of this grave question of
party organisation. Whatever your judgment may be, I shall humbly
acquiesce in it. If you are satisfied with the present arrangements, if
you think the National Union possesses the power to which it has a
right, if you think that things are going well with us and that the
future is sure and promising--well then, so do I. But if, on the other
hand, you are of opinion, after careful consideration of events since
1880, that we have not yet learnt enough from the experience of the past
to avoid disaster in time to come; if you think that we have not yet set
our house in order, that we are not as well prepared for battle as we
ought to be; if you are dissatisfied and distrustful of our present
arrangements and anxious about the prospects of our party; if you are
ready to consider and carry out needful and timely reforms--well then,
so am I.’
‘We had a real triumph,’ wrote Mr. Gorst to Sir Henry Wolff (October 3),
‘at Birmingham yesterday in carrying without division a resolution
directing a new Council to take steps to secure for the National Union
“its legitimate influence in the party organisation.” They got ----, ----,
and ---- and a whole bevy of Goats to attend; but Randolph, who was
received by the delegates with a regular ovation, made a capital speech
attacking the Central Committee and carried all before him. The
election, however, went off badly. Clarke, Chaplin, Claud Hamilton, and
a lot of other hostile men got elected and it will require the greatest
care and skill in the selection and election of the twelve co-optated
members to secure us the necessary working majority.’
Lord Randolph’s own account was laconic:--
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Sir Henry Wolff._
October 3, 1883.
Dear Wolff,--The proceedings yesterday were interesting and, on the
whole, satisfactory, but I could not give you an account of them in
a letter--it would be far too long. I shall be in town on Saturday,
when you must dine with me. Tell Gorst I expect him too, and you
will hear all about the infant Caucus. The Goats yesterday had got
wind of our proceedings and came down in great numbers. Ashmead
Bartlett also went dead against us and ‘entravéd’ our schemes to
some extent. I made my remarks, which appeared to me not to
displease the Assembly, though they must have been poison to the
Goats. R----, who was present at the beginning, sniffing a row,
prudently recollected he had an engagement and withdrew.
Yours faithfully,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
The consequences of the unsatisfactory election were evident in the
protracted and evenly-balanced conflict which broke out at once upon the
new Council. The twelve co-optated members seem to have been upon the
whole favourable to Lord Randolph. Some of them were men of such
influence in the large towns that the Orthodox Conservatives did not
care to oppose them. No doubt much forethought had also been exercised
in their selection. At any rate, from that moment Tory Democracy
secured a small but solid majority upon the Council.
The first meeting was upon December 7. Lord Randolph moved for an
Organisation Committee to consider the best means of carrying into
effect the rider passed at the annual conference. A Committee was
accordingly appointed. It consisted principally of Lord Randolph
Churchill’s friends. Its first act was to exclude the honorary
secretaries of the Council from its deliberations and to elect Lord
Randolph its Chairman. It next resolved unanimously to seek an interview
with Lord Salisbury, and the Chairman was instructed to write to him
with that purpose.
Nothing could exceed the politeness with which the correspondence
opened. Lord Randolph Churchill recounted the events of the Birmingham
conference and the formation of the new Organising Committee, and he
requested on their behalf the honour of an interview with the leader of
the party. Lord Salisbury replied that it would give him great pleasure
to confer with members of the National Union upon any subject which, in
their judgment, was of importance to party interests. Some delay was
caused through the Christmas holiday; but the meeting took place early
in January and was friendly in its character.
[Sidenote: 1884 ÆT. 35]
When, however, the Council of the National Union met on February 1, Lord
Percy complained that Lord Randolph Churchill should have been elected
to the Chair of the Organisation Committee, as it had always been the
custom for the Chairman of the Council to preside at all Committees at
which he was present. Mr. Chaplin then moved that Lord Percy be
requested to resume his position as Chairman of the Organisation
Committee. Other motions of a similar character were made. All were
rejected by the Council after close divisions, and Lord Percy thereupon
resigned the chairmanship. Although Lord Randolph Churchill subsequently
himself proposed and carried a unanimous vote of confidence in him, he
declined to withdraw his resignation. Lord Randolph Churchill and Mr.
Chaplin were then respectively proposed for the vacant office, and Lord
Randolph was elected by seventeen votes to fifteen. But Lord Salisbury,
ignoring this decision, continued to communicate with the Council
through Lord Percy, and the majority was greatly offended thereby.
On February 29 Lord Salisbury, as he had promised, wrote a formal letter
to the Organisation Committee setting forth the views of the party
leaders upon the powers and duties of the Council of the National
Union:--
_Lord Salisbury to Lord Randolph Churchill._
20, Arlington Street: February 29, 1884.
My Lord,--I have the honour to acknowledge your letter of the 17th.
The pressure of public business must be my apology for not having
sent you an earlier reply.
Sir Stafford Northcote and I have carefully considered the matters
which you mentioned at the small meeting which took place here in
January. Our task has been rendered more difficult by the
circumstance that no proposals were put forward on the part of the
National Union. Their communication was confined to the
representation that, possessing an efficient organisation, and
consisting, as it undoubtedly does, of highly competent men, the
Council had not the opportunity of concurring largely enough in the
practical organisation of the party.
It appears to us that that organisation is, and must remain, in all
its essential features local. But there is still much work which a
central body like the Council of the National Union can perform
with great advantage to the party. It is the representative of many
Associations on whom, in their respective constituencies, the work
of the party greatly depends. It can superintend and stimulate
their exertions; furnish them with advice, and in some measure with
funds; provide them with lecturers; aid them in the improvement and
development of the local press; and help them in perfecting the
machinery by which the registration is conducted and the
arrangements for providing volunteer agency at election times. It
will have special opportunity of pressing upon the local
Associations which it represents the paramount duty of selecting,
in time, the candidates who are to come forward at the dissolution.
The field of work seems to us large--as large as the nature of the
case permits--and ample enough to give scope for such co-operation
as the able men who constitute the Council of the National Union
may be in a position to offer. But if, on consideration, the
Council should desire to submit to us any proposal with respect to
the above matters or to other subjects, it will, of course, receive
our attentive consideration.
Believe me
Yours very truly,
SALISBURY.
The arrival of this letter was hailed by Lord Randolph and his friends
with delight, and with elaborate gravity they made haste to accept it
as a ‘charter’ establishing for ever the rights and position of the
National Union. It might seem at first sight that Lord Salisbury’s
utterances were sufficiently vague and guarded; but this was not the
view of the Organisation Committee and they forthwith proceeded to draw
up a report, in which, it must be confessed, the assigned duties of the
National Union seemed to be of a very responsible and definite
character. The next step was, of course, to ask for funds to carry out
such important work, and the report proceeded to indicate the sources to
which the Organisation Committee would look:--
The Council will, no doubt, perceive that for the proper discharge
of these duties now imposed upon them by the leaders of the party
the provision of considerable funds becomes a matter of first-class
necessity. Your Committee have reason to believe that there exists
at the present moment a large fund, collected for the general
purposes of the Conservative party, and collected principally owing
to the exertions of the Marquess of Abergavenny, from which the
Council has from time to time received irregular and uncertain
contributions, more or less of an eleemosynary character. Your
Committee would strongly recommend to the Council that this
arrangement, which in view of the new duties now devolving upon the
Council must be considered as of a most unsatisfactory nature,
should be modified, and that your Committee should be authorised by
the Council to claim from the aforesaid fund a certain definite
allocation, which shall be set apart absolutely for the uses of the
National Union, and shall, in some measure, enable them to commence
the effective discharge of their labours. In view, however, of the
large field of work marked out by Lord Salisbury’s letter, your
Committee are of opinion that whatever funds they may be able to
obtain from the aforesaid source should be supplemented by a
vigorous and earnest appeal to the Conservative party generally
throughout the country for donations and annual subscriptions.
Lastly, the Committee drew up a number of practical suggestions--some of
which were subsequently followed, with excellent results--for the
purpose of carrying out ‘Lord Salisbury’s scheme.’
Full information of the framing of this report and of its character was
conveyed to Lord Salisbury through a channel which could not then be
traced and he was much taken aback at the construction which had been
put upon his letter. He therefore wrote immediately to Lord Randolph
Churchill.
_Private and Confidential._
March 6, 1884.
My dear Lord Randolph,--I have been told on good authority that you
had inferred, as the result of our recent communications, that in
our contemplation the National Union was in some manner to take the
place of the Central Committee and to do the work which the latter
exclusively does now.
As my letter does not mention the Central Committee, this
misapprehension (if, indeed, it has arisen) must be due to
something that passed in our conversation at the Carlton on Sunday.
I should blame myself severely if I had misled you as to our views
on this point. The Central Committee are appointed by us and
represent us: and we could not in any degree separate our position
from theirs.
I hope, however, that there is no chance of the paths of the
Central Committee and the National Union crossing: for there is
plenty of good work for both to do.
I am sure you will forgive my giving you the trouble of reading
this letter--which only issues from my desire that we should all
work together in good understanding.
Believe me
Yours very truly,
SALISBURY.
‘With reference to the hope,’ replied Lord Randolph Churchill, ‘which
you express, that “there is no chance of the paths of the Central
Committee and the National Union crossing,” I fear it may be
disappointed. In a struggle between a popular body and a close
corporation, the latter, I am happy to say, in these days goes to the
wall; for the popular body have this great advantage--that, having
nothing to conceal, they can, at any moment they think proper, appeal
fully (and in some measure recklessly) to a favourable and sympathising
public, and I am of opinion that in such a course as this the National
Union will find that I may be of some little assistance to them.’
The report, together with the ‘Charter’ letter, was presented to the
Council at their meeting on the 7th, and their consideration was
adjourned till the 14th. At this adjourned meeting Lord Percy read a
letter which he had received from Lord Salisbury strongly disapproving
of the report and deprecating its adoption. He thereupon moved its
rejection. The Council divided, and Lord Percy’s motion was negatived by
19 votes to 14. The report was then adopted by 19 votes to 7.
The consequences of this decision were surprising. On March 18 Lord
Randolph Churchill received a letter from Mr. Bartley, the principal
agent at the Conservative Central Office, informing him that Lord
Salisbury and Sir Stafford Northcote thought it desirable that the
Central Committee and the National Union should work with separate
establishments, and requesting the National Union to take the necessary
steps for removing their belongings.
It is very easy to see what a great tactical mistake Lord Salisbury and
his friends committed by authorising such a letter to be written. The
premises in question were not the property of Lord Salisbury and Sir
Stafford Northcote and they had no legal power to eject the National
Union. The National Union had since 1872 contributed from their own
funds 175_l._ annually towards the rent and the office expenses.
Moreover--and all this was carefully and forcefully put before the
Organisation Committee by its Chairman--Lord Salisbury had directed such
a letter to be written without waiting for any official information as
to what the action which was complained of really was, and without
communicating, except informally through Lord Percy, with the Council.
The members of the Council therefore, many of whom were able men of
local influence and importance, felt themselves affronted by
discourteous usage. The opinion was expressed that when the leaders of
the party had communications to make to the National Union, those
communications should be made through their Chairman; and the ‘notice to
quit,’ as it was called, was regarded as a cause of deep and undeserved
offence.
Lord Randolph Churchill was careful, however, not to make too much at
the moment of this substantial advantage; and he persuaded the Committee
to modify the report in several important particulars, so as to remove
what were believed to be Lord Salisbury’s objections. The revised draft
was then, after several parleyings, forwarded to the party leaders, and
on April 1 Lord Salisbury replied in a letter[18] which strictly limited
the functions of the National Union and provided for its complete
control by the Central Committee:--
To ensure complete unity of action, we think it desirable that the
Whips of the party should sit, _ex officio_, on the Council, and
should have a right to be present at the meetings of all
Committees. Such an arrangement would be a security against any
unintentional divergencies of policy, and would lend weight to the
proceedings of the Union. Business relating to candidates should
remain entirely with the Central Committee. On the assumption,
which we are entitled now to make, that the action of the two
bodies will be harmonious, a separation of establishments will not
be necessary--unless business should largely increase. There is
some advantage, undoubtedly, in their working under a common roof,
for it is difficult to distinguish between their functions so
accurately, but that the need of mutual assistance and
communication will constantly be felt.
On the receipt of this letter Lord Randolph Churchill resolved to
abandon all pretence at further friendly negotiation. He summoned
immediately a special meeting of the Organisation Committee, on which,
as has been noticed, his personal influence predominated. Only three
members besides himself--namely Colonel Burnaby, Mr. Cotter and Mr.
Gorst--were able to attend; but these nevertheless took the
responsibility of sending to the leaders of the party what was, as will
presently appear, little less than a declaration of open war.
All these proceedings came before the Council of the National Union at
their meeting on April 4. Lord Randolph Churchill, as Chairman, read Mr.
Bartley’s ‘notice to quit’ letter of March 17, which, he stated, was the
result of an ‘unauthorised, unofficial, and inaccurate communication’ on
the part of some member of the Council to the leaders of the party of
what had taken place at the last meeting. But although the letter was a
great obstacle to amicable intercourse, he had endeavoured to negotiate
with the leaders, and had had many conferences with persons of
influence, such as Lord Abergavenny and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach; and,
finally, Mr. Gorst and he himself had had the honour of an interview
with Lord Salisbury on March 21. The results of the interview had been
very satisfactory, and it was understood that the leaders would
communicate thereafter with the Council; but in spite of repeated
requests, and even visits, no reply of any sort had been received. The
Organisation Committee had therefore drawn up their report, making such
alterations in it as they believed might make it acceptable. On the day
following the circulation of this report to the Council the Chairman had
received the letter from Lord Salisbury of April 1, to which the
Organisation Committee had sent a reply.[19]
This reply, after recalling the proceedings at Birmingham and the
unsatisfactory features in the Conservative organisation--‘the control
of Parliamentary elections by the leader, the Whip, and the paid agent
drawing their resources from secret funds’--suitable perhaps ‘to the
manipulation of the 10_l._ householder,’ but utterly obsolete in the
face of an extended franchise--described the gratification and
encouragement with which the Council of the National Union had learned
that Lord Salisbury was willing to entrust them with large and important
duties. The Council, however, committed the serious error of ‘imagining
that your Lordship and Sir Stafford Northcote were in earnest in wishing
them to become a real source of usefulness to the party.’ They had been
‘rudely undeceived.’ The day after the adoption of their report they had
been ordered to quit the premises they occupied. Their report had been
disapproved on the ground that their activities would trench upon the
functions ‘of an amorphous and unknown body styled the Central
Committee.’ The precise language of Lord Salisbury’s ‘Charter’ letter
had been completely abandoned and refuge had been taken ‘in vague,
foggy, and utterly intangible suggestions.’ In order that the Council of
the National Union might be ‘completely and for ever reduced to its
ancient condition of dependence upon and servility to certain
irresponsible persons who find favour in your eyes,’ it was demanded
that the Whips of the party should sit _ex officio_ on the Council, with
a right of being present at all committees. Finally, in the event of the
Council--representing upwards of 500 affiliated Conservative
Associations and composed of men eminent in position and political
experience, enjoying the confidence of the party in populous localities
and sacrificing continually much time, convenience and money to the work
of the National Union--acquiescing in such a view of its functions, it
might be graciously permitted to remain the humble inmate of the
premises which it occupied.
We shall lay your letter and copy of this reply before the Council
at its meeting to-morrow and shall move the Council that they
adhere substantially to the report already adopted, in obedience to
the direction of the Conference at Birmingham; that they take steps
to provide themselves with their own offices and clerks; and that
they continue to prosecute with vigour and independence the task
which they have commenced--namely, the _bona-fide_ popular
organisation of the Conservative party.
It may be that the powerful and secret influences which have
hitherto been unsuccessfully at work on the Council, with the
knowledge and consent of your Lordship and Sir Stafford Northcote,
may at last be effectual in reducing the National Union to its
former make-believe and impotent condition; in that case we shall
know what steps to take to clear ourselves of all responsibility
for the failure of an attempt to avert the misfortunes and reverses
which will, we are certain, under the present effete system of
wire-pulling and secret organisation, overtake and attend the
Conservative party at a General Election.
Lord Randolph finished reading the letter, and after moving the
appointment of an Executive Committee to carry out the recommendations
of the report, sat down abruptly. He was immediately asked to state the
names of those who had authorised the sending of such a letter, and the
fact that they were only four in number was received with murmurs of
astonishment. Lord Percy and Mr. Chaplin declined to serve upon the
Executive Committee until the letter was withdrawn, and Lord Claud
Hamilton moved at once the following amendment: ‘That this Council
regrets the disrespectful and improper tone of the letter of the
Organisation Committee of the 3rd inst. to the Marquess of Salisbury,
and declines to accept any responsibility for the same.’ This was
seconded by Mr. Stuart-Wortley, M.P., and supported by Mr. Chaplin and
others in an acrimonious debate. The issue appeared doubtful, but Lord
Randolph Churchill waved aside all suggestions of postponement and
insisted upon an immediate decision. So great was his influence that the
amendment was rejected by 19 to 13, and the original resolution
(appointing an Executive Committee) was carried by 18 to 14. The Council
then adjourned till May 2.
The month which followed was a month of intrigue and counter-intrigue.
The majority which Lord Randolph commanded upon the Council, was small.
He had been elected Chairman by a majority of two. The report of the
Organisation Committee had escaped destructive amendment by five votes.
The vote of censure on the Chairman had been rejected by no more than
six and the Executive Committee appointed by no more than four. If two
or three, or even one man, could be detached, the movement might be
crushed and its leader overthrown; and to this end every effort of power
and authority, by appeals, by local pressure, by threats and promises,
was employed. Against this Lord Randolph could set nothing but his
personal influence on the Council and his popularity in the country. It
was evident, moreover, that a great trial of strength between the two
sections of the Conservative party was impending, and moderate men had
to choose once and for all on which side they would be found. It is, to
say the least of it, remarkable that the majority on the Council
remained till the end of April solid and unwavering.
In the face of this attitude Lord Salisbury and his associates prepared
for compromise, and the leaders of Tory Democracy, who knew well how
slender were their resources, showed every disposition to meet them.
Lord Randolph Churchill declared that he would agree to anything ‘which
offered an honourable _modus vivendi_ to the National Union consistent
with the resolution of the Birmingham Conference.’ Lord Salisbury
appeared willing to concede a large part of what was demanded, including
a grant of 3,000_l._ a year to the National Union funds. This compromise
was to have been formally agreed to at the meeting of the Central
Committee on April 29, but at the last minute an unexpected event
occurred.
Mr. Maclean, the Member for Oldham, had hitherto been one of Lord
Randolph’s consistent supporters on the Council, but his private object
had been[20] to overthrow the dual control of Lord Salisbury and Sir
Stafford Northcote, rather than to place the organisation of the party
upon a democratic basis. If he had to choose, as he conceived himself
compelled to choose, between Lord Salisbury and Lord Randolph Churchill,
his intention was to support the former. He was a man of independent
views, who was not likely to be influenced against his decision by
either faction, and his intervention at this stage was for that reason
all the more effective. He, knowing nothing of the impending compromise,
now placed upon the agenda paper of the Council the following motion:--
‘That, having regard to the paramount importance of complete harmony and
united action between the Central Committee of the Conservative party
and the Council of the National Union, a Committee of the Council be now
appointed to confer with the Central Committee for the purpose of
securing these objects.’ On learning this Lord Salisbury at once broke
off all negotiations, pending the result of the motion. Mr. Edward
Stanhope was put in communication with Mr. Maclean and nothing was
neglected to induce him to persist.
The Council met again on May 2. Lord Randolph informed Mr. Maclean
privately that he would regard his motion, if carried, as a vote of
want of confidence in the Chairman. But Maclean was not to be dissuaded,
and upon a division--several of Lord Randolph’s friends being
absent--his motion prevailed by seventeen votes to thirteen. Lord
Randolph Churchill thereupon immediately resigned the chairmanship of
the Council. He determined to withdraw entirely from active politics,
and it was said that he would seek rest and amusement abroad. He even
prepared a letter to Mr. Satchell Hopkins explaining at length his
reasons for abandoning his candidature at Birmingham.[21]
Awful joy was manifested at the Tory headquarters upon the sudden and
complete suppression of the mutiny. At the Carlton and in the Lobby the
‘old gang’ were full of nervous self-congratulation. They had borne with
him long enough. They had always warned him what the end would be. Now
it had fallen out as they had always foreseen. Was it not sad to see a
young man--of undoubted talent--destroy what might have been a
meritorious career? &c., &c. The _Standard_ chanted a solemn pæan of
triumph. The victorious section upon the Council made haste to publish
glowing accounts of their action, and incidentally communicated to the
press the full terms of the ‘irritating letter’ which had been sent to
Lord Salisbury on April 3, and which was, of course, a strictly
confidential document. Sir Stafford Northcote said in his haste that
Lord Randolph was ‘a bonnet for the Liberal party.’ This mood lasted for
a little while. Then came a chilling reaction.
The news of Lord Randolph Churchill’s resignation became generally known
on May 4, and it was received through all Conservative circles--except
the highest--with something very like consternation. The publication of
his letter to Lord Salisbury made a great sensation, not at all to his
disadvantage. Telegrams, letters, resolutions, deputations poured in
upon him in a stream. Within forty-eight hours a formidable movement in
his favour had begun. The _Times_ supported him in a powerful article
(May 8). ‘The main question at issue between him and the official
leaders of the Opposition is whether the internal organisation of the
party should be for the future established on a popular and
representative or on a secret and irresponsible basis.’ It declared that
the quarrel, until it was repaired, left the country without an
alternative Government. It urged Lord Salisbury not to delay in making
friendly overtures. He had ‘before this effected a not less difficult
reconciliation.’ If he delayed, it was quite possible that he might find
himself ‘in the position not so much of dictating terms of
reconciliation as of accepting them.’ Many other important Conservative
newspapers took a similar view. In the Tory clubs of the large towns it
was freely said that the one man who really knew how to fight Mr.
Gladstone, had been tripped up by the jealous intrigues of an effete,
incompetent clique of aristocrats. A loud outcry was raised against ‘the
back-parlour’ management of a great party.
A more remarkable and effective demonstration followed. On May 8, the
respective Chairmen of the Liverpool, Manchester, Brighton, Sheffield,
Hull, Edinburgh, and Bristol Conservative Associations, representing
300,000 electors, met together in London under the presidency of Mr. A.
B. Forwood. They invited Lord Randolph Churchill to confer with them,
and having heard his views drew up a memorandum to the Council of the
National Union, of which the principal recommendation was that he should
be ‘earnestly requested to withdraw his resignation.’ They added,
moreover, that the National Union was not as representative of the
feeling in the country as it ought to be and urged that immediate steps
should be taken to broaden the basis of its organisation. They addressed
themselves also to Lord Salisbury both by letter and deputation.
Among the many tokens of public goodwill of which Lord Randolph was at
this time the object, there was one which seemed peculiarly welcome. It
was a deputation of undergraduates from the Cambridge University
Carlton, who travelled to London for the purpose of offering what
encouragement lay in their power. A year later, when as a Minister of
the Crown Lord Randolph was able to accept the invitation of this club
to a House dinner, he alluded to the incident in terms which cast an
intimate light upon his feelings at this tempestuous moment:--
‘There was a time last year when it happened to me to be engaged in
something partaking of the nature of a struggle with men of great
position, great responsibility, and great experience, as to the form
which modern Conservative political organisation ought to take. That
difference of opinion at one time became very sharp, and I did not know
what the result of it might be; and I was getting extremely anxious,
more for the sake of the Conservative party than for my own sake. One
evening I came home from the House of Commons very anxious and rather
discouraged, because at the House of Commons, among people whom I ought
to look upon as my political friends, I had met nothing but gloomy
looks; and I felt very much inclined to retire from the game, thinking I
was doing more harm than good, and rather--to use a slang
expression--disposed to cut the whole concern. However, when I arrived
at my house I found there waiting for me a deputation from the
University Carlton. Three gentlemen--three, I will venture to say, of
the most accomplished and able envoys ever sent out on any mission--were
waiting for me; and the only error which they committed was that,
instead of going into my house and waiting for me there, with whatever
accommodation that dwelling might afford, they waited for me in the
street, and had been waiting for me some time. I do not think you can
imagine the effect that expression of sympathy and that cordial
invitation had upon me at the time. Before I received it I felt that I
was very young, very inexperienced, and very much alone, and I did not
know to what extent any portion or fraction of public opinion might be
with me. But the expression of opinion from your club filled me with
hopes that, after all, I was not going so very far wrong--that I might
still persevere a little longer. I did persevere; everything came all
right, everything settled down, both to the harmony and, I think, to the
advantage of the Tory party. That was, to my mind, and must always be,
as far as I am concerned, a most interesting and memorable incident. It
was an encouragement from youth to youth.’
This temper among the rank and file was not lost upon the leaders of the
party. The olive branch was held out publicly, though patronisingly, by
Mr. Stanhope at a Finsbury meeting as early as May 7. Lord Salisbury
replied with grave courtesy to the representations of the provincial
Chairmen. All sorts of busybodies ran to and fro like shuttles weaving
up a peace. On the 9th a party meeting was called at the Carlton Club to
plan the contemplated second vote of censure on Egyptian policy. Upwards
of 170 members of Parliament attended. To the astonishment of many, who
thought he had been drummed out of the Conservative ranks, Lord Randolph
strolled in unconcernedly, was warmly welcomed by the leaders, and,
rising immediately after Sir Stafford Northcote, expressed his entire
approval of the terms of the vote of censure and of the general
arrangement of the debate. The meeting was loud in its satisfaction at
these signs of concord. The negotiations with the Central Committee were
resumed, almost at the point where they had been broken off. When the
Council of the National Union met again on the 16th, it was evident that
the tide of opinion flowed strongly in Lord Randolph’s favour. Upon the
motion of Lord Holmesdale he was unanimously re-elected Chairman. He
thus returned stronger than ever, neither disarmed nor placated, and the
movement which he had launched was driven steadily and relentlessly
forward.
CHAPTER VIII
THE REFORM BILL
Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri,
Quo me cunque rapit tempestas deferor hospes.
HORACE.
Sworn to no master, of no sect am I,
As drives the storm, at any door I knock.
POPE’S _Imitations_.
The Parliamentary session of 1884 began ill for Her Majesty’s Ministers
and its first month was like enough to have been their last. While the
mover and seconder of the Address to the Crown in either House were
purring ceremonious optimism about the improvement of the Egyptian
situation, the news arrived that General Valentine Baker’s wretched army
had been utterly destroyed by Osman Digna in a vain attempt to relieve
Tokar. So little disposed, indeed, were the Government to discuss
Egyptian affairs that they allowed the debate in the Commons to collapse
in a single night without any official reply to the serious attacks
which had been made; and it was only revived next day through Lord
Randolph’s moving the adjournment of the House, in somewhat unusual
procedure, to protest against their silence.
Hard upon the heels of Soudan disaster, and equally unwelcome, came Mr.
Bradlaugh. Judgment had been delivered in the Court of Queen’s Bench
upon the suit Bradlaugh _v._ Gosset, brought by the member for
Northampton against the Serjeant-at-Arms for excluding him from the
precincts of the House. The Court, while admitting the absolute command
of the Houses of Parliament over their own discipline, rules of
procedure, and interpretation thereof, asserted that resolutions of
either House could not affect Acts imposing fines and penalties. The
opportunity was thus presented to Mr. Bradlaugh of testing in the Courts
the value of a self-administered oath followed by a vote in Parliament.
Once again, therefore (February 11), he presented himself at the table.
Once again the members broke into a storm of shouting which drowned his
voice. Once again the Leader of the House sat silent and powerless. But
the battlefield had now become familiar to the Opposition. Sir Stafford
Northcote moved that the member for Northampton be not permitted to go
through the form of repeating the words of the oath. Mr. Labouchere
provoked the House to a division, in which Mr. Bradlaugh voted. Motion
was made forthwith to expunge his vote. Mr. Bradlaugh voted again upon
this. When it was realised that his vote could always be recorded once
oftener than it could be disallowed, the numbers of the first division
were read out and Sir Stafford Northcote’s motion was carried by 280 to
187. A further motion to exclude Mr. Bradlaugh from the precincts of the
House was agreed to without voting. Mr. Bradlaugh thereafter applied for
the Chiltern Hundreds and, his seat being thus vacated, Mr. Labouchere
moved for a new writ. This was granted by the House in spite of Lord
Randolph’s opposition. The electors of Northampton returned Mr.
Bradlaugh without delay by a largely increased majority. Sir Stafford
Northcote again moved his old motion to exclude him from the House and,
although the Prime Minister spoke impressively against it, the motion
was carried (February 26) by 226 to 173.
The Government were scarcely free from the humiliations of this affair
when fresh tidings of massacre and disaster arrived from the Soudan.
Despairing of relief after the destruction of Baker’s army, the garrison
of Tokar surrendered. The garrison of Sinkat perished in an attempt to
cut their way to the coast. While the fate of these places was
inevitably approaching, votes of censure were moved in both Houses of
Parliament. In the Lords the motion of Lord Cairns and Lord Salisbury
was affirmed by 181 to 81. In the Commons the debate followed what was
becoming the usual course. Sir Stafford Northcote made a long, mild, and
moderate speech, to which Mr. Gladstone replied vigorously. The moment
he sat down Lord Randolph Churchill sprang up to attack him in rhetoric
which can only be sustained by passion in few men and on rare occasions.
‘“Too late!”’ he cried. ‘“Too late!” is an awful cry. From time
immemorial it has heralded and proclaimed the slaughter of routed
armies, the flight of dethroned monarchs, the crash of falling Empires.
Wherever human blood has been poured out in torrents, wherever human
misery has been accumulated in mountains, wherever disasters have
occurred which have shaken the world to its very centre, there straight
and swift, up to heaven, or down to hell, has always gone the appalling
cry, “Too late! Too late!” The Opposition cannot but move a vote of
censure upon a Government whose motto is “Too late!” The Liberals should
be chary of giving support to a Government whose motto is “Too late!”;
and the people of this country will undoubtedly repudiate a Government
whose motto is invariably “Too late!”’
The Conservative party, profoundly stirred by tales of blood and shame,
continued shouting at this fierce conclusion long after the orator had
ceased.
From these embarrassments and humiliations the Government found a happy
escape which for a while entirely transformed the Parliamentary
situation and placed them, in the fifth year of their troubled
existence, once again in a position of great advantage. The story of the
Reform Bill of 1884 may be briefly told. By enlargements of the
household franchise and by assimilation of the county and borough
franchise, two million new electors would be called into being and the
total electorate raised from three to five millions. The momentum which
this ponderous measure acquired was great enough to carry it forward
through all sections of the Liberal party and over all opposition in the
House of Commons, and to throw on one side or the other, as irrelevant
or impracticable, principles as democratic as ‘one man one vote,’ causes
as cherished as ‘Female Suffrage,’ devices as intricate and attractive
as proportional representation. The Bill itself became an object of
paramount desire. ‘It is,’ said Mr. Gladstone in introducing it, ‘a Bill
worth having; again I say it is a Bill worth your not endangering. Let
us enter into no by-way which would lead us off the path marked straight
out before us. Let there be no wanderings on the hill-tops of
speculation or into the morasses and fogs of doubt. What we want to
carry this Bill is union, and union only. What will endanger it is
disunion, and disunion only.’ And so it proved.
The position of the Conservative party had been very ill-defined on the
question of Parliamentary Reform ever since 1867. Mr. Disraeli’s action
had deprived them for ever of the right to oppose large extensions of
the franchise on principle. Tory Democracy, especially in Lancashire,
though hostile to the Government, looked with favour on their proposal.
Reform was a national as well as a party movement. Yet, on the other
hand, some of the strongest and most unyielding forces in the Tory
ranks--the county members in the House of Commons and Lord Salisbury in
the House of Lords--were prepared to offer a stubborn resistance to the
change.
Nor, indeed, were they without grave reason from their point of view.
Hitherto the county Conservatives had been mainly, if not entirely,
selected and returned by farmers and landowners. The great labouring
population had been altogether excluded from political power. Now that
the franchise was offered to them, they welcomed it with greater
earnestness and enthusiasm than they have ever displayed on any other
question. Social reforms were good enough in their way but it was the
_vote_ on which they had set their hearts. There was a temper among them
that no one who understood county politics, could mistake and that
filled the Conservative representatives of a hundred seats with a
profound dismay. The overwhelming electorate that was to be, regarded
the interest of the farmer and landlord as fundamentally antagonistic to
their own. Any representative or candidate who was agreeable to the
farmer, must therefore be an enemy of theirs. Gratitude for the boon
which was offered, threw them still more completely on the Liberal side;
and the country party, once all powerful, long predominant, always
exercising enormous influence, now looked political extermination in the
face.
Lord Randolph Churchill’s course through this memorable controversy is
not marked by that clearness of view or consistency of action which may
be claimed for him during his whole life upon so many important
questions. In a letter written some years afterwards he speaks of it as
‘the only sharp curve’ revealed by his published speeches. But, in
truth, the forces which he employed, as well as those with which he was
contending, were complex and uncertain to a degree beyond description.
Tory Democracy wanted to pass the Bill, yet wanted to destroy the
Government. The Conservative party, as a whole, hated the Bill, hated
the Government, yet were unable to agree upon uncompromising
opposition. These perplexities were multiplied by the struggle for
mastery which was proceeding between the rival Parliamentary groups upon
the Council of the National Union and by the varying relations of Lord
Randolph Churchill towards Lord Salisbury and the official party
leaders. The Fourth Party was fated to perish amid this intricate
confusion. Its members criticised and even attacked one another and,
though they still all sat together in their old places, their old
comradeship was utterly destroyed.
It was known during the autumn of 1883 that the question of Reform was
occupying the Cabinet and would probably issue in a Bill. On December
19, 1883, when Lord Randolph was delivering his ‘trilogy’ at Edinburgh,
he had dealt among other matters with the question of Reform. Attacking
the Government, he was easily led into attacking their project. As the
representative of a small agricultural borough he could not, as he
himself said afterwards, be expected to look upon a measure for the
extinction of Woodstock ‘with any very longing eye.’ The divided state
of opinion in the Conservative party had not then been disclosed. He
believed that they would insist upon fighting the Bill to the death and
he was willing to stand with them in such a struggle. He therefore spoke
against Reform--not, indeed, in principle--but on the ground of (1) the
inopportuneness of the moment chosen and the far more urgent character
of other questions; (2) the obvious risk of any large addition to the
Irish electorate; (3) the transparent design of the Government to
divert public attention from foreign affairs; (4) the absence of any
indication, on the part of the unenfranchised masses, of any great
desire for the voting privilege.[22] His words, though listened to with
attention and respect, were plainly not acceptable to the audience of
Scotch artisans. They wanted to cheer the Tory Democrat: but they also
wanted Reform. A more surprising incident followed. Mr. Balfour and Lord
Elcho, who were on the platform, both thought it necessary then and
there to declare themselves in favour of the assimilation of the county
and borough franchise. Before Parliament assembled the utter lack of
unanimity in the Conservative party against the Bill was evident and all
chance of resisting it consequently perished.
The attempt to overthrow the Government on their Egyptian policy having
failed, the Reform Bill was introduced. Lord Randolph proposed to meet
it on the second reading by moving the previous question--‘that the
question be not now put.’ This form of opposition asserted most of the
objections he had stated at Edinburgh, without committing anyone who
might support it to resistance to Reform on principle. He secured
precedence for his motion. But the Conservative leaders, who were also
unable to meet the Bill squarely, attempted a parry of their own. They
declared that they could not agree to the extension of the franchise
unless it were coupled with provision for a redistribution of seats. A
motion in this sense was placed upon the paper by Lord John Manners in
the name of the Opposition. In so far as this motion allowed it to be
assumed that the leaders of the Conservative party were favourable to
the extension of the franchise, if only it were accompanied by
redistribution, it was plainly a pretence. But there was one element of
grim reality about it. A dissolution upon the extended electorate before
redistribution had taken effect would have been peculiarly injurious to
Conservative interests both in town and country. At Sir Stafford
Northcote’s request Lord Randolph Churchill removed his motion of ‘the
previous question’ from the paper and issue was accordingly joined upon
the motion of Lord John Manners. Even this modified and rather
meaningless form of resistance did not secure the support of the entire
Conservative party. At the beginning of the session the Government
majority had fallen to 17. They carried the second reading of the ‘Bill
for the Representation of the People,’ as it was officially styled, by a
majority of 130 (340-210).
Confronted with such evidences of the impossibility of further resisting
the measure as a whole, Lord Randolph Churchill now abandoned altogether
his opposition. He thought that if the Conservative party were not
prepared to fight the Bill, there was no reason why they should incur
the odium and the hazards, without the satisfactions of war, or the hope
of victory. Moreover, he had in the meanwhile accepted the invitation to
contest Birmingham at the General Election, and in exchanging a large
democratic constituency for a family borough he was naturally freed from
those special reasons connected with Woodstock which had previously
influenced him.
These arguments were no doubt fortified by the progress of the debates
in the House of Commons. It soon became certain that the Bill would pass
and that the Conservative party could offer it no united and general
resistance. It became, moreover, evident that the most bitter opponents
of Lord Randolph Churchill personally and of Tory Democracy as an idea,
were also the most bitter opponents of Reform. The line of cleavage
between the New and the Old Tories ran through the whole question. The
very fact that the ‘old gang’ were obstinately against the measure
influenced Lord Randolph powerfully in its favour and he was not the man
to allow a single precipitate speech to separate him from those
progressive forces in the Conservative party whose representative he
was. ‘An unchanging mind,’ he observed on one occasion, ‘is an admirable
possession--a possession which I devoutly hope I shall never possess.’
He declared publicly that he now regarded Reform as inevitable, and that
the principles of the assimilation of the county and borough franchise
and of equality of political rights between England and Ireland must
henceforth govern Conservatives as well as Liberals. The Fourth Party
therefore, after the second reading, became the friends of the Reform
Bill and genuinely and materially assisted its passage.
While the Bill was passing through Committee the quarrel in the National
Union was at its height, and Lord Randolph and his handful of friends
became increasingly hostile to the Conservative leaders and consequently
more favourable to Reform. He and Mr. Gorst voted and Sir Henry Wolff
spoke against Sir R. Cross’s amendment which affected the principle of
the Bill. The question of the date at which the Reform Bill should come
into force, exercised the Conservative party and was vital to the
position of conditional resistance they had perforce adopted. Sir Henry
Wolff, in the name of the Fourth Party, made a motion which would have
had the effect of postponing the decision upon this point until a later
stage. His suggestion was willingly accepted by Mr. Gladstone in the
interests of a compromise. Colonel Stanley, however, proposed from the
Front Opposition Bench at once to insert words delaying the operation of
the Franchise Bill until Redistribution had been effected. Lord Randolph
Churchill on this said bluntly that he had changed his mind since the
beginning of the session and he argued that while it might have been
possible to fight the Bill with a united party, it was foolish to incur
popular displeasure by futile attempts to wreck it. Colonel Stanley’s
amendment was dismissed by a large majority (276-182).
The tactics of the Fourth Party were supported by a few independent
members, but the serious cleavage in the Tory ranks was revealed more
evidently by the number of Conservatives who failed, during various
divisions in Committee, to sustain the Opposition leaders in the Lobby.
Lord Randolph’s refusal to fight provoked indignant complaints from
those old-fashioned country Tories who, faced by political ruin in their
seats, naturally wished to offer the Bill an unyielding resistance, no
matter at what cost to party interests in general; and, as may be
imagined, they did not neglect to quote Lord Randolph’s Edinburgh speech
against him. To charges of inconsistency which were not indeed denied,
Lord Randolph and his supporters retorted by accusing the Conservative
leaders of being secretly anxious to kill a measure they did not dare
openly to assail. During these debates the separation of Mr. Balfour
from the rest of the Fourth Party became notorious. Lord Randolph,
reproached with having abandoned his attitude of strong opposition to
Reform, adroitly attributed his conversion to Mr. Balfour and Lord
Elcho, who had proclaimed at Edinburgh their dissent from his earlier
opinion. Mr. Balfour replied with some acidness that ‘his noble friend’s
efforts to be in perfect accord with the Conservative party, numerous
and well-intentioned as they were, did not seem to be crowned with
success.’ Through the ineptitude of some of their leaders and the
perversity of others the Opposition, alike above and below the gangway,
cut a poor figure during the debates on the ‘Bill for the Representation
of the People.’
Perhaps the most direct divergence occurred on Mr. Brodrick’s amendment
to omit Ireland from the scope of the new franchise. We have seen how
Lord Randolph, as a young man in the Parliament of 1874, had first
supported and later on--when circumstances had changed--opposed the
extension to Ireland of electoral privileges similar to and simultaneous
with those enjoyed in Great Britain. His speech at Edinburgh had laid
emphasis on the danger of any large accession to the Irish vote. Only a
few days before the question was discussed he had been re-elected, as
described in the last chapter, to the chairmanship of the Council of the
National Union. It was popularly assumed that he had come to terms with
Lord Salisbury, and their reported reconciliation had been
ostentatiously paraded in the party press. But when Lord Randolph
resumed the debate on May 20, it soon appeared that he was still
recalcitrant. Amid an ominous silence on the Conservative benches he
asked Mr. Brodrick to withdraw his amendment, and declared that he had
made up his mind to vote against it if it were carried to a division. He
then declared once and for all in favour of the equal and similar
treatment of Ireland in all matters of electoral reform; and this
principle of ‘similarity and simultaneity,’ as it came to be called, has
since been commonly identified with his name. One passage in this speech
was at the time greatly admired and applauded. Mr. Smith during the
autumn had argued that no votes should be given to Irish peasants who
lived in mud-cabins, and the ‘mud-cabin’ argument had become a very
prominent feature in the debate. Lord Randolph dealt with this
contention in his most polished Parliamentary style.
‘I have heard,’ he said, ‘a great deal of the mud-cabin argument. For
that we are indebted to the brilliant, ingenious, and fertile mind of
the right honourable member for Westminster.[23] I suppose that in the
minds of the lords of suburban villas, of the owners of vineries and
pineries, the mud-cabin represents the climax of physical and social
degradation. But the franchise in England has never been determined by
Parliament with respect to the character of the dwellings. The
difference between the cabin of the Irish peasant and the cottage of the
English agricultural labourer is not so great as that which exists
between the abode of the right honourable member for Westminster and the
humble roof which shelters from the storm the individual who now has the
honour to address the Committee.’ When the cheers and laughter had
subsided he went on to quote the famous lines:--
Non ebur, neque aureum
Meâ renidet in domo lacunar;
Non trabes Hymettiae
Premunt columnas ultimâ recisas
Africâ.
‘But if the right honourable member for Westminster were to propose to
the Committee that he himself should have a vote at Parliamentary
elections and that I should have none, I feel sure the House of Commons
would repudiate the proposal with indignation and disgust.’ The
‘mud-cabin’ argument seems after this to have disappeared altogether
from Parliamentary warfare and Mr. Brodrick’s amendment was rejected by
the enormous majority of 332 to 137. After this the resistance of the
Opposition in the House of Commons was at an end. The third reading of
the Bill was allowed to pass _nemine contradicente_ and entered
accordingly on the journals of the House. The Bill then went to the
House of Lords at the end of June; and there, by amendments supported by
majorities of 59 and 50, it was incontinently destroyed. The collision
between the two Houses was direct, and a dangerous excitement arose in
the country.
Although unwilling to impede the progress of the Reform Bill and
decidedly predisposed to take action contrary to the views of his own
pastors above the gangway in order to put a spoke in their wheel, Lord
Randolph was the most unrelenting and vigilant opponent of the Liberal
Government. Whenever and wherever a favourable chance of fighting
occurred he was the foremost man, and many furious wrangles between him
and Mr. Gladstone, or Mr. Chamberlain or Sir Charles Dilke marked the
course of the session. In the quarrel between the two Houses after the
rejection of the Bill in the House of Lords, he exerted himself to his
utmost on behalf of the House of Lords and laid on the Prime Minister
the whole responsibility for the dangerous constitutional situation
which had arisen and was becoming increasingly grave. Hansard and the
newspapers record these battles in ample detail. Sometimes he found
powerful support. On one occasion, when a dispute arose with Sir Charles
Dilke as to the accuracy of a quotation from Lord Randolph’s speeches,
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach said abruptly that ‘he preferred to believe the
word of his noble friend to that of the right honourable baronet’--an
observation which he was required by the Speaker to withdraw. On another
occasion Lord Randolph charged the Prime Minister with having ‘traduced’
his opponents by representing that Lord Salisbury had said in the course
of a confidential conversation that he would not discuss Redistribution
‘with a rope round his neck,’ and he moved the adjournment of the House.
Mr. Gladstone, violently incensed, described this word ‘traduce’--which
he declared implied a wilful and disgraceful act, not arising from
error--as ‘foul language.’ Lord Randolph immediately rose to order, and
asked the Speaker whether the Prime Minister was to be allowed to use
words which would not be tolerated in any other member. The Speaker
hoped that Mr. Gladstone would not insist on employing the expression.
The Prime Minister’s reply was accepted as a withdrawal, though his
actual words do not favour that construction. It is said that this was
the only time in his whole career when Mr. Gladstone incurred the rebuke
of the Chair. Lord Randolph seems to have been distressed at having
offended his great antagonist so deeply. Later in the debate he rose
again. ‘Recollecting,’ he said, ‘the vast difference which separates me
from the Prime Minister, I wish to say that it never has been and never
will be my intention, during the many years I hope he will remain in
this House, to use language in any way incompatible with his lofty
position.’ Mr. Gladstone received this assurance with much magnificent
urbanity. ‘I was no doubt at the moment a little irritated at language
that I thought very strong; but on reflection I must own that the noble
lord has always been very courteous to me.’
But whether, in these vexed and protracted debates, Lord Randolph
Churchill attacked the Prime Minister or harassed his own leaders;
whether he was supported by loud applauses of Conservative members or
heard by them in chilly silence; whether he seemed to be the accepted
spokesman of the Opposition or a solitary politician--his hand against
every man and every man’s hand against him--his almost unerring eye for
a Parliamentary situation, his mastery over the House and his formidable
power for good or evil upon the fortunes of his party became continually
more evident. Alone, or almost alone, he waged his double warfare
against Government and Opposition. Assailed on all sides--from the
Ministerial box, from the Front Opposition Bench, from those who sat
before him and behind him and even beside him; confronted with his own
contradictory statements, now by one side, now by the other; rebuked by
the Prime Minister, repeatedly repudiated by his colleagues and
leaders, he nevertheless preserved throughout an air of haughty
composure and met or repelled all attacks with resourceful and undaunted
pluck. ‘Tory Democracy,’ said Mr. Chamberlain during a vehement speech
in favour of the Reform Bill (House of Commons, March 27), ‘of which we
shall hear a good deal in the future, is represented in this House by
the member for Woodstock. I pay the greatest attention to anything he
says because I find that what he says to-day his leaders say to-morrow.
They follow him with halting steps, somewhat unwillingly; but they
always follow him. They may not always like the prescription he makes up
for them; but they always swallow it.’
Meanwhile the second vote of censure upon the conduct of Egyptian
affairs had been debated. On May 12 Sir Michael Hicks-Beach moved: ‘That
this House regrets to find the course pursued by Her Majesty’s
Government has not tended to promote the success of General Gordon’s
mission and that even such steps as may be necessary to secure his
personal safety are delayed.’ The attack was vigorously delivered. The
Prime Minister’s reply was judged inadequate and disquieting, even by
many of his own supporters. Mr. Forster assailed him during the debate
harshly and sternly. The weight and earnestness of Lord Hartington alone
retrieved Ministerial fortunes. Lord Randolph Churchill spoke (May 13)
to a larger audience, according to the newspapers, than had gathered to
hear any other speaker; and the benches, the gangways and the spaces
below the bar and behind the Chair were all filled to overflowing.
Despite the bitterness of the struggle in the National Union, the
wrangles over the Reform Bill of almost nightly recurrence and the
antagonisms which these had excited, the Conservative members broke into
loud acclamation at his rising. Before he had spoken for a quarter of an
hour he was sustained by the cheering of the whole party. He scourged
Mr. Gladstone relentlessly. He applied to him the well-known story of
the Duke of Wellington sitting down after making a speech on Reform amid
a great buzz of conversation and, on asking the reason for the
excitement, being told: ‘My Lord Duke, you have announced the fall of
your Government.’ It was curious, he said, how different individuals
appealed to the Prime Minister’s sympathies. ‘I compared his efforts in
the cause of General Gordon with his efforts in the cause of Mr.
Bradlaugh. If a hundredth part of those invaluable moral qualities
bestowed upon the cause of a seditious blasphemer had been given to the
support of a Christian hero, the success of Gordon’s mission would have
been assured. But the finest speech he ever delivered in the House of
Commons was in support of the seditious blasphemer; and the very worst
he ever delivered, by common consent, was in the cause of the Christian
hero.’ At this there was a great tumult.
Towards the end, when he had his party thoroughly behind him, Lord
Randolph took occasion to declare, in the form of an elaborate eulogy
upon Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, his intentions as to the leadership of
the House of Commons. ‘I hear a great deal about the deplorable weakness
of the Opposition; but I did not detect any deplorable weakness in the
speech of the right honourable gentleman who proposed this motion; nor
did I detect any deplorable weakness in the sonorous and resonant cheers
which greeted that speech continually from beginning to end--a speech
with reference to which I may be permitted to remark that it was a
magnificent indictment, all the more magnificent because it was so
measured and so grave; and I think it must have recalled to the Prime
Minister himself the palmy days of Tory leadership.’
‘The Government,’ he concluded, ‘when they went to Egypt abandoned every
atom of principle which they possessed. Egypt has been a Nemesis to them
and will, I believe, be their ruin. But the whole question is at last,
thank God, presented to us in an intelligible form. Will you or will you
not rescue Gordon? Answer “Aye” or “No.” The people of England and
Scotland, and of Ireland also, I believe, say “Aye.”’ (Cries of “No”
from the Ministerial benches and cheers.) ‘The Prime Minister and a few
Radical fanatics say “No”; but great as is the Prime Minister’s power,
long as has been his career and dazzling as his eloquence is, the odds
against him on this question are so overwhelming that even he must
either submit or resign.’ The Government escaped defeat only by
twenty-eight votes. Thirty-one Home Rulers voted with the Tory party;
and fifteen, or enough to have carried the censure, voted with
Ministers. The debate and the division alike foreshadowed the events of
1885.
While the fortunes of battle in the House of Commons varied thus from
day to day, the attention of both factions in the National Union was
concentrated on the approaching Conference of delegates from all parts
of the country, when the new Council must be elected. The chairmanship
depended upon the complexion of the Council. Lord Percy, the official
candidate, and his friends entertained hopes that an appeal to the
delegates to stand by the official leaders of the party and to repudiate
disloyalty would result in the election of a Council hostile to Lord
Randolph Churchill. To this end nothing was neglected. A careful and
earnest canvass was set on foot, supported by all the influence which
the representatives of the old and high Toryism could command.
Sheffield, it appears, was specially selected for the meeting-place, as
the local members were hostile to Lord Randolph; and that authority in
its highest embodiment should not be lacking, Lord Salisbury himself
undertook to address the assembled delegates at the evening meeting.
On the other hand Lord Randolph Churchill’s friends were not idle, and
Mr. Gorst’s great experience in all matters of organisation proved
invaluable; but when all had been done, the event rested upon a popular
vote, the character of which none could forecast. The Conference was
awaited by all parties with anxiety and excitement, and passion ran high
in the weeks that preceded it. Lord Randolph had promised informally to
speak for Mr. Stuart-Wortley at Sheffield. Consequent upon that
gentleman’s hostility he now refused. He was pressed to reconsider his
decision in order to avoid making differences public. He refused. The
report of the Council of the National Union was now prepared for the
Conference. It contained a succinct account of the course of the
quarrel, with many of the letters published in the last chapter. It was
felt that its circulation would be damaging to party interests. Mr.
Hartley, ‘at risk even of annoying you,’ wrote (July 9) to urge that it
should be suppressed or modified. Lord Randolph curtly replied that the
report unanimously adopted by the Council for presentation to the
Conference could not now be altered without authority. A requisition
under the rules of the National Union, duly signed by five members of
the Council, was forwarded to Lord Randolph (July 10) demanding a
special meeting for the purpose of revising the report. Availing himself
of the discretionary power reserved to the Chairman under by-law No. 23,
Lord Randolph declined to act upon the requisition.
The following correspondence also passed at this time between him and
Sir Stafford Northcote:--
_Sir Stafford Northcote to Lord Randolph Churchill._
_Private._
30 St. James’s Place, S.W.: July 10, 1884.
Dear Lord Randolph,--Will you be able to give me a few minutes’
conversation after Mr. Gladstone has made his statement to-night?
We ought, I think, as soon as the intentions of the Government have
been disclosed, to come to some arrangement for a meeting in
London (either St. James’s Hall, Duke of Wellington’s Riding
School, or elsewhere, but _not_ out of doors) in order to give the
keynote for the party in the country. I would not make it a meeting
about the Reform Bill exclusively, but have three or four
resolutions--one a general review of the Ministerial misdeeds;
another a growl about Egypt; another on the question of the
Franchise Bill; and a concluding one urging a dissolution, unless
Gladstone has already announced one.
I should like to consult you about the resolutions and about some
other points.
I remain
Yours very faithfully,
STAFFORD H. NORTHCOTE.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Sir Stafford Northcote._
2 Connaught Place, W.: July 10, 1884.
Dear Sir Stafford Northcote,--It is my duty always to hold myself
at your service whenever it may be your pleasure to do me the
honour of asking my opinion on any political question; at the same
time I feel bound to remark that former occasions on which on your
invitation I have offered an opinion have almost invariably led to
considerable misunderstandings, for which, of course, I blame no
one but myself.
The Conference of Associations which is to meet on the 23rd will
have to decide upon important and serious differences which have
arisen between myself and certain other parties who claim to be
acting (with what amount of justice I cannot determine) as the
representatives and agents of yourself and the Marquis of
Salisbury; and till that Conference has taken place I am certain
that it is not in my power to attend public meetings with the
slightest usefulness or effect.
Believe me to be
Yours very faithfully,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
The Conservative Associations assembled at Sheffield on July 23. Lord
Randolph did not attend Lord Salisbury’s meeting, though Mr. Chaplin
naïvely assured him that he would have been welcome. Upwards of 450
delegates gathered under his presidency in the Cutlers’ Hall. He made a
conciliatory speech, urging the necessity of adapting the organisation
of the Conservative party to the changed political requirements of the
day. He expounded the report at length and concluded by declaring that
in the contest between himself and Lord Percy he was actuated by no
personal ambition, but anxious for the welfare of the party. Lord Percy
thereupon attacked him, asserting ‘that he had broken away from the
leaders of the party and not adhered to them as he ought to have done.’
It was known that he spoke with official authority and that the
candidates whom he proposed were those favoured by Lord Salisbury and
Sir Stafford Northcote. After a long debate the delegates voted. Lord
Randolph Churchill was placed at the head of the poll by 346 votes. Mr.
Forwood, his principal supporter, was second, but after a great interval
(298). Six of his nominees occupied the first six places. Lord Percy did
not appear till the eighth place (260). Lord Salisbury’s private
secretary, who was also a candidate, was rejected. Out of thirty
candidates proposed by Lord Randolph Churchill, twenty-two were elected.
The whole official authority of the party exerted by Lord Percy secured
only eighteen out of thirty-six put forward by him. ‘The result,’ said
the _Times_ (July 24), ‘showed that the substantial victory rested with
Lord Randolph Churchill.’ His main reforms in organisation had been
conceded by the Central Committee and adopted by resolution at the
Conference. His own re-election as Chairman was assured.
But now a strange and unexpected turn was given to the course of events.
Lord Randolph Churchill’s victory, remarkable as it was, had been
narrowly won. A powerful and inflamed minority remained upon the Council
of the National Union to hamper and assail the leader of Tory Democracy.
The proverbial three courses lay before him. To renew his chairmanship
and to continue an internecine quarrel up to the very verge of the
General Election; to withdraw for a time from public life; or to make a
peace with Lord Salisbury. He chose the third. Sir Henry Wolff was
authorised to open negotiations. Mr. Balfour’s good offices were freely
tendered. Lord Salisbury was prompt in seizing the opportunity. Indeed,
the suicidal results to the principals and to their party of a
continuance of the quarrel were obvious. Terms of reconciliation were
speedily arranged. The Central Committee was abolished, and the
democratic reforms in the organisation of the National Union were
confirmed; the Primrose League was formally recognised and supported by
the official leaders. Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, who had been elected to
the Council of the National Union as an independent member on the list
of neither contending faction, and who was liked and trusted by both
sides, was nominated as the new Chairman. There was, moreover, a
general understanding that Lord Randolph Churchill and his friends were
to act in harmony with Lord Salisbury and were to be treated with full
confidence by him and the ruling members of the Conservative party.
Such were the conditions, so far as they could be, or have ever been,
put on paper. But it is evident that their moral consequences were of
much graver importance. No record has been preserved of what passed at
the interview between Lord Randolph Churchill and Lord Salisbury. But
certain very significant facts are plain. Lord Salisbury did not select
a lieutenant. He formed an alliance on terms of comradeship for the
general advantage of the party. The two men met as chiefs of almost
equal powers. Although Lord Salisbury’s primacy was never disputed by
Lord Randolph Churchill, they exercised from the very first a divided
authority; and it is in the light of this unusual relationship--based
not, indeed, upon any definite agreement, but arising out of the hard
facts of the situation--that the conduct of both, amid the political
turbulence of the next two years, can alone be fairly judged.
Lord Salisbury was loyal throughout to Sir Stafford Northcote, even in a
degree which was often detrimental to party interests. But, whatever his
wishes may have been, the settlement of the National Union dispute
sealed that unfortunate statesman’s fate--so far as the leadership of
the House of Commons was concerned. The dinner to which, in celebration
of the peace, Lord Salisbury invited the Council of the National Union,
including a majority of those who had been his most active opponents
during the past year, was the public acceptance of Tory Democracy in the
councils of the Conservative party. The great meeting held in the Pomona
Gardens at Manchester in August and addressed by Lord Salisbury, Lord
Randolph Churchill, and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, was a plain indication
of the Cabinet and Parliamentary arrangements which would be a necessary
consequence of that acceptance.
Sir Henry Wolff, who had been throughout these conflicts Lord Randolph’s
most intimate and trusted friend, entirely approved of the steps which
had been taken to end the quarrel.[24] Mr. Gorst also wrote to Lord
Randolph on July 27, 1884, expressly and explicitly signifying his
concurrence and describing Lord Randolph Churchill’s refusal to continue
as Chairman of Council of the National Union as ‘a good stroke of
policy.’ But it has since been suggested, upon apparently unimpeachable
authority,[25] that Mr. Gorst disapproved of the reconciliation; that he
thought greater advantage to the Conservative party would have followed
from the prosecution of the dispute; and that he conceived himself in
some measure deserted by its abandonment. Of Lord Randolph’s behaviour
to his able, energetic supporter the reader will be able to judge before
the story is complete. But there is no doubt that Mr. Gorst was for a
time, after the _concordat_, in a position of much weakness and
isolation. He had incurred very bitter enmities by the part he had taken
in the quarrel. It was especially resented that those talents of
organisation which had so greatly aided the Tory victory of 1874, should
have been employed against the recognised leaders of the Conservative
party ten years later. Men who did not think it wise, in view of what
had happened in the past, and still more of what might happen in the
future, to anger Lord Randolph Churchill, were glad enough to indulge
their spite upon Mr. Gorst. His real feeling--that he had been thrown
over--must have become apparent to Lord Randolph Churchill, in spite of
his written agreement in the course adopted; and a coolness ensued
between them, diversified with occasional heats.
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach laid the National Union peacefully to rest in an
obscurity from which its members have only emerged at infrequent
intervals to pass Protectionist resolutions. Nearly twenty years elapsed
before it recovered, at another Sheffield Conference, a passing shadow
of its old importance, and the distinction which it achieved on that
occasion may excuse the hope that its future repose will long remain
unbroken.
The reconciliation of Lord Randolph Churchill with Lord Salisbury which
followed on the Sheffield Conference, was comprehensive and loyally
observed. The tactics of the Opposition became more effective in the
House of Commons and their councils more harmonious. But strife in the
constituencies was to succeed this session of storm and effort. Faced
by the rejection of a great popular measure at the hands of hereditary
legislators, the Liberal Government did not waver. The autumn was
consumed in angry agitation and Parliament was specially summoned for a
winter session to pass the Bill again. The Radicals were full of hope
that no compromise would be offered or accepted. Never before or since
had they laid hands upon so good a battering-ram as the Franchise Bill.
Never since those days has the House of Lords placed itself on ground so
insecure. But the pressure of public opinion proved effective; Mr.
Gladstone was benevolent; and the Queen urgent for a settlement. Lord
Randolph Churchill was deeply impressed with the danger of a continuance
of the constitutional struggle between the Lords and the Commons. ‘It
was not a little owing to the urgency,’ writes Sir Michael Hicks-Beach,
‘with which he pressed on me the need of some arrangement that, with the
consent of Lord Salisbury and Sir Stafford Northcote, I had the
preliminary conferences with Lord Hartington which led to the more
formal meetings of the leaders of both parties.’ Finally, after weeks of
haggling, expostulation, menace, and intrigue, it was finally arranged
that the Franchise Bill should pass first and that Redistribution upon
lines agreeable to both parties should follow forthwith.
To mark and proclaim the newly compacted alliance within the
Conservative party, Sir Stafford Northcote came during the autumn recess
to speak in Lord Randolph’s support at Birmingham. Of all the
demonstrations organised against the House of Lords for its rejection of
the Franchise Bill scarcely any had exceeded that held at Soho Pool,
near Birmingham, on Bank Holiday. Aston Park, in the same neighbourhood,
had been secured on October 13 by the Conservatives for a
counter-demonstration, which was to open a week of campaigning
throughout the district. Besides Sir Stafford and Lord Randolph
Churchill, Colonel Burnaby and many other members of Parliament and
candidates were to address the concourse at five simultaneous political
meetings, and the well-known attractions of the Park and of the orators
were to be strengthened by bands of music and a firework display.
According to the Conservatives, the Aston demonstration was to represent
the Midlands in general and Birmingham in particular, and special trains
were run from all the surrounding constituencies with detachments of
enthusiastic Tories and holiday-makers.
These well-conceived arrangements caused much offence to the Radicals of
Birmingham. They declared that an attempt was to be made to misrepresent
the feeling of their city by importing outsiders and excursionists to
swell the numbers of the demonstrators; and as the meetings had been
called from the citizens of Birmingham and were in local parlance ‘town
meetings’ rather than ordinary ‘party meetings,’ they resolved to attend
them too. Admission to Aston Park was by ticket. It was stated that
120,000 tickets would be issued to those who applied for them. Everyone
applied. Trade Union secretaries, great Liberal manufacturers like the
Tangyes, officials of the Radical organisations, applied for, in some
cases, as many as 800 at a time. The promoters of the demonstration
became alarmed; and as it was now clear--and even avowed--that the
Radicals would attend in force and spoil the effect, the issue of
tickets was stopped and the applications were refused. Elaborate,
formidable, and, as it proved, thoroughly effective measures were
thereupon adopted to enable the voice of Birmingham to be heard. It
became known that large numbers of tickets were being forged. Of course,
no one in authority in the Liberal party lent any countenance to such
proceedings. Mr. Schnadhorst went away for the day upon important
business. A few working men--a mere handful of trampled
toilers--spontaneously, with no help from their party, inspired by no
other emotion than zeal for freedom and Reform, organised a
counter-demonstration. The place of meeting was selected, by an unlucky
coincidence, just outside the walls of Aston Park; and there also it
happened that, on the appointed day, a cart containing ladders and other
useful appliances drew up. The bills announcing this innocent
counter-demonstration summoned the ‘Men of Birmingham and the Midlands’
to assemble for deliberation in Witton Road (just outside the Park),
after which ‘let all who can get admittance attend the Tory meetings,
wear the Gladstone badge, and show you are not ashamed of your
colours.’ In order that nothing should interfere with the discharge of
these civic duties, Tangye’s and other large works in the city closed
for the afternoon.
The day arrived. The weather was suitable to outdoor political debate.
The holders of tickets--forged or genuine--assembled by road and rail
from all parts of the Midlands. The Aston grounds were soon crowded with
demonstrators. Outside, the counter-demonstration, made up of three
large processions, estimated at 15,000 strong, converged upon a waste
plot of land hard by the Park wall. Individuals began to climb over but
were stopped by broken glass. Earnest hands seized the ladders which
stood there by chance and the broken glass was demolished. A waggon
which had served as the platform was dragged towards the wall; and by
this, by the ladders, and also, it appears, by a convenient tree, many
persons swarmed over. Inside they found a single policeman, who could do
nothing to gainsay them, and a tool-house containing a number of planks.
By using the planks as battering-rams a breach was made in the wall and
thousands of excited people poured through it into the Park to join by
force their friends who had entered by fraud.
The open-air meetings were broken up by riot. Stones, potatoes, and even
chairs were flung at the members of Parliament who attempted to address
the crowd. The platform of the great hall was stormed. Sir Stafford
Northcote, who showed much pluck throughout these turbulent experiences
which his physical condition ill fitted him to endure, and Lord
Randolph Churchill were overwhelmed by furious clamour and finally
driven from the hall in the midst of a battle royal of sticks and
chair-legs. Lord Randolph, not following promptly enough, was picked up
and carried away bodily by a burly admirer from Wolverhampton. The crowd
at first followed at a walk and afterwards at a run, and so menacing and
dangerous was their temper that Sir Stafford Northcote was dragged along
by his guards at full speed and even so narrowly avoided capture. Other
members of Parliament had rougher experiences and Mr. Darling[26] was
lucky to make an escape from a window before the door of the room in
which he had taken refuge was battered down. The platform of the Skating
Rink collapsed while a free-fight was raging upon it. The fireworks
perished ignominiously in broad daylight; the set-piece of Sir Stafford
Northcote being received with storms of groans and fired off, by a
refinement of cruelty, _upside down_. Such were the Aston riots. No
persons were actually killed in them, but not a few were seriously
injured, and hundreds carried away scars and bruises from the fray.
The indignation caused among the Conservatives of Birmingham, and indeed
throughout the country, by these events was fierce and bitter. Lord
Randolph Churchill turned to the fullest advantage the blunder into
which his adversaries had been drawn. Every day for a week, in spite of
repeated threats of personal violence, he journeyed to and fro in
Birmingham and in a series of speeches, published and read in every part
of the country, he fastened the responsibility for disorder and
intimidation upon Mr. Chamberlain and his Caucus. He urged Conservative
working men to take effective measures to protect themselves from
tyranny and not to hesitate to meet force by force. ‘I do not think,’ he
said, ‘the Conservative party ought to look to the police for
assistance. We are quite capable of taking care of ourselves.’ Formal
resolutions were accordingly passed by Conservative Clubs, pledging
themselves to take concerted measures of defence and of reprisal. Upon
the connection of the Birmingham Corporation with Radical politics he
was explicit.
The contest in Birmingham is not a contest, such as is carried on
in other constituencies in England, between party and party. It is
a contest between popular self-government and a corrupt oligarchy;
between electoral freedom and Russian despotism; between open
dealing and Venetian espionage; between individual security and
public order and all the resources and ingenuity of terror and
intimidation. The whole of the governing power of the borough of
Birmingham is almost absolutely in the hands of the Caucus. The
patronage disposed of is enormous. The Caucus, acting under the
name of the Corporation, own the gasworks; they own the water
supply; they control the lunatic asylums; they control the grammar
school; they control some large establishments in the nature of a
drainage farm; they manipulate the borough funds to the extent of
nearly one million a year; they pay something like 80,000_l._ a
year in wages; and their number of employees, as far as I can
ascertain, is about 25,000. And all these enormous resources are
directed principally, not so much to the good of the town of
Birmingham, as to the maintenance of the power of the Caucus. Every
one of their employees knows that he holds his office, his
position, his employment, upon the distinct understanding that in
all political and municipal matters he must blindly submit himself;
and upon the slightest sign even of independence--to say nothing of
opposition--he will lose his employment; he will be thrown upon the
world with all his family, even if it should lead to his ruin or
his starvation.
These charges were furiously denied, and were no doubt exaggerated in
form; but they bore a sufficiently accurate and substantial relation to
circumstances well within the knowledge of Birmingham citizens to be
highly damaging. Moreover, the argument that the Radical party, although
already possessed of all the machinery of national government, were
preparing--by the abolition of the Second Chamber on the one hand, and
the suppression of public meetings on the other--to subvert the
Constitution and to enter upon revolutionary paths, gained acceptance in
England far beyond the ordinary limits of Conservative opinion.
So soon as Parliament met, a week later, for the winter session, Lord
Randolph placed upon the paper an amendment to the Address taking the
form of a vote of censure on Mr. Chamberlain for speeches which
encouraged interference with freedom of discussion and incited to riot
and disorder. The debate was heralded for several days by much
preliminary snarling. Mr. Chamberlain, irritated by constant
cross-questioning, referred to Sir Henry Wolff as Lord Randolph
Churchill’s ‘jackal.’ ‘With his usual insolence,’ observed Sir Henry
Wolff in reply; and, on being rebuked by the Speaker, he substituted
‘with his usual courtesy.’ Mr. Chaplin inquired whether the President of
the Local Government Board would not proceed to describe his opponents
as ‘hyænas’; and Lord Randolph Churchill, availing himself of the
Speaker’s ruling that the word ‘jackal,’ if looked upon as a figurative
expression, was not out of order, proceeded to state that at the
earliest possible opportunity he would move his amendment and ‘draw the
badger.’
This occasion was provided on October 30, and led to a singularly
unpleasant debate. Lord Randolph Churchill quoted numerous extracts from
Mr. Chamberlain’s speeches. He asserted that no Minister of the Crown
had ever used such language and that Irish members had been committed to
prison for language much less strong. He declared that Mr. Chamberlain
knew beforehand of the counter-demonstration and of what it was intended
to effect and that he might easily have prevented the riot had he chosen
to do so. Mr. Chamberlain exerted himself greatly, and not
unsuccessfully, in replying. He in his turn was able to discover in Lord
Randolph Churchill’s speeches some traces of violent language. He flatly
denied that he had had any personal complicity in the riot, which, he
explained, had arisen solely from the mismanagement of the Tory
organisation and from their attempt to give their meeting the character
of a national demonstration. But the most effective part of his speech
consisted in a number of affidavits of roughs, said to have been engaged
by the Secretary of the Conservative Association to turn out Liberals
from the meeting, whose violence it was alleged had provoked the
outbreak. When he sat down he had in great measure stemmed the tide
which had been running strongly against him. As his speech was drawing
to a close Lord Randolph leaned across the gangway and asked Sir Michael
Hicks-Beach if he would reply. Sir Michael, much impressed by Mr.
Chamberlain’s argument, declined; but Sir Hardinge Giffard, to whom Lord
Randolph then turned, stepped into the breach, and with little
premeditation made a most admirable and effective rejoinder, which
swayed the opinion of the House and threw the gravest doubt upon the
authenticity and credibility of the documents from which Mr. Chamberlain
had quoted. Upon the division Lord Randolph’s amendment was defeated by
214 to 178. ‘The majority,’ observes the _Annual Register_, ‘exonerating
Mr. Chamberlain from any blameworthy act, was far smaller than a member
of the Cabinet commanding the confidence and sympathy of his supporters
had a right to expect.’
The dispute was then carried by both parties into the Courts. The
summonses and counter-summonses were heard together at Birmingham on
successive days during the month of November, and when Mr. Chamberlain
was examined as a witness (November 26) attempts were made to fix upon
him the responsibility of suggesting that the affidavits should be
procured. But he denied it. On December 6, the compromise upon the
Franchise and Redistribution Bill having been achieved nearly three
weeks before, the proceedings came to an abrupt close. But at the
Assizes (February 28 and March 2, 1885) a man named Peter Joyce, said to
be ‘Larry Mack,’ a notorious rough whose affidavit had been quoted in
Parliament, was tried before Mr. Justice Field on the charge of criminal
libel and sentenced, despite the lukewarmness of the prosecution and
strong recommendation to mercy, to six weeks’ imprisonment. A Liberal of
respectable antecedents was found guilty of having had the ‘forged
tickets’ printed and was heavily fined. No evidence was ever produced to
sustain any charge against Mr. Chamberlain of having himself fomented
the disorders; but an impression was created that the whole
affair--especially the discharging of the fireworks upside down--showed
that he had been only partially successful in exerting those influences
of moral restraint which are so much to be commended in political
leaders during times of popular excitement.
The Aston riots led to some curious consequences. When Lord Randolph was
arranging for the prosecutions of the ‘roughs’ whose depositions Mr.
Chamberlain had read to the House of Commons, he asked one of his
friends to find him a lawyer of repute who would conduct the case so as
to make ‘as much political capital out of it as possible.’ A Mr. Henry
Matthews--already a barrister of distinction upon the Midland
Circuit--was recommended to him. They met at dinner on two successive
nights. Lord Randolph was perfectly delighted with his conversation and
his personality and formed the very highest opinion of his powers. At
his insistence Mr. Matthews became a candidate for a Birmingham seat.
Eighteen months later, when he was reading in the Athenæum Club the
newspaper rumours of the composition of Lord Salisbury’s second
Administration, he was startled and astonished by Lord Randolph breaking
in upon him with the offer of the office of Home Secretary.
The course of their violent political quarrels and the harsh language
and personal charges with which they were accompanied produced a total
breach in Lord Randolph’s private friendship with Mr. Chamberlain. They
no longer addressed or saluted each other and such correspondence as was
necessary was conducted on both sides with frigid formality. Thus:--
House of Commons: October 28.
Mr. Chamberlain presents his compliments to Lord R. Churchill and
begs to thank him for his courtesy in communicating the grounds on
which he is prepared to support the charge which he has brought
against Mr. Chamberlain.
Lord Randolph had been much exhausted in health and strength by the
unremitting exertions of the year, and late in November it was announced
that he purposed to start almost immediately for a four months’ holiday
to India. Mr. Chamberlain no sooner heard this than he was anxious to
make friends. His letter speaks for itself:--
_Mr. Chamberlain to Lord Randolph Churchill._
40 Prince’s Gardens, S.W.; November 27, 1884.
My dear Churchill,--You see that I have returned to the old
superscription. If you object, I will not offend again; but I do
not like to allow you to leave the country for what, I understand,
is a long voyage, necessitated by circumstances that I sincerely
regret, without saying that recent occurrences have, in my case at
all events, left no personal bitterness behind.
I am sorry that we have been forced into public conflict; I should
be still more sorry if political opposition degenerated into a
private quarrel.
I heartily wish you a pleasant holiday, and hope that rest and
change of scene may thoroughly restore your health and strength.
Believe me,
_Sans rancune_,
Yours very truly,
J. CHAMBERLAIN.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Mr. Chamberlain._
2 Connaught Place, W.: November 27, 1884.
My dear Mr. Chamberlain,--I hasten to answer your very kind letter,
which caused me the greatest pleasure.
I had always hoped that the friendship which existed between us and
which, for my part, I most highly valued, might at all tunes be
altogether unaffected by any Parliamentary conflicts, however
brisk, and even sharp, the latter might be.
It is indeed very pleasant to me to know from the generous
expressions in your letter that my hopes are in no way illusory,
and as long as I continue in politics it will be a source of pride
to me to endeavour to the best of my abilities to mitigate the
asperities of party warfare as far as you and I are concerned. I am
not likely to forget that in the last Parliament you gave me the
most valuable and effective support in a matter in which at that
time I was greatly interested, without which support I should have
been unsuccessful.
I like to think that it is neither impossible nor improbable that
political circumstances may from time to time find us again in
agreement; and although your position and power will be far above
mine, I shall be on the look-out for those occasions.
Believe me, I am very sensible of your amiable wishes as to the
results of my travels to India, and that I hope always to remain
Yours very sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
One more incident which arose out of the Reform Bill must be noticed in
its place. When Parliament assembled for the winter session the
Conservative leaders agreed with Lord Randolph Churchill to offer a
regular though perfunctory resistance to the second passage of the
Reform Bill through the House of Commons, in order to strengthen the
position of the House of Lords in effecting the compromise which was now
recognised as inevitable. Lord Randolph accordingly placed on the paper
an amendment to the second reading, setting forth ‘that any measure
purporting to provide for the better representation of the people must
be accompanied by provisions for the proper arrangement of electoral
areas.’ This seemed to repeat as a general principle the amendment which
Colonel Stanley had moved as a precise instruction on May 23, when the
Bill was for the first time in Committee, which amendment Lord Randolph
and the Fourth Party had opposed and indeed denounced. The political
situation was entirely changed; but the verbal similarity did not escape
one acute, retentive mind.
In Lord Randolph’s absence at the funeral of Lord Londonderry his
amendment was moved by Mr. Stanhope. To the surprise of his party Mr.
Gorst rose from below the gangway and thereupon criticised and opposed
the amendment in terms which bore a sufficiently close resemblance to
those in which Lord Randolph had opposed it when it had last been moved.
By this very able and perfectly consistent speech Mr. Gorst gave great
offence to all sections of the Conservative party, who were now united
in an embrace of unaffected love. Lord Randolph, when he read the
newspapers next day, accepted it as a personal declaration of war. He
was very angry. ‘Gorst,’ he said, ‘must be punished’; and accordingly on
the next sitting of the House (November 7) he administered to his
mutinous lieutenant a castigation prolonged, deliberate, and severe. ‘I
have yet to learn,’ he observed, with undisturbed gravity, ‘that either
the traditions of party warfare or Parliamentary etiquette teaches one
to desert one’s party and stand aloof from it and refrain from giving
assistance to it, simply because of the very inadequate and miserable
reason that in one’s own poor and very feeble judgment one does not
altogether approve of the course which may have led them into that
difficulty.’ The mirth which this grimace excited was strengthened by
the joy and relief alike of Government and Opposition at the breaking-up
of the formidable confederacy at whose hands they had endured so much.
On December 3 Lord Randolph sailed in the _Rohilla_ for India. Since the
beginning of history many travellers have visited the East. Few have
neglected to record their adventures. But if the reader is inclined to
follow the subject of this story into an atmosphere remote from that of
Westminster his own letters will be found to supply an easy and
connected narrative.[27] After several years of strife he entered upon a
brief interval of peace. The battles of the Reform Bill had ended in a
compromise far less unsatisfactory to Tory interests than could have
been expected. The agitation which menaced the House of Lords was at an
end. His dispute with Lord Salisbury was settled. The Conservative party
had acclaimed the return of the prodigal son. The Aston riots were
forgotten in his renewed friendship with Mr. Chamberlain. And as the
English coast-line faded, a passing temper of tranquil benevolence led
him to send through Wolff messages of amity to all his friends--‘even to
the erring Gorst.’
CHAPTER IX
THE FALL OF THE GOVERNMENT
‘Of this, however, I am well persuaded, that it is better to be
impetuous than cautious. For Fortune is a woman who to be kept
under must be beaten and roughly handled; and we see that she
suffers herself to be more readily mastered by those who treat her
so, than by those who are more timid in their approaches. And
always, like a woman, she favours the young, because they are less
scrupulous and fiercer, and command her with greater
audacity.’--MACHIAVELLI: _The Prince_, chapter XXV.
[Sidenote: 1885 ÆT. 36]
This account, which has hitherto been concerned with the doings of Lord
Randolph Churchill and the steps by which he attained power in his party
and in Parliament, must now for a time be greatly extended. However
strictly the thread of personal narrative be followed, biography
broadens insensibly into history, and the career of a private member
becomes a recognisable part of the fortunes of the nation. We enter upon
a period of tumult and change. Within little more than a year two
General Elections were fought and four separate Administrations took
their seats on the Treasury Bench. In order to find an equal convulsion
it is necessary to go back almost exactly a hundred years, to the time
between the fall of Lord North’s Administration in 1782 and the final
triumph of Mr. Pitt after his dissolution in 1784. In each period
Ministries were constructed and fell like houses of cards; in each a
new, young figure sprang suddenly into universal attention; in each, one
of the historic parties in the State entered into a disastrous
coalition; and the other, after taking office in a minority, secured a
predominance which lasted for a generation.
The Administration of 1880 tottered to its fall in tragedy and disaster.
General Gordon perished and Khartoum fell in February. The expeditionary
columns recoiled in sorrow and failure from the desert and the Nile. The
Queen telegraphed her displeasure openly to the Prime Minister; and on a
vote of censure the Government escaped only by a majority of fourteen
(February 27). Few more critical divisions have been taken in modern
times; for the defection of eight more discontented Whigs or Liberals
would have procured a dissolution before either the Reform or
Redistribution Act could have come into operation. In the temper of the
moment, upon the votes of the old electorate, the Conservative party
could hardly have failed to gain a clear majority. With such a prize in
view the attacks of the Opposition increased in vehemence, bitterness,
and effect. Votes of censure succeeded each other with almost
bewildering rapidity. Early in the year Mr. Chamberlain began to
proclaim the new demands of Radicalism in a series of crudely impressive
speeches. Nationalist Ireland struggled in the grip of Dublin Castle.
The menace of Russian aggression towards the Indian frontier grew into
reality. Dynamite explosions tore up the Treasury Bench and shook the
structure of Westminster Hall. A momentous General Election drew near.
It was indeed, as Mr. Gladstone noted in his diary, ‘a time of _Sturm
und Drang_.’
Lord Randolph Churchill returned from India in March, to find himself in
a position of unusual importance. He had won no battle, negotiated no
peace; he had passed no great measure of reform; he had never held
public office; he was not even a Privy Councillor; yet he was welcomed
on all sides with interest or acclamation. The political temperature was
steadily rising with the approach of the General Election. The Fourth
Party received him with joy and the House of Commons with satisfaction.
Mr. Gladstone in his courtly way walked across the House to shake hands
with him. His absence had been felt on his own side. He was looked to as
a man who would infuse a belligerent energy into the Opposition and
range their lines for the impending battle. It was evident to all men
that he occupied a position in which he might turn the balance of many
great things. ‘What place will you give him when the Government is
formed?’ Sir Stafford Northcote was asked by a friend. ‘Say rather,’
replied the leader of the Opposition, ‘what place will he give me?’ ‘I
had no idea,’ said Lord Randolph calmly when this was repeated to him,
‘that he had so much wit.’
The passage of a year had wrought important changes. Birmingham, divided
by the Reform Bill into seven seats, was no longer the great
three-member constituency which had invited him to stand. Colonel
Burnaby, his good comrade, had been killed at Abu Klea.[28] But the
Central Division sent a pressing requisition. Although the acceptance
involved a direct contest with Mr. Bright himself, Lord Randolph
considered himself bound by his former promise to come forward; but,
lest fortune should be adverse in Birmingham, Mr. Kerans voluntarily
withdrew from the candidature of South Paddington, so that that seat
also might be at his disposal.
It is not easy to estimate, and quite impossible to explain, the
personal ascendency which he had by this time acquired in the House of
Commons. The Conservative Opposition almost instinctively yielded to his
decisions. His authority seemed to have grown in his absence. On the
motion to go into Committee on the Egyptian Loan Bill (April 16) Sir
Richard Cross moved an amendment urging that the Suez Canal Convention
should be submitted to the House before it was finally settled. The
ground was ill-chosen and the occasion inauspicious. The speech of the
mover could not fully surmount these disadvantages. But the amendment
was moved with all the sanction and authority of the official
Opposition, and the party Whips had summoned their followers from far
and near to support it. Lord Randolph Churchill made a short speech,
suave and friendly in substance, elaborately polite in form, but with
just a suspicion of irony. He deprecated the amendment. He persuaded
both sides of the House that it was unfortunate. The debate came
abruptly to a conclusion. All determination of dividing oozed out of
the Opposition. The amendment was withdrawn. This was a typical
incident.
Lord Randolph had returned from India at a time when Indian problems
occupied all minds. The turbulence of English politics was hushed for a
space by a perilous interlude. In the year 1884, after the occupation of
Merv, the Russian Empire attained the limits of its expansion southwards
and came at last into contact with the territories of the Amir, to whom,
by the engagements of 1880, Great Britain had given a pledge of
protection against external aggression. A joint demarcation of the
northern boundary of Afghanistan was decided on by the British and
Russian Governments, from the Persian border eastwards to a point on the
Oxus, beyond which that river had been recognised by the agreement of
1873 as constituting the limits of Afghan territory. The Commissioners
of the two Powers had met on the frontier in November 1884, and devoted
themselves to their task with that air of leisurely diligence
inseparable from international undertakings. On March 30 the tangled
negotiations were torn to pieces by an act of violence. While
diplomatists were groping for scientific frontiers upon imperfect maps
and amid unfamiliar names, General Komaroff advanced, ‘covenant’
notwithstanding, collided with the Afghan pickets upon the debatable
ground, and in a short but bloody action at Penjdeh drove the Amir’s
forces from the field. All England was stirred. The newspapers were hot
to counsel war. A wave of double panic swept across the country. The
national temper rose and the funds fell. A period of acute suspense
followed.
On all that concerned the safety of India Lord Randolph spoke in
picturesque and thoughtful language. ‘Our rule in India,’ he said at the
Primrose League banquet in the St. James’s Hall on April 18, ‘is, as it
were, a sheet of oil spread out over the surface of, and keeping calm
and quiet and unruffled by storms, an immense and profound ocean of
humanity. Underneath that rule lie hidden all the memories of fallen
dynasties, all the traditions of vanquished races, all the pride of
insulted creeds....’ He spoke of the advance of Russia on the North-West
Frontier--‘that sometimes stealthy, sometimes open, always gradual,
always sure advance of countless hosts, now resembling the gliding of a
serpent, now the bound of a tiger’--as a perpetual injury to stability
and progress in the Government and people of India. And his counsels,
like those of Lord Salisbury, seemed full of the menace of war.
On April 27 Mr. Gladstone asked the House of Commons for his vote of
credit of 11,000,000_l._ He unfolded the ‘case for preparation’ in an
impressive harangue. Tory blood, long chilled, stirred in his veins. The
eloquence and authority of his great war speech covered everything
behind it--even the total abandonment of the Soudan, which was
foreshadowed almost incidentally--and carried everything before it. He
sat down while the House was ringing with the united acclamations of
Radicals who hated war and of Tories who hated him. The debate
collapsed. Notices of motion and amendment disappeared as if by magic.
The vote was carried without a single protest.
But it was no part of the policy of the Opposition to allow Mr.
Gladstone to obtain personal triumphs of this character. Though for the
time they were dazzled by his rhetoric, they felt no confidence that the
honour of the country was safe in his hands; and the parlous condition
to which British relations with Russia had come, only made them more
anxious to get possession of the Government. Lord Randolph, who had
freed himself altogether from the Gladstone spell, saw in the collapse
of the debate only another proof of that feeble and ineffective
leadership of the Opposition against which he had warred so ruthlessly.
Hitherto his communications with Lord Salisbury had been scanty and
formal. Since the settlement of the National Union dispute no letters
had passed between them; and although they were supposed to be working
in harmonious agreement, they hardly knew each other at all. But Lord
Randolph’s vexation prompted him to write with much more freedom than he
had yet allowed himself; and this proved the beginning of an intimate
correspondence and association only to cease after the crisis in British
politics was over.
_Private._
Turf Club, Piccadilly: April 27, 1885. 11 P.M.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--The Opposition cannot be conducted to any
other goal but smash if things are to go on as they did to-night.
At first all went well. We divided, and were only beaten by 43--a
respectable position, the only unpleasant feature of which was the
slack attendance of our party. A four-line whip had been out for a
week. Many telegrams had been despatched yesterday, and yet only
about 160 Tories came up to the scratch. The worst was to come, and
I blame myself as much as anyone for what happened. Mr. Gladstone
was evidently much annoyed by the opposition to his vote of credit
arrangements and commenced his statement in Committee by the most
wanton, outrageous, violent, and yet wretchedly weak attack upon
the late Government. He then went on into a very elaborate and
easily exposed apology for the evacuation of the Soudan, and
finally wound up (and this part I did not hear) with a very warlike
denunciation of Russian aggression, which H. Fowler of the Home
Office told me he thought was too strong. Would you believe it? The
whole Front Opposition Bench sat as mute as mummies--though, after
all, it was they who had been flouted--and the Prime Minister got
his 11,000,000_l._ at one gulp, without a remark of any sort or
kind. I have not really the right to complain or criticise, as I
went away in the middle of his speech to dine; but it never
occurred to me for a moment that Sir S. N. would allow his
intemperate remarks to pass unnoticed, or that the debate would
collapse in such an ignominious manner for the Opposition.
It is quite possible that the Metropolitan Press may not notice
this so strongly, but the Liberal provincial Press will; and the
fact remains that at this time of day Gladstone has the audacity to
revive in their worst form all the stale and exploded charges
against the Beaconsfield Government, and that Northcote, the man
most concerned, has not a word to say in reply. The effect in the
House of Commons has been deplorable. All the Liberals are
cock-a-whoop, and Gladstone has been allowed to obtain,
gratuitously, an unparalleled Parliamentary triumph. It is probable
that in the next few weeks crisis and sensation will follow each
other closely. You know that under these circumstances, in the
House of Commons, if the leader of the Opposition does not move,
no one else can; and if to-night’s proceedings are to be repeated,
we are done. Excuse, I pray you, a hurried scrawl. I thought you
might like to have an account fresh from the House of Commons.
Yours very sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
The reply was prompt and friendly.
‘I sympathise with you very heartily,’ replied Lord Salisbury late the
same night. ‘But what can I do? It is not a case where advice would be
of any service. In fact, I sometimes think my advice does more harm than
good; for, if only partially followed, it may produce exactly the
reverse of the intended effect. I hope the papers will attribute the
collapse to our exalted patriotism. At least, that is the only hope with
which one can console oneself.’
Lord Randolph wrote again:--
_Private and Confidential._
Carlton Club: April 28, 1885.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--I have been thinking of nothing else but the
events of last night in the House of Commons and, encouraged by
your kind note received this morning, I venture to inflict upon you
another letter.
The tone of the Metropolitan Press this morning is not unfavourable
to us; but the Metropolitan Press is most misleading. I see every
day the provincial Press, and I know well how in their London
correspondence and in their articles they will magnify the personal
triumph of Mr. Gladstone. He had been running down for some time,
but has now, _for the time_, completely recovered his old position
by the extraordinary and unprecedented _coup_ he carried off last
night. That _coup_ has done us, as a party, more real harm with the
constituencies than any event in this Parliament which I can
remember. This sort of thing did not matter in 1880; but we are now
within six months of a General Election, and any event which
greatly elevates the Liberals and depresses our own people has a
terrible effect. That triumph of last night will be repeated unless
very decided and energetic steps are taken now. The personal
ascendency of Mr. Gladstone is our great difficulty. If we can
destroy or mitigate that, we gain adherents. I know what the little
Fourth Party did in ‘80 and ‘81 and what support and sympathy they
acquired in the country on that account. That old Fourth Party has
disappeared; but the time has come when another body of the same
nature, but on much better and weightier lines, might be formed,
and might effect astonishing Parliamentary success.
I quite perceive that anything in the nature of open revolt against
Sir S. N. would be fatal in every way. At the same time _it is
madness_ to blind yourself to the fact that whatever abilities he
once possessed for guiding a party are utterly gone and that his
influence upon the vigour and vitality of the party now enervates
and enfeebles; and _that_ at a moment when the greatest possible
party life and vigour is a matter of life and death.
I have suggested to Sir Michael Hicks-Beach that he should remain
permanently in town for the remainder of the Session and should be
always in the House of Commons when it is sitting; and I have told
him that if he can pledge himself to this, I believe a certain
number of M.P.’s would pledge themselves to be always at his back.
I allude principally to the old Fourth Party, to Raikes and
Chaplin, to Dyke and Gibson, and to one or two more very talented
and ambitious young members of the party. The effect of the
constant attendance and skilful action of such a body night after
night upon the Government cannot be over-estimated. It might lead
them to throw up the sponge, either by one or more unexpected
defeats. But, in any case, it would keep our party in the country
alive and in good heart and should supply them with endless topics
for local controversy. It is absolutely essential that some member
of real position and influence upon the Front Bench should be at
the head of such a combination. The weakness of the old Fourth
Party was that they had no _point d’appui_; they were always a body
of skirmishers altogether _en l’air_. And yet House of Commons
history would be altogether misread if their disintegrating effect
upon the Liberal party was underestimated or ignored. To show you
what might have been done last night, I have ascertained from so
reliable a source as Lord R. Grosvenor that all the elements of the
Courtney faction and the Labouchere faction might have been let
loose last night, if only Sir S. N. had not weakly yielded to an
evanescent impression created by Gladstone’s gingerbread rhetoric,
and allowed the debate to collapse. I think under high persuasion
Sir M. Hicks-Beach would be prepared to make great sacrifices and
run some personal risks, and it is for that reason that I bring all
these matters to your notice. I may, without overmuch presumption,
claim some little authority on these party interests. My letters to
the _Times_ in 1882 and my article in the _Fortnightly_ clearly
foretold the ultimate effect of Sir S. N.’s leadership. They
brought much odium upon me at the time and may indeed have
embarrassed persons I wished not to embarrass, but my word has been
justified by events and by present public opinion.
I pray you not to allow yourself to imagine that either then or now
was I or am I actuated by much, or indeed any, personal ambition.
My only desire is to see the game properly and scientifically
played, and the Conservative party fairly strong in the next
Parliament; and I do not care a rap who carries off the laurels or
the credit. The plan I propose for efficient Parliamentary action
during the remainder of the Session may be skilfully carried out
without any formal communication to Sir S. N. But not only does it
depend upon Sir Michael being supported by a certain number of
M.P.’s; that body will have to be inspired by yourself and will
have to show that in their action they are receiving and deserving
your support and approval.
I am ashamed of myself for worrying you with this interminable MS.
It is only the critical condition of our party prospects which
enables me to do it.
Yours very sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
‘I concur very much,’ wrote Lord Salisbury in answer to this lengthy
appeal, ‘in your estimate of the evil; and your idea of surrounding the
Sultan with a body of Janissaries under Sir M. Beach is likely to be
very effective if vigorously carried out. I will gladly do anything I
can to help, but always with one reservation. I am bound to Sir S.
N.--as a colleague--by a tie, not of expediency, but of honour; and I
could not take part in anything which would be at variance with entire
loyalty to him. But what you propose will rather take the form of
assistance than supersession. I think that, properly managed, your
_jeune garde_ may do great things and acquire considerable practical
authority. I will talk the matter over with Beach whenever I can see
him. But he must abandon agriculture.’
The Conservative party had repented of their enthusiasm by May 4, when
the Committee stage of the vote of credit was again set down for
discussion. The decision to abandon the Soudan altogether and admit
defeat in that quarter of the world had soaked in. They now learned,
besides, that--vote of 11,000,000_l._ notwithstanding--Anglo-Russian
differences were to be submitted to arbitration--‘surrender disguised as
arbitration,’ as Lord Randolph Churchill called it. They were indignant
at what they considered a betrayal. But how to show their displeasure?
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach protested against the vote of credit being
proceeded with in the altered circumstances without further delay. Lord
Randolph, who had a speech all ready, intimated meekly that, unless the
vote of credit was forthwith debated, he would obstruct the passage of
Supply. The Government, anxious to get their business through, and
uncertain which section in the Opposition would prove the more
recalcitrant, proposed a compromise. Lord Randolph waved it aside and
remained obdurate. The vote of credit came on at once.
The speech which he then delivered was a speech of minute detail, but of
accurate detail. In twenty-four hours he had mastered an enormous Blue
Book. No one could contradict him at any point. ‘So far as I know,’ said
Lord Salisbury later, ‘that description [of Russian proceedings] is
historically unimpeachable.’ Into the entanglements of General
Komaroff’s action, of the strategic value of Merv, of the opinions of
Baron Jomini, or of the territorial rights of the Amir in the disputed
regions of the Murghab and Khushk rivers it is not, fortunately,
necessary to enter. But one episode in Lord Randolph’s second speech on
May 11 is worthy of record. The complacency with which the Government,
and particularly the Prime Minister, had abandoned, in the Soudan,
enterprises for the sake of which so many lives, British and Arab, had
been sacrificed, had excited general wonder and even disgust.
‘I was reading in the _Times_ this morning,’ said Lord Randolph,
dropping his voice and buttoning up his coat--‘does the Prime Minister
ever read the _Times_?’ Mr. Gladstone tossed his head disdainfully. ‘It
is a pity, because if the Prime Minister had read the _Times_ this
morning he could not have failed to notice the review of a very
interesting book--“The Home Letters of Lord Beaconsfield”--edited by Mr.
Ralph Disraeli, who is, I believe, a friend of the Prime Minister’s.’
(‘Nothing of the sort,’ said Mr. Gladstone.) ‘Lord Beaconsfield, it
appears, went many years ago to Yanina, where he had an interview with a
very celebrated Minister--Redschid Pasha. There had recently been a
great insurrection in Albania which had been put down by the Turks. This
is Lord Beaconsfield’s account of the interview: “I bowed with all the
nonchalance of St. James’s Street to a little, ferocious-looking,
shrivelled, careworn man, plainly dressed, with a brow covered with
wrinkles and a countenance clouded with anxiety and thought. I seated
myself on the divan of the Grand Vizier (‘who,’ the Austrian Consul
observed, ‘has destroyed in the course of the last three months--not in
war--upwards of four thousand of my acquaintance’) with the
self-possession of a morning call. Our conversation I need not repeat.
We congratulated him on the pacification of Albania. He rejoined that
the peace of the world was his only object and the happiness of mankind
his only wish.”’ Here there was a long pause, intensified by the hush
with which the House awaited the delayed conclusion. ‘There,’ cried
Lord Randolph, raising his voice suddenly, hissing his words and
pointing savagely across the House at Mr. Gladstone--‘there, upon the
Treasury Bench, is the resuscitated Redschid Pasha.’
I have tried to revive the spirit of this attack as some of those who
listened describe it, for _Hansard_ reduces it to a very bald account.
But, although Lord Randolph Churchill never commanded the surge and
majesty of Mr. Gladstone’s oratory, he held the House docile and
responsive in his grip. Whatever liberties he chose to take, they chose
to cheer. So through a speech of an hour and a half, all devoted to a
pitiless reproach of ‘that policy of base and cowardly surrender to
Russia which marks your daily life.’ Was it wonderful that party
newspapers and party men rallied to this bold champion of their
grievances? ‘Why was it left to Lord Randolph Churchill,’ they asked,
‘alone to raise a protest against Mr. Gladstone’s treacherous conduct?
Where were the occupants of the Front Opposition Bench? Have they
resigned their functions? If so, let them resign their position’; and so
forth. The next day Lord Granville took occasion to refer to this speech
at length in the House of Lords. He declared that he had marked no less
than nine passages, ‘some of them inaccurate and some exactly opposed to
the truth.’ Lord Randolph rejoined, through the columns of the _Times_,
in a celebrated--or perhaps I should write ‘notorious’--letter. He
accused Lord Granville, among other things, of showing ‘the petty
malice of a Whig’; ‘of his usual shamelessness’; and of ‘sneaking down
to the House of Lords to make without notice a variety of deliberate
misrepresentations, deliberate misquotations, and false assertions which
were quite in accordance with the little that was known about the public
career of Earl Granville, Knight of the Garter, and, to the misfortune
of his country, Her Majesty’s principal Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairs.’ The _Times_ was so horrified at this that, not content with
printing the letter in a column of its largest type, it devoted another
column and a half to repeating, for the purpose of dissociating itself
from, its insults, and rebuking the bad taste of the author.
But the fate of the Government was not to be settled by anything arising
out of the stormy events in the East. Another cause, nearer home and
more intimately affecting party politics, was to operate decisively. The
Crimes Act was to expire in August. Lord Spencer insisted upon its
renewal and his demand was backed by most of the Whig Ministers. The
Radical representatives, however, refused to associate themselves with
such legislation and moderate Liberals were scarcely less reluctant to
tar their hands with Coercion before presenting themselves to the
electors as the champions of liberty. On May 15 Mr. Gladstone gave
notice that the Government would propose what was, at any rate, a
partial continuation of the measure. Five days later Lord Randolph
Churchill, at the St. Stephen’s Club, struck what was, according to Mr.
Morley, a mortal blow. He intimated that a Conservative Government would
not think it necessary to renew the Act. His language was guarded and
carefully chosen. He had to carry his audience with him and he knew with
what satisfaction many of his colleagues in the House of Commons would
repudiate his words if they thought their repudiation would be
effective. He said, in short, that he was shocked that so grave an
announcement as the renewal of a Coercion Bill should be taken as a
matter of course. The state of Ireland must be much worse than was
commonly supposed for the Radical members of the Cabinet to assent to
such a proposal. What a comment it was on Liberal administration, and on
the boasted Viceroyalty of Lord Spencer, that the Liberal party could
not govern Ireland without that arbitrary force ‘which all their
greatest orators have over and over again declared is no remedy for
lawlessness!’ ‘I believe most firmly,’ he concluded, ‘that this ought to
be the attitude of the Tory party--that while they are ready and willing
to grant to any Government of the Queen whatever powers may be
necessary, on evidence adduced, for the preservation of law and order,
they ought to be anxious and careful beyond measure not to be committed
to any act or policy which should unnecessarily wound and injure the
feelings and the sentiments of our brothers on the other side of the
Channel of St. George.’ That was all, but it was enough. The speaker was
not disavowed. The Tory party remained mute. The words were observed
and weighed both by the Irish Nationalists and the English Radicals.
Within a few days Mr. Morley gave a notice of motion to oppose the
renewal of the Crimes Act. The Radical members of the Cabinet stiffened
their backs, and the days of the Ministry were numbered.
As the weakness and embarrassments of the Government and the dissensions
in the Cabinet became glaring, it was evident the end could not be
distant. But no one could tell when the moment would come; and the
imminent possibility of a transference of power forced grave
considerations into the minds of the chiefs of the Opposition. They
hated the Government. They believed its continuance to be deeply
injurious to the country. They were mortified by the dishonour which had
been inflicted on British arms and British reputation. The cry of their
supporters in the country for unceasing Parliamentary attack was
vehement. They were bound to fight their hardest. But, upon the other
hand, what if they succeeded? They could not dissolve, because of the
Reform Bill. Until the new registers for the reconstructed
constituencies had been prepared, and other indispensable mechanical
details settled, a General Election was physically impossible. Could
they, then, take office? Even if some Ministers were anxious to escape
from power, willing to ride for a fall--and this was certainly not the
disposition of the Prime Minister--the Government majority was enormous.
The only chance of overturning the Gladstone Administration was by a
division on some issue which should at once divide the Liberals and
secure the Irish vote. No mere lukewarmness on the part of
Ministerialists would suffice.
It was quite plain that an incoming Government, in a minority, without
the power of dissolution, brought into office by Nationalist votes,
could never carry a Coercion Bill through Parliament. But was a Coercion
Bill necessary? Mr. Gibson on whom the Conservatives relied as their
Irish authority, was of opinion that it would not be necessary. But
certainly Mr. Parnell could make it necessary! The question was long and
painfully debated. Clearly they had to fight. Not to do so was to
discourage the whole party on the eve of the election. Clearly they
might win. To refuse then to undertake the task, to admit that the
Conservative party had neither the men nor the cohesion to carry on the
Government, would equally injure them in the national estimation. It was
a grim dilemma. But the decision did not lie altogether in the hands of
particular men. Had it been possible for any one man to give orders
which would be obeyed with military discipline, he could not have
failed, were he a Conservative, to decide against any attempt to turn
out the Government; and, conversely, a Minister must have sought for any
decent pretext to resign. But the forces at work were not to be so
nicely governed. It is in the nature of Ministries to survive in spite
of their inclinations. It is in the nature of Oppositions to strive to
win, even in spite of their interests. Borne along by the stream, the
Conservative leaders determined to overthrow the Government if they
could, and they solaced themselves with Mr. Gibson’s assurances that the
state of Ireland did not require the renewal of the Crimes Act to
protect the lives and liberties of Her Majesty’s lieges.
Lord Randolph Churchill made a regular practice of preserving every
letter he received. He made notes of many important interviews. Nothing
that related to politics, whether creditable or not, whether important
or petty, seems to have been excluded from his archives. Had any
agreement been made with Mr. Parnell sufficiently definite or formal to
be called a ‘compact,’ it is most unlikely that no written record would
have been preserved. No scrap of paper referring directly or indirectly
to this subject can, however, be traced. On the other hand, it is
certain that he had more than one conversation with the Irish leader;
that he stated to him his opinion of what a Conservative Government
would do should it be formed; and that he declared that he considered
himself precluded by public utterances from joining a Government which
would at once renew the Crimes Act. No bargain could, in the nature of
things, have been made. The chances of Lord Randolph joining a
Conservative Administration were undetermined. The Conservative party
would certainly not have ratified such a bargain. Lord Randolph
Churchill could not presume to speak in their name; and even if their
official leaders had bound themselves, their action might well have been
repudiated by important sections of their followers both in Parliament
and in the country. ‘There was no compact or bargain of any kind,’ Lord
Randolph said to FitzGibbon a year later, ‘but I told Parnell when he
sat on that sofa [in Connaught Place] that if the Tories took office and
I was a member of their Government, I would not consent to renew the
Crimes Act. Parnell replied, “In that case, you will have the Irish vote
at the Elections.”’
So far as the vote in the House was concerned, the Nationalists wanted
little temptation to turn out a Coercionist Liberal Administration. They
had long been looking for an opportunity of revenge. They shared the
general expectation that the lowering of the franchise would give a
great advantage to the Liberal party. Their interest was clearly, and
their intention was notoriously, to play for an equalisation in party
strength by supporting the weaker side at the dissolution. If the
Conservatives would give them any reasonable excuse for preferring them
to the Liberal Government, if they would avoid studied causes of
offence, the Irish party would be content to support them in the House
and to throw their vote--so far as it could be thrown--for the
Conservative candidates in the election. On some such tacit
understanding as this Lord Salisbury’s first Administration came into
power and held sway. Neither party gave away any point of practical
importance, or entered into any confidential relationship. Both Tories
and Nationalists pursued their own ends. They used each other for their
own purposes; and in the end the Conservatives came off the winners.
All suggestions of a more definite compact belong to the regions of
romance.
Within the space of a single year both great English parties were
supported by the votes of the Irish members and were to some extent
dependent on their good-will. But there was an important difference
between the relations which respectively existed. The Conservatives,
consciously or unconsciously, used the Irish party. The Liberals,
willingly or unwillingly, were used by them. And whereas the former
moved on through that association to prosperous years of power, the
latter sank into paralysis and decay. But it should not be inferred from
these unedifying reflections that Lord Randolph Churchill in his
declarations against the re-enactment of the Crimes Act in 1885 was
animated solely by a hard desire to effect a political combination. His
views on Irish men and Irish matters were very different in character
from the general opinion of his party. He knew Ireland well and liked
her people. He had been in former days the friend of Mr. Butt. For five
years of hard Parliamentary fighting he and his associates had sat in
front of the Irish Nationalists, and many a reciprocal service or
manœuvre had built up a House of Commons comradeship. ‘You can always
trust them,’ he used to say, ‘if you know them and understand them.’ In
office or Opposition, in good fortune or defeat, he detested the use of
special legislation in Ireland; and, although he remained an unwavering
opponent of Repeal, these pages will show that he at least did not
approach Irish questions in a spirit of selfish opportunism.
Lord Randolph’s votes and speeches during all the Coercion struggles of
the Parliament were, moreover, upon record. The Irish members, on their
part, knew that he had often supported them, to the detriment of his
reputation among his own friends, while the most brilliant
representatives of the Liberal Cabinet were scourging them without pity.
They remembered that he had always been civil and friendly to them in
days when scarcely any other English member would speak to them. They
were attracted by his stormy, rebellious nature. They delighted in his
attacks upon the Government. Parnell, we are told, liked him personally,
though +their acquaintance was scanty. Among prominent English
politicians, he was at that time the best friend, and the only friend,
Nationalist Ireland could find. Any Government in which he was powerful
must be better than the Ministry from which Irish members had received
so much ill-usage. It was upon the opinion they had formed of him during
several years as a man, and upon their estimate of his influence with
his party, and not on any compact or bargain, that they acted in 1885.
In some fashion or another, however, Cabinet and Administration had held
together till the Whitsuntide holidays. The third period of the session
is dangerous to Governments. Most of the measures of the year, and
usually the Budget, are in the Committee stage and liable at any moment
to be challenged by a vote. At the same time, when vigilance is most
needed, a feeling of languor or exhaustion steals over the House of
Commons. With the advent of hot weather weary members seek escape from
London. Divisions are frequent; majorities precarious; an accident
always possible. Rumours had, however, gained acceptance that Cabinet
differences on Irish policy were not incapable of adjustment, and many
Liberal members thought that for the session at least the danger of
defeat was passed. But meanwhile a third and, as it proved, a fatal blow
had been aimed against the Ministry. An amendment to the Budget had been
framed at a meeting in Mr. Balfour’s house in Carlton Gardens, at which
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, the Fourth Party, and Mr. Raikes alone were
present. It was approved by Lord Salisbury and Sir Stafford Northcote
and placed upon the paper in the name of Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. To a
casual observer the amendment might have appeared unimportant. It
condemned the proposed increase of the beer and spirit duties in the
absence of a corresponding increase in the duties upon wine, and
declined to add to the duty on real property without relief to the
rates. But it was, in fact, artfully and deliberately contrived to unite
the Opposition on an issue easily defensible in the country and likely
to secure support from the Irish and from the liquor interest in the
House. It acquired significance from a rumour that the Radical section
of the Cabinet had severely criticised Mr. Childers’s increase of the
beer duties and wished to substitute therefor an additional duty on
spirits.
The debate was not remarkable and until late in the evening neither in
the House nor outside it was there any expectation of the actual result.
But after the dinner-hour a feeling of apprehension seemed to pervade
the air. When the division was about to be taken, the ranks of the
Ministerialists were unusually thin. Suddenly it was realised that the
result must be narrow. A thrill of excitement swept through the House.
The doors were closed, and the counting proceeded. When the tellers
advanced to the table it was seen that Lord Richard Grosvenor, the
Government Whip, stood at the left instead of at the right of the line.
For a moment the significance was not appreciated; then the Opposition
burst into exultant cheering, renewed again and again. Four Liberals and
42 Irishmen had voted against Ministers: 74 Liberals were absent, mostly
unpaired: the Government was defeated by 12.
It had come, after all. The mighty Government which had towered up
august and formidable in 1880, which during five long years, in spite of
disastrous enterprise and so many evil turns of fortune, had presented
an unbroken front to all attacks, was overthrown at last. So often had
good and careful plans miscarried; so often had skill, patience, and
courage led only to disappointment that, although a dark curtain of
perplexity obscured the future, this at least was triumph now. Lord
Randolph had seen the shot strike home. The aim was shrewd and sure. His
famous antagonist was down at last and he did not care, or was not able,
to contain his joy. He jumped on his seat below the gangway and, waving
his handkerchief, led the cheers of the astonished and delighted
Conservative party. Well might they have cheered if they had only known
that events would follow from that June division which should lead in
direct and unbroken sequence to their long supremacy in the State; and,
having regard to the repression and firmness which the next few days
would require of Lord Randolph Churchill, his jubilation may be
pardoned.
A threefold crisis now supervened: first, the national emergency,
arising from grave affairs in Egypt and with Russia, and the political
fermentation at home and in Ireland; secondly, a constitutional
situation peculiar and unprecedented in character; and thirdly, the
struggle within the Conservative party. All these operated
simultaneously and sympathetically affected each other. The Liberal
Administration was defeated on June 8. On the 9th Mr. Gladstone tendered
his resignation to the Queen. The Queen expressed surprise that he
should make his defeat a vital question and inquired whether, if Lord
Salisbury were unwilling to form a Government, the Cabinet would remain.
Mr. Gladstone replied that they would not remain. The Queen thereupon
accepted the resignations, which were announced to Parliament on the
12th, and sent for Lord Salisbury. Anticipating, or having private
notice of, the formal summons, Lord Salisbury had already approached
Lord Randolph Churchill through Sir Michael Hicks-Beach:--
June 10, 1885.
My dear Lord Randolph,--Lord Salisbury has asked me to tell you
that he would be very glad to talk to you on the general position,
if you would call on him: and I very much hope that no such ideas
as those which you seemed to entertain this afternoon will prevent
you from doing so.
I feel convinced (though I am not authorised to give you more than
my own belief) that he has asked no one to call on him, and that
his reason for not doing so is that he thinks that to do so would
be to usurp the position of leader, which no one has as yet
conferred on him.
It would be simply ridiculous that this idea on his part, combined
with your idea as to ‘place-hunting,’ should keep you two apart
just now.
Yours sincerely,
MICHAEL HICKS-BEACH.
And the next day, on the eve of his departure to Balmoral, Lord
Salisbury himself wrote:--
_Confidential._
20 Arlington Street, S.W.: Thursday, June 11, 4.45.
My dear Churchill,--I have just received a communication which
makes me anxious to see you. Could you call on me to-night after
dinner, or to-morrow morning?
Yours very truly,
SALISBURY.
Lord Randolph thought it better to defer his visit until after Lord
Salisbury had seen the Queen. His opinion had already been given as to
the conditions under which it would be desirable for the Conservatives
to take office, and was involved in the decision to try to turn out the
Liberal Government by means of the Irish vote on the Beach Amendment. He
had nothing new to say about that. If Lord Salisbury should decide not
to undertake the commission, there would be no necessity to raise the
thorny and painful questions connected with Sir Stafford Northcote.
In ordinary circumstances Lord Salisbury’s course would have been
simple. He would have advised a dissolution of Parliament. This solution
was, however, impossible until November, owing to the Franchise and
Seats Acts. Therefore his legal and constitutional right of recommending
a dissolution was in abeyance; and, upon the other hand, the party of
which he was the head would be compelled, if he took office, to carry
the Budget, Supply, and other indispensable business of the year through
a House of Commons in which they were in a minority of nearly 100. Lord
Salisbury was so impressed by the difficulty of the situation that he
went to Balmoral with the intention of declining to form a Government.
At Balmoral, however, the Queen persuaded him to make the attempt if Mr.
Gladstone would not resume; and several attempts to induce Mr. Gladstone
to resume having failed, Lord Salisbury accepted the duty and returned
to London to discharge it. His first care was to seek from Mr. Gladstone
an assurance of support in the measures absolutely necessary to bring
the session to a close. The negotiations were protracted for many days;
but eventually Mr. Gladstone agreed that facilities for expediting
Supply might reasonably be provided, so long as the liberties of the
House of Commons were not placed in abeyance; and he added the
assurance that there was no idea on the part of the Opposition of
withholding the Ways and Means required for the public service. During
this discussion Lord Salisbury addressed himself to the formation of a
Government. He forthwith invited Sir Stafford Northcote to become
Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons; and Sir
Stafford Northcote agreed. He asked Sir Michael Hicks-Beach to be
Colonial Secretary; and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach agreed. Lord Salisbury
then applied to Lord Randolph Churchill, whom he desired to take the
India Office. But Lord Randolph refused to join the Government if Sir
Stafford Northcote continued to lead in the House of Commons.
From this position nothing could move him. He remained silent and
stubborn. While Lord Salisbury was still undecided whether to go on
without him or not, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach intervened. He was, in his
own words, ‘deeply impressed with the conviction that Lord Randolph
Churchill’s active assistance as a member of the Government was vital to
any hope of Conservative success at the General Election, for his
popularity with the new electorate was greater than that of any other
member of the party’;[29] and therefore, as soon as he learned that Lord
Randolph had refused to join, he told Lord Salisbury--though without
Lord Randolph’s knowledge, and entirely without pre-arrangement of any
kind--that in the altered circumstances he could not join either. The
dead-lock was again complete.
The narrative must here be somewhat interrupted, so far at least as
chronology is concerned, to admit Lord Randolph Churchill’s own account
of his action. He left behind him a considerable memorandum from which I
quote all that is relevant to this situation.
‘In the events,’ he wrote (as I should judge, early in 1889, though the
paper is undated), ‘which led to the formation of the Conservative
Government in June 1885, I bore a part, and am induced to record my
recollection of their nature; for one reason among others, that in my
belief they were the main cause which led to the adoption by Mr.
Gladstone of the policy of Repeal.
‘In the spring of 1885 it was a matter of notoriety among well-informed
and studious politicians that the question as to the expediency of the
renewal by the Government then in power of the Irish Crimes Act--which
was to expire in September[30]--was one on which the Cabinet could come
to no agreement. In the speeches which I made in the month of May at the
St. Stephen’s Club and at Bow I endeavoured by diffuse examination of
the question to do what I could to add to the difficulties which in
connection with this subject embarrassed the Ministry.
‘My remarks at the former place were followed by a decisive intimation
from Mr. J. Morley that he would oppose any measure for the renewal of
any portion of the Crimes Act. This intimation practically terminated
the duration of Mr. Gladstone’s Government. Agreement in the Cabinet on
this question became impossible. The Ministers determined to court
defeat in Parliament as a method of escape from the dilemma by
resignation. A General Election was impending and the Opposition eagerly
clutched at any opportunity of discrediting and defeating the Liberal
party, and with this eagerness I was in thorough accord. Two attempts to
place Ministers in a minority failed--one arising out of the events in
the Soudan, the other out of a dispute concerning election expenses and
local rates. A third attempt, against the Budget, met with unexpected
success. The hostility of the licensed victuallers, who considered
themselves aggrieved by Mr. Childers’s financial proposals, and the
almost admitted connivance of Lord Richard Grosvenor, then the Head Whip
of the Liberal party, secured the absence from the division of some
sixty or more members of the Ministerial forces. The Government was
placed in a minority and resigned.
‘The Opposition now found themselves in a position of immense
difficulty, and though the difficulty had been foreseen by the leaders
it was not on that account in any degree diminished.
‘The difficulty was twofold: personal and political.
‘1. For a long time there had been a division of opinion in the
Conservative party on the question of the leadership--on the question as
to whether Lord Salisbury or Sir Stafford Northcote ought to be the
head of any Conservative Administration which events might bring into
existence. While, on the one hand, there was a unanimous recognition by
the party of the sterling worth and high character of the latter, there
was, on the other, an equally unanimous but certainly not equally
expressed opinion that he was indisposed by nature and training to place
himself in entire harmony with the intense and acute party polemics of
the moment; that he was, as he once admitted in a public speech,
“deficient in go”; and that Lord Salisbury, though he was much less
personally known to members of the House of Commons and much less
popular than Sir Stafford, was more qualified for the conduct of a
pitched battle such as we had to face.
‘I had identified myself with this latter opinion, and had expressed it
publicly and privately in one way and another since the year 1883. In
that year I had committed myself to such an extent that my action was
much resented by the party in the House of Commons, who adopted and
presented to Sir Stafford an address expressing their full confidence in
and great admiration of him. My belief is that in this controversy, the
existence of which was notorious, the principals had no share; that Sir
Stafford and Lord Salisbury behaved with the utmost loyalty to each
other, and remained throughout on the most intimate and friendly terms.
‘In June 1885, the crucial moment came. Mr. Gladstone resigned. “Whom
would the Queen send for?” was a question in everyone’s mouth. Lord
Salisbury was sent for. His intention was, if he formed a Government,
that Sir Stafford should become Leader of the House of Commons. To this
proposition, when proper opportunity offered, I declined to agree,
adhering to my former opinions as to the indisposition of Sir Stafford
for acute party warfare. Whether I was right or wrong I do not argue;
public opinion in the party and outside was certainly not with me, and
soon after, and since, I have been strongly drawn to the conclusion that
I was in error. The fact remains for record: I declined to take office
unless there was a change in the leadership of the party in the House of
Commons.
‘My conviction is that Lord Salisbury was most reluctant to attempt to
form a Government. It was most distasteful to him to be brought into any
conflict with Sir Stafford, to be preferred above him--thus shattering
what had been Sir Stafford’s great and honourable ambition. Finally,
when it was demanded of him that he should put a slight upon Sir
Stafford, and depose him from the leadership of the party in the House
of Commons, Lord Salisbury almost determined to renounce the duty
imposed upon him by the Sovereign. For days the matter was in suspense.
Conversations, suggested arrangements, even intrigues were rife in the
Carlton and in the Lobby. I have only a general and second-hand
knowledge of what then went on. I kept entirely aloof, saw hardly
anyone, and took no part in the controversy beyond what I had originally
taken. Ultimately representations were made to Sir Stafford--how and by
whom I do not know--which induced him to consent to accept the sinecure
office of First Lord of the Treasury and a peerage with the title of
Earl of Iddesleigh and Viscount St. Cyres. All I do know is that in
these _pourparlers_ Lord Ashbourne (then Mr. Gibson) was very busy and
prominent and that he constantly and to many expressed his astonishment
and displeasure that the susceptibilities or predilections attributed to
Sir Stafford should form any obstacle to the formation of a Conservative
Government. At that time Mr. Gibson exercised considerable influence
with the Conservative party in the House of Commons.’
Lord Randolph seems to have overrated the importance of the part played
in these negotiations by Mr. Gibson, though there is reason to believe
that his influence was, so far as it was effective, exerted--and
properly exerted--in the direction described. It is probable that Mr.
Smith was the principal agent. Like other colleagues who sat beside him
on the Bench, he knew, perhaps better than Sir Stafford Northcote’s
family, how often the progress of heart disease incapacitated the Leader
of the Opposition from Parliamentary work, and sometimes even reduced
him to a lethargic condition. Mr. Smith had recently taken Sir Stafford
for a long cruise in his yacht, the _Pandora_, and had the best reasons
for judging his true condition, as well as the best right to make
representations to him about it. But to return to Lord Randolph.
‘The second part of the difficulty,’ proceeds the memorandum, ‘which
confronted Lord Salisbury was political and arose entirely out of the
question whether it was or was not essential and necessary to seek from
Parliament a renewal of the expiring Irish Crimes Act. This question had
been more than once discussed in small conciliabules before the fall of
Mr. Gladstone’s Government, and a sort of decision arrived at. I alluded
publicly to the subject in a speech I made at Sheffield in the following
September. But the former semi-decision did not help Lord Salisbury much
when the actual crisis came. The whole question was again gone over with
great care. Mr. Gibson in this difficulty was the real arbiter. He was
the principal, and indeed the only, adviser to whom Lord Salisbury and
his friends could have recourse for Irish information. In all the
recurring debates on the state of Ireland and on the Irish land
legislation which had marked the preceding sessions since 1880 he had
been the real leader, and with him naturally it rested now to decide
practically this grave and difficult question. I use the adjective
“grave” because I believe that the decision not to attempt to renew the
Crimes Act, more than any other event, finally determined Mr. Gladstone
no longer to resist Repeal, and by some process or calculation not open
to ordinary persons led Mr. Gladstone to the conclusion that there was a
real working alliance arrived at between the Tories and the party of Mr.
Parnell, the legitimate results of which would be proposals by the Tory
Government in the nature of very large concessions to the Irish in the
direction of Repeal.
‘My own part in the matter was to express no opinion beyond what was
contained in the following formula, from which I never departed, and
which was accepted by Lord Salisbury and his friends: If it is decided
that the state of Ireland is such as to require the further continuance
of the Crimes Act, then the Conservative party cannot accept office, as
the period of the session and the Parliamentary weakness of the party
preclude the possibility of their passing through the House of Commons
the necessary measure. If a contrary decision is arrived at--viz. that
the Act may be allowed to expire--then the Conservative party might
succeed the Liberal Government with safety and advantage. It was well
known that personally I would not have taken office had it been thought
necessary by a Conservative Government to attempt to renew the Crimes
Act.
‘Such was the nature of the difficulty which Lord Salisbury had to
solve. I repeat my impression that he was most reluctant to form a
Government. The personal difficulties alluded to above deterred him, and
the recollections of Lord Derby’s Ministries of 1852, 1858, and 1866
were heavily against an attempt to carry on the business of the country
without the support of a majority in the House of Commons. The pressure,
however, from the local organisations in the country was strong to cause
him to undertake the unattractive duty, and the prevalent feeling of
the party in Parliament was in accord with this pressure.
‘For the decision he ultimately arrived at I can claim little
responsibility and in it I had little or no share. I had no
prepossession one way or the other, unless it was that the precedent set
by Mr. Disraeli in 1873 under similar circumstances, and the apparent
results of Mr. Disraeli’s action, were very vividly before my mind. I
would have consented with equal cheerfulness to one decision or the
other; nor do I believe that either decision would have affected
numerically the results of the General Election which took place in
November.
‘Looking back on those events after January 1886, and after the
resolution arrived at by Mr. Gladstone to introduce a measure for the
Repeal of the Union, I came to the conclusion that in June 1885, we had
been most unfortunately inspired. I can trace a clear connection of
cause and effect between Lord Salisbury’s accession to office in 1885
and Mr. Gladstone’s new departure in 1886.’
For five days uncertainty and rumour were supreme. Lord Randolph
maintained an unbroken reserve. Good friends who had knowledge of what
was going forward pressed him hard. Those who cared about his career
thought he was ruining himself. Even Sir Henry James, a political
opponent, but a personal friend, was provoked to address him.
The letter is interesting for its frank recognition that ‘Tory
Democracy’ was a faith of its own.
_Sir Henry James to Lord Randolph Churchill._
Temple: Saturday Morning.
My dear Friend,--I am so afraid that you are about to make a grave
mistake, most injurious to your interests, that I _must_ intrude my
thoughts upon your breakfast.
I assume Salisbury ‘accepts the commission’; of course he will
offer you office. If there be any definite measure--say the Crimes
Act--which he insists upon and you object to, you will be quite
justified in refusing office. For you will have a justification
which you can make public, and everyone will give you credit for
having acted according to your principles and conscience. But if
your reasons are indefinite--say, for instance, because you cannot
obtain a declaration in favour of a Liberal Toryism--you will have
no explanation to give which the public will ever be able to
understand. Between this and November no policy can be carried into
effect by legislation, and so it is scarcely possible that any
difference existing between the Salisbury Tories and yourself could
be brought to a practical issue. And so, if you now refuse office
on theoretical grounds which you can never explain, you will obtain
the credit amongst the whole Tory party of having plotted against
Salisbury and of having prevented him and them from coming into
office. It will be time enough for you to fight the battle of Tory
Democracy when some action (by way of legislation or
administration) is taken adverse to the principles you hold.
Surely you ought to be catholic _now_, and let all shades of
Toryism enjoy a gleam of success. If you do not, you will much
endanger the cause of ‘Tory Democracy’; for although you can at any
time be the leader of a Democracy, your power with the Tory element
will be sadly shaken.
Ever yours,
H. J.
Men who presume to deal with great affairs must cultivate an unyielding
disposition. It is easy to withstand the reproaches or attacks of
opponents; but the honest advice of a friend and well-wisher at once
disinterested and experienced saps the foundations of judgment. There
was one appeal which must have greatly disturbed Lord Randolph. Nothing
in his private life was more striking and constant than his affection
for his mother and his respect for her opinion. ‘I have been thinking,’
she wrote (June 14), ‘very quietly and calmly over your position, and I
think you might go to see Lord Salisbury before his meeting, to show him
your friendly feeling while you maintain your own position. You see, in
the winter you felt acutely he did not consult or notice you. He may say
on this critical occasion he came to you before anyone else and offered
you one of the highest places in his Cabinet, and you refused your
assistance. Yesterday he sends his secretary to bid you to go to his
meeting. This, from reasons, you are obliged to decline. But do you not
think you owe him some explanation?... He told you to consider his
offer; so that, it seems to me, you are almost in duty bound to go to
see him; and if you simply refrain from going, he will think you
decidedly hostile. There is no doubt he is in a very difficult position,
and may say you require _not_ any policy or special measure, but simply
that he should _kill_ an old friend whom _all_ respect.... I do hope you
may be guided rightly.’
But Lord Randolph Churchill remained unresponsive. No communication of
any kind passed between him and Lord Salisbury until the crisis was
ended.
‘At this time,’ writes a Bencher of the Middle Temple, ‘an event
occurred which strangely evidenced the strength of Lord Randolph’s
popularity. But a description of the scene needs some explanation.
Amongst the Inns of Court the Middle Temple is fortunate in the
possession of a Hall grand in its construction and rich in evidence of
associations extending over seven centuries. In this Hall, during Term
time, the barristers and students dine. From amongst the barristers a
governing body, called the Benchers, is selected. On the Grand Day of
the summer Term the Benchers entertain distinguished guests at a
sumptuous banquet held in the Hall. On these occasions Benchers and
guests enter the Hall walking two and two, in procession, to the Daïs,
upon which they dine. After the dinner is concluded, in like procession
they leave the Hall, walking throughout its full length from the Bar to
the door which leads to the Parliament Chamber.
‘A Grand Day of the Middle Temple occurred on June 10, 1885. Never
before or since has so remarkable a company gathered within that Hall.
‘Nearly every Bencher was present, for fifty-five were there. Amongst
them were the Prince of Wales and his eldest son, Prince Albert Victor,
who on that day was called to the Bench. But many distinguished visitors
were also present, for amongst the guests were the Archbishop of
Canterbury, Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar, Lord Derby, Lord Cranbrook,
Sir Stafford Northcote, Mr. John Bright and other leading politicians;
and yet it seemed as if there was only one of whom the gathering was
thinking--and he was Randolph Churchill. The first sign of the great
interest was shown when the loving-cup was being handed round; for when
it was placed in Lord Randolph’s hands and he stood up to drink from it,
the whole assemblage in the body of the Hall sprang to their feet and
cheered him vociferously. No such demonstration had ever occurred in the
Middle Temple Hall. And, again, when the dinner was concluded and the
Benchers and their guests, walking two and two, proceeded to leave the
Hall, a still more marked demonstration took place. The Royal Princes
passed almost unheeded, whilst the Hall rang with shouts of “Randolph!”
“Randolph!” “Churchill!” “Churchill!” No other name was uttered. It
seemed as if all present wished to show that they regarded him--and him
alone--as being the political victor of the hour.’
Yet, in contrast with these signs of triumph, what inward misgivings
darkened Lord Randolph Churchill’s mind! In the presence of a trusted
friend he dropped with relief his mask of unconcerned reserve and
revealed himself plunged for a while in one of those fits of despondency
which so often followed or preceded the crisis and action of his life.
‘I am very near the end of my tether,’ he said to this friend who met
him at the Turf Club in these anxious days. ‘In the last five years I
have lived twenty. I have fought Society. I have fought Mr. Gladstone
at the head of a great majority. I have fought the Front Opposition
Bench. Now I am fighting Lord Salisbury. I have said I will not join the
Government unless Northcote leaves the House of Commons. Lord Salisbury
will never give way. I’m done.’ To the remark that Lord Salisbury could
not form a Ministry without him he answered drily, ‘He can form a
Ministry if necessary with waiters from the Carlton Club.’ His companion
on this proceeded amiably to suggest that if all was really over with
the Conservative party, Liberalism offered a wide field for the
activities of a Tory Democrat. ‘Ah, no!’ said Lord Randolph in utter
pessimism, ‘Chamberlain and the Birmingham Caucus will swallow you all.
It is they who will govern the people of England for the future.’ ‘The
working classes must have leaders.’ ‘Yes, but they will not want
aristocrats.’
The whole country was agog about the political interregnum and busy in
the fascinating employment of Cabinet-making. Two main opinions were
focussed by the newspapers--one was for a Cabinet of ‘old and tried
public servants,’ to maintain an orderly and decorous Government during
the few months that must elapse before the election; the other for a
‘Cabinet of Compromise,’ which should include the Tory Democrats and
secure their powerful aid in the coming fight. But meanwhile the
business of the House of Commons was not wholly interrupted and a
curious Parliamentary incident occurred. On the evening of the 15th Mr.
Gladstone proposed to consider, before adjourning, the Lords’
amendments to the Seats Bill. He moved accordingly; but on the question
being put Sir Henry Wolff at once moved the adjournment of the debate.
He pointed out that the Lords’ amendments were matters of substance and
importance--as, indeed, they were--and ought not to have been inserted
by them into the Redistribution Bill. He declared that such matters
could not be decided upon in the absence of a responsible Government or
a responsible Opposition. Sir Charles Dilke replied on behalf of the
Government that the insertion of these amendments in the Redistribution
Bill had the approval of Lord Salisbury himself, and was, in fact,
adopted to avoid inconvenient delay. Sir Stafford Northcote thought it
right to confirm the statement that it had been agreed that the matter
should be dealt with in the Redistribution Bill instead of by a separate
Bill. But the Fourth Party were not inclined to change their minds on
that account. Mr. Gorst argued against haste without good reason for
haste. Lord Randolph also spoke sharply in favour of the adjournment.
What were the leaders of the so-called constitutional party about that
they should tolerate the transaction of important business connected
with reform under prevailing conditions? He also accused the Government
bluntly of having produced the difficulty by procuring defeat.
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach then got up from the Front Opposition Bench and,
to the astonishment of his colleagues on the Treasury Bench, spoke in
favour of the adjournment and against his leader. In the division the
Conservative party split into puzzled fragments, and persons who thought
they might be Under-Secretaries--and in such circumstances they are a
respectable body--suffered acutely. Thirty-five members voted with Sir
Michael and Lord Randolph for the adjournment. Sir Henry Wolff and Mr.
Gorst were their tellers. The rest, with Sir Stafford Northcote at their
head, went into the Government lobby to support Mr. Gladstone. Sir Henry
Wolff’s colleague in the representation of Portsmouth was a venerable
member of the orthodox Conservative party. As he passed the Front
Opposition Bench on his way to vote with Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir
Stafford Northcote said reproachfully: ‘These are the times when one can
tell one’s friends.’ ‘At such a crisis,’ replied the old gentleman
ruefully, ‘and with such an election before us, the representation of
Portsmouth must be undivided.’
This was the end. Two days later it was formally announced that Sir
Stafford Northcote would retire to the House of Lords and that Sir
Michael Hicks-Beach would lead the House of Commons. It has been
asserted that this division settled the struggle and that Lord
Salisbury, confronted with this plain proof that Sir Stafford
Northcote’s leadership would not be accepted by a powerful and active
section of his party, capitulated to Lord Randolph Churchill. This is
not quite true. No doubt the division clinched the issues; but the
personal negotiations which resulted in Sir Stafford’s elevation were
already far advanced; and he himself notes in his diary of June 15:
‘This has apparently been my last night in the House of Commons.’
Indeed, there seems to have been less design in the affair than is
commonly supposed. Few people--even among the most intelligent and
informed--will believe how much in modern English politics is settled by
the accident or caprice of the hour. Lord Randolph Churchill had often
voted and spoken against the leader of the Opposition before. He thought
the acquiescence in Mr. Gladstone’s wishes on this occasion stupid, and
he said so. He thought the House should adjourn without transacting
business and he voted in that sense. Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was party
to no plot. He did not enter the House until late and had not heard Sir
Stafford’s speech. He gathered from the debate that the Fourth Party and
the ‘Janissaries’ were attacking the Government and he supported them on
general principles. Not until he sat down did he learn what he had done.
Moreover, before the division had taken place Lord Salisbury’s hopes of
a settlement were already so good that he had sent the following letter
to Lord Randolph Churchill:--
_Private._
20 Arlington Street, S.W.: June 15, 1885.
My dear Churchill,--I was very sorry you were not able to come to
our meeting this morning. The general sense of those present, with
one or two exceptions, was that we could not well refuse to take
office, after all that has happened this year, if the Government
have finally determined not to resume it. Still I think everyone
present recognised that in a party sense this obligation was a
misfortune.
Though I fear I must draw an unfavourable inference from your
absence, I still venture to express a hope that you will allow me
to put down your name for the Indian Secretaryship on the list
which I must submit to the Queen on Wednesday.
I should be very glad to talk these matters over if you like to
come and see me. I shall be in all the morning.
Yours very truly,
SALISBURY.
Lord Randolph replied as if nothing had happened:--
2 Connaught Place: June 16, 1885.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--I am deeply sensible of the extreme kindness
towards myself which you show me by your letter received this
morning, and if not inconvenient to you I will do myself the honour
of waiting upon you about eleven o’clock to-day.
Believe me to be
Yours most sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
That the interview was friendly and in the main satisfactory may be
inferred from the following letter written later in the day, which
shows, among other things, that in the hour of victory Lord Randolph
Churchill was not inclined to desert those who had worked with him:--
2 Connaught Place: June 16, 1885.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--I do hope you will not be annoyed if I add to
your many difficulties by these few lines. Of course, since I saw
you this morning I have thought about little else than all that you
were kind enough to say to me on many subjects. I do feel very
uneasy indeed about Wolff and Gorst, and I cannot think that I have
submitted to you their position as regards myself with the urgency
which they are entitled to expect from me. If it were possible for
you to consider whether it might not be in your power to recommend
Wolff for the high dignity of a Privy Councillor I should be easy
in my mind about him, and I venture to press this desire of mine
upon you.
Gorst ... knows his powers, his position in the House, his hitherto
barely recognised claims, and it makes me perfectly wretched to
feel that it must occur to his mind that his failure to obtain that
for which so many persons of knowledge consider he is fitted in
every way is due to lukewarmness on my part. If I did not know what
the general feeling of the House of Commons will be as regards
myself on this point, I would have hesitated to trouble you; but I
am certain that if with respect to these two cases things remain in
the position you gave me to understand this morning they would be,
I shall be considered to have failed my friends, and my powers,
whatever they may be, of being useful to your Government will be
impaired.
Yours most sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
Lord Salisbury, thus appealed to, consented to submit Mr. Gorst’s name
to the Queen for the office of Solicitor-General and Sir Henry Wolff’s
for a Privy Councillorship. When the lavish hand with which high
appointments were distributed among persons who had borne no share in
the battle is remembered, it cannot be said that these rewards were
disproportioned to services or talent.
The difficulties within the Conservative party were now settled; but the
delays in the formation of the Government and consequent uncertainty
were prolonged in order to extract from Mr. Gladstone further
assurances in regard to the passage of necessary public business while
the Government were in a minority in the House of Commons; and meanwhile
Lord Salisbury retreated to Hatfield. Of the interviews and negotiations
incidental upon this, a complete account was afterwards given to
Parliament; and on June 23 the acceptance of office by Lord Salisbury
and the composition of the Ministry, the main features of which had
become generally known, were formally announced, and the constitutional
and party crisis came to an end.
‘What a triumph!’ wrote Mr. Chamberlain on June 18, when the issue
became apparent. ‘You have won all along the line. _Moriturus te
saluto_.’ And with this an important chapter in Lord Randolph
Churchill’s life may be conveniently closed.
CHAPTER X
THE ‘MINISTRY OF CARETAKERS’
‘This is no man of system, then; he is only a man of instincts and
insights. A man, nevertheless, who will glare fiercely on any
object; and see through it, and conquer it; for he has intellect,
he has will, force beyond other men. A man not with
_logic-spectacles_; but with an _eye_!’--CARLYLE on Mirabeau,
_French Revolution_, bk. iv. ch. iv.
The first trials of a Prime Minister are often the most severe. The most
formidable obstacles lie at the beginning. Once these have been
surmounted, the path is comparatively smooth. Nearly all the rest of
Lord Salisbury’s life was spent at the head of the Government. In a
period of seventeen years he filled for more than twelve the greatest
office in the State. Four separate Administrations were formed under his
hand. Responsibilities not less grave than those of 1885, far more
important legislation, wide acquisitions of territory, vast decisions of
peace and war attended their course. But, as with Mr. Pitt, the first
two years of his service perhaps exceeded in personal stress all the
years that were to follow. And it is probable that no part of those two
years was more clouded with anxious perplexity than the autumn of 1885.
His own position was not assured. Public confidence in his character and
judgment had yet to be won; his authority within his party had yet to
be consolidated. That party itself had struggled back to power, weak in
numbers, nervously excited by its efforts, upon curious and compromising
terms. It was torn by the very inspiration that revived its strength. It
awaited in acute apprehension an imminent and momentous election, the
result of which no man could foretell. Very different were those
after-years, when the old statesman, towering above his colleagues in
the Cabinet and commanding the implicit obedience of his followers, had
gathered patiently together round the standards of Conservatism almost
all the strongest forces in the country.
Yet while resources were still slender the difficulties and dangers of
the situation were tremendous. The dispute with Russia about the Afghan
boundary was in its most critical stage. For at least two months the
Cabinet faced the chance of war with a formidable military Empire. The
triumphant Mahdi was ravaging the Soudan, and Egypt, withdrawn behind
her narrowest frontiers, was threatened without and utterly disorganised
within. The British finances were oppressed by a deficit. Ireland
smouldered. All the elements of Irish national life were banded together
under the supreme authority of Parnell and that efficient Protestant
rebel was methodically preparing his campaign for an Irish Parliament.
In the English provinces Mr. Chamberlain, released from such partial
restraint as official obligations had hitherto imposed, unfolded the
‘Unauthorised Programme’ to an exulting Radical democracy. And behind
all ‘two million intelligent citizens,’ newly enfranchised, impatiently
awaited the opportunity of casting their votes. Such were the perils and
embarrassments amid which the ‘Ministry of Caretakers’ came into being.
Nor was it strange that eminent politicians were willing to prophesy
that after a brief and inglorious career they would be ‘swept off the
face of the earth.’ But Lord Salisbury, reminding the House of Lords
that several of the longest Administrations in English history had come
into being under precarious conditions, and fortifying himself by the
examples and experiences of Mr. Pitt in 1784, of Lord Liverpool in 1812,
and of Lord Palmerston in 1855, addressed himself to his heavy task with
serene determination.
The Fourth Party was translated bodily to a higher sphere. Lord Randolph
Churchill became Secretary of State for India--at that time, with the
exception of the Foreign Office, the most anxious and important of all
Ministerial posts. Mr. Balfour, though not admitted to the Cabinet, was
appointed President of the Local Government Board. Sir Henry Wolff was
despatched on a special mission to Turkey and Egypt with wide and
peculiar authority over the whole field of Egyptian affairs. Mr. Gorst
accepted the position of Solicitor-General. Three out of the four
friends who had worked together more or less harmoniously in Opposition
were sworn Privy Councillors upon the same cushion; and it was also
noticed that an unusual proportion of the thirty-five members who had
voted with the Fourth Party in the division upon Sir Henry Wolff’s
motion during the _interregnum_ were included in the Government.
Lord Randolph’s popularity was enhanced by his promotion. Those
commanding qualities which the House of Commons had so frankly accepted,
and Tory Democracy so loudly proclaimed, were now recognised by persons
and by classes who had hitherto schooled themselves to regard him merely
as an unedifying example of irresponsible audacity. The vigorous
assertions of youth were stamped with the seal of official authority and
over all hung the glitter of success. His friends, old and new, hastened
to offer their congratulations. One of his acknowledgments may be
recorded:--
June 25, 1885.
Dear Mr. Tabor,--I was so pleased to receive this morning your kind
letter and I trust that your congratulations may be to some extent
justified by results. As it is the fact that whatever of success I
may have attained is mainly owing to the six years which I passed
at Cheam, may I ask as a favour for a holiday for all those young
gentlemen who are now deriving from you similar advantages to those
which befell me? It would be a pleasure to me to know that I have
not asked anything which was not in your power to grant.
Yours most sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
Now that Lord Randolph had accepted ‘an office of profit under the
Crown’ his seat at Woodstock was vacated and he had to submit himself to
re-election. The leaders of the Liberal party did not encourage
opposition to Ministers in such circumstances at this juncture. When
they had themselves forced upon the Conservative party the task of
Administration, it seemed factious to impede the return of individuals
necessary for that purpose. Moreover, they were sensible of the
advantage which almost always accrues to anyone who is singled out for
attack by the opposite side. But the personality of the candidate gave
promise of distinction to his opponent, the nice balance of parties in
the old Borough held out a hope of success, and Mr. Corrie Grant hurried
down from London to voice the hot and not unreasonable resentment of the
Radical rank and file. This gentleman appealed to the electors upon a
single issue. It was not, he declared, a fight of politics against
politics, or of principle against principle--it was a fight against a
man. The statements and expressions which Lord Randolph had employed
against the Liberal party, its leaders, and in particular Mr. Gladstone,
made it necessary at all costs to challenge his return.
Because of the immense pressure of work at the India Office and also no
doubt not to treat his opponent too seriously, Lord Randolph declared
himself unable to take part in the contest personally and left his
election entirely to his constituents and friends. He contented himself
with a short address. Having never held office before, it was necessary
for him to give double the time of more fortunate persons to acquiring
knowledge of his duties. ‘Under these circumstances it is impossible for
me to leave London and to go among you as has been on former occasions
my practice and my pleasure. But I console myself with the recollection
that I am no stranger to any of you, that for nearly twelve years my
public life has been before you, and that on no occasion had I any
reason to imagine that I had forfeited your confidence or gone against
your general political sentiments.’ ‘Whatever may be, in your opinion,
the position I now occupy, that position you have made; it is mainly
your work. And that position I am perfectly certain no stranger or
carpet-bagger or any hirelings from the Birmingham Caucus will persuade
you to damage or destroy.’
The campaign was opened immediately and with determination on both
sides. Sir Henry Wolff, Lord Curzon, Sir Frederick Milner, Mr. St. John
Brodrick,[31] a nephew of the former Liberal candidate, arrived in
Woodstock to support Lord Randolph; and the Opposition was aided by a
zealous contingent from Birmingham to such an extent that at the opening
meeting Sir Henry Wolff described Mr. Corrie Grant as ‘the delegate of
Mr. Schnadhorst and Mr. Chamberlain.’ This statement caused Mr.
Chamberlain annoyance and he wrote at once to Lord Randolph disclaiming
all responsibility for the contest and any desire to cause him trouble.
Lord Randolph replied as follows:--
_To Mr. Chamberlain._
July 1, 1885.
I think the mention of your name in Wolff’s speech was either
wrongly reported or else not in the least meant ill-naturedly....
In any case, no mischief is to be made by anyone between you and
me as far as I am concerned. I was quite sure that you had nothing
to do with the Woodstock contest, but even if you had, I never
should have thought it anything else but perfectly fair and
legitimate. In the meantime many thanks for your kind letter, which
I much value. Don’t be angry with Wolff.
There were, notwithstanding, several reasons for uneasiness as to the
result. The absence of the candidate was an undoubted drawback. The
propaganda of Mr. Joseph Arch had produced a considerable impression
upon a section of the labourers. A more formidable consideration was the
attitude of the Duke of Marlborough. Lord Randolph’s father had wielded
immense personal influence in the borough and had neglected nothing that
might constitutionally be done to secure the return of his nominee. Two
years before, the new Duke would no doubt have exerted himself to the
utmost to help his brother; but the sale of the Blenheim pictures had
produced a serious quarrel in the family. Lord Randolph had vehemently
protested against the dispersal of so many of the treasures for which
Blenheim had been famous and a complete estrangement had ensued. The
Duke, moreover, after the opposition which had been threatened to his
candidature for the Carlton, had relapsed into political independence.
He now declared himself so strictly neutral during the contest that Lady
Randolph and the friends who came down to fight the election for her
husband, were fain for the first night of their arrival to shelter at
the Bear Hotel. Sir Henry Wolff’s diplomacy soon proved equal to those
difficulties. Friendly relations were restored; Blenheim opened its
gates to the Conservatives; and the Duke, stung by a statement in the
press that he had himself been a party to Mr. Corrie Grant’s
candidature, finished by lending his carriages to convey Lord Randolph’s
supporters to the poll. The election was nevertheless fought under some
disadvantage as compared with former occasions.
But the Secretary for India found in Lady Randolph and in his sister,
Lady Curzon, a mainstay of support and enthusiasm. ‘I should be very
glad,’ he wrote to his wife on June 29, ‘if you could arrange to stay in
Woodstock till Friday. If I win, you will have all the glory.’ Driving
about the widely extended constituency in a smart tandem profusely
decorated with pink ribbons, well known to most and with a smile for
all, these ladies canvassed indefatigably from morn till night. Their
Primrose badges--still an object of amusement in high Tory circles--were
the first to be worn in actual political warfare; and their influence,
supplying as it did that personal element without which enthusiasm is
scarcely ever excited, became a factor in the fight, against which the
eloquence of two Liberal ladies from Girton--specially imported to meet
the emergency--was utterly unable to prevail.
The result of the election was announced on the evening of July 3:--
Lord Randolph Churchill 532
Mr. Corrie Grant 405
The majority for Lord Randolph Churchill was 127, or more than double
that by which he had been returned in 1880. Needless to relate, the
declaration of the poll was received with the utmost satisfaction by the
crowd in front of the Bear Hotel, to whom Lady Randolph, Lord Curzon,
Sir Henry Wolff, and later on Mr. Corrie Grant made brief but
appropriate speeches; and the fact that over six hundred ‘result
messages’ were despatched from the local post-office that evening showed
the interest taken by the world at large in this the last of the
Woodstock elections.
Even before Lord Randolph was re-elected for Woodstock, he was required
in the House of Commons. Portentous extracts were read from his speeches
as a private member, and his secretary in the House was cross-questioned
about them. Did he still adhere to his charges against the Khedive? Were
his views on Ireland what he had declared them to be at Edinburgh? To
all such inquiries Lord Randolph sent a simple answer, which may be
recommended to others similarly circumstanced: ‘I neither withdraw nor
apologise for anything that I have said at any time, believing as I do
that anything which I may have said at any time was perfectly justified
by the special circumstances of that time, and by the amount of
information I may have had in my possession.’
The new Ministers met Parliament with general statements of their views
and intentions on July 6. In both Houses they made a good appearance.
They achieved at once the requisite pomposity of public utterance, and
handled power as to the manner born. To the Peers Lord Salisbury
declared that the pledges of any British Government were sacred, and
that all existing obligations would be faithfully observed in the
further conduct of the negotiations with the Court of Russia. In answer
to the taunt, made out-of-doors, that the Conservatives would postpone
the date of the election for the purpose of prolonging their enjoyment
‘of what some persons are pleased to call the sweets of office,’ he
invited Lord Granville to admit that the new Government had endeavoured
to amend the Redistribution Bill so as even to accelerate the
dissolution. Lord Carnarvon justified the attempt to govern Ireland
under the ordinary law by statistics which showed the diminution of
agrarian crime. He spoke of former statesmen who had failed in
Ireland--‘so many that the wrecks of them lie strewn about’--and he
seemed to wrestle modestly, but hopefully, against the conviction that
he himself would be added to the number. In the Commons Mr. Bradlaugh
again presented himself and was received by the new Leader of the House
with the usual resolutions of prohibition and exclusion, affirmed by the
usual majorities. The next day Sir Michael Hicks-Beach explained the few
uncontentious legislative projects which the Government would try to
carry through and asked for the time of the House to enable them to wind
up the business of the Session. Mr. Gladstone declared that the request
was not unreasonable and that he would himself endeavour to help the
Ministry by his vote and by the example of his silence. Lord Randolph,
in what is called ‘a statesmanlike tone,’ described the late Prime
Minister’s conduct as magnanimous and considerate; and a Radical motion
of want of confidence in the new Administration finding only two
supporters, the prevailing harmony remained unbroken.
The position of the Government, faced by a large majority in nominal
opposition, dependent upon Nationalist favour for the avoidance of
defeat at any moment and on any question, mistrusted by many of their
own friends, bitterly hated by Whigs and Radicals, and unable to escape
from constant humiliation by resignation or dissolution, was one of
extreme discomfort. But there seemed to be a kind of truce at
Westminster, in vivid contrast to the rising strife elsewhere. Under
such happy conditions, and with the cessation of Irish obstruction, the
end of the Session proved curiously fruitful. The Budget was
uncontroversial. The Government helped Lord Rosebery to carry his
Secretary for Scotland Bill through both Houses. Lord Salisbury passed a
measure dealing with the housing of the working classes, in spite of
some murmurings among the Peers at its socialistic flavour. Mr. Balfour
took charge of a Medical Relief Bill which ultimately became law,
although the Liberal majority ‘improved’ it to such an extent that the
Government disclaimed responsibility for it. Mutual concessions and
genuine co-operation placed both a Land Bill and a Labourers Bill for
Ireland upon the statute book. The Land Bill, or the ‘Ashbourne Act,’
as it was called, took extensive effect, and was the foundation and the
precursor of all subsequent Land Purchase Acts, culminating in the Land
Act of 1903. Sir William Harcourt and the new Home Secretary aided each
other to effect most important amendments in the criminal law; and,
finally, the Colonial Secretary, firmly refusing to allow the objections
of New South Wales to defeat the wishes of the other Australian
Colonies, succeeded in passing a Federation Bill which opened the door
to a Commonwealth of Australia. Indeed, a Parliamentary Paradise, albeit
enduring only upon sufferance, seemed to have sprung into being in the
midst of a Political Inferno. The good sense and tolerance of the nation
were gathered within the sheltering walls of Parliament, while discord,
faction, and electioneering clamour reigned supreme outside.
One curious legislative feat must be recorded. An Irish Educational
Endowments Bill had been brought down from the Lords and read a first
time in the Commons early in the session (May 12) as one of Mr.
Gladstone’s Government Bills. It had been practically abandoned before
the change of Ministry. Not one of the members of the new Government had
read a line of it; but Lord Randolph--interested as ever in Irish
education--was persuaded by FitzGibbon, in the early days of August,
that the Bill might be so altered as to make a useful measure and he
exerted himself to salve the derelict. The difficulties seemed
insuperable. The Chief Secretary for Ireland, Sir William Hart-Dyke,
indignant at a proposal to introduce important legislation in the last
week of the last session of an expiring Parliament, refused to have
anything to do with it. The Leader of the House only consented to allow
the attempt upon the condition that the session should not be prolonged
by a single day. The Bill had to be redrafted from beginning to end. It
could not be advanced a stage without the concurrence of the Nationalist
party. Three or four perfectly distinct and usually antagonistic
sections of Irish opinion had to be conciliated and the negotiations
between Lord Randolph and FitzGibbon on the one hand, and Mr. Sexton and
Mr. Healy on the other, afforded some beautiful specimens of Hibernian
diplomacy. All obstacles were surmounted. The Irish Attorney-General,
Mr. Holmes--with whom Lord Randolph had made friends--undertook the
conduct of the redrafted Bill. It was read a second time on August 11.
The amendments, covering whole pages of the order paper, entirely
altering the Bill from its original shape, unintelligible to everyone
except the Minister who moved them and the two or three Irish members
who discussed them, were considered on the 12th. On the 13th the Bill
was recommitted, to introduce the necessary money clauses, read a third
time and sent to the House of Lords: and the next day, on which the
session closed, it passed and received the Royal Assent. None of its
thirty-eight sections have given rise to any difficulty and during the
nine years which followed its passing it was constantly renewed until
the endowments and management of upwards of 1,350 Primary Schools and
more than 100 Intermediate and Collegiate Institutions had been
reorganised under its operation.
Mr. Holmes, the Attorney-General, like many others who worked under Lord
Randolph Churchill, became warmly attached to him. Their joint labours
on this Bill impressed him with the extraordinary power of conciliating
persons and overcoming difficulties possessed by a man so often
associated only with violence. Above all he admired his courage. ‘I
feel,’ he wrote two years afterwards, when the leader of Tory Democracy
was leader no more, ‘like one of Rupert’s soldiers serving under a Dutch
Burgomaster.’
One harsh note jarred upon the ears of these Elysian legislators. The
new Ministers had scarcely taken office before the shadowy relations
which existed between the Conservative Government and the Irish party
issued in a substantial form. Nationalist opinion in Ireland had long
been excited over one of those dark and curious police cases the
savagely disputed details of which are thrust from time to time before
the House of Commons, to the bewilderment of British members. In August
of 1882 a whole family of the name of Joyce had, with the exception of
one young boy, been murdered under circumstances of peculiar atrocity at
Maamtrasna. Ten men were arrested upon the evidence of three witnesses
who professed to have seen them enter the house in which the crime was
committed. This evidence was confirmed by two of the prisoners who
turned approvers. After three successive trials three men were condemned
to death and executed, and the remaining five, having pleaded guilty,
received death sentences, afterwards commuted to penal servitude for
life. So far the story was grimly simple. But it was now alleged that
two of the murderers hanged had, in their dying depositions, declared
the innocence of the third, Myles Joyce; while this man himself had
protested always and to the last that he was not guilty. One of the
informers next came forward and swore that he had been told by an
official that his evidence would not be accepted by the Crown unless it
applied to all the prisoners, that he was given twenty minutes to
decide, and that then from ‘terror of death’ he had been induced to
swear away the life of Myles Joyce. An appeal from the Archbishop of
Tuam to the Lord-Lieutenant had led to an inquiry by Lord Spencer and
this inquiry resulted in the conclusion that the verdict and sentence
were right and just.
Hatred of a Coercion Viceroy and the profound distrust which divided all
who administered the law in Ireland from the mass of the people,
magnified this squalid tragedy into a political issue of importance. It
was asserted that as a result of Coercionist procedure and the
overweening desire of the Government to secure convictions, not only had
an innocent man been done to death, but that some of those still in
prison had been wrongfully convicted. When the case was raised in
Parliament during the Autumn Session of 1884, the Government,
representing the vote as one of confidence or want of confidence in Lord
Spencer, refused all further inquiry. In this they were generally
supported by both great parties and the Irish motion was rejected by 219
to 48. But Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir Henry Wolff, and Mr. Gorst had
voted in the minority with the Nationalists and Lord Randolph had spoken
strongly in their favour.
Almost as soon as the formation of the new Cabinet was complete Mr.
Parnell moved (July 17) a resolution reflecting on Lord Spencer and
demanding a fresh inquiry. Sir Michael Hicks-Beach opposed this
resolution in the name of the Government; but at the same time he said
that it was the right of every prisoner at any time to appeal to the
Lord-Lieutenant for the reconsideration of his sentence. ‘The present
Lord-Lieutenant [Lord Carnarvon] has authorised me to state that, if
memorials should be presented on behalf of those persons referred to in
this motion, they will be considered by him with the same personal
attention which he would feel bound to give to all cases, whether great
or small, ordinary or exceptional, coming before him.’ That was all; and
it may not seem a very large concession to Irish national feeling, but
it was enough to draw upon the head of the Minister a storm of reproach.
Sir William Harcourt, undisturbed by the significant absence of Mr.
Chamberlain and Sir Charles Dilke, rose to express the indignation of
the Liberal party that law and order should be subverted to political
expediency and the decision of a Viceroy impugned. These sentiments were
received with undisguised approval on the Conservative benches. Lord
Randolph Churchill replied. So far as he was personally concerned his
task would have been easy. He, at least, had consistently supported the
Irish demand for an inquiry. He was to defend in office a smaller
concession than he had urged in Opposition. But what with Ulster
growlings, sympathetically echoed by the Tory party on the one hand, and
on the other the plain need of Nationalist good-will, if peace and order
were to be maintained in Ireland under the ordinary law, the path was
not easy to find and perilously narrow to tread. His speech, in fact,
resolved itself into a series of depreciatory comments upon Lord
Spencer’s administration. Sir William Harcourt had spoken of it with
pride. ‘We were proud of the administration of Lord Spencer.’ Who did
‘_we_’ include? It was the prerogative of royalty to speak in the plural
number. Sir William Harcourt had once before electrified the country by
claiming royal descent. Was it in that exalted character that he used
the ‘we,’ or did he mean that the late Cabinet were united in their
admiration of Lord Spencer’s Viceroyalty? The division list would show.
For himself he had had no confidence in the administration of Lord
Spencer. For that reason he had a year before voted in favour of an
inquiry into this particular case. The new Government ought not
unnecessarily to go out of their way to assume responsibility for the
acts of the late Administration. They would now pronounce no opinion
upon the merits of the case. The new Lord-Lieutenant would inquire
carefully and impartially into it; and pending that inquiry, having full
confidence in Lord Carnarvon, Ministers would vote against the motion of
Mr. Parnell which seemed to prejudge the issue. On this Mr. Parnell rose
at once and said that he was content to await Lord Carnarvon’s decision.
He therefore asked leave to withdraw his motion. But the discussion did
not terminate. The Ulster members and their friends--always so powerful
in the Conservative party--were offended by the concession, small though
it was, which had been made to their hereditary foes. The friendly tone
of the Irish leader, and the Nationalist cheers with which Lord
Randolph’s strictures upon Lord Spencer had been received, excited
Orange wrath and Tory disapproval. Liberals who had smarted under the
taunt ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ were not slow to retort ‘Maamtrasna Alliance.’
Mr. Brodrick, a young Conservative who had not been included in the new
Government as his talents deserved, and who believed, perhaps with
reason, that his exclusion was due to the fact that he had voted with
Sir Stafford Northcote and against Lord Randolph Churchill in the
_interregnum_ division, expressed with much force the Conservative
discontent. He was supported by the vehement outcry of an Ulster member.
Mr. Gorst, who now for the first time defended the Government as
Solicitor-General, unwittingly fanned the flames by allowing himself to
use the candid but unfortunate expression ‘reactionary Ulster members.’
The stern reproaches with which Lord Hartington closed the debate, were
endorsed by many Conservatives in the House and by an influential
section of the party press.
The Maamtrasna incident was a factor in great events. It profoundly
disturbed the Conservative party. It thrust the Whigs for a space back
upon Mr. Gladstone. It prepared Mr. Gladstone’s mind for the reception
of other impressions which were to reach him later. Upon Lord Spencer
its influence was perhaps decisive; and the Viceroy who for three years
had ruled Ireland with dignity and courage, yet with despotic power,
whose name had become a synonym for the maintenance of law and order by
drastic measures, finding the standard of Coercion abandoned even by
Tory Ministers, came by one wide yet not irrational sweep to the
conclusion that Home Rule in some form or other was not to be prevented.
There can be no doubt that he was deeply wounded by Lord Randolph
Churchill’s speech. Connected though they were by many ties of kinship,
their friendly relations were not for several years repaired and were
never perfectly restored.
Heavy censures have been laid upon Lord Randolph Churchill for his share
in this affair. The Maamtrasna inquiry has often been described as part
of the purchase price paid by the Conservative party to Irish
Nationalism for power. On this a word may be said. Although no bargain
of any kind existed, it is obvious that Lord Salisbury’s
Government--which had come into office upon Nationalist votes, which was
forced to govern Ireland by the ordinary law, and which possessed no
majority in the House of Commons--was dependent largely upon Nationalist
good-will. To preserve that good-will was vital to their power to bring
the necessary work of the expiring Parliament to a creditable conclusion
and to the success of their struggle with Mr. Gladstone. Many other
issues of domestic and Imperial politics, far greater in their
importance than Irish affairs, were at stake in the approaching
election. The times were tempestuous; the need was great; the concession
pitifully small. In the event, Lord Carnarvon received, considered, and
in due course rejected the memorials which were sent him. No decision
was reversed; no prisoners were released; but the Irish people,
satisfied that the inquiry had been fair, accepted its conclusions. It
would not be difficult, from another point of view, to justify on its
merits an examination into the administration of justice in an island
which for five years had lain in the grip of what was almost martial
law, where the most elementary civil rights had been in abeyance and
where nearly every safeguard of British judicial procedure had been
destroyed--more especially when that examination was demanded by
recognised representatives from a Government of which they were in a
sense constituents. This is, however, to raise questions beyond the
scope of these pages. The merits of the Maamtrasna inquiry will be
variously appraised. Lord Salisbury’s first Administration must
collectively share the responsibility, as they shared the advantage.
But, whether right or wrong, Lord Randolph Churchill’s personal
sincerity cannot be doubted by anyone who reads his consistent
declarations upon this and kindred Irish subjects or who studies his
life and opinions as a whole.
The feeling excited among the Ulster members and so largely shared by
orthodox unbending Conservatives was not concealed. The _Standard_
abused the Tory leaders in the Commons as vigorously as any Liberal
newspaper. Lord Randolph Churchill had promised to attend a great
meeting at Liverpool at which Conservative working men from all parts of
Lancashire were to present him with a great number of addresses. July 29
was fixed for the ceremony. On the afternoon of the 28th he learned that
Lord Claud Hamilton, one of his old opponents in the National Union
fight, and another local member declined to attend. Regarding this as a
deliberate insult to the Government and to himself, he telegraphed at
once to the Chairman of the meeting:--
_Telegram from Lord Randolph Churchill to A. B. Forwood, Esq._
Lord Claud Hamilton has just informed me that he and Mr. Whitley do
not intend to be present at the meeting to-morrow, assigning as
their reason that they disapprove so strongly of the policy of the
Government on Irish questions that, if they were present, they
would be obliged to express publicly their disapproval. Under
these circumstances I distinctly decline to attend a meeting of the
Tory party in Liverpool at which the two senior members refuse to
be present. I think it in the highest degree ungenerous and
unpatriotic that two gentlemen professing Tory principles should
show at a difficult and critical time such a deplorable want of
confidence in a Government which, in all other parts of the United
Kingdom, has received from its friends a hearty and cordial
sympathy.
From this determination the most frantic appeals from Liverpool failed
to move him, and the meeting was abandoned at the last moment, to the
great disappointment and inconvenience of all concerned. The Lancashire
Tories were not, however, to be discouraged from their purpose and
resolutions were immediately passed by the Liverpool Conservative
Association inviting Lord Randolph to another similar meeting a few
weeks later and urging the local members to attend.
The relations of Ministers with the Irish party which were thought so
improper by good Conservatives, and were certainly compromising, did not
end with the Maamtrasna inquiry. The appointment of Lord Carnarvon as
Viceroy had been a part of the general policy of concession to Irish
feeling which the new Government was forced to adopt. His opinions were
known to be sympathetic to Irish aspirations and he was for that reason
agreeable to the Nationalist party. That he had carried Federation in
Canada, had tried to carry it in South Africa, and was well known to be
familiar with the machinery of subordinate legislatures and Colonial
Parliaments, were facts not in those days devoid of significance. His
first speech, in the House of Lords, as Lord-Lieutenant had been a
declaration of the abandonment of Coercion and an appeal, in terms of
generous sincerity, for a kindlier feeling between the two countries.
Beginning thus, Lord Carnarvon was soon treading that path of hope and
peril which seems to possess an almost irresistible fascination for
English statesmen who are invited to watch at close quarters the
detailed workings of Irish administration.
Lord Randolph Churchill was always inclined to blame Lord Ashbourne for
his absence from Ireland at this critical time. ‘The Irish Chancellor’s
constant presence in Dublin,’ he wrote in 1889 in the memorandum already
quoted, ‘might have been of inestimable service to the Viceroy and the
Government.... Lord Carnarvon, a nobleman of broad sympathies, liberal
mind, and warm imagination, was left alone, without any previous
knowledge of the country, to survey Ireland, to realise its condition,
to appreciate the difficulties of its government, under the influence
and guidance of Sir Robert Hamilton, at that time permanent
Under-Secretary, who was possessed of great ability and long experience
of the Civil Service, and who had some time previously arrived at the
conclusion that the concession of Home Rule in some shape or other was
inevitable. There was no countervailing influence of knowledge and
authority with the Viceroy such as Lord Ashbourne might have afforded
and Lord Carnarvon glided gently into the heresy which so grievously
embarrassed and damaged his colleagues and correspondingly strengthened
the party of Repeal.’
At the end of July Lord Carnarvon’s opinions were so far advanced that
he sought an interview with Mr. Parnell. The famous ‘empty house’
meeting was arranged. In a drawing-room in Grosvenor Square, dismantled
and deserted at the end of the London season, the representative of the
Queen in Ireland and the executive head of the Irish Government met the
man whom the mass of the English people, high and low, had been taught
during five years, by the leaders of both political parties, to regard
as guilty at least of high treason and probably of complicity in murder.
From the accounts which have since been made public, the conversation
that ensued seems to have been interesting and agreeable. Lord Carnarvon
carefully explained that he spoke for no one but himself, that he sought
for information only, and that as the Queen’s servant he could listen to
nothing inconsistent with the Union of the two countries. After this
formality had been assented to by Mr. Parnell, the two rulers of
Ireland--coroneted impotence and uncrowned power--rambled discursively
over such topics as self-government and national aspirations, Colonial
Parliaments and a central legislative body which might, it appeared,
possess--a remarkable licence--the right of protecting Irish industries.
Altogether a very instructive afternoon!
When Lord Carnarvon first explained this incident in the House of Lords
(June 10, 1886) he stated emphatically that he had had no communication
with the Cabinet on the subject either before or after the interview
took place and that he had received ‘no authorisation’ from the Cabinet.
Not until two years more had passed (May 3, 1888) did he reveal the fact
that he had acted throughout with Lord Salisbury’s consent. ‘I should
have been wanting in my duty if I had failed to inform my noble friend
at the head of the Government of my intention of holding that meeting
with Mr. Parnell, and still more should I have failed in my duty, if I
had not acquainted him with what had passed between us at the interview,
at the earliest possible moment. Accordingly, both by writing and by
words, I gave the noble Marquess as careful and as accurate a statement
as possible of what had occurred within twenty-four hours after the
meeting and my noble friend was good enough to say that I had conducted
that conversation with perfect discretion.’[32]
Lord Salisbury, however, kept this matter entirely to himself. No one of
his colleagues, not even the Leader of the House of Commons, was made
aware of the incident until the fact was declared in Parliament. Lord
Randolph Churchill was subsequently both astonished and offended at this
concealment of such an important political event from Cabinet Ministers
by the head of the Government.
The fact that Lord Carnarvon met Mr. Parnell and, with the knowledge and
assent of the Prime Minister, discussed at large with him projects of
Home Rule, has been held by many people to prove that the Tory Cabinet
was considering such a policy in the autumn. But, as Lord Salisbury
never apprised his colleagues of this interview, the inference is
obviously incorrect. No Home Rule proposals were ever submitted to the
Cabinet of 1885. Had proposals of this kind been submitted, taking the
form of the establishment of a Parliament in Ireland, the Cabinet would
inevitably have rejected them. If Lord Salisbury had been a convinced
Home Ruler he could not have imposed his view upon his colleagues.
Principle, prejudice, obstinacy, conviction, would each and all together
have paralysed him. Apart from the Irish Viceroy, the two Ministers who
might have been expected--according to prevailing impressions and
suspicions--to give the most favourable consideration to such proposals
were Lord Randolph Churchill and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. It is certain
that both Lord Randolph and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach would have resigned
rather than support such proposals, still less be responsible for their
conduct through the House of Commons; and in resigning they would have
been followed by the great majority of their colleagues. If these two
leading Ministers had agreed with Lord Salisbury upon a plan, the
Cabinet would have broken in pieces; and even if the entire Cabinet had
agreed, it is by no means likely that they would have succeeded in
carrying the Conservative party with them.
What ground is there for believing that Lord Salisbury was ever inclined
towards Home Rule, or contemplated, even in the vaguest terms, making
proposals to the Cabinet? No one knew better than he the character of
his party and the disposition of his Government. His method had always
been to obtain and use power only _through_ the party and _by_ the party
and no English statesman in the nineteenth century was less likely to
split his party or to lead some forlorn, uncalculated crusade of
enthusiasm or adventure. Certainly, if any idea had crossed his mind of
making a settlement on Nationalist lines with Mr. Parnell, Lord Randolph
Churchill would have been the Minister he would earliest have
approached. Lord Salisbury was on intimate terms with Lord Randolph.
They communicated with the greatest freedom and fulness almost every day
and almost always by letter. In all the extensive correspondence that
remains no trace can be discovered which suggests even remotely the
existence or the recognition of such an idea. The Prime Minister’s
letters to Lord Randolph, so far as they relate to Ireland, proceed on
the fundamental assumption that they are leagued together to resist Home
Rule. They speak of the ‘onslaught that is impending.’ They examine the
resources with which it can be met. But that either or both could join
the attacking forces is a suggestion in itself so widely improbable, of
such inherent absurdity and unimagined remoteness, that it is not even
mentioned for the purpose of being dismissed. The same may be said
generally of the correspondence of the 1885 Cabinet of which Lord
Randolph’s archives contain an extensive store.
Why, then, did Lord Salisbury allow and authorise the Irish Viceroy to
confer with Mr. Parnell? It is not for me to attribute motives to
persons with whom this story is only indirectly connected; but the
question cannot be avoided and certain interpretations of his action
irresistibly obtrude themselves. It seems, in the first place, a
reasonable assumption that Lord Salisbury allowed the Viceroy to meet
Mr. Parnell because the Viceroy was anxious for such a meeting and
because Lord Salisbury did not think that such a meeting would do any
harm. If the officer responsible for the Government of Ireland thought
that his task would be made easier by private consultation with any
particular Irishman, why should the head of an Administration avowedly
pursuing a conciliatory policy to Irish Nationalism and earnestly
endeavouring to preserve order without a special Act, refuse to allow
such consultation? Lord Carnarvon was warned to make it perfectly clear
that he was acting for himself and by himself, that the communications
were from his lips alone, that the conversation was with reference to
information only, that no agreement or understanding--however
shadowy--was in question, and that the Viceroy must neither hear nor say
a word that was inconsistent with the union of the two countries. Lord
Carnarvon always asserted that he had made these conditions perfectly
clear. Mr. Parnell did not in all respects concur. He declared that he
did not recollect that these conditions were made. The conflict of
evidence was direct. Even if it were admitted that Lord Carnarvon
failed to convey fully to Mr. Parnell these important preliminaries to
their discussion, the fact that he honestly tried to do so to the best
of his ability and believed that he had in fact done so, relieves him
from any imputation of intentional bad faith as regards Mr. Parnell and
clears _à fortiori_ the Prime Minister--a person more remote from the
transaction. But if Mr. Parnell chose to place upon Lord Carnarvon’s
words a construction which they would not bear or to attach to them an
authority which they did not possess; if he chose deliberately, or
through natural inclination, to magnify the importance of the whole
incident, to treat it as a formal negotiation of a treaty, was Lord
Salisbury to blame for that? And if Mr. Parnell thought fit for his own
purposes to convey a detailed and highly-coloured account of his
interview to Mr. Gladstone and other Liberal leaders, was Lord Salisbury
responsible for that? And if Mr. Gladstone jumped at conclusions upon
insufficient and questionable evidence, was Lord Salisbury responsible
for that? Could he foresee these possible consequences of the permission
he had given to Lord Carnarvon? Ought he to have foreseen them; and if
he had foreseen them, ought he to have refused to allow the meeting to
take place? These are questions which it is difficult to answer here. A
sufficient explanation is that Lord Salisbury allowed the interview to
take place in order to pacify the Viceroy and soothe Mr. Parnell and
that he did not communicate the fact to his colleagues because he
thought the matter would make more trouble in the Cabinet than it was
worth. Mr. Parnell’s biographer has explained with ingenuous candour the
delicate and elaborate manœuvres in which his hero was at this time
engaged. ‘The course of the Irish leader,’ he tells us, ‘was perfectly
clear. He had to threaten Mr. Chamberlain with Lord Randolph Churchill,
and Mr. Gladstone with both, letting the whole world know meanwhile that
his weight would ultimately be thrown in the scale that went down upon
the side of Ireland.’ Tactics like these, though perfectly legitimate
for a public object earnestly cherished, are not of a character to
entitle those who adopt them to any special consideration.
The session had no sooner ended than the campaign in the country began.
The Liberal party went down to the General Election of 1885 in a spirit
of comfortable over-confidence. Their leaders occupied themselves more
in correcting each other than in assailing the Conservative Government.
Indeed, it would seem that in the fulness of their power, with all the
prestige of the ‘Old Man’ and the ‘old cause’ and the expected
reinforcement of ‘two million intelligent citizens,’ they believed
sincerely that the future lay exclusively in their hands and that the
only questions of real importance were those which divided the ranks of
the predominant party. Of these questions, however, there seemed to be
no lack. Mr. Chamberlain’s views upon Local Government, free education,
graduated taxation and, above all, upon the transfer, tenure, and
compulsory acquisition of land, set forth in a series of remarkable
addresses, soon drew him into a lively controversy with Lord Hartington
and Mr. Goschen. Speech for speech they followed him about the country,
until in the end he declared that he would accept office in no
Government which ‘deliberately excluded’ the reforms he had
advocated--in other words, in no Government of which they were members.
Next came the question of Disestablishment, raised by stern Liberals,
who found phrases about ‘the old cause’ and ‘the old ship’ soothing
rather than satisfying in point of precision and substance. It was
supported positively, as it appeared, by 374 Liberal candidates, and
eagerly snatched at as a bone of contention by Wales and by English and
Scotch Dissenters on the one hand and by Tory Churchmen and--let it be
added--Tory politicians, on the other. In the last week of August Mr.
Parnell demanded a national Parliament for Ireland. The whole press,
Metropolitan and provincial, Liberal and Conservative, denounced his
claim as destructive and impossible. ‘There was no sign,’ said the
_Manchester Guardian_, ‘of any appreciable section of Englishmen who
would not unhesitatingly condemn or punish any party or any public man
who attempted to walk in the path traced by Mr. Parnell.’ Lord
Hartington and Mr. Chamberlain--differing so widely on all
else--representing as they did the extreme limits of Whig and Radical
opinion, rivalled each other in terms of prompt, explicit, and
unqualified condemnation. Ministers were silent. Lord Randolph
Churchill, speaking at Sheffield a few days later, ranged over many
subjects, dwelt long upon the state of Ireland and the decision not to
renew the Crimes Act, but made no reference of any kind to Home Rule.
Upon all these grave matters Mr. Gladstone was called to pronounce; and,
like other party leaders under similar circumstances, he exerted himself
rather to find a common basis of agreement between followers who
fundamentally disagreed than to point a path of his own. He would
apparently go as far with Mr. Chamberlain in domestic reform as he could
carry Lord Hartington. Disestablishment, he observed cautiously, was a
gigantic question, ‘and I am very far from saying that if I were twenty
years younger, and circumstances were ripe for taking a matter of this
kind in hand--either on the one side or the other--I should urge you not
to give it the first place in your thoughts and actions.’ Upon Ireland
and the future he was majestically mysterious and uttered stately
phrases about the supremacy of the Crown, the unity of the Empire, and
the authority of Parliament, mingled with aspirations towards ‘an
equitable settlement’ and ‘another effort to complete a reconciling
work.’ Mr. Gladstone’s utterances were officially declared to have
united the Liberal party and, fortified by this assurance, all its
sections resumed their warfare with ever-increasing turbulence, amid a
babel of conflicting voices.
From this clamour and darkness the lines of battle slowly but surely
ranged themselves much as Lord Randolph Churchill had expected and
desired. The menace to the Established Church and to denominational
teaching consolidated the Conservative party. It provided a new and
perfectly unimpeachable bond of union between them and the Irish
Nationalists. The cry of the ‘Church in danger’ rendered Lord Salisbury
very tractable on all other questions. To preserve that sacred vessel,
to him precious beyond all else in English life, there was scarcely any
concession he was not prepared to make--no merchandise he would not
jettison. At Newport (October 7) he showed in unmistakable language that
he was ready to make common cause with Tory Democrats, though they were
Radicals at heart, and with Irish Nationalists, who were rebels by
profession, thereby the better to resist the onslaught of secularism and
atheism. Viewed in this light, boycotting seemed to him a very small
matter, probably intangible to the law, depending ‘on the passing humour
of the population,’ ‘more like the excommunication or interdict of the
Middle Ages than anything we know now’; and in fine his Conservative
principles made shift to accommodate themselves to a political programme
which was morosely admitted by friends and foes alike to be little less
than the Gladstonian manifesto.
The Irish vote came over solid and unstinted into the Tory lines upon a
Parnellite denunciation of Mr. Gladstone and all his works, which in
tone and language might have been an extract from one of Lord Randolph’s
speeches. ‘In 1880,’ ran this document,[33] ‘the Liberal party promised
peace, and it afterwards made unjust wars; economy, and its Budget
reached the highest point yet attained; justice to aspiring
nationalities, and it mercilessly crushed the national movement in Egypt
under Arabi Pasha. To Ireland more than to any other country it bound
itself by most solemn pledges. It denounced Coercion, and it practised a
system of Coercion more brutal than that of any previous Administration,
Liberal or Tory.’
Among the millions who at the General Election of 1885 exercised, many
of them for the first time, the proud privilege of the franchise, no
human being could have explained with any approach to accuracy what a
vote for either of the great parties in the State actually involved,
whether in principle or action. Leaders on both sides, swept to and fro
by turbulent cross-currents, took refuge in ambiguous obscurity, even
where the most fiercely contested questions were concerned. Official
Liberalism had no decided opinion about Disestablishment, nor Toryism
about Fair Trade. Every politician had his own ideas about a social
programme; and Ireland was a riddle at which neither party cared to
guess in the absence of the electoral returns. What a mockery of
statesmen’s leadership and foresight the future was to unveil! The
Parnellite manifesto and the Irish vote weakened, perhaps fatally, the
Liberals who a few months later were to stake their fortunes upon Home
Rule. Sir William Harcourt, who derided the Conservative party for
‘stewing in Parnellite juice,’ was himself to stew in that juice for
the rest of his life. Lord Salisbury, whose philosophic defence of
boycotting had excited general consternation, stood on the threshold of
a Coercion Bill and ‘twenty years of resolute government.’ Mr.
Gladstone, appealing for a majority independent of Irish members, became
evermore dependent upon them. Mr. Chamberlain was soon to fight for
political existence side by side with that same Lord Hartington whom he
now described as Rip Van Winkle, to sit for years in the same Cabinet as
the Mr. Goschen he now ran up and down the land to denounce, and to be
driven from the Liberal party, locked in fast alliance with the very
Whigs he was now striving in the name of Radicalism to expel. Whether
Lord Randolph Churchill surpassed these standards of consistency the
reader will be able to judge as the account proceeds.
These were perhaps the busiest days of his life, and the amount of work
of the most exhausting character which he contrived to discharge
astonished all who knew him. Besides the anxious and incessant attention
which the India Office required, and the ordinary labours of a Cabinet
Minister, he had to watch the Irish situation and to prosecute his
Birmingham candidature from week to week. In addition to all this he
darted to and fro about the country--to Dorsetshire, Sheffield,
Worcester, Lynn, Manchester--commending the Conservative cause to the
electors in speeches in which serious argument was garnished with a
vigour of metaphor and a raciness of language that delighted the Tory
Democracy and attracted universal attention. Lord Salisbury, who knew
what the management of the India Office at this time involved, seems to
have been genuinely concerned lest his lieutenant should break himself
down by attempting a platform campaign as well as his departmental work.
‘The strain of doing the two things together,’ he wrote (September 13)
in a letter almost paternal in the kindness of its tone, ‘is enormous:
and if you once go a step too far--if you once break the spring--you may
take years to get over it.’ But Lord Randolph persevered; and though he
was forced by ill-health to take a few weeks’ rest at the end of
September, he managed to carry out nearly all the engagements he had
undertaken.
Such brief leisure as he could secure he spent mainly salmon-fishing in
the Carron at Auchnashellach--a house and river in Scotland then the
property of his brother-in-law, Lord Wimborne. Thither also went Sir
Frederick Roberts before leaving to take up the Indian command. Lord
Randolph was delighted to renew a friendship so happily begun the year
before at Rewah.[34]
_To his Wife_.
Auchnashellach: September 27.
I have written twenty-one letters to-day, some of them long ones,
so you won’t be vexed if I only send a short scrawl. I think your
letter to Lady Dufferin admirable and all your plans with regard to
her Fund most excellent. I am sure Moore will do anything you want.
I should advise you to get hold of Mr. Buckle and fascinate him,
and make him write you up. I have been very glad to get Sir
Frederick Roberts here, and have had long conversations with him on
many Indian subjects. Did you not find him very nice? It has been
everything for me getting him up here. I never could have had any
real satisfactory _pow-wow_ in London. He is coming to dine with me
on October 6, to meet some of the other Ministers--only a man
party. I hope the new cook will be on his mettle....
He found time to pay a flying visit to Howth--thus combining pleasure
with certain matters of importance which drew him to Dublin.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Justice FitzGibbon_.
Auchnashellach, Dingwall, N.B.: September 21, 1885.
A line to tell you that on Tuesday, 29th inst., I commence my
journey to Howth. A considerable business. I shall go by Carlisle
to Holyhead, and imagine I ought to arrive at Kingstown on Thursday
morning. From there I shall proceed to the Attorney-General’s abode
at Monkstown, and later in the day move on in the direction of ‘the
Eye.’[35] Will you keep me for two nights? I have asked the
Lord-Lieutenant to let me go to him on the Saturday. Can you
possibly manage to put up my secretary, Cecil Wolff? He is here
with me and, while we are exploring the bay and deluding the wily
lobster, will decipher telegrams and look after papers--a work I am
perfectly unequal to. I hope the ‘Tutissimus’[36] will be on the
spot and David Plunket--also I shall have to go and see O. V. G.
L.,[37] who wrote to me from Buxton the other day; and there are
many other old friends I am greatly looking forward to seeing
again--you first.
Auchnashellach, Dingwall, N.B.: September 27, 1885.
Many thanks for your letter and telegram. My complete physical
restoration absolutely depends upon an evening with Father James
Healy.
I shall try to get to you early Saturday morning, and I fear I must
leave Monday night, as our great Prime Minister has summoned a
Cabinet for Tuesday. I shall go to the Attorney-General’s on
Thursday morning in order to get myself into a proper state of mind
and body before meeting the Lord-Lieutenant. Could you not run out
to Monkstown in the early morning, in order that we may deliberate
as to the proper employment of Saturday and Sunday and Monday, and
also that I may hear at first hand from authentic sources what the
FitzGibbon Commission (Endowed Schools) has been up to. I see you
have made a lot of jobbing appointments. Wolff is very pleased with
your kind letter.
Can’t you get O. V. G. L. over to Howth on Sunday? This would be
better than any amount of Church.
Please tell Baillie Gage privately that an intelligent telegraph
clerk at Howth while I am there would be a great advantage. The
cypher telegrams require care, or else are worse than useless. They
come pretty thick now.
The Irish capital under Lord Carnarvon was disturbed by many whisperings
of Parnellite intrigue, Maamtrasna alliances, Catholic Universities and
Repeal. What if they had known of the conversation in Grosvenor Square?
Lord Randolph’s sudden arrival in Dublin created a new flutter. It had
been very freely said that he had committed himself to the Parnellites
on Home Rule, and his visit was attributed in some newspapers to the
purpose of further negotiation. He soon reassured his Irish friends. At
the Vice-Regal he had a long conversation with Lord Carnarvon. The
Viceroy made no mention of his communications with Parnell; but his
language excited Lord Randolph’s suspicions. He called upon Mr. Holmes,
the Attorney-General, early one morning, as he had proposed. They
talked much on Irish politics. At length Lord Randolph got up to go. As
he reached the door he paused, and, pointing with his finger, said,
almost harshly and in a tone of command: ‘Now, mind. None of us must
have anything to do with Home Rule in any shape or form.’ For the rest
of his visit he amused himself at Howth, playing whist, chaffing his old
friends, and catching lobsters in the bay. The cypher telegrams came in
thickly. The short holiday was soon at an end.
Election oratory is not illuminating. The tags, the personalities, the
arguments which spring into being in the excitement of the moment, may
pass muster in the scrimmage. It were a harsh measure to call them forth
one by one in cold blood to justify themselves before austere tribunals
of taste and truth. The passions of these stormy months drew Lord
Randolph Churchill into a dispute with Lord Hartington very soon to be
regretted by both. It was natural that Whigs and Tory Democrats should
eye each other with mutual dislike. The Whigs saw with jealousy the hold
which the Tory party were gaining upon popular sympathies; with disgust
their readiness to outbid old-fashioned Liberalism in all that appealed
to the new democracy; and with alarm the excesses to which their own
Radicals were encouraged or goaded thereby. The Tory Democrat, on the
other hand, was incensed to see the ægis of aristocracy and wealth and
all the solid assurance of respectability spread, however reluctantly,
in protection over levelling and revolutionary doctrines. Both exerted
influences upon their respective parties--the one of restraint, the
other of propulsion--contrary to the general tendency of those parties.
It needed but a step from these considerations for each to regard the
other as insincere. The Whig accused the Tory Democrat of unscrupulous
opportunism; the Tory said that the Whig was a humbug.
The actual dispute arose in this wise. Lord Hartington’s examination of
Mr. Chamberlain’s programme led him to utter many sentiments about the
rights of property which were not less gratifying to the Conservative
party than his blunt repudiation of Mr. Parnell and Home Rule. ‘If,’
said Lord Randolph Churchill at Sheffield, after reading one of Lord
Hartington’s speeches, ‘this is really all you can bring yourself to
utter on political questions, you cannot indicate any difference between
yourself and your friends and the Government now in power. If, on the
contrary, you are compelled by the honesty of your nature to indicate
the strongest possible difference with a certain section of the Liberal
party with whom for years you have hopelessly and vainly tried to agree,
then I say you have no longer the right as a patriot and a citizen to
oppose the Conservative Government simply on the ground of antiquated
names; nor the right to act with Mr. Chamberlain and his friends, who
would not only destroy the Constitution, but would destroy with it that
great party of the Revolution--the Whigs--under whose guidance that
noble Constitution was framed.... I say to Lord Hartington before you
all--not by any backstairs intrigue, not by any secret negotiations, but
in the face of this meeting and before all England--to Lord Hartington,
to his friends, and to his following, words which were said to men
nearly two thousand years ago, who were destined to become great
political guides, “Come over and help us.”’
This invitation was rejected by Lord Hartington with some asperity. It
was comically suggested that he had written to inquire ‘Who’s “us”?’ and
had received the answer ‘“Us” is me.’ Radicals earnestly besought him to
follow the advice which had been offered. He would be much happier in
the Conservative camp. It would be better for all parties if he took the
plunge. To a proud man profoundly attached to historic Liberalism,
painfully conscious of the increasing difficulties of his position,
these taunts were galling in the extreme. In more than one speech he
denounced the New Conservatives, of whom he said that they arrogated to
themselves the title of Tory Democracy, had no distinctly marked
political opinions, and looked on politics only as a game by which they
might attain office. One shaft at least was shrewdly aimed. He taunted
Lord Randolph Churchill with going about the country with ‘a great
policy of grand pretensions but absolutely no legislation.’
The Secretary of State for India spoke in Manchester on November 6. It
was the eve of the poll. The election fever was at its height. The
streets leading to the St. James’s Hall were impassable, through the
crowd waiting to catch a glimpse of their favourite.[38] The vast hall
itself was crammed with excited people. Lord Randolph was in his
element. He cast away every kind of restraint and devoted himself for an
hour and a half with zeal and relish to an unmeasured attack upon the
Whigs, their record, their leaders, their influence, and their aims. He
showed how Lord Hartington had opposed almost every reform that the
Liberal party had ultimately carried--the ballot, household suffrage,
the abolition of flogging in the army--and yet under pressure had in the
end consented to them all; how he was still professedly opposed to
manhood suffrage and Disestablishment, but how in the near future he
would be forced to support them; how he already advocated that extension
of Local Government to Ireland which only the year before he had
denounced. This was political principle! And now? ‘Did any of you ever
go,’ inquired the speaker, ‘to the Zoological Gardens? If you go there
on some particular day in the week you may have the good fortune to
observe the feeding of the boa-constrictor, which is supplied with a
great fat duck or a rabbit. If you are lucky and patient and if the
boa-constrictor is hungry, you may be able to trace the progress of the
duck or the rabbit down his throat and all along the convolutions of his
body. Just in the same way, by metaphor and analogy, the British public
can trace the digestion and the deglutition by the Marquess of
Hartington of the various morsels of the Chamberlain programme which
from time to time are handed to him; and the only difference between the
boa-constrictor and the Marquess of Hartington is this--that the
boa-constrictor enjoys his food and thrives on it and Lord Hartington
loathes his food and it makes him sick....’ ‘Ah! the Whigs hate the New
Conservatism and the Tory Democracy because they are democratic and
because they are popular. They hate the Tory Democracy because it has
cut the ground from under their feet; because Tory Democracy has taken
the place of the Whigs and swept away that baffling and confusing medley
party which at every crisis obscures the issues before the people. No; I
quite admit that there is nothing democratic about the Whig. He is
essentially a cold and selfish aristocrat who believes that the British
Empire was erected by Providence and exists for no other purpose than to
keep in power a few Whig families, and who thinks that our toiling and
struggling millions of labourers and artisans are struggling and toiling
for no other purpose than to maintain in splendour, opulence, and power
the Cavendishes and the Russells.’
The audience were delighted at this hard hitting. Certainly Lord
Randolph had set his mark upon the Whig leader in unmistakable fashion.
It is said by some who were present and who followed his movements
closely, that on no occasion in Lancashire, not excepting the celebrated
‘Chips’ speech at Blackpool in 1884, was his command from minute to
minute of a meeting containing a large proportion of opponents so
strikingly displayed. Lord Hartington was deeply and personally
offended. ‘I hear,’ wrote Lord Randolph to his wife a few days later,
‘that Hartington says he will never speak to me again. _Je m’en moque._’
But ‘never’ is a hard word in political strife.
The contest in Birmingham was watched with the keenest interest all over
the country. The fame of Mr. Bright, the popularity of his young
challenger, the antagonisms which Mr. Chamberlain and his doctrines had
excited, the daring of the assault upon the stronghold of Radicalism,
the incidents of the Aston Riots, still fresh in the public mind, united
so many picturesque and personal elements that the rough and tumble of a
modern election assumed the glamour of a Homeric combat. Even Mr.
Balfour seems to have become enthusiastic. Considering how intimate his
relations with Lord Randolph must have been during these years, it is
curious how few of his letters are to be found among Lord Randolph’s
extensive correspondence. But the Birmingham election drew from him a
warm private message of encouragement and congratulation, written in his
own hand, in the midst of his own fight in Manchester. Every word
uttered by Lord Randolph was diligently reported. Not merely the regular
speeches in the Town Hall with which the campaign was opened, but
accounts of every petty ward meeting were telegraphed verbatim to the
newspapers. Lord Randolph’s address[39] had been issued as early as
October 10. From October 24 till the poll a month later he prosecuted
his candidature with seemingly inexhaustible vigour and fertility; and
as the days slipped by the tide of popular approval seemed to flow ever
more strongly in his favour. At the Radical headquarters there had been
at first some disposition to treat the attack with indulgent and
superior contempt. But soon feelings of incredulous anxiety broke in
upon complacency, and Mr. Schnadhorst and his myrmidons bent again over
their finished--‘perhaps too highly finished,’ as Lord Randolph
suggested--organisation, ciphering their pledged electors out again by
wards and streets and alleys with all that American thoroughness for
which the Caucus was remarkable. The progress of the fight, strangely
enough, provoked no personal ill-feeling between Lord Randolph and Mr.
Chamberlain. Their renewed friendship continued unimpaired. They
exchanged various small civilities and avoided, so far as possible,
attacking each other in irritating terms. When, for instance, Mr.
Chamberlain described Lord Randolph’s address as ‘colourless’ and the
reporters wrote ‘scurrilous,’ Mr. Chamberlain at once telegraphed to
explain the mistake and added a friendly inquiry about Lord Randolph’s
health. For the rest, the contest in all the seven divisions was bitter
and fierce. Lord Randolph was helped from morn till night by his wife
and his mother, at the head of their Primrose Dames. These ladies
canvassed the whole of the Central Division street by street and house
by house; and the Duchess of Marlborough--who was, as these pages
perhaps suggest, a woman of remarkable character and capacity--visited
the factories and addressed the workmen effectively on her son’s behalf.
If it were in human power to command success, the Central Division of
Birmingham would have been won. Against any other candidate Lord
Randolph must have prevailed. But the personal loyalty of the people to
their famous representative resisted all efforts. ‘I like your husband,’
said an old fellow to Lady Randolph on one of her canvassing tours, ‘and
I like what he says; but I can’t throw off John Bright like an old
coat.’
Not until the very eve of the General Election did the Liberal party
realise that their victory in England and Scotland would not be complete
and was even doubtful. For the first time since the Conservatives had
taken office in June all talk of triumphant and crushing Gladstonian
majorities died away. Tales of distress came in on every hand from the
boroughs. Crowds of ardent Conservative working men--utterly unexpected
phenomena--assembled to cheer and support the Government candidates. The
Conservative party was found, moreover, to have gained vastly in
prestige by its short tenure of power. Lord Salisbury’s conduct of
foreign affairs extorted admiration even from his opponents. The Afghan
difficulty had been removed and the Russian crisis was at an end. The
Egyptian settlement was proceeding smoothly. Good relations had been
restored between Great Britain and the two Empires of Germany and
Turkey, from which under the late Government she had been estranged.
The charges of ‘rashness’ and ‘Jingoism’ which it had been so
fashionable to make against Lord Salisbury found their answer in actual
events. The new Ministers had shown themselves competent and capable
men. It was no longer denied that the Conservative party could produce
an efficient alternative to any Government Mr. Gladstone might form.
The voting began on November 23. Forty-four borough constituencies which
had been represented in the late Parliament by 35 Liberals and 20
Conservatives now (after redistribution) returned 26 Conservatives and
18 Liberals. Liverpool elected 8 Conservatives and 1 Parnellite (Mr. T.
P. O’Connor); Manchester 5 Conservatives to 1 Liberal; Leeds and
Sheffield 3 Conservatives each to 2 Liberals. Other large towns like
Stockport, Blackburn, Oldham, Staleybridge, Bolton, Brighton, hitherto
for the most part strictly Liberal, were now represented mainly or
wholly by Conservatives. London, which in 1880 had sent up 14 Liberals
and 8 Conservatives, now returned 62 Members, of whom 36 were
Conservatives and 26 Liberals. Wherever the influence of Lord Randolph
Churchill upon the Tory Democracy had been the strongest, that is to
say, in the great centres of population and of active political thought,
victory--all the more dazzling because so desperately won--rested with
the constitutional cause. Two ex-Cabinet Ministers and quite a litter of
underlings from the late Government fell before the storm. Whereas, in
1880, 287 English borough members had mustered only 85 Conservatives;
in 1885, 226 English borough members numbered 116 Conservatives to 106
Liberals, 3 Independents, and 1 Parnellite. And it was, moreover,
noticed that even in boroughs where the Tories were outnumbered the
increase in their vote was heavy and almost universal.
Yet it is remarkable that, amid so many successes, the Conservative
party should have derived enormous encouragement from a defeat. The
result of the Birmingham election was declared late on the night of the
24th. Seven Liberals or Radicals were returned for its seven divisions.
But the Conservative minorities were everywhere largely increased, and
raised in the aggregate from 15,000 voters to 23,000. Whereas in 1880
the proportion of Liberals to Tories in Birmingham was as 2 to 1, it was
in 1885 as 3 to 2. Mr. Alderman Kenrick, the Chairman of the National
Liberal Federation, saved his seat by scarcely 600 votes from Mr.
Matthews. In the Central Division Lord Randolph Churchill was defeated
by Mr. Bright by 4,989 votes to 4,216, a majority of less than 800. It
was claimed by Conservative, and generally admitted by Liberal, writers
that no more significant proof of the change of opinion in English
cities could be furnished than this result. But while the political
world was fully aware of the meaning of the Birmingham elections, the
Tories who had fought the battle with so much earnestness and enthusiasm
were bitterly disappointed. Hope, growing stronger, had even ripened
into confidence as the contest had proceeded, and the crowd of local
leaders in the Midland Conservative Club awaited the declaration of the
poll in intense excitement. As one by one the adverse results came in,
the hum of eager conversation died away and gloom overspread every face.
The figures of the Central Division were still delayed. ‘Churchill’s
in!’ shouted a voice from the street; and a frantic cheer went up. ‘At
the bottom!’ cried the mocker; and fled. Then the truth arrived. There
was a sickly silence. In a moment Lord Randolph was upon his feet.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘the man who cannot stand a knock-down blow isn’t
worth a damn.’ The Midland Conservative Club were accustomed to regard
this remark with a respect which they did not always extend to more
edifying political pronouncements.
Lord Randolph returned to London next day and was almost immediately
elected by a majority of more than 2 to 1 for South Paddington, where he
then lived. The Fourth Party had fought everywhere in the front line.
Mr. Balfour, forsaking the shelter of Hertford, had captured an immense
working-class constituency in Manchester. Mr. Gorst was returned again
for Chatham. Only Sir Henry Wolff--still far away in Egypt--fell at
Portsmouth, and passes as a Parliamentary politician out of this story
altogether. Tory confidence flared high during the first few days of the
election and ‘Back to 1874’ was everywhere the word. Lord Justice
FitzGibbon was in London when the returns from the boroughs were coming
in, and after spending the small hours among an excited crowd at the
tape machine in the Grand Hotel, he hurried round to Connaught Place to
see his now famous friend. ‘Ah!’ said Lord Randolph, pacing up and down
in excited satisfaction, ‘the Whigs can no longer call us the party of
the classes. If they do, I’ll chuck big cities at their heads.’
But after the boroughs, the counties. While Liberals all over the
country were beginning to lose heart, while whispers of utter defeat and
panic were flying about among the wire-pullers, Mr. Gladstone stoutly
proclaimed his undiminished confidence that the new voters would reverse
the decision of the old; and so it proved. Scotland voted solidly
Liberal--only nine Conservatives being returned. In the English counties
the agricultural labourers tramped doggedly to vote down the farmers’
and landlords’ candidates. Mr. Farrer Ecroyd’s Fair Trade movement,
which had proved so popular in Lancashire towns, exerted an opposite
effect in villages, where Corn Law memories were still wakeful. Mr.
Chamberlain’s speeches had fallen upon a fertile soil. The country
party, with all its immense territorial influence and candidates of
county families, was shattered, never to be restored, except as a shadow
of its old strength. Henceforth the Conservative leaders, if they were
to rule the land, must build in town and country upon the foundation of
democracy.
[Illustration: _Reproduced by permission of the proprietors of “Punch.”_
THE WAITS.
_Punch._ December 26, 1885.]
Ireland was a portent. Not a single Liberal was returned. The Irish
Whigs were as a party and a force totally exterminated. Ulster elected
16 Tory members and 17 Nationalists. Out of 89 contests Mr. Parnell
won 85, the greater part by overwhelming majorities. Upon such national
authority could he base his demand for Home Rule. The leaders of both
the great English parties understood the meaning of the Irish elections.
On November 30 Mr. Gladstone was still appealing to his counties for a
clear and strong majority over the combined forces of Conservatives and
Parnellites. ‘There seems to be still hope,’ wrote Lord Salisbury to
Lord Randolph Churchill, as late as December 3, ‘that we may be above
low-water mark--_i.e._ Tories + Parnellites = Liberals.’ The hopes of
both were falsified by the event. The final result of the General
Election of 1885 sent to the House of Commons 335 Liberals, 249
Conservatives, and 86 Parnellites. ‘Low-water mark’ it was.
‘What will happen now?’ Lord Randolph was asked by a friend. ‘I shall
lead the Opposition for five years. Then I shall be Prime Minister for
five years. Then I shall die.’ In respect to the span of his life the
words came true almost to the day. But his personal fortunes and the
destinies of Britain were about to receive a vast and unanticipated
twist.
CHAPTER XI
AT THE INDIA OFFICE
[Greek: archhê andra deixei. ἁρχἡ ἁνδρα δεἱξει]
‘Great command proves the man.’
The reader, having persevered so long amid the intrigues of party and
the warfare of Parliament, may now be glad to escape for a while into
the calm atmosphere of a public department. The India Office rejoices in
a character and constitution of its own. The cost of its maintenance and
the salaries of its officials, from the Secretary of State downwards,
are defrayed by India and do not appear upon the votes of the House of
Commons. The opportunities of debating the policy or conduct of the
responsible Minister, except upon formal votes of censure, are therefore
perhaps inconveniently few. Any apparent laxity of control by Parliament
is, however, corrected by the Council of India--a body consisting of
gentlemen of long and distinguished service in the East--with whom the
Secretary of State is by law compelled to act and by whose decisions he
is in many matters of the highest importance absolutely bound. Under
these restrictions the Minister brings the opinion of his colleagues and
of Parliament and his own personal influence to bear upon the majestic
organisation of the Government of India.
Modern conditions increasingly enhance the power of the political chief
over all officials, military and civil. If the Secretary of State is
possessed of sufficient personal authority to enforce his will upon the
Cabinet, no hierarchy, however glittering, no Constitution, however
venerable, can withstand him. He has it in his power to change the
hierarchy and to remould the Constitution till the implement is
convenient to his hand; and his decisions will in almost every case be
acclaimed by the party press and ratified by driving a party majority
through the division lobbies of the House of Commons. But to employ
methods so costly and even ruinous, in their violence, is in itself
usually a confession of failure on the part of the Minister. His
business is to exert his authority by modes of persuasion, patience, and
adjustment which may secure in the end the triumph of his opinions
without the sensible abasement of others.
The Council of India is for all such purposes an invaluable instrument
to a wise Secretary of State. Having in subordination to him officers as
great and independent as the Governor of nearly three hundred million
persons and perhaps as intractable as a Commander-in-Chief at the head
of nearly three hundred thousand soldiers, he should naturally fortify
himself with the unique authority of his Council, now in his dealings
with the Cabinet and now with the Viceroy. At the time at which Lord
Randolph became Secretary of State the Council of India consisted of
fifteen men, nearly all of whom had spent their lives, whether as
soldiers or as civilians, in India; nearly all were old or elderly men,
and many of them were men of very high distinction and reputation. In
these circumstances it was not an easy task for a Secretary of State
thirty-six years of age and absolutely devoid of all official
experience, to preside over their meetings and to bring to bear on them
the personal influence which, for the proper conduct of business, should
be exercised by the responsible head of the office. Lord Randolph
himself, after his first experience of a meeting of Council, said to a
friend that he had felt ‘like an Eton boy presiding at a meeting of the
Masters.’
‘Yet it is probable,’ writes Sir Arthur Godley (who was then, as now,
Under-Secretary of State for India) in a memorandum for which I am much
indebted to him, ‘that no Secretary of State ever showed greater skill
and address in the discharge of this part of his duties. His treatment
of it was characteristic and in a degree peculiar to himself. For some
time and until he had mastered the methods of procedure and the
idiosyncrasies of the individual members, he took no part whatever in
the debates, but sat in his Presidential chair absolutely silent. As
soon, however, as he began to feel at home, he adopted a method to which
he strictly adhered as long as he was at the India Office. Having gone
carefully through the list of agenda, he would decide some days
beforehand which were the subjects as to which he desired to use his
influence. He would then send for the papers on these subjects and would
study them most thoroughly. Then, when the day of meeting arrived,
having thus mastered his brief, and possessing the immense advantages of
his natural readiness, his powers of speech and his Parliamentary
training, he would intervene with decisive effect, and rarely, if ever,
failed to carry his point. The other subjects--those which he had
deliberately left unstudied--he never touched, relying entirely upon
those members of Council who were specially qualified to deal with them.
He treated his Council with great consideration and with marked
politeness; but he nevertheless spoke always with confidence and
decision and occasionally with a touch of vehemence and of “the personal
note” which, though natural enough in the House of Commons, came as a
slight surprise in the serener regions of the India Council room.’
Railway construction was one of the first subjects which commanded his
personal attention. The opinion had been for some time gaining ground in
the Railway Department that the necessary development of Indian lines
could only be attained if private enterprise were enlisted to supplement
the efforts of the State. Bargains between public departments and
limited companies are subject to such severe scrutiny in Parliament that
hitherto the India Office had not ventured to offer sufficient
inducement to attract commercial interests. Lord Randolph Churchill had,
however, no fear of the House of Commons and always believed in his
power to persuade them to any reasonable proposal. The construction of
the Indian Midland and Bengal-Nagpur Railways had been recommended as
famine-protective lines by a select committee which sat in 1884. Under
his hand both projects moved forward at once. The stimulus of a four per
cent. guarantee on capital, together with one-fourth of the amount by
which the net receipts might exceed the guarantee, led to the formation
of the Indian Midland Railway Company in July 1885. The railway was 589
miles in length; it connected the Great Indian Peninsula with the East
Indian Railway system by continuous broad-gauge lines, opened out a
populous and fertile country, and shortened the distance by rail from
Bombay to Cawnpore by 134 miles. The Bengal-Nagpur Railway, though,
owing to financial considerations, not actually floated till 1887, was
eventually founded on the same conditions. The transfer of the Mysore
State Railway to the Southern Mahratta Railway Company for extension and
working was another important railway scheme arranged while Lord
Randolph was in office.
Nothing pleased the officials of the India Office more in their new
chief than his total freedom from anything like humbug. On one occasion
the Finance Committee were to deal with the question, then so vital to
India, between bimetallism on the one hand, and a gold standard on the
other. Before going into the committee he said to the Permanent
Under-Secretary, who happened to be in his room: ‘I’ve asked Arthur
Balfour to come across and sit with us at this Committee: he knows all
about bimetallism, but I’m as ignorant about these things as a calf.’
Accordingly Mr. Balfour came and a very interesting discussion took
place, at the end of which Lord Randolph (though he probably had not
greatly exaggerated his own previous ignorance) delivered an admirable
summing-up, worthy of an experienced Chancellor of the Exchequer.
‘He was, in fact,’ Sir Arthur Godley continues, ‘an excellent head of a
great department. He occupied himself instinctively and naturally with
the great questions and kept his work upon a high plane, leaving petty
matters to his subordinates, but always maintaining his own ultimate
control. He was, as everyone knows, exceedingly able, quick, and
clear-sighted. Besides this, he was very industrious, very energetic and
decided when once his mind was made up and remarkably skilful in the art
of devolution--that is to say, in the art of getting the full amount of
help out of his subordinates. He had the gift of knowing at once whether
a given question was worth his attention or should be left to others. If
he took it up, he made himself completely master of it; if he left it
alone, he put entire confidence in those to whom he left it, endorsed
their opinions without hesitation, and was always ready to defend them
or to further their wishes. This quality, it is needless to say, was
invaluable both to himself and to those who worked with him. His perfect
candour and straightforwardness were not only admirable in themselves
but were a great assistance to business. What he said, he meant; and if
he did not know a subject he did not pretend to know it. Few high
officials can ever have been his superior, or indeed his equal, in the
magical art of _getting things done._ Those who worked under him were
sure of a friendly and favourable hearing and they felt that, if they
had once convinced him that a certain step ought to be taken, it
infallibly would be taken and “put through.”’
Lord Randolph enjoyed his official work greatly, and made no secret of
it. His tenure of the post was brief but it would be safe to say that
there was not a single individual among those who had worked with him
who was not sorry to lose him. He, on his side, was extremely sorry to
go, and freely said so. Just before Christmas, when it was known that
the Government would be turned out as soon as Parliament met, he was
talking to one of his Under Secretaries and said: ‘I suppose you are
going away for a holiday?’ ‘Yes,’ was the reply; ‘I am going away for a
week; what holiday are you going to take?’ ‘I shall take none,’ he said;
and then, with the air of one who is making a confession, ‘The fact is,
you know, it is all very well for you: but I’m new to office: I enjoy it
thoroughly; and I’m going to be kicked out very soon. So I mean to stay
here and get as much of it as I can.’
Lord Salisbury in after-years distinguished as perhaps Lord Randolph
Churchill’s greatest quality his power of commanding the personal
devotion of his subordinates. In coming to the India Office the new
Minister was lucky in finding available as his Private Secretary a
remarkable man, who rendered invaluable service to him, to the India
Office, and (it is hardly too much to say) to the two Governments of
which Lord Randolph was a member. Mr. A. W. Moore had come at an early
age to the India Office as a clerk, with no special reputation for
industry or ability, and, being placed in the Finance Department, was
soon regarded as a somewhat idle and not very efficient member of the
establishment. After some years, however, he was by a lucky chance
transferred to the Political Department, which is concerned with Indian
Foreign Affairs and with the relations between the Government of India
and the Native States and conducts the correspondence which is
constantly passing between the India Office and the Foreign Office. No
more important work could be found; but it requires special
qualifications which are not very commonly met with. ‘Mr. Moore,’ writes
Sir Arthur Godley, ‘as soon as he was transferred, was a new man: he set
to work with extraordinary energy and zeal and in a very short time
acquired the reputation, which he never lost, of being among the most
valuable servants of the Crown. His industry was immense, possibly
excessive; his knowledge of his work, and of everything connected with
it, was unrivalled: he had it always at his finger-ends; and his gift of
rapid but clear, lucid and effective conversation and writing was hardly
to be surpassed. When Lord Randolph came to the Office, it happened
fortunately that, owing to some changes in the Department, Moore’s
services were available, though his age and position were by this time
such as might have been expected to debar him from the office of Private
Secretary. In this capacity he was exactly the man Lord Randolph needed;
he supplied whatever was at first wanting to his chief, who treated him
not only with the most complete confidence but really more as a
colleague than as a subordinate; and it may safely be said that he
contributed in no small degree to the success with which Lord Randolph
discharged the duties of the two great offices which he successively
held.’
Moore followed his chief from the India Office to the Treasury when Lord
Salisbury’s Administration of 1886 was formed, and Lord Randolph
Churchill’s resignation of the Chancellorship of the Exchequer seems to
have struck him a fatal blow. In a sense it may be said to have broken
his heart. His health had for some time suffered from the amount of work
he imposed upon himself. He was an active, athletic man, a great hero in
the annals of the Alpine Club; but he had undoubtedly over-tasked both
his mind and his body in the service of a master to whom he was not only
personally but politically devoted. Fortunately, as it seemed, an
opportunity occurred just then of offering him the headship of his old
branch, the Political Department, in the India Office. He accepted it,
and went abroad to the Riviera for a few weeks’ rest. But he never
recovered from his exhaustion and depression, caught a fever at Cannes
and died there two months later (February 2, 1887) at the age of 46.
‘The Home Civil Service,’ writes Sir Arthur Godley, ‘has not, for very
many years, sustained a greater loss.’
When Lord Randolph Churchill became Secretary of State for India on June
24, 1885, the imminent danger of war with Russia had been dispelled by
the agreement of May 4. Under this it was arranged that Penjdeh should
be neutralised till the boundary on that section of the frontier had
been settled and that negotiations should be resumed at once in London
as to the main points of the line of delimitation, the details of which
alone would be examined and settled by Commissioners on the spot. Some
progress had also been made towards defining the general line of the
frontier by an agreement arrived at on May 22. That agreement, however,
left open what was then the crucial question of how to reconcile the
full possession by the Afghans of the Zulficar Pass, on which we
insisted with the maintenance of the existing communications between
points on the Russian side of the frontier which the Russian Government
considered essential. This difficulty had declared itself before the
change of Government took place and the negotiations on the subject were
resumed by Lord Salisbury from the point at which they had been left by
Lord Granville.
Little progress was made for some considerable time and the situation
again became somewhat critical owing to the local excitement on both
sides of the border and recollections of what had taken place at
Penjdeh. Finally, however, an agreement was arrived at and embodied in
a Protocol signed on September 10, which stated, in sufficient detail to
ensure the completion of the work, the conditions under which the
Commissioners on the spot were to carry out the actual demarcation. The
agreement was one which, though it necessarily involved mutual
concessions, enabled both parties to it to claim that they had made no
sacrifice of vital points. From the British point of view the really
important objects attained by the settlement were the maintenance of
British credit with the Amir, whose interests had been successfully
guarded, the escape from what for a long and anxious period had seemed a
diplomatic impasse and the establishment of a frontier which has
remained unaltered to this day.
The actual demarcation commenced on November 10, when Sir Joseph West
Ridgeway met the Russian Commissioner at Zulficar. The work proved long
and difficult; and the position of the British Agent, forced to winter
with a small escort in that wild country, was full of peril to himself
and caused constant anxiety at home. It was not until July 1887 that a
Protocol was signed at St. Petersburg completing the delimitation of the
whole frontier between the Hari Rud and the Oxus.
Lord Randolph’s letters to the Queen throw a clear light on his views
and temper during this critical time. The dignified and ceremonious
style which flowed so naturally from his pen may surprise the reader who
is familiar with his platform speeches and his private letters.
India Office: July 11, 1885.
Lord Randolph Churchill presents his humble duty to your Majesty,
and begs to submit the accompanying telegrams which have passed
between the Viceroy of India and himself.
There can hardly be any doubt, in view of the remarkable
expressions made use of by Mr. Gladstone on Tuesday last in the
House of Commons, giving such strong confirmation as to the
absolute pledge given by the Government of Russia, that the pass of
Zulficar should be ceded to the Amir. Your Majesty’s Government is
in an exceptionally favourable position for taking up an unyielding
attitude on this question. Parliament as a body is practically
committed to the policy of faithful observance of pledges given to
the Amir, and it may well be that so much Parliamentary unanimity
on any large question of foreign policy may not occur again for a
very long time. It is most earnestly to be hoped that this dispute
with the Government of Russia, which really involves the whole
Afghan Question as far as Russia is concerned, may be definitely
decided one way or another before Parliament separates for the
recess.
The negotiations have been extremely protracted. Troops are being
massed, both by Russians and Afghans, near the frontier; the strain
on the finances of India, caused by the obligation of keeping our
military preparations in a very advanced state, is evidently
causing the Viceroy uneasiness; and the character and credit of
this country cannot well sustain any further concessions to Russia
at the expense of our ally the Amir.
If this matter is not resolutely treated and definitely settled
now, before Parliament separates, not only does the state of
military emergency, so trying both to this country and to India,
continue indefinitely, but there is great reason to believe that in
September or October the Russians will make a further advance or
aggression, just before the General Election here, causing the
greatest alarm, confusion, excitement, and party feeling among the
people, and consequently the greatest possible danger to the
interests and security of India. Lord Randolph Churchill would
humbly submit that no possible precaution should be neglected now
in order, if possible, to obviate such an eventuality.
Lord Randolph Churchill humbly submits to your Majesty a memorandum
he has drawn up on the subject of proposing to the Government of
Russia and, if possible, concluding a comprehensive and to some
extent permanent treaty, providing generally for the integrity of
Afghanistan and the regulation of all frontier matters, and having
appended to it a rough draft of the possible clauses of such a
treaty.
India Office: July 13, 1885.
Lord Randolph Churchill presents his humble duty to your Majesty,
and begs to submit that, as is pointed out by your Majesty, it
would be in the highest degree desirable to have some information
as to the manner in which a proposal for a comprehensive treaty on
the Afghan Frontier Question would be received by the Government of
Russia.
Lord Randolph Churchill has never supposed that a proposal of this
kind would be favourably received by the Government of Russia
unless it was known to that Power that such a proposal was
favourably received by other European Powers, or that a refusal to
view it in a friendly manner would place so singular an
interpretation on Russian policy that the continuation of
negotiations might become very difficult.
Such a state of things, favourable to the proposal for a treaty the
rough draft of which has been humbly submitted to your Majesty,
does not exist at the present moment. Whether such a state of
things may be brought into existence Lord Randolph Churchill would
not venture to determine positively, but he has often expressed to
Lord Salisbury the opinion that an effort in this direction could
not well be at variance with sound policy, and would in no way
conflict with public opinion.
The observation which your Majesty graciously records, that under
such a treaty as has been sketched your Majesty’s Government would
become responsible for the acts of the Amir, is profoundly
accurate; and it may well be that such a policy is liable to most
searching criticism, and might lead to serious evils. The whole
policy which is best known as ‘the buffer State policy’ is herein
called in question, and Lord Randolph Churchill is possessed by the
gravest doubts as to whether that policy is the best which could be
adopted for the security of your Majesty’s Indian Empire.
In its defence it may be urged, [1] That that policy has been
adopted by this country for very many years; with short and abrupt
intervals it was the policy pursued when Dost Mahomed and when
Shere Ali Khan ruled in Afghanistan. [2] That it is a policy to
which both political parties in this country are deeply committed,
and therefore it is a policy which, if it does not actually unite
public men, perhaps divides them the least. [3] Under that policy
pledges of a very binding character have been given to the present
Amir, on several occasions, that as long as he is guided by the
advice of your Majesty’s Government in the conduct of his foreign
relations your Majesty’s Government will hold themselves
responsible for, and will protect him from, any dangers and evils
arising from that advice being followed. [4] It is a policy which,
if it can be carried out (a very large and wide assumption),
undoubtedly has the merit of keeping Russian influence very remote
from actual contact with India.
The great danger of the policy alluded to is that it is dependent
upon the caprice or the design of the Amir; that it may be upset at
any moment by the revolt of the Governor of Badakshan in the north
and of the Governor of Herat in the south-west of Afghanistan, by
the escape of Ayoub Khan from Teheran, or by a decidedly aggressive
movement of the Russian forces.
It may be doubted whether there is any real solution of our
difficulties and dangers except in the breaking-up by force of arms
of the Russian Asiatic Empire, an enterprise far less hazardous and
doubtful, in Lord Randolph Churchill’s opinion, than is generally
supposed, but nevertheless an undertaking the responsibility of
which would, except under extraordinary circumstances, terrify an
Administration which at the present day has to face a House of
Commons.
Lord Randolph Churchill humbly submits that in acknowledging the
great force of your Majesty’s observations graciously conveyed to
him he has ventured to offer for your Majesty’s consideration views
and opinions which have for long been upon his mind, and Lord
Randolph Churchill earnestly hopes that he may not have
transgressed your Majesty’s pleasure by too diffuse an exposition.
No further action could well be taken with regard to a treaty until
the opinion of the Viceroy has been fully ascertained.
India Office: July 15, 1885.
Lord Randolph Churchill presents his humble duty to your Majesty,
and begs to submit that there can be little doubt that your
Majesty’s apprehension that the Government of Russia will try to
evade the half-promise they gave to cede the pass of Zulficar to
the Afghan Amir is well founded. Lord Randolph Churchill would
humbly submit to your Majesty whether the original pledge given by
the Russians was not very full and unreserved, the difficulty about
communications being raised subsequently. In the note to M. de
Staal Lord Salisbury has taken this view very plainly. Colonel
Ridgeway’s telegrams cannot well be regarded as at all reassuring,
though there is reason to hope that the news in No. 97 may not be
altogether so grave as at first seemed to appear. The sequence of
events from day to day does not at all weaken the views on the
whole boundary question which Lord Randolph Churchill has from time
to time humbly submitted to your Majesty, and Lord Randolph
Churchill is more than ever of opinion that a firm and resolute
insistence on the faithful fulfilment of Russian pledges is not
only vital to your Majesty’s interests, but perhaps in reality the
best method of averting an eventual rupture of negotiations.
While Lord Salisbury at the Foreign Office was rapidly gathering into
his skilful hands the tense and tangled threads of British diplomacy,
the Secretary of State for India took pains to secure an effective
defence upon the spot. Until the advance of Russia had reached the
borders of Afghanistan, the functions of the military forces of India
had been limited to maintaining internal peace or to frontier operations
against adversaries of limited power. Now that a great European Power,
liable at any time to become hostile, was in close proximity to the
Afghan border, it was evident that the existing military establishments
must be strengthened. The British troops in India were accordingly
increased by 11 batteries of artillery (30 guns and 1,373 men), by the
addition of a fourth squadron to each British cavalry regiment (1,332
men), and by the addition of three battalions of infantry and the
augmentation of each of those already serving by 100 rank and file,
amounting to 196 officers and 10,567 men. The increase of the British
garrison allowed an expansion--in recognised proportion--of the native
army. Most of the cavalry regiments were raised to four squadrons each
and three new native cavalry regiments were formed, making an increase
of 56 British officers and 4,572 natives of all ranks. Nine new native
infantry battalions were enlisted and the strength of the existing
regiments was increased--a total addition of 63 British officers and
11,968 natives of all ranks. Various improvements were made in the
position of the native soldier and a native Army Reserve was formed of
23,000 men. The Ordnance and Commissariat Departments were reorganised
and an Army Transport Department was formed. The construction of
strategical railways, roads and bridges on the North-West Frontier was
undertaken, and Karachi harbour was improved as part of a general scheme
of defence. Although all these military preparations were rapidly pushed
forward, this substantial increase of power was secured at an initial
cost of about one and a half millions sterling and maintained at an
annual charge of not much more than one million pounds a year. Lord
Randolph also approved, shortly before he left the India Office, of a
proposal for arming the native army with the best rifle available and
placing it in this respect on an equal footing with British troops. This
change, however, was long delayed.
Scarcely anything that Lord Randolph Churchill did as a Minister gave
him more pleasure than the appointment of Sir Frederick Roberts to be
Commander-in-Chief in India. It was almost the first important step
which he took on coming into power. Very powerful influences supported
the high claims of Lord Wolseley and, as the appointment of the Indian
Commander-in-Chief rested according to practice with the Secretary of
State for War, the matter hung for some days in suspense. But Lord
Randolph was insistent. His long and friendly talks with Sir Frederick
Roberts during his visit to India had made a great impression upon him.
All his life he continued to assert that Roberts was the first soldier
of his age. The Russian crisis and Sir Frederick’s unequalled service
and experience in the theatre of possible war constituted in his eyes
overwhelming qualifications. He won the agreement of Lord Salisbury; he
persuaded the Queen. In less than five weeks after the Government had
taken office, the appointment was announced and was received with
general assent and satisfaction.
In conjunction with this appointment and with the military preparations,
orders were given and money supplied for a Camp of Exercise to be
prepared upon a much larger scale than had ever been held in India
before. The troops were mobilised early in 1886 in two Army Corps. They
assembled at Umballa and Gurgaon--towns 150 miles apart--and after a
fortnight of brigade and divisional tactics, the opposing forces came
into contact near the famous battle-ground of Panipat. This was the
first occasion on which representatives from foreign armies had been
invited to be present at Indian manœuvres. Lord Randolph Churchill
arranged that the invitations should be sent through the Foreign Office;
and Lord Dufferin, who was present during the closing days of the
operations, was accompanied by twelve officers from the principal armies
of Europe and America.
On August 6 the Secretary of State for India laid the Indian Budget
before the House. This statement, coming as it does during the ‘Dog
Days,’ at the end of the Session, is usually heard in its ponderous
complexity with apathy by an empty and exhausted House. But the
importance of public departments varies with the authority of the
Minister who directs them. The Chamber was filled with members in all
the interest and eagerness of a great Parliamentary occasion. Nor were
they disappointed. Lord Randolph had no difficulty in holding their
attention for upwards of an hour and three-quarters while he unfolded in
stately language, but with the utmost simplicity and clearness, the wide
scroll of Asia. Intricate and unfamiliar figures, facts and problems
tangled with strange names and novel conditions, submitted themselves
willingly to his interesting narration. The account was not cheering in
its character. The confusion of Indian finances had permitted an
astounding error in the Budget calculations of Lord Ripon’s Government
and the new Minister had to announce to Parliament a heavy deficit,
largely unforeseen. The Russian crisis, moreover, imposed upon India the
necessity of extensive military preparations. Before he had spoken very
long the House realised that Lord Randolph was developing an elaborate
indictment of the late Viceroy.
‘The most unpardonable crime,’ he said, ‘of which the Governor-General
of India can be guilty, is not to look ahead and make provision for the
future. The Government of England cannot from its very nature look far
ahead; its policy is always one of month to month, of week to week and
sometimes of day to day; it is always more or less a policy of hand to
mouth. The reason is, that our Government in England depends upon a
Parliamentary majority which is violently assailed and swayed by an
enlightened, but at the same time by a capricious public opinion. The
Government of England has to think, in shaping its policy, of the state
of Europe, of the Colonies and of Ireland; of the state of England; and
last, not least, of the state of business in the House of Commons. It
has to think of all those subjects, and the result is, that although we
in England possess an unrivalled Constitution and unexampled freedom,
yet for the purpose of that freedom we have to put up with the
disadvantage of little stability and little continuity in our Government
and hardly any forethought in our policy. The Government of India is
exempt from all these disadvantages. It is a Government in its nature
purely despotic, but it is not an hereditary despotism. We do our best
to supply India from time to time with statesmen who shall exercise this
tremendous power of government, but who shall at the same time be wise,
experienced and courageous. In India it is not as in England. In India
there is no public opinion to speak of, no powerful press, and hardly
any trammels upon the Government of any sort or kind. For that reason I
say that if the Governor-General of India does not look ahead and
provide for the future, he not only commits a blunder but is guilty of a
crime.
‘I am compelled to apply this general statement to the Government of
Lord Ripon. Lord Ripon went out to India with a full knowledge of the
state of affairs; he knew of all the events which had occurred--of the
Russo-Turkish War which led to the Treaty of San Stefano and the
Congress of Berlin; he knew of all the events which had caused the great
preparations of Russia for advancing on India. He must have had
knowledge of the gradual but sure extension of the Russian Empire in
Asia.... I say nothing of the abandonment of Candahar. I say little of
the destruction of the Quetta Railway. I come rather to the acts of Lord
Ripon’s Government which seriously affected the finances of this year.
Lord Ripon had prosperous times to deal with and an increasing revenue.
The sky overhead, to the careless observer, seemed very blue. All
dangers apparently had passed away so far as foreign affairs were
concerned and so far as they had any bearing upon Indian finances, and
Lord Ripon and his counsellors laid themselves down and slept. All
indirect taxation of any value was remitted, the Customs duty was almost
totally abolished and the salt duty was reduced. In 1882-3 the Indian
army was reduced by five cavalry regiments and sixteen infantry
regiments. The British army was allowed to fall to 10,000 men below its
proper strength. To bring it up to its full strength, which it has now
nearly attained, has cost the Indian Government 100,000_l._ No frontier
railways were commenced; no roads were begun; no preparations were made
for the defence of a long and difficult frontier. Surely in prosperous
times a wise man would have provided for the event of a rainy day. But
Lord Ripon slept, lulled by the languor of the land of the lotus. Yet
there was much which ought to have warned and to have roused him. In
1882 the Russian Government, with the frankest candour, called our
attention to their proceedings in Central Asia and invited us to delimit
the frontier of Afghanistan; but the only reply they received was a dull
and sullen reply, as of a man under the influence of a narcotic. Our
ally, the Amir of Afghanistan, also sent many warnings. It is most
curious to observe, in the account of the interview of the Amir with
Lord Dufferin at Rawul Pindi, how frequently we come across that
familiar saying “I told you so.” All this time the cloud grew bigger,
the distant darkness nearer and blacker and the great military Power
loomed larger and more distinct upon our borders; yet Lord Ripon and his
counsellors slumbered and slept, never dreaming that any foreign danger
could by any possibility come nigh those dominions which had been
entrusted to their watchful care, taking no thought for the morrow,
heedless and ignorant of the future which was shaping itself with the
utmost clearness under their very eyes. Then, sir, there came a sharp
and sudden awakening. Russia’s hosts absorbed the territory of Merv,
rapidly filled up the vacuum to the south which had been so blindly left
unprovided for by us, and Lord Ripon and his counsellors were found,
like the foolish virgins, with no oil in their lamps. Then followed the
fruitless frontier negotiations and Lord Ripon came home and Lord
Dufferin went out, not one hour too soon for the safety of India and the
tranquillity of the East. Next we see the lonely and unsupported
British Commissioner endeavouring to stay the advance of the Russian
troops--troops flushed with success and animated by the highest hopes of
glory and of booty. Then came the incident of Penjdeh and, following
that, the vote of credit of eleven millions. Next we see the hasty and
hurried recommencement of the Quetta Railway which had been so foolishly
abandoned. Then came the announcement of the frontier railways and roads
too fatally postponed. And then came the additional military
expenditure, from three to four millions; and the result of it all is
now before the House in the deficit in the Indian accounts of a million
and a half and in the permanent extra military charge of no less than
two millions a year.[40] The good time has gone; the advantages which we
had, have been thrown away. No economy whatever was practised by that
Government. The expenditure on civil buildings was allowed to be
increased by over one million a year. The Famine Insurance Fund, on
which we prided ourselves, has been proved in time of trial to be
illusory. I declare that I endeavoured to contemplate the action of the
late Government of India without party passion. I found in it not one
redeeming feature. Indian interests were so clumsily, so stupidly,
handled that progress has been thrown back almost for a generation; and
having to place those results before the House of Commons in the
practical and matter-of-fact form of figures and finance, I disown and
repudiate on behalf of the present Government all responsibility of any
sort or kind for that policy and I hold up that Viceroyalty and the
Government responsible for it to the censure and the condemnation of the
British and Indian peoples.
‘This Parliament,’ he concluded, after a survey of many matters
interesting in themselves, but too specialised for quotation here, ‘has
done little or nothing for India. It would appear as if members of
Parliament of the present generation considered Indian affairs to be
either beneath their attention or above their comprehension, and India
is apparently left to pursue its destiny alone--some might even think
uncared for--as far as Parliament is concerned. That was not always the
case. In the last century, when our Indian Empire was forming, the
greatest men--Mr. Pitt and Mr. Burke and Mr. Fox--did not disdain to
apply their minds to the most careful examination and exposition of the
difficult and complicated Indian questions, and with great advantage. At
the present time, when everything around is changing fast and when
nothing seems secure or firm or free from assault and danger, as far as
India is concerned, we shall act wisely if we revert to the more
patriotic practice of earlier days. I would ask those who have been so
kind as to listen to me, and those who possibly may not have concurred
in many remarks I have made, to join with me in what I would call an
appeal, or even, almost, a command, to those who will be our successors,
some faint echo of which may possibly linger around these walls and
influence the new Parliament so shortly to meet here: I would ask those
who hear me to join in an appeal to the members of the new Parliament to
shake themselves free from the lassitude, the carelessness, the apathy,
which have too long characterised the attitude of Parliament towards
India. I would appeal to them to watch with the most sedulous attention,
to develop with the most anxious care, to guard with the most united and
undying resolution, the land and the people of Hindostan, that most
truly bright and precious gem in the crown of the Queen, the possession
of which, more than that of all your Colonial dominions, has raised in
power, in resource, in wealth and in authority this small island home of
ours far above the level of the majority of nations and of States--has
placed it on an equality with, perhaps even in a position of superiority
over, every other Empire either of ancient or of modern times.’
With this impressive harangue the ‘Ministry of Caretakers’ may be said
to have brought the Session and the Parliament to a close.
Upon Lord Randolph’s acceptance of office begins a constant, intimate
and candid correspondence with Lord Salisbury, which ranges over the
whole field of politics at home and abroad, continues with almost equal
fulness in Opposition and in Government and ends abruptly in January
1887. Their letters were never more frequent than when Lord Randolph was
at the India Office. The fortunes of India were at this time inseparably
interwoven with the conduct of the Foreign Office--at first in regard
to Russia and Afghanistan, and later on in regard to France and China on
account of Burma--and Lord Randolph was always most particular to
consult the Prime Minister on any matter of importance and to take no
serious step without his concurrence. Lord Salisbury, on the other hand,
had much to give to an Indian Secretary. He possessed a vast knowledge
of Indian affairs, gained during his prolonged administration of that
department; and in all matters of official method, of procedure and
etiquette, his guidance was especially valuable to a Minister altogether
unversed in the details of administration.
Lord Salisbury was, like Lord Randolph Churchill, a prodigious
letter-writer, and he seems to have written no fewer than 110 letters to
his lieutenant--many of them very long ones--all in his beautiful
running handwriting, during the seven months of his first Ministry. How
he ever found time to write so many to a single Minister is a marvel.
Often three letters passed between them in a day. On July 25, for
instance, Lord Salisbury wrote four times to Lord Randolph on different
subjects, all of considerable importance. Two of these letters cover
between them five separate pieces of closely written notepaper. To a
later generation, accustomed to shorthand writers and anticipating a
time when it will be regarded as inconsiderate to address a person on
business otherwise than in type, such manual energy is astounding.
Whether elaborate letter-writing between Ministers is conducive to the
facile conduct of public affairs is doubtful. Strength and time are
consumed, difficulties are multiplied and differences only look wider
and more formidable when marshalled by ink and paper. Many of the
questions laboriously discussed on both sides of this correspondence
could have been despatched immediately at an interview or even upon a
telephone. But Lord Salisbury did not like political conversations. He
felt that he could not do so much justice to himself or his opinions in
an informal discussion as he could either in a letter or a speech. He
belonged, moreover, to a formal, painstaking, old-fashioned school; and
in Lord Randolph Churchill he had a pupil unexpectedly apt and
energetic.
Whatever may have been lost at the time has been gained by posterity,
for Lord Salisbury’s letters have a character and interest apart from
and even superior to the important matters with which they deal. A wit
at once shrewd and genial; an insight into human nature penetrating,
comprehensive, rather cynical; a vast knowledge of affairs; the quick
thoughts of a moody, fertile mind, expressed in language that always
preserves a spice and flavour of its own, are qualities which must exert
an attraction upon a generation to whom the politics of the ‘85
Government will be dust.
Throughout their association the letters of both men--whether in
agreement or in sharpest dispute--are marked by personal goodwill; and
Lord Randolph never for a moment drops the air of respect and deference
with which he invariably treated Lord Salisbury and which is never more
pronounced than in moments of stress. Lord Salisbury’s counsels and
comments are always instructive and so often amusing that I may be
allowed to transcribe a few at random: ‘My dear Randolph,’ the letters
begin (June 25), ‘(if I may venture to address a Secretary of State in
such familiar fashion!),--So much has been made of Herat, that we must
do more than is possible to defend it’ (July 25). ‘I quite agree with
your doctrine that it is better to go at the principal offender rather
than the instrument--with one important qualification--_if you can_’
(August 4). ‘It is curious to notice how the “buffer State” policy has
gone down in the world. When first I had to do with India, nineteen
years ago, it was the supremest orthodoxy: you might as well have
impugned one of the doctrines of Free Trade’ (August 4). Upon a curious
little question of Portuguese ecclesiastical establishments in India he
writes (August 24): ‘I am glad to see you take the same view as on the
first blush I was inclined to take. The Government of India by its
nature must ignore religious questions, except so far as they take the
secular form of furnishing a pretext for either robbery or riot.’ ‘I am
inclined to think you underrate H----. He knows these odd people in a
way we cannot do. I should be as much inclined to set up my opinion
against that of the keeper of an asylum on the best way of keeping
lunatics quiet’ (November 24). Again, in another letter on the same
day: ‘I am afraid F.O. and I.O. have hopelessly divergent opinions on
H----’s trustworthiness. But I think that when Departments differ on a
point which is not worthy of reference to the Cabinet, the best rule is
that the Department should prevail which will have the trouble of
dealing with the consequences of a mistake if a mistake is made. The
India Office view should therefore prevail.’
‘Honours’ and promotions of various kinds prove a thorny business to
handle, more especially after an episode soon to be recorded. ‘I was not
aware that Mr. * * * had been disappointed. He bears a high character in
the service, and I shall be glad to assist him if I have the
opportunity. But it is perilous to go out of the beaten track in matters
of promotion. I remember doing it in 1878, and I had a vote of censure
moved on me in the House of Commons by a Conservative’ (January 8,
1886). ‘I am afraid that in the matter of honours I am as destitute as
you are. The C.B.’s are all exhausted’ (June 20). And again (November
13): ‘My Baths are all run dry.’ ‘There can be no doubt that * * * is a
very fit candidate for the Privy Council and I will submit his name at
once. We may take more time to consider over the other two--who are less
distinguished: it will be time enough to settle whenever a
much-to-be-regretted accident befalls us. Unless * * * is very much
changed, I doubt your getting him to resign for a Privy Councillorship.
If I might follow the precedents of the early Church I should like to
make * * * a Bishop’ (December 5). ‘That fountain which you desire to
have turned on for the benefit of Birmingham is frozen up--and only runs
with a dribble. It is very difficult to restore it to activity’
(November 13).
The pleasant flow of this correspondence was very soon disturbed by an
interlude which might have broken up many other things as well. The
Bombay command, which at that date was a post of much dignity and
importance, carrying the title of Commander-in-Chief and giving the
holder a seat on the Governor’s Council, became vacant about the same
time that the new Government took office. In the prevailing uncertainty
upon the frontier Lord Randolph Churchill desired that it should be
filled at once. He agreed with Mr. Smith at the War Office upon an
officer. The Queen, however, was anxious that the Duke of Connaught
should serve in high command in India and Lord Salisbury strongly urged
her wishes upon the Secretary of State. ‘Though I am quite ready to
accept the responsibility of your decision,’ he wrote (July 25), ‘I
cannot, speaking confidentially, take quite your view. I hold that in
India the monarchy must seem to be as little constitutional as possible;
that it is of great importance to obtrude upon the native Indian mind
the personality of the Sovereign and her family; and that, therefore,
the policy of giving high military command to one of the Queen’s sons is
a step of political importance; and that its value is far from being
outweighed by the more restricted considerations attaching to military
susceptibilities or the details of military administration.... However,
though my opinions on it are clear, the matter is one for your
decision.’
Lord Randolph Churchill resisted the appointment with an obstinate
determination. It need scarcely be said that his reasons were not based
on any suggestion that the Duke of Connaught was not fully qualified to
discharge the military duties of the office. They consisted entirely in
the grave constitutional objections which exist to the employment of
Royal Princes in positions, such as the Bombay command then was, which
carry with them the necessity of speaking and voting constantly in
Council, and where numerous and important _political_ functions, apart
from military duty, may at any moment devolve upon the General officer
in command. These reasons were unanimously accepted as decisive by the
Cabinet on October 9. While the matter was still in suspense there
occurred an incident which is, on various grounds, indispensable to the
completeness of this story. The letters tell their own tale:--
_Lord Salisbury to Lord Randolph Churchill._
(_Very Confidential._)
Hatfield House, Hatfield, Herts:
August 14, 1885.
My dear Randolph,--About ten days ago the Queen wrote to me and
told me to send a private telegram to Lord Dufferin in the
following words:
‘How would it be for the Duke of Connaught to succeed to the
command at Bombay? I wish for your opinion by telegraph after you
have consulted Sir Donald Stewart and Sir Frederick Roberts, both
of whom, I know, think very highly of the Duke of Connaught’s
qualifications.’
As it is quite regular for the Queen to communicate directly with
the Viceroy, I simply cyphered and sent the telegram without note
or comment on my part.
At the beginning of this week I received from the Viceroy and
forwarded to the Queen, also without any comment, the following
reply:
‘Secret and Personal. Please submit following to Her Majesty. Both
Sir Frederick Roberts and the Commander-in-Chief entirely approve
of the idea of the Duke of Connaught’s appointment to the command
of the Bombay army. The Commander-in-Chief observes that the Duke
was the best of his General officers, and he considers that he
possesses great tact in dealing with the natives. Speaking from a
political point of view, I have always considered it a very good
thing that one of H.M.’s sons should be in India. The presence of
the Duchess of Connaught also exercises a very wholesome effect
upon Indian society. Personally I should welcome H.R.H.’s return
with the greatest satisfaction.’
The next day there came the following from the Viceroy, which was
also sent on to the Queen:
‘I conclude you know that in a despatch which will go home next
week, or the week following, we are reiterating the proposals
already made by the Indian Government for the amalgamation of the
Presidential armies, in which case the command at Bombay would be
that of a Lieutenant-General. Perhaps you will mention this to Her
Majesty.’
I then requested the Queen that I might be allowed to communicate
these telegrams to you, which I have received permission to do.
I have not offered her any advice on this matter since I last wrote
to you about it--except to defer any public decision till after the
election.
My advice to you, however, would be to give way, so far as the
Lieutenant-Generalship is concerned; that is to say, subject to
the last telegram. It is probable that these three men are sincere
in substance in what they recommend; and, if so, there is no doubt
they are probably right--and our position (if we oppose them) will
be a very difficult one to maintain. On the other hand, I think no
declaration should be made before the elections.
Believe me
Yours very truly,
SALISBURY.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Salisbury._
Carlton Club: August 14, 1885.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--I have just received your two letters; one
about the succession to the Bombay Command, and the other about
giving Mr. Gorst[41] a nomination for the examination for the F.O.
I am very greatly obliged to you for your kindness in this latter
matter.
The first subject is very serious, to my mind. I cannot continue to
hold with any advantage the high position which H.M. the Queen has
conferred upon me unless I feel I have the confidence of the
Sovereign and her principal advisers. This elementary qualification
I am without. Some time ago I placed you in possession of the
objections which I and others saw to the Bombay Command being
conferred upon the Duke of Connaught. I was not aware that it was
possible, under such circumstances, that communications should pass
between the Prime Minister and the Viceroy, at the instance of H.M.
the Queen, without the knowledge of the Secretary of State, on a
matter on which the latter held very strong and deliberate
opinions.
I have for some time felt that the India Office, while I was there,
had little influence with respect to other matters of great
importance. But from what has passed between yourself and the
Viceroy about the Duke of Connaught, it must be obvious to the
Viceroy that I no longer possess either the confidence of the
Sovereign or of yourself, and, under these circumstances, I
respectfully ask you to submit to H.M. the Queen my resignation of
the office which I have now the honour to hold.
Yours very sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
_Lord Salisbury to Lord Randolph Churchill._
_Private._
Hatfield House, Hatfield, Herts: August 14, 1885.
My dear Randolph,--I am sorry you take such a view of a
correspondence that is perfectly regular. The Queen has always
written private letters to the Viceroy, and has always received
private answers from him, both received and sent without any
knowledge of any of her Ministers. She would have telegraphed in
the same way, only the Viceroy did not happen to have her cypher. I
did nothing else but cypher and decypher the message for her. I
could no more inform you of her private telegram, without her
leave, than I could inform you of a private letter, if I had been
asked to copy it for her, without her leave.
I regret very much that you should think I have not shown you
confidence. I have done my best to give effect to your wishes as
far as I possibly could. In this case I think you are really under
a misapprehension. What has passed does not pledge your liberty of
action, or decide the question in issue. The question is exactly
where it would have been if the Queen, instead of telegraphing, had
written to Lord Dufferin. It would still have remained to be
decided by her responsible Ministers. The only effect of the
telegraphing has been to ante-date the issue by five or six weeks.
I trust I have removed from your mind all misapprehension of the
character and effects of the Queen’s correspondence with Lord
Dufferin.
Believe me
Yours very truly,
SALISBURY.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Mr. Moore._
Dear Mr. Moore,--Will you copy the enclosed letter to Lord S., and
send it to Hatfield? A special messenger is not necessary.
Yours very truly,
RANDOLPH S. C.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Salisbury._
2 Connaught Place, W.: August 15.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--You write to me, as usual, very kindly, for
which I am indeed grateful; but the impressions with which I
received your letter of yesterday remain as strong as ever. God
forbid that I should allow myself for one moment to throw a shadow
of a doubt upon the right of the Sovereign to communicate with the
utmost freedom on any conceivable matter with any one of her
subjects; but I submit that a very different question arises when a
communication from the Queen to so high an official as the Viceroy
of India on a matter of high State importance passes through the
Prime Minister. Such a communication, so sent, acquires a character
of responsibility which it would not otherwise possess.
Moreover, the matter becomes complicated indeed when it happens to
be the fact that it is in the knowledge of the Prime Minister that
the Royal communication which he forwards contains a suggestion--or
rather, I may say, makes a proposal--to which the responsible head
of the Department chiefly concerned entertains the strongest
possible objections.
The communications from the Queen direct to the Viceroy may be
frequent--I can see no reason why they should not be; but it would
appear that telegraphic messages on matters of a very confidential
and important nature have not been usual hitherto; otherwise surely
the Viceroy would have been provided with a copy of the Queen’s
cypher.
Generally, I would further submit to you the following: My
position in relation to Lord Dufferin is in many ways anomalous. He
is old enough to be my father, has been all his life in public
affairs, has acquired an immense reputation. Clearly, therefore, it
is curious that I should be placed in a position of superiority
over him--I who have had no experience of official life, a very
short experience of public life, and have not acquired any
reputation worth speaking of.
Under the circumstances the relations between the Secretary of
State and the Viceroy can be attended with no advantage to the
public service, on the contrary must be attended with the utmost
disadvantage, unless it is, more than usually even, obvious to the
latter that the former possesses the full, complete and perfect
confidence of the Prime Minister.
Lord Dufferin is no ordinary man. He has a greater faculty for
putting two and two together than most men. I have not the smallest
doubts as to the nature of the impression left upon his mind by the
Royal communication on the subject of the Duke of Connaught as it
has reached him. In about a week he will get a letter from me in
which I gave at great length, and with all the arguments that had
occurred to me, my strong objections to the appointment in
question. He will find that he has committed himself somewhat
lightly, and after the manner of a courtier--influenced, no doubt,
by the fact that the inquiry came through you--to an opinion
diametrically at variance with that of the Secretary of State, and
he will know that in so doing the Prime Minister is on his side. If
you follow my argument and concur in the premises on which it is
based, I think you will easily see that satisfactory and
advantageous relations between me and Lord Dufferin, which under
the best circumstances were difficult, will now have become
impossible.
The superiority of the Secretary of State over the Viceroy, as
intended by the Constitution of the Indian Government, will exist
only in name as far as I am concerned, and this must have a most
unfortunate effect on all questions of Indian administration. I
shall never know, moreover, what communications may not be passing
between the Queen, the Prime Minister and the Viceroy on matters of
great and small importance; and this element of uncertainty and
ignorance of events will prevent me from being of the smallest
utility.
The appointment of the Duke of Connaught to a high and very
responsible military command in India is, as it appears to me, a
question of the utmost importance. It is not my business to point
out how largely is raised by it the constitutional position of
Royal Princes in these days; though I infer that you are aware of
the existence of objections of very considerable weight, from the
stipulation which you make with the Queen that no public
declaration of the appointment should be made till after the
elections. I am concerned only with the matter as it affects India
generally, and the Indian Army in particular. Although the
Secretary of State is not solely responsible for such an
appointment, he practically is the person most identified with it
in the public mind: and if it was not for my inexperience of
official life, I should have thought that it was absolutely
impossible that the freedom of action of the Secretary of State on
so important a matter could be so absolutely demolished as it has
been in this case.
I may add, to show the extreme inconvenience of allowing matters of
this kind to be prematurely settled without the knowledge of the
Department chiefly concerned, that the Viceroy’s proposal that the
Duke of Connaught should have the command of a Corps d’Armée with
the rank of Lieutenant-General is absolutely impracticable at the
present time. Even assuming that the new proposals of the
Government of India for the amalgamation of the Bombay and Madras
Commands were approved of by the Secretary of State in Council, and
this is very uncertain, they would require, before they could be
entered upon, an Act of Parliament. A Bill introduced into the
House of Commons for this purpose would lead to much debate; it
would necessarily raise very large questions of Indian government,
military and political; might easily fail to pass into law, and at
the best would hardly receive the Royal Assent till the early
autumn of next year. It cannot be supposed that all this while the
Bombay Army could be left without a responsible chief.
Under all these circumstances I remain of the opinion which I
expressed to you yesterday. From the first I always had great
doubts whether my being in the Government would be any advantage to
the Government or to the party. All doubts on the point are now
removed from my mind. A first-class question of Indian
administration has been taken out of my hands, and at any moment
this action may recur, and it is clear to the Viceroy that I do not
occupy towards himself the position which the Secretary of State
ought and is supposed to occupy.
I therefore with much respect adhere to the views which I put
before you yesterday.
Believe me to be
Yours very sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
P.S.--I enclose for your consideration an extract from my letter to
Lord Dufferin of July 31.
His advice, which I asked for, will not be worth much now.
_Lord Salisbury to Lord Randolph Churchill._
_Private._
Hatfield House, Hatfield, Herts: August 15, 1885.
My dear Randolph,--I had no intention of taking any decision out of
your hands, and I think in attributing it to me you do not put
fairly the position in which I was placed. The Queen’s desire for
privacy was very natural. The question she was asking about her son
might have had an unfavourable answer: and then she would naturally
wish that as few should know it as possible. I could not,
therefore, do otherwise than I did--send the message, and urge her
to communicate it to you as soon as I knew it could be done
satisfactorily. It would not have been honourable to communicate it
before. Perhaps I might, if I had thought of it, have sent the
cypher to Ponsonby--but that would hardly have been civil; and it
did not occur to me that you would take this objection. As a matter
of fact I did not communicate with the Viceroy otherwise than by
transmitting that which was sent to me. But if I had done so I
should not have done anything unusual. Lord Beaconsfield used to do
it occasionally: and Lord Dufferin wrote to me and asked me to
correspond with him. The Viceroy is nominated by the Prime
Minister, not by the Secretary of State. I only say this because I
am concerned to show that I have not behaved unfairly to you, or
taken anything out of your hand. But I do not hold to this power of
corresponding either by letter or wire with the Viceroy: and if you
really feel that ‘you will never know what communications are
passing between the Queen, the Prime Minister, and the Viceroy,’ I
am quite ready to give up for myself the right of communicating
with him.
Of course, you must take what course you think right. I should be
sorry if, out of mere suspicion of me, you took a step which will
tend to break up the party at a critical time: and still more that
you should do it on a matter which can hardly fail to make the
Queen’s name and actions matter of public controversy. But, at all
events, before you take any definite step I trust you will talk to
me about it. I shall be going through town on Tuesday to Osborne.
If you are still there, would you come to me at two o’clock?
Yours very truly,
SALISBURY.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Salisbury._
2 Connaught Place, W.: August 16.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--I feel I cannot persist easily in urging my
view upon you after your letter received this morning, though it
does appear to me that you have not allowed yourself to appreciate
with perfect justice the consideration which I tried to convey to
you. It can be no satisfaction to me to be the means of depriving
Lord Dufferin of the advantage, instruction and pleasure which
correspondence direct with you cannot fail to afford him, and I do
not quite understand how you can think me capable of such a
purpose.
Further, I am much distressed that you should suppose that the step
which I was anxious to take (and which I still firmly believe would
be for the advantage of all concerned) could be animated by so
unworthy a motive as ‘suspicion of you.’
My argument was that, viewing all the surrounding circumstances
together, the peculiar occurrence about which I wrote had
seriously, if not irreparably, impaired my power of being useful to
your Government.
Perhaps, before finally putting aside what I have pressed upon you,
you will kindly give Mr. Moore an interview. He understands and can
explain the position as I regard it much better than I can make it
clear by letter.
I shall be happy to wait upon you on Tuesday in accordance with
your desire, if I am allowed to leave the house, to which for the
last two days I have been kept a prisoner.
Yours very sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
_Note by Mr. Moore._
I went to Hatfield on Sunday August 16, and saw Lord Salisbury. The
result was that he spontaneously proposed to send the subjoined
telegram to the Viceroy, which he thought would remove any
misapprehension on the part of Lord Dufferin. I took the draft to
Lord Randolph, who quite concurred. The matter was thus
settled.--A. W. M.
_Lord Salisbury to Mr. Moore._
_Private._
Hatfield House, Hatfield, Herts:
Sunday, August 16, 1885.
Dear Mr. Moore,--I am not sure that the last phrase in the draft
telegram I gave you is sufficiently accurate. It should run:
‘My own view--_though inclining towards the proposal_--is not very
decided on the subject.’
That is very much what Lord R. C. said in his letter.
Yours very truly,
SALISBURY.
DRAFT TELEGRAM.
_Lord Salisbury to Lord Dufferin._
Most secret. Your telegraphic correspondence with the Queen. It may
be as well to put upon record that the telegram I sent you was from
the Queen and that I merely transmitted it. The Cabinet have not
considered the question; there is much difference of opinion on the
subject, and my own view, though inclining to the proposal, is not
very decided.
_Lord Salisbury to Lord Randolph Churchill._
_Private._
Hatfield House, Hatfield, Herts: August 16, 1885.
My dear Randolph,--I was very glad to receive your letter, for it
would have been very painful if we had ‘come in two’ over this
matter. I saw Mr. Moore, whose power of exposition I knew of old. I
gave him a draft telegram which, if you approve, I will send, and
which will prevent any possible misapprehension in Dufferin’s mind.
I do not the least fear any such misapprehension--for he is an old
public servant, and knows the Queen’s ways well. You need not have
the least anxiety about your authority with Dufferin. I shall be
very glad if your health is sufficiently restored to enable you to
come about two on Tuesday to my house. I can explain any point you
wish explained, and I can tell you what Staal has said.
Ever yours very truly,
SALISBURY.
Opinions vary on the merits of this dispute. Some of those who have held
great office have informed me that the Secretary of State for India had
no choice but to tender his resignation after such an incident: and it
is certainly curious that so high an authority upon Ministerial
propriety as Lord Salisbury should have allowed the difficulty to arise.
On the other hand, it may be urged that personal slights, however
provoking, ought never to be allowed to compromise a great political
situation. Probably Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, in his dry way, summed the
question up correctly:--
_Sir Michael Hicks-Beach to Lord Randolph Churchill._
Many thanks for sending me the correspondence, which I return. I am
the more glad of its conclusion, because I think there is reason on
both sides. The Queen put Salisbury in an almost impossible
position by asking him to forward the telegram. He could not tell
you of it and it would have been very difficult, perhaps
impossible, for him to interfere with her _private_ correspondence
by suggesting that she should reconsider it. But, on the other
hand, I agree with you that the very fact of _his_ forwarding it
must have suggested to Dufferin that it was something more than the
Queen’s private opinion.
Salisbury has written to tell me what has passed and I have
therefore ventured to suggest to him that Ponsonby should have the
cypher, so that what has occurred should not happen again. So far
as I know, the Queen exercises her right of private correspondence
with great care, to avoid anything that would affect the decisions
of Ministers; and this exception to the rule was obviously due to
the personal nature of the question, which Dufferin (had the
telegram been sent by Ponsonby) would have quite appreciated.
But please forgive me for saying that I think you looked at this
matter rather too seriously last Friday. I think I should have been
more inclined to laugh at the story of the telegram than to treat
it as a proof of want of confidence on the part of the Queen and
Prime Minister. If you had not been ill you would never have said
of yourself in your letter to me that ‘I have no longer any energy
or ideas, and am no more good except to make disturbance.’ And I
suspect the same reason has influenced your view of this telegram
affair.
The sequel, so far as concerned the Bombay command, was simple. Lord
Dufferin perceived from Lord Salisbury’s second telegram that grave
differences had arisen in the Cabinet and that the matter would not be
settled with easy and deferential good-humour. Upon receiving Lord
Randolph’s despatch on the subject, the Viceroy, while seeming to
re-iterate his opinion, ranged himself with the Secretary of State in
the following dexterous sentence: ‘The fact of our having proposed the
abolition of the Presidential Commanderships-in-Chief has got rid of
what otherwise would have been _an insuperable objection_[42]: namely,
the political responsibilities of the Bombay Commander-in-Chief as a
member of Council’ (August 21). As this proposal involved the carrying
of a Bill through the House of Commons, the ‘insuperable objection’ must
have held good until the autumn of 1886--even had the Government
survived. The Cabinet, to whom the matter was referred, unanimously
decided (October 9) ‘that the political position of the
Commander-in-Chief of a presidency army could not be filled by a son of
the Queen’;[43] and the Bombay command remained vacant during the
remaining tenure of the Government. It should, however, be added, lest
anything in the foregoing correspondence should seem to reflect upon the
Duke of Connaught, that under Lord Salisbury’s second Administration,
the ‘insuperable objection’ being removed by the abolition of
Presidential Commanders-in-Chief with their customary political
functions, he was appointed to the Bombay command and discharged its
military duties with conspicuous advantage to the public.
But the consequences were more lasting outside the actual subject of
dispute. Although the correspondence between Lord Randolph and the Prime
Minister ripples on as pleasantly as ever, although in the next few
months their comradeship became increasingly cordial, it cannot be
supposed that such a conflict could pass away without leaving scars.
Lord Salisbury could not forget, Lord Randolph Churchill could not but
remember, what the result of a resignation had been.
Last in chronology, first in importance, among Lord Randolph Churchill’s
enterprises at the India Office came the conquest and annexation of
Burma. When Lord Randolph Churchill had travelled in India in the
winter of 1884, he had consulted a native fortune-teller and thought it
worth while to keep a note of what he said. The astrologer, after
saying, perhaps ambiguously, ‘that he had never seen so good a star
since Lord Mayo’s (for during his Viceroyalty Lord Mayo was assassinated
in the Andaman Islands), repeatedly asserted that his visitor would
‘return to India shortly in connection with a warlike expedition,’ and
that he was ‘about to go on a warlike expedition.’ The prediction may
perhaps in a sense have come more nearly true than many others of its
class. When the Conservatives came into power, the British
administration in Burma was confined to the maritime province at the
mouth of the Irrawadi and the strip of sea-coast bordering on the Bay of
Bengal. The inland country up to the confines of China still remained an
independent State under its native ruler, the King of Ava. The relations
of the British Government with that State had long been unsatisfactory.
By the Treaty of Yandaboo, which terminated the first Burmese War in
1826, the right of a British representative to reside at Mandalay had
been secured, and until 1876 this agent of the Imperial Government had
from time to time--sitting on the ground and barefooted, according to
the inflexible ceremonial of the Burmese Court--endeavoured, with small
success, to safeguard the ever-growing commercial interests of British
and British-Indian subjects.
In 1878 the old King of Burma died, leaving behind him thirty sons with
families on the same generous scale. A palace intrigue secured the
throne to Prince Theebaw and the new reign was inaugurated by an
indiscriminate massacre of the late King’s other sons, with their
mothers, wives and children. Eight cart-loads of butchered princes of
the blood were cast, according to custom, into the river. The less
honourable sepulchre of a capacious pit within the gaol was accorded to
their dependents. Two of the thirty sons had had the prudence to take
refuge with the British Resident, who not only stoutly refused to
surrender them but addressed a strong remonstrance to the Burmese
Government. The Burmese Minister for Foreign Affairs replied tartly that
the procedure followed was in accordance with precedent and that under
the existing treaties of ‘grand friendship’ the two great Powers were
bound to respect each other’s customs. With this answer the Government
of India were forced to be content, though Ministers at home seem to
have had some difficulty in persuading Queen Victoria to sign the
necessary message of cousinly congratulation to the new monarch.
The unpleasant feelings which had been aroused were not readily allayed.
Since 1876 the British representative had been instructed not to sit
upon the ground barefooted when enjoying the honour of a royal audience
but to sit upon a chair, clothed in the ordinary manner. The etiquette
of the Burmese Court could not, however, be relaxed. The King refused to
countenance the innovation and all direct access to the Sovereign
ceased. Forced now to deal only with the Minister of State, the British
representative found his personal influence vanishing and his personal
safety impaired. For nearly a year the British Residency remained
guarded by a scanty escort, wholly indefensible in itself, within a mile
of the palace where ‘the ignorant, arrogant, drunken boy-king,
surrounded by a set of parvenu sycophants, the men of massacre and
bloodshed, ignorant and savage enough to urge him on to any further
atrocities,’[44] disposed of a body of two thousand soldiers. It was
therefore decided in 1879 to recall the whole Residency and the
Government of India, whose patience was inexhaustible, were left without
a representative at the Burmese capital.
For the next five years disorder and misgovernment gripped the land of
Upper Burma. In 1883 a hideous massacre was perpetrated upon three
hundred prisoners in the gaol. Outrages upon British subjects and upon
British vessels on the Irrawadi were frequent. The protests of the
Viceroy were treated with disdain. Innumerable vexations arose. Trade
was strangled. The life and property of a large European-Indian
community were insecure. So threatening was the Burmese attitude that a
considerable addition, involving much expense, had to be made in the
garrison of the maritime province, and this necessary precaution
aggravated the prevailing uncertainty. To complete the tale of
grievances, Burmese Missions were found in March 1885 to be negotiating
treaties of commerce in various foreign capitals. Such was the
situation when Lord Randolph Churchill became Secretary of State.
Events were now to force a crisis. The Burmese Mission had already
negotiated in Paris a Franco-Burmese Convention. The French Consul at
Mandalay, an energetic man, had acquired great authority. French
influence was rapidly becoming predominant and ousting British
interests, both diplomatic and commercial. Banks, railways, mining and
timber concessions were falling almost daily into their hands. The long
procession of facts which advanced upon the British Government in July
1885, left no room to doubt the imminence of a dominant foreign
influence in Upper Burma, involving the most serious and far-reaching
consequences to the British province of Lower Burma and to the Indian
Empire. The whole question at once became urgent.
While these considerations were causing Her Majesty’s Government the
utmost anxiety, a lucky incident occurred. King Theebaw, partly from
want of money, partly in a spirit of sheer bravado, imposed a fine of 29
lacs of rupees upon an important British company trading in his
dominions, on a pretext that certain Customs duties had not been paid,
and with the intention of ruining the company and transferring their
concession to a French firm. With this final and definite provocation
Lord Randolph Churchill considered the case for action complete both as
regards Parliament and the country. He threw himself into the enterprise
with characteristic vigour. The official papers show on almost every
page the driving power which he exerted. As early as July 25 he drew
Lord Salisbury’s attention to the rumours of a new Franco-Burmese
Convention. Lord Salisbury’s reply was terse: ‘The telegram, if not a
_canard_, is painfully important. The King of Burma must not be allowed
to conclude any such convention.’ Unofficial remonstrances having
produced no effect, Lord Randolph addressed the Foreign Office formally
on August 28, urging that a communication should be made to the French
Government stating that any further prosecution of the commercial
projects in contemplation ‘will necessitate such prompt and decided
measures as may most effectually satisfy the paramount rights of India
in the Indo-Chinese Peninsula.’ The French Government recognised frankly
that the British interest in Burma was much more intimate and
substantial than their own. Their Ministers temporised politely and
deprecated, while they did not arrest, the activities of the Consul.
Meanwhile King Theebaw, in his great unwisdom, rejected almost
insolently the remonstrances of the Government of India and their
proposal that the case should be referred to arbitration. On October 16,
therefore, Lord Dufferin transmitted to the India Office the draft of an
ultimatum insisting that a special envoy of the British Government
should be received at Mandalay to settle outstanding disputes and that a
British Resident, suitably guarded, should be permanently admitted,
without being forced to submit to any humiliating ceremony, to the
Court of Ava. It was further intimated to King Theebaw that he would be
required in future to accept the same position in regard to his foreign
relations as the Amir of Kabul and to regulate them in accordance with
British advice. Lord Randolph Churchill, in approving the despatch of
the ultimatum, telegraphed as follows:--
The terms of your ultimatum are approved. But I am strongly of
opinion that its despatch should be concurrent with movement of
troops and ships to Rangoon. If ultimatum is rejected, the advance
on Mandalay ought to be immediate. On the other hand, armed
demonstration might bring Burmese to their senses. Also, on account
of security of many British subjects and Europeans in Upper Burma,
it is of vital importance that Burmese should feel that any injury
to them or their property would be followed by rapid punishment.
Under all the circumstances of the case, and in view of public
opinion here, I do not think that considerations of expense should
deter you from these precautions. Lord Salisbury concurs. I would
suggest that you should demand an answer within a specified time.
Overwhelming force was employed. An expedition, consisting of a naval
brigade of 433 seamen and marines, with 49 guns and machine-guns, and
3,029 British and 6,005 native soldiers, with 28 guns, was ordered to
assemble, together with a flotilla, at Thyetmyo by November 14, under
command of General Prendergast, with Colonel White (afterwards Sir
George White) and Colonel Norman as Brigadiers. These troops were
collected swiftly and unostentatiously. No sufficient reply having been
received by the appointed date--November 10--General Prendergast was
ordered to advance. The strength of the force employed, prevented any
effectual opposition in Burma. Its rapid movement allowed no time for
serious complications to develop either with France or China. The
Burmese army was routed at Minhla on November 17, at a cost of one
officer and three men killed and five officers and twenty-four men
wounded. On the 27th Mandalay was occupied and King Theebaw was a
prisoner. Injuries and embarrassments tolerated for fifty years were
swept away in a fortnight. General Prendergast’s advance was pressed
forward to Bhamo, on the Chinese frontier, which was soon occupied
without any serious fighting.
Although a sporadic resistance--euphemistically termed
‘dacoity’--disturbed the less accessible regions for several years,
Burma was now in British hands. What was to be done with it? Lord
Randolph Churchill was for annexation simple and direct. The Council of
the Governor-General disapproved of this course, which they feared would
excite the hostility of China. Many important authorities preferred the
establishment of a native prince under British advice. Lord Salisbury
thought the great cost of British administration would overweight the
new territory. In the end, however, the Secretary of State for India
prevailed. The Chinese Government was reassured by the abandonment of
Lord Randolph Churchill’s projected mission to establish commercial
relations between India and Thibet, to which they had been persuaded to
give a rather reluctant consent. They were soothed and even gratified
by the establishment of a Llama in Burma--‘a spiritual king sending
decennial presents,’ as Lord Salisbury with relish describes him,
‘though,’ he adds, ‘the Chinese Empire is no more Buddhist than
Chartist.’ The annexation was resolved. Lord Randolph arranged that the
proclamation should be made on January 1, 1886, as ‘a New Year’s present
to the Queen.’ On the last day in December he was staying with
FitzGibbon for his Christmas party; and as the clock struck midnight he
lifted his glass and announced, with due solemnity, ‘Howth annexes Burma
to the British Empire.’ The next morning the Viceregal proclamation was
published. It is one of the shortest documents of the kind on historical
record:--
_By command of the Queen-Empress, it is hereby notified that the
territories formerly governed by King Theebaw will no longer be
under his rule, but have become part of Her Majesty’s dominions,
and will during Her Majesty’s pleasure be administered by such
officers as the Viceroy and Governor-General of India may from time
to time appoint._
APPENDICES
I
_THREE ELECTION ADDRESSES_
1874.
_To the Electors of Woodstock._
I gladly avail myself of the opportunity afforded me by the retirement
of your late member, Mr. Barnett, to offer myself as your representative
in the coming Parliament.
The politics I profess are strictly in accordance with those of the
great leaders of the Conservative party which the Borough of Woodstock
has now so long supported.
Many questions of great political importance which formerly divided the
Conservative from the Liberal party have passed for the present out of
the field of conflict; their settlement, whether for good or evil, being
now stamped on the face of our Statute Book. The essential features of
the Constitution of this country continue, however, to defy the attacks
of extreme Reformers. All legislation should, in my opinion, be based
strictly on the outlines of these features, which are capable of being
developed and expanded in accordance with the demands of a progressive
age.
Any measures that would ameliorate the condition of the working classes
would ensure my best and most earnest assistance. My desire would be to
place at their disposal, if it were possible, the common necessaries and
comforts of life free from the prohibitory impost of taxation.
Some reforms of the systems of rating and local taxation are much
required. This subject, however, I hold to be one which should be dealt
with largely in one comprehensive measure, and not piecemeal or by
small instalments after the manner of recent futile attempts.
Legislation tending to the severance of the Established Church from the
State would be vigorously opposed by me. On the other hand, measures
which would increase the great sphere of usefulness of the Church of
England and render her more and more the Church of the nation, I would
as vigorously support.
With regard to Foreign Policy, it is impossible to blind oneself to the
fact that the position of England among foreign nations has deteriorated
in the hands of the recent Liberal Administration. While deprecating
unnecessary interference in Continental affairs, I am of opinion that in
cases where the honour of our country is implicated, the security of the
nation can only be attained by a bold and uncompromising policy. To that
end I should oppose any large reduction of our naval and military
establishments. An economical policy might, however, be consistently
pursued, and the efficiency of our forces by land and sea completely
secured, without the enormous charges now laid upon the country.
The Colonial Empire of Great Britain, offering as it does a field of
development for the talent, energy and labour of the sons of our
overburdened island, will continually demand the attention of the
Legislature. I would support all efforts which would tend to facilitate
the means of emigration, and would at the same time strengthen and
consolidate the ties which unite the Colonies with the mother country.
With regard to education, both in this country and in Ireland, I am of
opinion that the existing means are capable of a large and liberal
development, and that while the rights of conscience should be most
sacredly respected, religious teaching should not wholly be forgotten.
The Education Act of 1871 has, on the whole, successfully settled the
question and opened the doors of knowledge to all our countrymen without
regard to sect. I agree with the spirit of that Act, but any alterations
that may be needful to ensure its more perfect working will always
receive my best consideration.
The principles of true Conservatism I hold to be those of gradual,
unceasing progress, adhering strictly to the lines of a well-founded
Constitution and avoiding all violent and unnecessary changes. It is in
these principles, in which I firmly believe myself, that I aspire in
hopeful confidence to become the Representative of the Electors of the
Borough of Woodstock.
Should I be so fortunate as to be successful in gaining your confidence,
I can safely promise that the interests of the Borough will not suffer
from any neglect at my hands, and the wishes and views of every
individual member of the constituency, of whatever political party, will
always receive my best and most earnest attention.
I have the honour to be, Gentlemen,
Yours very faithfully,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
Woodstock, January 26, 1874.
1880.
_To the Electors of Woodstock._
Parliament is about to be dissolved, and I venture again to solicit a
renewal of your confidence, which for six years I have enjoyed.
When in 1874 you did me the honour to return me as your representative
to the House of Commons, I pledged myself to give a general support to
the policy and the principles of the Conservative party.
And now that I again offer myself as a candidate for the Borough I
confidently appeal to you on the same grounds, renewing my former
pledges.
The attention of the Parliament which is about to expire has been
chiefly occupied by momentous questions of Foreign Policy involving
almost the existence of the Empire.
Her Majesty’s Government have had to contend not only against the
dangerous ambition of a great Foreign Power but also against a
determined and powerfully-led Opposition at home.
By repeated and unusually large majorities the policy which the
Government pursued has been sanctioned by Parliament. A few weeks will
surely demonstrate that it has been approved by the country.
In giving a consistent support to that policy I am convinced that I have
been carrying out the wishes of a vast majority of this constituency,
and I believe that the safety of this Empire can only be secured by a
firm adherence on the part of the country to the course pursued by the
present advisers of the Crown.
To their credit it may be stated that they have hitherto achieved the
great result of ‘peace with honour’ without having added perceptibly to
the burdens imposed upon the people by taxation.
My opinions on domestic matters have been more than once stated to you
during the six years which have elapsed since my election in 1874. The
Conservative party have been instrumental in placing on the Statute Book
many comprehensive and useful measures. I would instance the Act to
Consolidate and Amend the Law relating to Friendly Societies; the
Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Act; the Act Consolidating and
Extending the various Laws relating to the Sanitary Condition of the
People; the Act for Modifying and Improving according to Modern
Experience the Regulations affecting the Discipline and Control of our
Army; and other Statutes which I need not now particularise.
Her Majesty’s Government have now in hand carefully considered measures
for the consolidation of the Criminal Code, and for the improvement of
the Law of Bankruptcy; also three most important measures relating to
the settlement of landed estates, enlarging the powers of life owners
and reducing the cost of land transfer, to which, as you may imagine
from my remarks to you in the autumn, I shall be prepared, if you return
me as your Member, to give a most cordial support.
The present condition of Ireland must be a cause of uneasiness to every
thoughtful person and will no doubt occupy the anxious consideration of
the new Parliament.
The party led by Mr. Parnell, which has for its object the
disintegration of the United Kingdom, must, in my opinion, be resisted
at all costs.
At the same time, I do not see how the internal peace of Ireland can be
permanently secured without a judicious reconsideration of the laws
affecting the tenure of land; and should measures with that object be
introduced by her Majesty’s Government, I shall be inclined to give them
an unprejudiced support.
It must not be forgotten that the successful and wise solution of the
difficulties surrounding the question of Irish education effected by
ministers and the Conservative party will greatly contribute to the
rapid progress of a future prosperity of the sister Island.
I am in favour of the present system of County Government by Quarter
Sessions, but I think that the hands of the magistrates might be
strengthened by the addition of elected representatives of the
ratepayers.
The contribution from the Imperial revenue to the expenses of Local
Government, which was the work of the Conservative party, has no doubt
proved a boon to the agricultural community. I should be glad to see
this principle further carried out by throwing a portion of the cost of
maintenance of highways upon the moneys annually voted by Parliament.
To secure the freedom and to encourage the enterprise of the tenant
farmer, it would be expedient to abolish the Law of Distress in its
present form.
It appears to me that all matters dealt with by that law should be a
subject of agreement between landlord and tenant.
I shall heartily co-operate with any party which brings forward
carefully considered measures for the amelioration of the condition of
the agricultural labourer, and I think it would be well if powers were
given to municipalities and local bodies for the purchase of land to be
let in allotments and for the improvement of the dwellings of this
valuable class of men.
Trusting that the principles above enunciated will commend themselves to
your consideration and will secure your approval,
I have the honour to remain,
Very faithfully yours,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
Woodstock, March 9, 1880.
1885.
_To the Electors of Birmingham._
The time is near when you will be called upon to express your judgment
on the past and your desires for the future. Two schools of political
thought strive against each other to win your confidence. The one,
composed of those who, having had under their complete control the
Government of the Empire from May 1880 until June 1885, are unable to
justify their claims upon you by any record of foreign or colonial or
home achievement, but, contenting themselves with incomplete and
misleading extenuation of acknowledged failure, seek to attract you by a
renewal of promises, and even bribes, which bitter experience has shown
they have neither the capacity nor the strength to fulfil. The other,
whose views I share, and whose policy I will endeavour soon, as best I
may, personally to uphold among you, appeals to the electoral body in
Great Britain and Ireland to confirm the adverse judgment pronounced on
June 9, against Mr. Gladstone’s Administration by the Parliament which
in a few weeks will be dissolved. That judgment, striking and
wide-reaching as it was in its immediate results, was literally wrung
from a House of Commons the majority of which would have been only too
glad to have continued their support of Mr. Gladstone had it not been
for the irresistible influence of popular discontent, excited by various
causes--Irish troubles, Colonial losses, Indian dangers, costly wars,
fruitless sacrifices of many heroes, financial excesses, Parliamentary
impotence, imperilled industries, commercial and agricultural depression
growing greater and more alarming year by year. All this was expressed
by the action of the House of Commons on June 9. Mr. Gladstone’s
Government, the author of these many and long-continued disasters, fell;
that Government in 1880 so popular, so powerful, with such immeasurable
opportunities for promoting the peace, progress and prosperity of the
people, fell, and not a voice was raised, either in Parliament or the
country, of sympathy for the vanquished or of mourning over their fall.
Mr. Bright will request of you to contribute to restore to power that
most unlucky Administration. To this end will be directed all the powers
of his unrivalled oratory, his simple but forcible invective, his
personal position and experience. But very little of patriotism, very
little of self-interest, very little of recollection, reflection and
calculation will compel you to remain outside the influence of that
persuasive voice. The British Empire is great and powerful from the
character of its people, the extent of its dominions and the varied
nature of its resources. More than all other Western nations, we can
afford to indulge ourselves in experiment and, indeed, caprice, as
regards our system of Government or the direction of our Home and
Imperial policy. But there are limits even to the strength of the
British Empire, and a repetition of the policy of the last five years
will, without doubt, transgress those limits. Yet such will be the
inevitable consequence of a restoration to office of the Liberal party,
as that party is at present constituted. The old divisions, the
irreconcilable differences, personal and political, which all the
ascendency of Mr. Gladstone was unable to compose, much less conceal,
while he was Prime Minister, which were the chief cause of the failure
of his Administration, are now blazing forth most fiercely, and Mr.
Gladstone, with all honesty, warns you that his controlling hand will be
stretched forth only for a little time. To this party, which even
hatred of the Tories cannot decently unite, which comes before you with
such a past, you will be asked to commit for another six years perchance
the destinies of the Empire. You cannot yield to this appeal.
The policy of the Tory party is before you:--To regain the friendship of
the European Powers which prejudice, presumption and poltroonery had all
but forfeited; and to use that friendship so as to maintain effectually
the united European action by which alone the peace and the liberties of
the peoples of the Continent and of these islands can be secured and
developed; to evolve from the region of sentiment such forces as may
enable the mother country to tighten the bonds of union between herself
and our colonies and to rear on a practical and permanent basis, for
defensive and commercial purposes, that Imperial federation of the
subjects of the Queen which many wise and far-seeing minds regard as
essential to the perpetuation of our power; to conciliate by equal laws
and by just and firm administration our Irish brethren, now much
irritated and estranged, so that the Union which Nature, as well as
policy, has effected may for all time endure; to place, by material
provisions and constructions, the security of our Indian dependency
beyond the influence of panic, alarm or even anxiety, and
simultaneously, by careful Parliamentary inquiry, to ascertain how we
may most safely and most speedily bring to the strengthening of our
Government all that is high and good of the traditions, the intellects
and the aspirations of the native races; to give to our rural and
agricultural population that machinery of self-government which has been
of advantage to our great towns; to strive, as far as the laws of
political economy may permit, to multiply the number of freeholders and
occupiers; to utilise the powers of the House of Commons, in recent
years almost forgotten, so as either to effect financial retrenchment
and departmental reform, or else to make sure that the present
expenditure of the people’s money is justifiable and thrifty; to
develop still further the efficiency of Parliament by alterations in its
methods of transacting business and in its hours of labour; to restore
public confidence; to revive commercial enterprise by a patient
continuance of good and prudent administration; in a word, to govern the
British Empire by the light of common sense. That is the policy of the
Tory party.
Measures are now recommended to you by our opponents which the Tory
party will not only not attempt to carry out, but which I hope and
believe they will always resolutely oppose. They are the dismemberment
of the Empire, under the guise of National Councils, the abolition of
the House of Lords, the disestablishment of the Church and the
appropriation of its endowments to the support of irreligious education,
the compulsory acquisition by local bodies of landed estates for the
purposes of arbitrary division, the wholesale plunder of all who have
acquired properties, great or small, by thrift or by inheritance, under
the names of ‘ransom’ and of ‘graduated taxation.’ These and other
similar projects, if they are decided by the nation to be wise and
prudent, I freely admit must be confided to the hands of Mr. Chamberlain
and his friends. I will have none of them, for I know that they mean
political chaos and social ruin.
Such, gentlemen, are to my mind the circumstances of the time, as far as
they can be conveniently and concisely summarised in an election
address. No one can be more convinced than I am that I should be guilty
of intolerable presumption if I based my candidature for the Central
Division of Birmingham on any other ground than the truth of the
political principles I have endeavoured in this document to set forth;
moreover, I am profoundly aware that from many causes, some of them
physical, I have feebly and inadequately served in the House of Commons.
My opponent has the immense advantage of long-established possession,
amounting in the minds of some almost to prescriptive right; he is
further supported by a highly (perhaps too highly) finished political
organisation. But the experience of the past and the essential truth of
the principles which I will endeavour to sustain may, in all
probability, outweigh these considerable forces. The people, in the
widest acceptance of the expression, are now, for the first time in the
history of England, called upon to decide and define their future. If
they are guided by reflection and by knowledge they cannot err. But if,
unmindful of the last five years, they recur, like the constituencies in
1880, for government and for policy to those who have so misled them and
betrayed them, I, in common with the party with which for twelve years I
have acted, will patiently accept their judgment; but history will mourn
and will wonder long at the blindness and the folly, ay, even the
insanity, of a people who, called to the more free and perfect enjoyment
of their ancient liberties, deliberately and in spite of warnings writ
large and full, flung away a priceless heritage, and consigned to the
grave of the past a great and glorious Empire.
I am your obedient servant,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
India Office, St. James’s Park:
October 10.
II
_FURTHER CORRESPONDENCE RELATING TO THE NATIONAL UNION OF
CONSERVATIVE ASSOCIATIONS_
1884.
_The Marquess of Salisbury to Lord Randolph Churchill._
_Private._
Hatfield: April 1, 1884.
My Lord,--I had the honour of receiving a letter from you, dated
the 19th ult., in which, on behalf of the Organisation Committee of
the National Union, you requested that Sir Stafford Northcote and
myself would give our early consideration to a report and other
documents which you enclosed.
We had already expressed our disapproval of the report; therefore,
in the absence of any explanation, we could not have entered
further upon the consideration of it. We had the advantage,
however, of a conference with yourself and Mr. Gorst, in which some
passages of the report, which seemed to us objectionable, were
explained. It was made clear to us that there was no intention on
the part of the Council of the National Union either to trench on
the province of the Central Committee or to take any course upon
political questions that would not be acceptable to the leaders of
the party. The ‘large and general principles of party policy’
reserved for the determination of the Council by the fourth
recommendation of the report were explained to refer exclusively to
questions affecting the organisation of the affiliated
Associations.
It was very satisfactory to us to find from your language that the
Council were at one with us in the conviction that harmonious
co-operation between them and the Central Committee was of great
importance to the interests of the party, and that the matters
which have hitherto been disposed of by the leaders and Whips of
the party must remain as heretofore in their hands, including the
expenditure of the funds standing in the name of the Central
Committee.
It was thought desirable that, in place of further discussing the
report, Sir Stafford Northcote and I should indicate with more
precision the objects to which the efforts of the Council may with
the greatest advantage be directed. It appears to us that these
objects may be defined to be the same as those for which the
Associations themselves are working. The chief object for which the
Associations exist is to keep alive and extend Conservative
convictions, and so to increase the number of Conservative voters.
This is done by acting on opinion through various channels, by the
establishment of clubs, by holding meetings, by securing the
assistance of speakers and lecturers and by the circulation of
printed matter in defence of Conservative opinions, by collecting
the facts required for the use of Conservative speakers and
writers, and by the invigoration of the local press.
In all these efforts it is the function of the Council of the
National Union to aid, stimulate and guide the Associations it
represents.
Much valuable work may also be done through the Associations, by
watching the registration and, at election time, by providing
volunteer canvassers and volunteer conveyance. But in respect to
these matters it is desirable that the National Union should act
only in concert with the Central Committee, because there are in
many constituencies other bodies of Conservatives who do not belong
to the Associations, but whose co-operation must be secured.
To ensure complete unity of action, we think it desirable that the
Whips of the party should sit, _ex officio_, on the Council, and
should have a right to be present at the meetings of all
Committees. Such an arrangement would be a security against any
unintentional divergencies of policy and would lend weight to the
proceedings of the Union. Business relating to candidates should
remain entirely with the Central Committee. On the assumption,
which we are entitled now to make, that the action of the two
bodies will be harmonious, a separation of establishments will not
be necessary--unless business should largely increase. There is
some advantage, undoubtedly, in their working under a common roof,
for it is difficult to distinguish between their functions so
accurately but that the need of mutual assistance and communication
will constantly be felt. I have the honour to be
Your obedient servant,
SALISBURY.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to the Marquess of Salisbury._
The National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations,
St. Stephen’s Chambers, Westminster S.W.: April 3, 1884.
My Lord,--I have laid your letter of the 1st inst., in which you
indicate your reconsidered views and those of Sir Stafford
Northcote concerning the position and functions of the National
Union of Conservative Associations, before the Organisation
Committee. It is quite clear to us that in the letters we have from
time to time addressed to you and in the conversations which we
have had the honour of holding with you on this subject, we have
hopelessly failed to convey to your mind anything like an
appreciation either of the significance of the movement which the
National Union commenced at Birmingham in October last or of the
unfortunate effect which a neglect or a repression of that movement
by the leaders of the party would have upon the Conservative cause.
The resolution of the Conference at Birmingham in October--a
Conference attended by upwards of 450 delegates from all parts of
the country--directed the Council of the National Union to take
steps to secure for that body its legitimate share in the
management of the party organisation. This was an expression of
dissatisfaction with the condition of the organisation of the
party and of a determination on the part of the National Union that
it should no longer continue to be a sham, useless and hardly even
an ornamental portion of that organisation.
The resolution signified that the old methods of party
organisation--namely, the control of Parliamentary elections by the
Leader, the Whip, the paid agent, drawing their resources from
secret funds--which were suitable to the manipulation of the 10_l._
householder were utterly obsolete and would not secure the
confidence of the masses of the people who were enfranchised by Mr.
Disraeli’s Reform Bill, and that the time had arrived when the
centre of organising energy should be an elected, representative
and responsible body. The delegates at the Conference were
evidently of opinion that if the principles of the Conservative
party were to obtain popular support, the organisation of the party
would have to become an imitation, thoroughly real and _bonâ fide_
in its nature, of that popular form of representative organisation
which had contributed so greatly to the triumph of the Liberal
party in 1880 and which was best known to the public by the name of
the Birmingham Caucus. The Caucus may be perhaps a name of evil
sound and omen in the ears of the aristocratic or privileged
classes, but it is undeniably the only form of political
organisation which can collect, guide and control for common
objects large masses of electors; and there is nothing in this
particular form of political combination which is in the least
repugnant to the working classes in this country. The newly-elected
Council of the National Union proceeded to communicate these views
to your Lordship and Sir Stafford Northcote, and invited the
assistance of your experience and authority to enable them to
satisfy the direction which had been imposed upon them by the
delegates.
It appeared at first from a letter which we had the honour of
receiving from you on February 29 that your Lordship and Sir
Stafford Northcote entered fully and sympathetically into the
wishes of the Council, in which letter it was distinctly stated
that it was the duty of the Council--
1. To superintend and stimulate the exertions of the local
Associations.
2. To furnish them with advice and in some measure with funds.
3. To provide lecturers on political topics for public meetings.
4. To aid them in the improvement and development of the local
press.
5. To help them in perfecting the machinery for registration and
volunteer agency at election time.
6. To press upon the local Associations the paramount duty of a
timely selection of candidates for the House of Commons.
Nothing could have been clearer, more definite or satisfactory than
this scheme of labour; and accompanied as it was by observations of
a flattering character concerning the constitution of the National
Union, the Council was greatly gratified and encouraged by its
reception.
The Council, however, committed the serious error of imagining that
your Lordship and Sir Stafford Northcote were in earnest in wishing
them to become a real source of usefulness to the party, and
proceeded to adopt a report presented to them by us, in which
practical effect was given to the advice with which the Council
have been favoured, and they were under the impression that they
would be placed in a position to carry out their labours
successfully by being furnished with pecuniary resources from the
considerable funds which your Lordship and Sir Stafford Northcote
collect and administer to the general purposes of the party.
The Council have been rudely undeceived. The day after the adoption
of the report, before even I had had time to communicate that
report officially to your Lordship, I received a letter from Mr.
Bartley, the paid Agent of the leaders, written under their
direction, containing a formal notice to the National Union to
quit the premises occupied by them in conjunction with the other
organising officials, accompanied by a statement that the leaders
declined for the future all and any responsibility for the
proceedings of the National Union.
Further, in your letter of the 1st instant you express your
disapproval of the action of the Council, and decline to consider
the report, on the ground that the contemplated action of the
Council will trench upon the functions of an amorphous and unknown
body, styled the Central Committee, in whose hands all matters
hitherto disposed of by the leaders and Whips of the party must
remain, including the expenditure of the party funds.
In the same letter you state that you will indicate with more
precision the objects at which the Council of the National Union
should aim, the result being that the precise language of your
former letter of February 29 is totally abandoned, and refuge taken
in vague, foggy and utterly intangible suggestions.
Finally, in order that the Council of the National Union may be
completely and for ever reduced to its ancient condition of
dependence upon, and servility to, certain irresponsible persons
who find favour in your eyes, you demand that the Whips of the
party--meaning, we suppose, Lord Skelmersdale, Lord Hawarden and
Lord Hopetoun in the Lords, Mr. Rowland Winn and Mr. Thornhill in
the Commons--should sit _ex officio_ on the Council, with a right
of being present at the meetings of all Committees.
With respect to the last demand we think it right to state, for the
information of your Lordship, that under the rules and constitution
of the National Union the Council have no power whatever to comply
with this injunction. The Council are elected at the Annual
Conference and have no power to add to their number. All that they
can do is that, in the event of a vacancy occurring among the
members, they have power by co-optation to fill up the vacancy.
I will admit that in conversation with your Lordship and Sir
Stafford Northcote, with a view to establishing a satisfactory
connection between the Council and the leaders of the party without
sacrificing the independence of the former, I unofficially
suggested an arrangement--subsequently approved by this
Committee--under which Mr. R. N. Fowler, one of the Treasurers of
the National Union, might have been willing to resign that post,
and Mr. Winn might have been elected by the Council to fill it--an
arrangement widely different from the extravagant and despotic
demand laid down in your letter of the 1st instant.
You further inform us that in the event of the Council--a body
representing as it does upwards of 500 affiliated Conservative
Associations, and composed of men eminent in position and political
experience, enjoying the confidence of the party in populous
localities, and sacrificing continually much time, convenience and
money to the work of the National Union--acquiescing in the view of
its functions laid down in your letter of April 1, it may be
graciously permitted to remain the humble inmate of the premises
which it at present occupies.
We shall lay your letter and copy of this reply before the Council
at its meeting to-morrow and shall move the Council that they
adhere substantially to the report already adopted, in obedience to
the direction of the Conference at Birmingham; that they take steps
to provide themselves with their own officers and clerks; and that
they continue to prosecute with vigour and independence the task
which they have commenced--namely, the _bonâ fide_ popular
organisation of the Conservative party.
It may be that the powerful and secret influences which have
hitherto been unsuccessfully at work on the Council, with the
knowledge and consent of your Lordship and Sir Stafford Northcote,
may at last be effectual in reducing the National Union to its
former make-believe and impotent condition; in that case we shall
know what steps to take to clear ourselves of all responsibility
for the failure of an attempt to avert the misfortunes and reverses
which will, we are certain, under the present effete system of
wire-pulling and secret organisation, overtake and attend the
Conservative party at a General Election.
I have the honour to be
Yours obediently,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
_Draft of Lord Randolph Churchill’s letter resigning his
candidature for Birmingham._
Dear Mr. Satchell Hopkins,--You will not be surprised, after what
passed yesterday at the Council of the National Union, to receive a
communication from me with reference to the electoral contest which
the Conservative party in Birmingham intend to wage at the General
Election, and to the part in that contest which I have been invited
to take. It will be within your recollection that in last November,
when you first inquired of me whether I would be willing to have my
name submitted to the Conservative party in Birmingham as one of
the candidates for the Parliamentary representation of the town, I
hesitated greatly before complying with your very flattering
request. My hesitation was not due to any great fear of defeat, but
rather to doubts which I entertained as to whether the political
principles, both as regards foreign and domestic affairs, which I
held to and which I should advocate as candidate for Birmingham,
were in any degree coincident with the political principles of the
present leaders of the Tory party or would be adopted by them if
they came into power. You are also aware that shortly before I went
to Birmingham at Easter for the purpose of addressing public
meetings at the Town Hall I again expressed to you those doubts,
which had been rather confirmed than dissipated by various
circumstances which had marked the interval between April and
November last. It is within your knowledge that the Council of the
National Union has been since its election by the Conference of
Associations at Birmingham in October 1883 engaged in a struggle
to acquire for itself a large share in and control over the
organisation of the Tory party throughout the country, to become
the principal centre and source of organising energy, and to
transform itself from a thoroughly sham and artificial into an
active and powerful body. The Council in undertaking this effort
was acting in obedience to the positive direction of the delegates
at the Conference. The principles of political organisation which
animate the Council are the encouragement, extension and formation
of popular Associations combining all classes and electing a
representative and responsible executive in electoral districts for
the carrying-on of all business relating to Parliamentary
elections. This is the form of political organisation which has
been widely and successfully adopted by the Liberal party, which is
the only form of political combination suitable to the present vast
electorate but which as far as the Conservative party is concerned
is solely confined to some of the most populous constituencies of
Great Britain. I would also add that this is the only form of
organisation which can bring the Parliamentary action of the
Conservative party into harmony and sympathy with the masses of the
people in the country who are inclined to support the principles of
that party. A popular organisation and a popular policy follow
naturally the one upon the other, and without the former you will
not have the latter. The efforts of the Council from the outset met
with the strongest opposition from those who have great influence
with the leaders of the party, who at present control such
organisation as exists, and dispense in irresponsible secrecy the
considerable funds subscribed for party purpose.
To thwart the efforts of the Council every pretext of delay was
seized upon, promises and menaces being freely resorted to. The
Council, however, succeeded in procuring from the leaders a
document recognising largely the legitimacy of their demands and
conceding much of that which they claimed; but so soon as they
embodied its substance in a report for the purpose of immediate
action, an attempt was first made to prohibit this step, and when
the Council had the independence to persist, the National Union
received a prompt notice to quit the premises it had so long shared
with the agents of the party leaders. Thereupon the Council were
careful not to communicate this hostile measure to the Associations
in the country, ever hoping that a conciliatory spirit might yet
avert a public rupture. Unfortunately no corresponding spirit
restrained those who had been opposed to the Council. Independents
in the Conservative party could not be brooked for a moment, and a
circular was hurriedly issued from the Central office to every
Association and agent in the country intimating that the National
Union was an outcast, and that a small Committee nominated by the
leaders themselves, in whose appointment the Associations had no
voice, would conduct all the functions for the discharge of which
the National Union was originally constituted. Notwithstanding the
issue of this document, which threw local bodies and local leaders
into the greatest confusion and embarrassment, the Council of the
National Union continued their efforts to bring about an
arrangement which, while preserving their independence and
usefulness, would enable them to act harmoniously with all
authorities in and sections of the party.
These efforts proved unavailing, and on the 2nd instant the
majority of the Council was induced under great pressure to recede
from the line of action which it had for six months adopted, and a
Committee was appointed to supersede the Chairman and the Executive
Committee.
The advocates of popular control on the Council were suppressed,
the inchoate work of invoking energy and co-operation among the
Associations was abruptly stopped, and the Council has been in
effect reduced to the position of dependence and unreality from
which the delegates at the Birmingham Conference had directed it to
emancipate itself.
Such is the summary of the abortive effort of the National Union to
infuse a popular element into the organisation and policy of the
Tory party. The jealous guardians of aristocratic privilege have
proved for the time too powerful for those who would base the
strength of the Tory party upon the genuine and spontaneous
attachment of the masses of our people. The interests of the many
are still to be sacrificed to the love of power and interested
ambition of a favoured few.
These things being so, I have arrived at the irresistible
conclusion that it would be impossible for me, consistently even
with the lowest standard of political honesty, to solicit the
suffrages of the citizens of Birmingham in support of the obsolete
policy still adhered to by the Tory party; basing my solicitations
upon those principles of government, whether domestic or foreign,
which I endeavoured to set forth in your Town Hall at Eastertide;
knowing, as I know now, beyond all doubt of contradiction, that
notwithstanding the immense changes effected by the Reform Bill of
1867, and about to be effected by the Reform Bill of 1884, those
principles are inexpressibly repugnant to the authorities of the
party and would never be carried into effect by the Tory party
under their guidance.
The malignant influences which for four years have had complete
possession of the Tory party and hopelessly muddled the conduct of
the Opposition, rendering us an object of derision even beyond the
limits of these Islands, ought not in my opinion to be permitted to
overshadow the destinies of the British people.
Caring less than nothing for results personal to myself, and using
what lights I possess, what knowledge and experience I have
acquired for the purpose of laying the whole truth on political
matters before the public on the eve of a great national decision,
I have, after much reflection and perhaps unduly prolonged
self-restraint, indited to you this communication. You and your
friends will surely perceive that, hampered and shackled by the
animosity of those whose support is essential, and which I had a
right to anticipate, it would be out of the question for me with
any hopes of honourable success to realise the aspirations of the
Conservatives of Birmingham.
I remain
Yours faithfully,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
_Sir Henry Wolff to Mr. Harold Gorst._
28 Cadogan Place, S.W.: Jan. 5, 1903.
My dear Harold Gorst,--Only on Saturday I saw the recent number of
the _Nineteenth Century_, in which was published your third article
on the so-called ‘Fourth Party.’
It contains two passages which I should like to see corrected.
On page 138 you write: ‘Lord Randolph Churchill, on his own
initiative and without consulting his colleagues, made terms for
himself with Lord Salisbury.’
This statement does not accord with my recollections.
After the Sheffield conference on July 23, 1884, it appeared to me
and to some other friends of Lord Randolph Churchill, that the
election of a majority of his supporters on the council of the
National Union placed him in a position so strong as to enable him
without any misconstruction or sacrifice of dignity to negotiate
with Lord Salisbury for more harmonious action. Your father was out
of town, and there was no time to lose, as the election of a
chairman of the Union was impending. I was therefore authorised to
inquire whether Lord Salisbury would be willing to discuss certain
points with Lord Randolph Churchill. The same day they met, and an
agreement was come to on the following terms:--
(1) Lord Randolph Churchill and his friends were to act in harmony
with Lord Salisbury, and were to be treated with full confidence by
him and the ruling members of the Conservative party.
(2) Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was to be elected chairman of the
National Union.
(3) The Primrose League was to be officially recognised by the
leaders of the party and by the Council of the Union.
(4) In order to celebrate this concordat--as you have put it--Lord
Salisbury was to give a dinner to the Council.
The conditions were carried out within a few days. Sir Michael
Hicks-Beach was elected chairman and the Primrose League
recognised, by resolution, at the first meeting.
As above mentioned, your father was at the time absent, but until
now I had always understood that he concurred in the course taken.
I had attributed his absence from the dinner to some other cause,
and I the more believed in his approval of the reconciliation from
the support given the next year, after conference, both by himself
and Lord Randolph Churchill, to a motion made by me in the House of
Commons to adjourn the third reading of the new Reform Bill during
the interregnum between the resignation of Mr. Gladstone and the
accession of Lord Salisbury. This motion is, I think, referred to
by Sir Herbert Maxwell in his ‘Life of Mr. W. H. Smith.’
I had regretted in later years to perceive that there was some
tension between your father and Lord Randolph Churchill; but,
through ignorance, I had imputed it to disagreements on the
formation of Lord Salisbury’s second Administration in 1886, when I
was absent from England.
The second passage which, to my mind, requires explanation occurs
on page 140. It runs thus:--
‘But no member of the Fourth Party, except himself (Lord R. C.),
was admitted to the Cabinet. Mr. Balfour, though made President of
the Local Government Board, was excluded from the latter
distinction.’
I have always understood that at the time Lord Randolph Churchill
not only advised, but urged the admission of Mr. Balfour to the
Cabinet; and that this advice was not followed on account of Lord
Salisbury’s reluctance to give to a near kinsman an advancement to
which others might think they had greater claim.
Yours very truly,
H. DRUMMOND WOLFF.
III
REFORM BILL, 1884
_Lord Randolph Churchill to H. H. Wainwright, Esq., M.P._
2 Connaught Place, W.: June 9, 1884.
My dear Mr. Wainwright,--You tell me in your letter of the 30th ult.
that you find some difficulty in understanding my recent action in the
House of Commons with respect to the Reform Bill.
The position of the Conservative party on the question of Parliamentary
Reform ever since 1887 has been very ill-defined. The action taken at
that time by Mr. Disraeli and his colleagues made it impossible for the
Conservative party at any future date to oppose on principle large
extensions of the franchise. That this result was clearly perceived by
the authors of the Reform Bill of 1867 is proved by the fact that in no
single speech of Mr. Disraeli or of Sir Stafford Northcote on the
question of Parliamentary Reform can any trace be found of opposition to
assimilation of county and borough suffrage on principle. The old Tory
attitude of 1832 has been for ever abandoned. I think, if you refer to
Mr. Disraeli’s address to the Buckinghamshire electors in 1874, you will
find a passage clearly intimating that he himself was prepared, if
necessary, to supplement his work of 1867 by doing what Mr. Gladstone is
at present engaged on. If these facts had any meaning at all they meant
this--that extension of the franchise was no longer a monopoly of the
Liberal party, and was not attended by any danger to the Constitution.
Lancashire, which is usually in the van of the Conservative party in
Great Britain, was quick to detect the change. When I went to Oldham
and to Manchester in the autumn and winter of 1881 for the purpose of
addressing public meetings I was particularly enjoined by the leading
gentlemen in those places not to say a word against the assimilation of
the county and borough franchise. During the sessions of 1880-81,
1881-82, 1882-83, the question of Parliamentary Reform was permitted to
remain in a dormant state, and the position of both parties with regard
to it was to no inconsiderable extent forgotten.
Suddenly in the autumn of 1883 it was rumoured that Parliament would be
called upon to deal with the question; the recess oratory of Ministers
and their followers confirmed the intelligence; the Conservative leaders
were singularly reticent of their opinions, and I found myself (then, as
now, a mere member of the rank and file of the party) obliged to go at
length into this question of Reform before an Edinburgh audience without
having at my command any certain indication as to the course which the
Conservative party would pursue. As the representative of a small
agricultural borough which any new Reform Bill must extinguish I could
not be expected to look upon the measure with any very longing eye;
further, in accordance with the maxim that it was the duty of the
Opposition to oppose, I considered that it would be right and reasonable
for Conservatives to resist the proposed Reform Bill on the ground of
(1) the inopportuneness of the moment chosen and the far more urgent
character of other questions; (2) the obvious risk of any large addition
to the Irish electorate; (3) the transparent design of the Government to
divert public attention from foreign affairs; (4) the absence of any
indication, on the part of the unenfranchised masses, of any great
desire for the voting privilege. On those grounds at Edinburgh I spoke
against Reform; but I perceived that my views, though listened to with
kindness and courtesy, were not highly acceptable to the intelligent
audience of Scotch artisans which I was addressing, and moreover the
disagreement with those views which was expressed from the platform by
Mr. Balfour, M.P., and Lord Elcho, M.P., voiced unmistakenly the
prevalent opinion of the meeting.
In the ensuing period, before the opening of Parliament, I ascertained
by communications with members of the party at the Carlton that no
unanimity of feeling on the subject of Parliamentary Reform existed;
that many borough members, and particularly Lancashire members, were
positively in favour of the change; and that direct opposition on
principle was only to be expected from a highly influential but
numerically small circle of members representing county and borough
constituencies exclusively of a rural character.
Under these circumstances, after Parliament had met, and after the
Opposition had failed to overthrow the Government on the Egyptian
policy, and the Reform Bill had been introduced, I proposed on the
second reading of the Bill to move the previous question--a form of
opposition which appeared to combine most of the objections which I had
stated at Edinburgh, while not committing anyone who might support it to
resistance to Reform on principle. Sir Stafford Northcote requested me
not to persevere with this motion, which had precedence over the
amendment of Lord John Manners, and it was accordingly removed from the
paper. Now Lord John Manners’ motion, if it meant anything at all (and
on this I am not prepared positively to decide), meant that the
Conservative party was prepared to deal with extension of the franchise,
provided that the measure was accompanied by provisions for the
redistribution of seats. Yet even this modified form of resistance did
not secure the support of the entire Conservative party, and was
defeated by the overwhelming majority of 130. Finally, on the motion to
go into Committee, Mr. Chaplin’s proposal to exclude Ireland from the
Bill met with so little favour from the leaders of our party that he
wisely declined to press it to a division.
These things being so, I am sanguine that all impartial persons will
agree that a frank and open departure from the position of strong
resistance to Reform which I had taken up in December was not only
pardonable but incumbent upon any practical politician. Had that
position been the position of the Conservative party generally, I would
certainly have adhered to it at any sacrifice; but, far from that, it
was not even the position of any considerable section of the party, who
as a body recurred to the policy of Mr. Disraeli. Moreover, since
December I had by the favour of the Conservatives in Birmingham become a
candidate for the Parliamentary representation of that immense
constituency, and undoubtedly in Birmingham there existed no serious
differences between Liberals and Conservatives as to the propriety of
the assimilation of the county and borough franchise. Having thus been
guided to the conclusion that Reform was inevitable, and that equality
of political rights between England and Ireland was to govern the
Conservatives as well as the Liberals, I did not conceal my change of
mind from the House of Commons or the public. It appeared to me to be as
reasonable and intelligible a change of mind as it could be possible for
any M.P. to undergo; brought about not by one short debate, as has been
most erroneously asserted, but by a careful study of a continued
succession of circumstances extending over a period of four months. I am
sure that it is well for our public life that a change of opinion on any
great question, should it take place, should be frankly and fearlessly
avowed; and I believe that violent censure of such a change, if
generally adopted, would tend to produce hypocrisy and political
dishonesty: and possessed by that idea I do not now hesitate to remark
that if the Government were to give a definite guarantee to Parliament
that their Reform legislation should not be operative until the
redistribution of seats has been provided for, by the announcement that
Parliament will be called together in the autumn to complete the scheme,
and by the insertion of a proper date in the present Bill before which
no election shall take place under it, then I see no strong or
overwhelming reason why the labours of the present session should be
rendered abortive by the rejection of the Bill for the representation of
the people.
IV
_LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL’S LETTERS FROM INDIA_
_To his Wife._
S.S. _Rohilla_: December 13, 1884.
We had a very enjoyable day yesterday at Malta; the steamer dropped
anchor at 9.30, and greatly to my surprise the Governor, Sir
Lintorn Simmons, whom I did not know, sent his barge and an
aide-de-camp to fetch me off and take me to the Palace. I had a
long interview with the Governor, who was most polite and
agreeable. He was very gloomy about Wolseley’s expedition and
generally about the Army, Navy, fortifications, &c.; and as he is
considered one of our greatest authorities, I suppose he is right
as to the unsatisfactory condition of everything. But they want
such a lot of money!
He showed me all over the Palace, which would have delighted you;
it is one of the finest buildings I ever saw. His sitting-room used
to be the Grand Master’s bedroom, and the whole place is in much
the same condition as it was 300 years ago. The tapestries exceed
in beauty any I ever saw. After we had seen the great church, a
magnificent edifice, Lord John Hay gave us his barge to go round
the dockyard, which fortunately happened to be full of ships. We
went over the _Dreadnought_ and _Inflexible_, and on the latter
enjoyed the pleasure of moving the turrets and 80-ton guns with
just the same ease as one winds up one’s watch--the whole thing
very wonderful, very complicated and perfectly unintelligible, and
all the more interesting on that account.
At 1.30 luncheon with the Governor; large party; Admiral Tryon and
Lord Elphinstone, going out to Australia, Lord John Hay and
others. We returned on board in the Governor’s barge in great
state, the object of admiration and envy of the other passengers.
At five o’clock the ship started again for Port Said, where we hope
to arrive Tuesday night. The weather keeps very fine. To-day
(Sunday) muster of the crew at 10.30: 120 Lascars, Negroes, Turks,
heretics and infidels; curious objects. After that, church in the
saloon, the chief merit of which was its brevity. The ubiquitous
parson, of course, presided, and gave us a silly address on the
dislike the clergy felt for the laity and _vice versâ_, and several
silly reasons for same. I thought if the clergy are like him the
whole thing was very easily accounted for, but have not yet
communicated to him this suggestion.
They are talking of getting up some theatricals and concerts; I
hope they won’t. The two junior officers on board are very cheery
fellows, and give smoking concerts in their cabin, which is about 6
ft. square, and which seats comfortably about a dozen persons,
smoking, drinking whiskey-and-water and singing choruses. I have
twice attended these concerts, which are of a very cheerful
character; and so wonderful is the sea air that though the
concert-room atmosphere might be cut with a knife and the whiskey
is copiously supplied, one feels rather the better than the worse
for it the next morning.
I saw the _Morning Post_ of the 4th at Malta with Borthwick’s
valedictory article; the article is so very friendly that I fear
people will think I wrote it myself.
December 18.
Here we are in the Canal, which is very much what I expected; a
dirty ditch with nothing remarkable except the multitudes of
flamingoes, pelicans, and wild fowl in the lakes we passed. It is a
great nuisance having to change ships. I have got so accustomed to
the _Rohilla_, and the captain is such a good fellow that I am
quite sorry to leave him. I doubt if the _Nizam_ will be as
pleasant.
S.S. _Nizam_: December 22.
Yesterday we had adventures. At 10.30 the machinery broke down;
something had got into the cylinder. At first they thought it would
only be an affair of half an hour, but in the end we did not start
again until seven in the evening. In the meantime we had church on
deck, the captain doing clergyman; and after that there was great
excitement over some sharks which were swimming about the ship. In
the clear water we could see them beautifully, each attended by a
shoal of pilot fish, a most beautiful creature about the size of a
10-lb. salmon and streaked with the brightest blue. The sailors
fixed a piece of pork on a hook at the end of a chain, and
instantly hooked one. Such a business to get him on board!--and he
flapped about finely, making us all beat a hasty retreat, in which
two or three unfortunate people were knocked down and trampled on.
Then we caught another, and after that a very large one, which
turned out to be 7 ft. 6 in. long and weighed 210 lbs. This one had
three live sharks inside, which we cut out and handed round. The
vitality of these brutes is extraordinary. After their tails had
been cut off and their insides taken out they kept flapping and
struggling, and the heart of one placed on a bit of wood kept
beating for hours.
In the meantime the _Rohilla_, which left Suez after us, came in
sight and, seeing something was wrong, bore down. Captain Barrett
and his chief engineer came on board, and there was much joy at
meeting again, and drinks were partaken of. As they found we could
go on again in a short time they departed and steamed away, and
were soon out of sight; and then we felt gloomy, as it was quite
uncertain whether the machinery would not collapse again, and if it
did we should have no _Rohilla_ to pick us up, and might be days in
the Red Sea. But while we were at dinner another ship appeared, and
this turned out to be the _Rohilla_, which felt nervous about us
and had come back. Much relief was experienced at this amiability
and soon after, after much struggling, our machinery was in motion;
but this delay will make us get to Aden in the dark, which is most
tiresome.
Government House, Bombay: January 1, 1885.
We got here Tuesday morning early, after a very pleasant voyage
across the Indian Ocean. I found the Governor’s carriage waiting at
the dock, and we came up here. Sir James Ferguson is most kind and
pleasant and so are all the Staff. I have not done any sight-seeing
yet, except going into Bombay and walking about the streets and
looking at the people, an endless source of interest. It would be
quite useless my endeavouring to describe to you my impression of
this town. The complete novelty and originality of everything is
remarkable, and one is never tired of staring and wondering. I
cannot tell you how much I am enjoying myself or how much I wish
you were with me. The Bombay Club asked me to a dinner but I
declined, as there would have been speeches and more or less of a
political demonstration against the Ripon party, which would never
have done. I did not come out to India to pursue politics or to
make speeches.
January 9.
We have been going about a great deal, seeing various things and
people. Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, a great Parsee, took us to see
the Towers of Silence, where they place all the dead Parsee bodies
to be eaten by vultures. I was asked to write my opinion of their
process in their books, and composed a highly qualified and
ambiguous impression which would have done credit to Gladstone.
Last night we dined at the Byculla Club with several gentlemen,
when an American lady gave us some very dull recitations from
Tennyson; we were all much bored. I had a long interview with eight
of the leading native politicians on Wednesday morning on Indian
politics, in which they set forth with great ability their various
grievances. We leave to-night for Indore, and after that go to
Jaipur, Agra, Delhi and Lucknow, which last place we hope to reach
about the 21st. From there I go to spend a week or ten days with
Colonel Murray in the district which he administrates, somewhere
on the borders of Nepaul. We shall be in camp, and moving about
every day, and I shall be able to see something of the details of
Indian administration and also lots of sport; but of this last I
shall be a spectator rather than an actor. You have no idea how
extraordinarily polite people are out here, and what trouble they
take to amuse me.
The Residency, Indore: January 14.
We were met at the junction for Indore by Captain F., of Holkar’s
service, who informed us that Holkar was away from his capital and
was ill, but would come to a station near and meet us; and
presently there we found him, drawn up with all his Court. We had
an interview of about half an hour, while the other unfortunate
passengers were kept waiting. He was most gracious and very
intelligent, and when we left he embraced me. At Indore we found
his son, also drawn up, and more _pow-wow_. In the evening
fireworks, Hindoo drama, Nautch, conjurers, &c. All very Hindoo and
delightful the first time one sees it, but I can quite imagine that
after a time it would pall. In the morning Holkar sent us out
cheetah-hunting for black buck; however, the cheetah was sulky and
would not run well, so did not catch one. We then took our rifles,
and I shot three and Thomas two.
The Residency, Lucknow: January 24, 1885.
Poor Fred Burnaby’s death[45] is a great blow to me, and it was so
sad getting his letter enclosed in yours this morning. I wrote to
him as I passed through Egypt; I wonder if he got my letter. I
shall miss him greatly. I see Airlie has been wounded, but am
delighted not to find the names of any more of our friends in the
list of casualties. I have had a most exasperating letter from
Wolff, saying that he has a great deal to tell me, but that it is
so important he cannot write it for fear the letter should be
lost. Did you ever know such tiresomeness?
I have no intention to hasten my return in order to increase the
embarrassments of the Government. I am starting off to-night for
Colonel Murray’s camp.
In camp Dudna: February 1.
Here we are in camp in the middle of an immense Government forest
at the foot of the Himalayas. We have been leading a very enjoyable
life since we left Lucknow and Colonel Murray. Out all day
careering round on elephants after game, sleeping in tents at
night, always at a different place, always hungry for breakfast,
very hungry for dinner--two sensations to me which have the
attraction of novelty. The whole thing is a charming change after
racketing about in railways from town to town. We have not seen
much game, I must admit, as it is far too early in the year and, no
grass being burnt and much water being about, the wild animals are
very widely scattered, and shots are few and far between; though
yesterday we hunted one leopard which ultimately escaped after
being much fired at and, I think, grievously wounded. I shot a very
nice swamp deer and Thomas a nilghai or blue bull. We also shot
pea-fowl, bustards and partridges, and every variety of bird. We
have fifteen elephants, and these creatures are an unfailing source
of interest and amusement. I think an elephant is the best mode of
conveyance I know. He cannot come to grief; he never tumbles down
nor runs away (at least, not on the march); nothing stops him; and
when you get accustomed to his paces he is not tiring. You would
not believe what steep places they get up and down or what thick,
almost impenetrable jungle they go through. If a tree is in the
way, and not too large a one, they pull it down; if a branch hangs
too low for the howdah to go under, they break it off. They are
certainly most wonderful animals, and life in many parts of India
would be impossible without them. The scenery all round here is
lovely--very wild, and with splendid woodland effects. We have
spent more days in camp here than we meant, which has altered our
plans a little, but I like so much seeing the country and the
people.
What explosions these are in London! I think it very amiable of the
dynamite people to blow up the House of Commons when we are all
away; they might have chosen a more inconvenient moment.
_To his Mother._
Government House, Calcutta: February 8.
I have had the great good fortune to kill a tiger. It was our last
day, and the party proposed to shoot ducks and snipe; but for that
I did not much care and suggested that I and a Mr. Hersey (an
English gentleman who is living in the district) should go into the
forest on the chance of seeing deer and perhaps getting a
sambur-stag, while the others went to shoot ducks. This was agreed
to, and the others bet fifty rupees they would have the heaviest
bag. Well, Hersey and I, each on an elephant and accompanied only
by two other elephants, were beating an open space in the forest
when I came upon the recently killed carcase of a hog, half
devoured. Hersey, when he saw it, declared it was quite fresh, and
that the tiger must be close by. You may imagine the excitement. We
beat on through the place and then came through it again, for it
was very thick high grass. All of a sudden out bundled this huge
creature, right under the nose of Hersey’s elephant, and made off
across some ground which was slightly open. Hersey fired, and
missed. I fired, and hit him just above the tail. (A very good
shot, for he only showed me his stern, and he was at least forty
yards off.) Hersey then fired his second barrel, and broke his
shoulder, which brought him up (literally with a round turn). He
took refuge in a patch of grass about fifty yards from us, where we
could just see bits of him. Heavens, how he growled and what a rage
he was in! He would have charged us but that he was disabled by
Hersey’s last shot. We remained still, and gave him four or five
more shots, which, on subsequent examination, we found all told;
and then, after about five minutes’ more awful growling, he
expired. Great joy to all. The good luck of getting him was unheard
of at this time of year; the odds were a hundred to one against
such a thing. He was a magnificent specimen, nine feet seven inches
in length, and a splendid skin--which will, I think, look very well
in Grosvenor Square. This is certainly the acme of sport. I never
shall forget the impression produced by this huge brute breaking
cover; or, indeed, the mingled joy and consternation of the other
party when they saw him--for they had to pay up fifty rupees. They
had got a black buck and a blue bull, and thought they had
certainly won.
Tigers in the Zoo give one very little idea of what the wild animal
is like.
Government House, Calcutta: February 10.
I hope to leave Bombay March 20th and return viâ Marseilles, in
which case I should be back in London about the 11th or 12th April.
I do not think I shall be able to stop in Paris, as I guess the
House of Commons will be just reassembling after Easter, and it
would be a good moment to drop in upon that body. It is extremely
pleasant here. The Dufferins are very kind and easy-going; the
Staff, too, are amiable; and Bill Beresford does everything he can
for one. Yesterday the Government telegraphed to Dufferin to
despatch a brigade of Indian troops and thirty miles of railway
plant to Suakim. Great preparations at once made; late at night
comes an order from London countermanding the whole thing.
Dufferin, diplomatist that he is, could not conceal his disgust at
this vacillation when they handed him the telegram on our return
from dinner. I telegraphed to Borthwick, and I hope I put the fat
in the fire.
Rewah: February 17.
I got a telegram from Wolff yesterday, through Pender, saying that
affairs were pressing and a crisis impending, and inquiring when I
was coming back. _Mais je connais mon Wolff_; he has crisis on the
brain and, in any case, no political contingency will hasten my
return by an hour. I expect the Government will try and get put out
and the Tories will try to come in; I wish them joy of it.
On Sunday morning General Roberts turned up, and we had a jolly
day; lots of talk. The General is all I had imagined him to be. He
is very keen on taking me up the frontier to Peshawar and Quetta.
It would be most pleasant if it could come off, and one would learn
a great deal about that most mysterious problem, ‘the dangers of
the Russian advance’; but there is no chance of it.
Benares: February 24.
This place is the most distinctly Hindoo city I have yet seen; old
and curious in every part. We are leaving for one of the
Maharajah’s palaces, or villa rather. We are extremely _bien logés
et nourris_, with a retinue of servants and carriages at all times
ready. There is an old Rajah, Siva Prasad, an interesting and
experienced old man who acts as guide; he speaks English perfectly,
though at the top of his voice, and indulges in endless
dissertations on Indian politics. Yesterday morning we started off
to see the Maharajah’s royal palace of Ramnugger. Very great
reception; all the retainers, elephants, horses, &c., together with
army--the latter about 100 strong--drawn up in a long avenue from
the gates to the door. The army gave a royal salute, and the band
played ‘God save the Queen,’ which I had to receive with gravity
and dignity; rather difficult! The Maharajah’s grandson, a boy of
ten, met us at the door, and his son, a man of thirty, half-way up
the staircase; such are the gradations of Oriental etiquette. The
Maharajah was not there, as he is old and infirm, and was keeping
himself for the evening. Then Nautch girls and mummers, which, so
early in the morning, were out of place; and so on.
Later we took a boat, came down the Ganges, and saw all the Benares
people bathing--thousands. As you know, this is part of their
religion. The water is very dirty, but they lap up quantities of
it, as it is very ‘holy’; also there were to be seen the burning
Ghats, where all the dead are cremated. There were five bodies
burning, each on its own little pile of faggots; but the whole
sight was most curious and I am going again this morning to have
another look. Benares is a very prosperous city, as all the rich
people from all parts of India come here to spend the end of their
days. Any Hindoo who dies at Benares, and whose ashes are thrown
into the Ganges, goes right bang up to heaven without stopping, no
matter how great a rascal he may have been. I think the G.O.M.
ought to come here; it is his best chance.
In the evening the Maharajah gave a party to all the native
notabilities of the city; great attendance of Baboos. Many of them
speak English, and some appear to be very clever men, but I have
had so much _pow-wow_ that I did not talk to them much. I
discovered a great scandal here the evening of my arrival. I found
the magistrate and police were impressing Bheesties, or
water-carriers, for service in the Soudan; great consternation in
the profession, and all the Bheesties were hiding and were being
actively hunted up by the police. I investigated the matter,
questioned the head of the police, and went and saw three of the
victims for the Mahdi. The poor creatures fell at my feet in the
dust, screaming not to go. I was very angry, and telegraphed it to
Sir Alfred Lyall, the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West
Provinces, and an inquiry is being made which will, I hope, save
these unfortunate persons from a service to them terrible. This
little incident of our rule goes far to explain why we make no
progress in popularity among the people.
Jaipur: March 3, 1884-5.
We only remained at Delhi two days, as the hotel was piggy, and we
moved to the Club at Agra, which is very comfortable, with
excellent food and wine. This also gave us the opportunity of
seeing the ‘Taj’ by moonlight, which we were not able to do last
time, and which is an unequalled sight. Also we went to dine at the
house of a native judge--a very interesting and clever man; we met
a most curious collection of native notabilities. The natives are
much pleased when one goes to their houses, for the officials out
here hold themselves much too high and never seek any intercourse
with the natives out of official lines; they are very foolish.
We go on to-night to Baroda, where the Guicowar is organising a
tiger hunt. I almost think I am getting a little tired of
travelling, and shall be glad to find myself on board ship.
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL
VOL II.
[Illustration: _Lord Randolph Churchill,
1886._]
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL
BY
WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL, M.P.
AUTHOR OF
‘THE STORY OF THE MALAKAND FIELD FORCE, 1897’
‘THE RIVER WAR,’ ‘LONDON TO LADYSMITH VIA PRETORIA,’ ETC.
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1906
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1906,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1906.
Norwood Press
J.S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
CONTENTS
OF
THE SECOND VOLUME
CHAPTER XII
1886
THE TWENTY-SIXTH OF JANUARY
.....PAGE
Mr. Gladstone’s meditations--The Home Rule disclosures--Lord Randolph’s
Irish policy--Hopes of a Coalition--Lord Randolph’s programme--Lord
Salisbury’s reply--Resignation of Lord Carnarvon--Procedure
discussions--Rumour and report--Mr. Gladstone’s offer--The Queen’s
Speech--Lord Salisbury and Coercion--Divisions in the Cabinet--Meeting
of Parliament--The policy of the 26th of January--Mr. Jesse Collings’
Amendment--Defeat of the Conservative Government--Their record.....1
CHAPTER XIII
1886
HOME RULE
Mr. Gladstone’s Home Rule Administration--The reality of the
struggle--Mr. Chamberlain’s position--Lord Randolph and Home
Rule--Ulster, 1886--‘The Union party’--Waiting for the Bill--Mr.
Chamberlain resigns--Mr. Chamberlain and Lord Randolph--The great
debate--Mr. Chamberlain’s speech--The Whig peers--The Land Bill--The
dissentient Liberals--Mr. Chamberlain and Birmingham--The Foreign
Office meeting--A critical interlude--‘Never! Never!’--The Home Rule
Division--Parliament dissolved.....48
CHAPTER XIV
1886
LEADER OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
The General Election--‘An old man in a hurry’--Birmingham--Triumph
of the Unionist party--Formation of Lord Salisbury’s second
Administration--The lead in the House of Commons--Chancellor of the
Exchequer--The short session--Lord Randolph as leader--Conduct of
public business--Correspondence with Lord Hartington--End of the
session--Golden opinions--Foreign affairs--A grave divergence--Eastern
policy--The Dartford programme--‘Mr. Spencer’s journey’--Bradford--‘The
Grand Young Man’.....115
CHAPTER XV
1886
THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER
At the Treasury--Lord Randolph as an official--Secret Service money--The
Metropolitan coal and wine dues--Preparation of the Budget--Democratic
finance--The death duties--The inhabited house tax--New stamp
duties--Horses, cartridges and theatre tickets--The Sinking Fund--Large
reductions of taxation--A fivepenny income tax--The means for Local
Government--The Budget in the Cabinet--A silence.....179
CHAPTER XVI
1886
RESIGNATION
Lord Randolph Churchill’s resignation announced--Consideration of rival
forces and principles in the Conservative party--The conflict in the
Cabinet--Various differences--Retrenchment--The Army Estimates--The
Prime Minister’s choice--Windsor Castle--Letter of Resignation--Lord
Salisbury’s reply--Publication of the news--General reflections
thereon.....213
CHAPTER XVII
1887
THE TURN OF THE TIDE
A private member--Mr. Chamberlain’s letters--Outcry against Lord
Randolph Churchill--Lord Salisbury and Lord Hartington--Failure
of a coalition--Protracted Cabinet crisis--A New Year’s Day
letter--Explanation to the Queen--Mr. Jennings--Mr. Goschen--Death of
Lord Iddesleigh--The Government reconstituted--Final correspondence with
Lord Salisbury--The two courses--Meeting of Parliament--Lord Randolph’s
statement--Algiers and Italy--Public results of Lord Randolph’s
resignation--Displeasure of the Conservative party.....251
CHAPTER XVIII
1887
ECONOMY
Difficulties of an ex-Minister--Lord Randolph’s course--Mr.
Goschen’s Budget--The Army and Navy Committee--Economy and
efficiency--Departmental mismanagement--Wolverhampton speech--The
Hartington Commission--Effect of Lord Randolph’s agitation--Lord
Randolph abandons Fair Trade.....302
CHAPTER XIX
1887-1888
THE NATIONAL PARTY
Ireland still--The Liberal Unionists--Coercion--Lord Randolph Churchill
and Mr. Chamberlain--Dream of a central party--Difficulties of
co-operation--A severance--Correspondence with Lord Hartington--Weakness
of the Government--Irish educational schemes--Lord Randolph in
Russia--His conversation with the Czar.....334
CHAPTER XX
1888-1889
CROSS CURRENTS
Irish Local Government--A disregarded pledge--Suakin--Vacancy at
Birmingham--Mr. Chamberlain’s attitude--Mr. Jennings’ account--Lord
Randolph withdraws--Disappointment of Birmingham Conservatives--Mr.
Balfour’s intervention--Correspondence with Mr. Chamberlain--Royal
grants--Speeches in the Midlands--‘Mr. Podsnap’--Hostility of the
Conservative party.....370
CHAPTER XXI
1890-1891
THE PARNELL COMMISSION
The Pigott letter--Action of the Government--Lord Randolph’s
warning--The forgery exposed--Report of the Special Commission--Mr.
Jennings’ amendment--Lord Randolph’s speech--Mr. Chamberlain
replies--Mr. Jennings offended--Wrath of the Conservative
party--Estrangement from Mr. Jennings--Tendency of Lord Randolph
Churchill’s later views--Ministerial discredit--Lord Randolph on the
turf--At home and abroad--Barren years--Loyalty to the Conservative
party--Expedition to Mashonaland--Lion-hunting--Mr. Balfour becomes
Leader of the House of Commons.....405
CHAPTER XXII
1892-1895
OPPOSITION ONCE MORE
A new situation--General Election of 1892--Lord Randolph
unopposed--Friendly dispositions of Conservative leaders--Lord
Randolph rejoins their councils--Speech on the Home Rule Bill--Fatal
symptoms--His last success--Correspondence with FitzGibbon--Riot
in the House of Commons--Increasing infirmities--A desperate
campaign--Kissingen--Meeting with Bismarck--Preparations for a long
journey--The end.....453
APPENDICES
V. TWO ELECTION ADDRESSES, 1886 AND 1892.....491
VI. PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE: THE CLOSURE.....500
VII. POLITICAL LETTERS OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL: FREEDOM OF CONTRACT;
TEMPERANCE; HOME RULE.....504
VIII. MR. JENNINGS’ ACCOUNT OF HIS QUARREL WITH LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL:
LORD JUSTICE FITZGIBBON’S NOTE THEREUPON.....512
IX. LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL’S MEMORANDUM ON ARMY AND NAVY
ADMINISTRATION.....517
INDEX.....525
ILLUSTRATIONS
TO
THE SECOND VOLUME
1. LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL, 1886 (_Photogravure_)....._Frontispiece_
.....TO FACE PAGE
2. ‘ULSTER WILL FIGHT AND ULSTER WILL BE RIGHT’ (_Photogravure_).....64
3. THE GRAND YOUNG MAN (_Cartoon from ‘Punch’_).....140
4. LETTER FROM QUEEN VICTORIA (_facsimile_).....154
5. ‘YOUTH ON THE PROW AND PLEASURE AT THE HELM!’ (_Cartoon from
‘Punch’_).....168
6. BELLEROPHON JUNIOR (_Cartoon from ‘Punch’_).....184
7. LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL’S BUDGET (_facsimile_).....192
8. LADY RANDOLPH CHURCHILL (_from a drawing by John S. Sargent_).....438
CHAPTER XII
THE TWENTY-SIXTH OF JANUARY
‘When it was said that the noble lord, the member for Paddington,
had not declared a policy, he pointed, and he was justified in
pointing, not to a sentence, nor even to a phrase, but to a date,
and he said, “Our policy is the 26th of January.”’--_Speech of Mr.
Gladstone, Second Reading Government of Ireland Bill, May 10,
1886._
According to Mr. Morley, the month that followed the General Election
was passed by Mr. Gladstone ‘in depth of meditation.’ The questions
which he revolved were vast and grave. Important and even vital factors
in their decision were hid from him. He saw that the Liberal party was
ripe for schism. He faced the united demand of Nationalist Ireland. He
knew that the balance of power was held by Mr. Parnell. But he could not
know whether the Government would meet Parliament or not; whether they
wanted to be dismissed or not; whether they would seek to gain Whig and
Liberal support, or would try to preserve the combination which had
placed them in power; nor what, in the last alternative, was the Irish
policy Ministers would be prepared to offer or parties disposed to
accept. Yet time was short and the country waited tip-toe on his
deliberations.
The suspense was not prolonged. The results of the elections could not
be estimated till after November 30 and were not determined until
another week had passed. But on December 17, after ten days of
whisperings and rumour, a public announcement of his Home Rule scheme,
apparently authentic in character and circumstantial in detail, appeared
simultaneously in Liberal and Conservative papers. Mr. Gladstone was
prompt to repudiate, as a mere ‘speculation’ upon his opinions, this
premature and unfortunate disclosure. But the next day he was writing to
Lord Hartington, who had asked for explanations, a frank and full
account of his ‘opinions and ideas,’ which shows how closely newspaper
assertion corresponded with the workings of his mind. The process by
which his conversion was effected, has been at length laid bare. His
internal loathing of the Coercive measures he had been forced to impose
during the past five years; his suspicion and entire misconception of
the cold-blooded manœvres by which his Government had been
overturned; his hope of repairing, remoulding and consolidating the
great party instrument which he had directed so long; the desire of an
‘old Parliamentary hand’ to win the game; the dream of a sun-lit
Ireland, loyal because it was free, prosperous and privileged because it
was loyal--the crowning glory of an old man’s life--all find their place
in that immense decision. And then the whole mass of resolve,
ponderously advancing, drawing into its movement all that learning and
fancy could supply, gathering in its progress the growing momentum of
enthusiasm, wrenching and razing all barriers from its path, was finally
precipitated like an avalanche upon a startled world! All has been set
forth. What communications Mr. Gladstone made to his colleagues; how he
addressed himself to Lord Granville, to Lord Spencer, to Lord
Hartington, to Mr. Chamberlain; and how he was variously met, have now
become matters of published fact. An authoritative analysis of the
workings of his mind has been published and may be checked or extended
by a score of conversations, letters and chance remarks, all carefully
recorded. Judgment may be formed of the part he played, upon evidence
perhaps more full and accurate than attaches to any similar transaction.
But a veil of mystery and even suspicion still hangs over the inner
councils of Lord Salisbury’s Government. What were the leaders of the
Conservative party thinking about during these anxious weeks? What plans
did they resolve, what difficulties did they face within the secrecy of
the Cabinet? Their final decision was declared on January 26. But what
alternatives were they weighing meanwhile in conclave or consultation?
How far were they prepared to go in satisfaction of Irish demands? What
purpose lay behind Lord Randolph Churchill’s silence at Sheffield or
lurked in Lord Carnarvon’s ‘empty house’? Upon these much-disputed
matters it may now be possible to cast some light.
Lord Randolph’s view of the policy which the Conservative party should
pursue in Irish matters is described with the utmost candour in a
letter which he had written to a friend of mark before the result of
the General Election was known:--
_Private._
2 Connaught Place, W.: October 14, 1885.
I have no objection to Sexton and Healy knowing the deliberate
intention of the Government on the subject of Irish Education; but
it would not do for the letter or the communication to be made
public, for the effect of publicity on Lancashire might be
unfortunate and might cripple the good intentions of Her Majesty’s
Government.
...It is the Bishops entirely to whom I look in the future to turn,
to mitigate or to postpone the Home Rule onslaught. Let us only be
enabled to occupy a year with the Education Question. By that time,
I am certain, Parnell’s party will have become seriously
disintegrated. Personal jealousies, Government influences, Davitt
and Fenian intrigues will all be at work on the devoted band of
eighty: and the Bishops, who in their hearts hate Parnell and don’t
care a scrap for Home Rule, having safely acquired control of Irish
education, will, according to my calculation, complete the rout.
That is my policy, and I know that it is sound and good, and the
only possible Tory policy. It hinges on acquiring the confidence
and friendship of the Bishops; but if you go in for their mortal
foes the Jesuits on the one hand, and their mortal foes the
anti-clerical Nationalists on the other, for the purpose of
humiliating and beating back Archbishop Walsh and his colleagues,
this policy will be shattered.... My own opinion is that if you
approach the Archbishop through proper channels, if you deal in
friendly remonstrances and in attractive assurances, ... the
tremendous force of the Catholic Church will gradually and
insensibly come over to the side of the Tory party.
Lord Randolph furthermore openly avowed and defended his Irish policy
during these months--in its general scope--on March 4, 1886, in the
House of Commons _after_ the election and after the accession to power
of Mr. Gladstone’s Home Rule Government. ‘I am not going to deny,’ he
said, ‘that at one time I had an idea that the Tory party might
co-operate with the Irish party. I have often worked with Irish members.
I hope to be able to do so again. I have never concealed in the last
Parliament that I thought it possible that on many Irish subjects the
Tory party might co-operate with the Irish National party.... It always
appeared to me that the Tory party were well qualified to deal with many
questions of Irish interest in a manner agreeable to the Irish people
and not in the least dangerous to the general welfare of the British
Empire. I particularly allude to the question of education and to the
question of the land. Judging by past history, I imagined that the cry
of Repeal might be raised as strongly as ever and that Irish members
might say again: “Live or die, sink or swim, we go for Repeal.” Still, I
imagined that might merely turn out to be a sentiment for keeping
together a powerful political party; and that, if Repeal were shown to
be absolutely against the will of the Imperial Parliament, the policy of
Repeal would be dropped.’ Whatever may be thought of the merits of such
a policy, there is nothing disingenuous or obscure either in its private
handling or its public declaration.
Lord Randolph’s Irish opinions were not altered by the verdict of the
constituencies. His natural delight at the Tory victories in the
boroughs led him to form a more sanguine estimate of the mood of the
counties than the event sustained. But even his highest anticipations
did not place the number of Conservative members at more than 300; and
his mind turned at once towards a Whig coalition:--
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Salisbury._
2 Connaught Place, W.: November 29, 1885.
Dear Lord Salisbury,-- ...If we have any luck this week we ought to
number 300 in the House.
I saw Sir Erskine May yesterday--very grumpy. He said the first
trial of strength would be a vote of want of confidence. I said
that did not follow; that the first trial of strength in a new
Parliament often took place on the election of a Speaker. He said:
‘What, oppose Mr. Peel!’ I intimated that, though we were very fond
of Peel, he had no prescriptive possession of the Chair, and that
his election would require something in the nature of a _quid pro
quo_. I also gave him to understand that we have quarrelled with
the Irish, and, having put these and various other false ideas into
his head, left him in a state of exasperated perplexity.
I hope you may be a little in town next week, for the future seems
to require the most careful consideration before any policy is
submitted to the collective luminosity of the Cabinet. I think you
ought to negotiate with the other side, giving Hartington India,
Goschen Home Office and Rosebery Scotch Office. You will never get
Whig support as long as I am in the Government, and Whig support
you must have. I should like to contribute effectively to your
getting it, for my curiosity as to the internal and mysterious
mechanism of Government is completely satiated. Very indifferent
health makes me look forward irresistibly to idleness regained. If
you wanted another bait for the Whigs, ----’s elevation to the
Lords might supply it, for I hear on the very best authority that
chaos and the ---- Office are at present indistinguishable. I
believe that by some process of this kind you could institute a
Government which would keep the Parnellites and Radicals at bay for
years; and, after all, that is what must be arrived at.
Yours most sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
Lord Salisbury’s answer reads strangely in the light of after-events:--
November 30, 1885.
My dear Randolph,--I am afraid your patriotic offer of giving place
to Goschen for the sake of making a coalition will be of little
avail. They hate me as much as they hate you--and if retirements
are required for the sake of repose and Whig combinations I shall
claim to retire with you in both respects.
The time for a coalition has not come yet--nor will, so long as the
G.O.M. is to the fore. But I don’t expect we shall be long in
office this time. I must try and see you some time this week about
our future measures. Are you staying in town? I have not yet had
time to read your Burma papers, but will send them you back, with
any comments that occur to me, when I have.
Yours very truly,
SALISBURY.
Lord Randolph, however, held tenaciously to the idea of a coalition. The
fact that the accession of Lord Hartington to the leadership of the
House would block his own path effectively and that the acceptance of
office by important Whig Ministers must diminish his personal influence,
does not seem to have affected this self-seeking and unscrupulous man;
and about December 4 or 5 he sent the Prime Minister a formal and
elaborate account of his views, which is for many reasons worthy of
attention:--
MEMORANDUM.[46]
Assume that the supporters of the Government will number 300.
Under ordinary circumstances Government would probably resign at
once, there being a clear majority of seventy against them. The 370
opponents of the Government are so singularly disunited that there
is no reason to suppose the Government need be placed in a
minority, and there is every reason to suppose that no other
Government could command so large a following as the present
Government.
CONSTITUTION OF THE 370 OPPONENTS.
It is almost certain that there are in this number some twenty-five
members who without doing any violence to their political
principles would habitually support the Government. It may be
reckoned that 200 will follow the lead of Lord Hartington as long
as he remains leader of the Liberal Opposition. The party more
immediately under the control of Messrs. Chamberlain, Dilke, Morley
and Labouchere may be estimated at sixty-five votes. There remain
eighty Nationalists under the leadership of Mr. Parnell.
It is certain that no Vote of Censure or of Want of Confidence will
be moved at the assembling of Parliament because--
1. Neither Mr. Gladstone, nor Lord Hartington, nor Mr. Chamberlain
could form a Government.
2. Without the support of the eighty Nationalists a Vote, of
Censure or otherwise, would be heavily defeated.
3. The support of the Nationalists would demand a heavier price
than any large portion of the Liberal party would be prepared to
pay.
On what occasion can a trial of party strength arise?
1. On the election of Speaker.
2. On the question of Parliamentary Oath.
SPEAKERSHIP.
The Irish are hostile to Mr. Peel.
The Whigs equally strong in his favour. The Government can displace
Mr. Peel with the help of the Irish. The Whigs will be bitterly
alienated. On the other hand, the Government can support Mr. Peel
and carry his election. The Irish will find their revenge in voting
for Mr. Bradlaugh. The triumph of Mr. Bradlaugh would be a shaking
blow to the Tory Government and party. The alienation of the Whigs
by the defeat of Mr. Peel would certainly in the course of a few
weeks or months destroy the Government.
Which course to choose?
Seeing that the Irish support can never be other than momentary,
seeing that by no possibility can [that] support be clothed with
any elements of stability, seeing that the alienation of the Whigs
from the Government must lead to great evils, seeing that Whig
support, if attained, is honourable, stable, and natural, in my own
mind I pronounce for the re-election of Mr. Peel and for running
the risk of the triumph for Mr. Bradlaugh.
We have proceeded thus far.
The Whigs will not be displeased by the election of Mr. Peel. The
Whigs will not be indignant at the seating of Mr. Bradlaugh. Is it
possible to convert this negative frame of mind of non-hostility
into one of positive co-operation?
Three methods suggest themselves.
1. The offer of places in the Government.
2. The production of a large, genuine and liberal programme.
3. After such a programme has been produced and proceeded with
satisfactorily, the renewal of the offer of places in the
Government.
I think that all these three methods should be honestly tried in
their order. The first must be done with liberality. The leading
members of the Whig party who should be offered places in the
Government are Lord Hartington (with the lead of the House of
Commons), Mr. Goschen, Lord Rosebery and Sir Henry James.
I do not imagine that these offers would be now accepted.
Nevertheless the fact that they have been honestly made may before
long be a powerful weapon in the hands of Lord Salisbury, either as
influencing his own party or the public. The making of these offers
in a generous spirit cannot possibly do harm.
II. THE PROGRAMME.
On foreign questions there does not at present appear to be any
difference of opinion, nor on colonial questions. Attention may be
concentrated on domestic questions. I suggest that the programme
should include:--
1. Parliamentary Procedure }
2. Departmental Reform } Executive.
3. Indian Inquiries. (H. of C. Committee) }
4. Education Inquiries. (Royal Commission) }
5. Local Government }
6. Land Laws } Legislative.
7. University (Ireland) Education }
8. Codification of Criminal Law }
PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE.
The following measures might be informally submitted to the leaders
of parties in the House of Commons:--
_A. The Resort to Autumn Sessions._--The session at present is too
long and too short--too long for a consecutive session; too short
for the decent and efficient transaction of executive, financial
and legislative business.
If this is granted, the following reform suggests itself:--
That Parliament should meet not later than the first week in
February, and, with the usual Easter and Whitsuntide holidays,
should continue in session not later than the first week in
August. That an adjournment should then take place to a period not
later than the second week in October, and that the annual session
should formally be brought to an end by prorogation not later than
the first week in December.
_B. The Alteration of Hours of Business._--That the House should
meet four days in the week at 1 P.M., adjourn from 7 P.M., and rise
at midnight.
_C. Clôture._--That, in addition to existing regulations, it shall
be within the right of the Minister to demand a division on the
subject under discussion a quarter of an hour before the
adjournment of or rising of the House.
_D. Questions._--That the Speaker should appoint a Committee of
three, not being Privy Councillors, who shall decide what questions
can be answered in the House, and which in the votes; and that no
question shall be put without notice, other than explanatory
questions, except by the leave of the House on the demand of 100
members.
_E. Adjournment, Motion for._--That the existing rule be altered,
substituting the number 100 members for the present number 40.
_F._ That Grand Committees deal with the report stage of any Bill
referred, as well as with Committee stage; and that all Bills be
referred to Grand Committees after second reading.
_G._ That the bulk of private business relating to local
development and local enterprise be transferred to local boards
whose proceedings must be sanctioned by provisional orders.
_Departmental Reform._--That Committees of the House of Commons be
appointed to examine and report upon the constitution, staff, work
performed, comparative cost of all public departments, with a view
to the effecting of economies and the rearrangement of salaries,
promotions and retirements.
_Indian Inquiry._--This has been agreed upon.
_Elementary Education Inquiry._--This requires no further notice.
LEGISLATIVE.
_Local Government._--Two essentials: (1) purely popular election by
ratepayers; (2) large and liberal measure of executive and local
legislative powers. Workhouse management need not be touched, nor
education arrangements. But all Quarter Sessions business, all
sanitary matters, registration of votes, survey of land and
registration of titles should be among the duties of the local
boards. Also powers might be given, as in Ireland, to local boards
to advance money on security of rates for purchasers of small
holdings and allotments.
LAND LAWS, REFORM OF.
1. Abolition of primogeniture in cases of intestacy.
2. Compulsory registration of title.
3. Enfranchisement of future leaseholds.
4. Enfranchisement of copyholders.
5. Enfranchisement of lands held in mortmain.
UNIVERSITY (IRELAND) EDUCATION.
This should take the form of--
1. The transference of Cork College to a Catholic board of
management.
2. The endowment of the Catholic University College in Dublin.
3. The establishment of a Catholic College in Armagh.
4. The transference of the Belfast College to a Presbyterian board
of management.
CODIFICATION OF AND REFORM OF CRIMINAL LAW.
This can never be attained if it is left to the action of
Parliament entirely. The procedure suggested is:--
1. The proposing and carrying of certain general resolutions
through both Houses.
2. The appointment by statute of jurisconsults with full power
under aforesaid resolutions to codify; and
3. That the code as drawn shall, after lying on the table of either
House for six months, become the criminal code of the United
Kingdom.
This, as above, is my second method for attracting Parliamentary
support from the ranks of the nominal Opposition. Should this
programme, or one more or less closely analogous to it, be
introduced, generously received by the bulk of the Whigs and
honestly supported, a further offer of places in the Government
might with advantage be made.
‘The success of foregoing,’ concluded Lord Randolph, ‘turns upon
Ireland. I assume two facts:
‘1. That Coercion is impossible now.
‘2. That anything in the nature of an Irish Parliament is
impossible always.
‘_Similarity_ of treatment between England and Ireland in respect
of Local Government:
‘_Liberality_ of grants from Treasury towards Irish objects:
‘_Concession_ to the Roman Catholic hierarchy on education
questions:
‘These are the main lines of a policy towards Ireland which will
secure a great amount of Parliamentary and public concurrence and
will, if vigorously and boldly followed, bring about inevitably the
disintegration of Mr. Parnell’s party. The great size of this party
is its chief danger. Its members are open to various
influences--jealousy of each other and of Parnell; want of funds;
Ministerial influences, priestly influences; and last, but not
least, the capricious, unstable and to some extent treacherous
character of the Irish nature. If that party is boldly dealt with
at the outset it will soon dissolve. I do not consider that the cry
for an Irish Parliament now need be more dangerous than was the cry
for Repeal in the days of O’Connell. As that latter danger
altogether disappeared, so may this present danger if the
Government is strong in Parliament, undivided in council and
unwavering in action.
‘I wish to express my firm conviction and belief that if the
general spirit of this Memorandum could be acted up to, the
Queen’s Government might well be carried on with dignity and
efficiency, and the Parliament will have every reasonable chance of
running a normal course and of being the means of benefit to the
people.’
Lord Salisbury did not answer until the 9th:--
_Private._
Foreign Office: December 9, 1885.
My dear Randolph,--Lord Melbourne used to say that if you only
would let a letter alone, it would answer itself. Your very
interesting memorandum is not quite in that condition: but some
important parts of it have been answered by events. After
Hartington’s speech of Saturday, there can be no longer any
question of offering office _just yet_ to the Moderate Liberals;
and, therefore, no question of your or my resigning to facilitate
that operation. He evidently said what he did to prevent his
friends from suspecting him of any intention, under any
circumstances, to join us. His resolves are not eternal, but he has
effectually debarred himself from any such course until some little
time has passed or something new has happened. Then, again, I don’t
think the Irish will expect us to upset the Speaker; but, if they
did, I quite agree with you in thinking that it would be poor
policy to do so.
But we shall have to make a Queen’s Speech--at least, I can hardly
imagine the Cabinet resolving on an immediate resignation. It would
be deliberately excusing the other side from the necessity of
showing their hand.
In making this Queen’s Speech I entirely agree that our leaning
must be to the Moderate Liberals, and that we can have nothing to
do with any advances towards the Home Rulers. The latter course
would be contrary to our convictions and our pledges, and would be
quite fatal to the cohesion of our party.
But in leaning towards the Moderate Liberals we should take note
of the fact that the moment for bargaining with them has not yet
come. Whenever it does come, two results will follow: (1) Our own
people will recognise the political necessity of admitting a
somewhat stronger ingredient of Liberal policy into our measures,
and (2) the Moderate Liberals will require some such concession as
a condition of their joining us and as a proof to their own friends
that they have not been guilty of any _apostasy_ in so doing. That
being so, the extra tinge of Liberalism in our policy will be part
of the bargain when it comes, and must not be given away before
that time comes. If we are too free with our cash now, we shall
have no money to go to market with when the market is open.
In this view I should offer one or two suggestions in revisal of
your programme. The abolition of primogeniture is in itself of no
importance except on strategic grounds--it is not worth the trouble
of resistance. But it is a bit of a flag. The concession would be
distasteful to a certain number of our people now, and it might be
acceptable as a wedding-present to the Moderate Liberals whenever
the Conservative party leads them to the altar. I would not proffer
it, therefore, now; though, if carried against us, I should make no
serious fight over it.
The proposition of Leasehold Enfranchisement in the future requires
more thrashing out. I doubt whether it would effect your object,
which is that more occupiers should be owners of the houses they
inhabit. I quite agree in the object. I should be more disposed to
follow the Irish precedent and give local authorities the power of
advancing (on the security of the tenement) some large fraction of
its value at low interest, limiting the advance to cases where the
occupier was owner of the whole lease--and, of course, confining it
to voluntary purchase. This for existing leaseholds. For future
buildings the most effective plan would be to allow exemption from
the rates and house tax for five years in all cases where the
occupier was also the owner. (3) With respect to Local Government,
I admit that a general ratepaying franchise may be difficult to
avoid; and, on the whole, I think the Local Government Bill should
be mentioned in the Queen’s Speech. But I should mention in the
same sentence, and as part of the same subject, a London Local
Government Bill, which might be drawn in a very popular manner. The
multiplication of municipalities--say eight or nine--would please
the local leaders, who hope to figure in them and become Mayors. I
should introduce this before the big Local Government Bill. If we
are turned out, we shall be able to fight the question better for
not having shown our hand.
I should be disposed--subject to counsel--to introduce a Church
Reform Bill giving an easy method for getting rid of criminous
clergy, and perhaps also of incompetent clergy; but that craves
wary walking. Then a Bill for making the sale of all corporate land
easy; a Bill to enable marriages to take place in Dissenting
chapels without the presence of the Registrar; and, perhaps, a Bill
for dealing with the Scotch marriage law, but that is doubtful.
With respect to the other articles of your programme--such as
Parliamentary Procedure, Criminal Code, and Roman Catholic
Education--I need say nothing, because I generally agree with you.
I have inflicted on you an abominably long letter, but I thought it
better to put my thoughts before you....
Lord Randolph replied:--
India Office: December 9, 1885.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--It will be a great pleasure to me to wait
upon you to-morrow afternoon at three o’clock at the Foreign
Office.
It is very kind of you writing to me at such length; but as this
will require no answer, other than what you may give in
conversation to-morrow, I venture a few additional observations.
As to offer of places to Whigs.
I can imagine a crisis supervening, to deal with which might
require heroic measures and a great appeal to your followers in
both Houses of Parliament for confidence and support. Under such
circumstances the fact of the offer having been made and sulkily or
arrogantly refused would be of great moral value to you. A proper
recognition of two leading features of the situation seems to me
almost to compel you to make an attempt _now_ at such a
negotiation, even though you may be certain that it will fail:--
1. The fact that your Government is in a minority in the House of
Commons.
2. The division in the Opposition, so glaringly and so recently
shown by Mr. Chamberlain’s speech at Leicester and Lord
Hartington’s in Derbyshire.
I submit with great deference that, your task being to carry on the
Queen’s Government, it is incumbent upon you to take advantage of
every apparent circumstance which may be made to contribute to the
efficiency and solidity of the Government; nor ought you, under
such grave conditions as now exist, to shrink unduly from any
reasonable sacrifice of friends or colleagues which might enable
you honourably to attain the end in view. Having put your hand to
the plough under the uninviting conditions of June last, it is
hardly possible to look back, or to act as if the responsibility
for Government was not upon you.
It is very pleasant to me to learn that my suggestions with regard
to Parliamentary Procedure, R.C. University Ireland, Education, and
criminal law reform and codification meet with your general
concurrence; and that being so, I allow myself to risk a few
arguments which seem to me to militate somewhat against the views
expressed in your letter on the question of the programme
generally, and in particular the questions of Local Government and
Land Law reform.
If I apprehended your meaning rightly, you would make your
programme rather rigidly orthodox Tory, with a view of expanding it
into Whig heresy when the time for a fusion should seem to have
arrived. Now I hold very strongly that in that case the moment for
a fusion will never arrive. If the Newport programme is not at once
presented to Parliament in a large and generous measure, the Whigs
will be justified in their contention that it did not signify real
progressive legislation--that they were right and discriminating
when they mocked at it. That has been Lord Hartington’s cry all
along, which he reiterated with emphasis last Saturday. The
difference between the Newport programme and the concrete portions
of the Midlothian address was not easy to be distinguished, and I
doubt its existence. That being so, if you produce the former,
without timidity, skimping, paring, or scraping, and if the Whigs
turn you out, obviously their motive is office, and office only.
The country will not be deceived or edified by such purely party
manœuvres. And as by your administrative record, so with your
legislative programme, you will have laid up for yourself treasure
in the constituencies, you will have cast bread upon the waters
which you will find after many days.
This is indubitably the lesson of 1835.
I do urge as strongly as I may that you should decide in your mind
how far you can go in legislation--not under Whig pressure, not
with a view solely of gaining Whigs, but solely with a view of what
appears to be best for the country without infringement of any
great Tory principle; and that, having so decided, you should offer
the result to Parliament without delay, without stint, without
qualification, and with all confidence. It is, I am convinced, by
‘showing your hand,’ by showing how many good trumps you have in
it, that you will gain support--if not immediate, at any rate in
the near future. It is by hiding your hand--by giving cause for the
belief, or ground for the accusation, that it is a poor hand and
that you have no trumps, that you will lose support now and make it
most difficult to gain later. The boroughs have gone for you so
strongly because they believe in the fulness and genuineness of the
Newport programme. Our task should be to keep the boroughs, as
well as to win the counties; this can only be done by an active
progressive--I risk the word, a democratic--policy, a casting-off
and a burning of those old, worn-out aristocratic and class
garments from which the Derby-Dizzy lot, with their following of
county families, could never, or never cared to, extricate
themselves.
This being so, in my mind, I find the suggested postponement of
rural Local Government a course open to the deepest suspicion; the
preference given to London government an error in tactics of the
largest kind. No one in the country, or in London either, cares a
damn about a London municipality, nor would many municipalities
attract them. But county government, involving as it does a
redistribution and relief of burdens, to which every man of our
party is deeply pledged, is without doubt anxiously expected by the
constituencies, and will not brook delay. So I would say about land
law reform. I am very sure that the feeling of the boroughs is in
favour of extensive changes in our land system, on the ground that
the labour in the towns is depreciated by agricultural migration,
and that this latter is the effect of an antiquated land system.
This, rightly or wrongly, is the notion in the manufacturing minds,
and failure on our part to come up to their legitimate and
reasonable expectations would produce incalculable disappointment
and mortification.
If you decide that the large constructive measures which the times
seem to demand are beyond the capacity of the Tory party, or the
scope of their political principles, though I should regret the
decision I would accept it without demur. But in that case I would
press upon you the advisability of prompt resignation, on the
ground that the country had for the time decided that the function
of the Tory party would be more usefully displayed in Opposition,
in efforts purely critical, in attempts to amend Liberal
legislation and moderate Liberal zeal. If you show your hand at
all, show it fully and show a good one; but if you have no hand
good enough for the game or the stakes, place the cards face
downwards on the table, decline to play, and leave the Downing
Street table. I cannot think there is any safe _via media_ between
these two courses.
Lastly, I will not conceal my repugnance to dealing with Church
reform. Surely the Russell-Gurney-Disraeli Church legislation is a
warning. The time of Parliament will be wasted in furious
ecclesiastical differences, and votes will be lost on every side by
the party responsible for the effort. The Public Worship Regulation
Act was one of my first House of Commons experiences, and I cannot
forget it. The Nonconformists, so powerful, will offer every
opposition; and nothing will be gained except loss of time, of
temper, and of strength. If those ornamental but, on the whole,
rather useless and expensive Lords Spiritual care to justify their
privileges by attempts at legislation, smile on them, beam on them,
give them every encouragement for bringing the Lords Temporal into
a devout and heavenly frame of mind. Some good may possibly issue
from such a source, if such should be the will of Providence. But
Church reform which is the product of a Cabinet checked and
controlled by party Whips and guided by House of Commons lobbies is
surely in its nature a monstrosity, possibly a profanity, certainly
a farce.
Please pardon me this long letter. I feel that my constant and
lengthy epistolary communications to you may lead you to look
forward to resignation of office as an immense relief, but I find
my excuse in your kindness hitherto, and am
Yours most sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
Ireland swiftly overclouded all other projects and puzzles which
Ministers might consider. It was late in July that Lord Carnarvon had
met Parnell. Four anxious months had passed and the Viceroy had now
arrived at definite conclusions. He saw with alarm that the National
League was strengthening and expanding every day. The fall in prices had
affected the payment of rents. Serious social and economic discontents
stimulated the increasing political excitement. Boycottings were
flagrant, pitiless and widespread. Alike by his convictions and his
public pledges he felt himself debarred from asking for special
legislation. Another policy forced itself upon him with crushing weight.
He declared that unless the Cabinet could move in the direction of Home
Rule he could not continue their servant. It became a question for the
Cabinet whether the retirement of Lord Carnarvon on the grounds stated
would be so heavy a blow to the Government and so injurious to their
main political position that, if he persisted, it would be better for
the Government to resign in a body, ostensibly as a consequence of the
election. Lord Salisbury desired his principal colleagues to express
their opinion upon Lord Carnarvon’s views and intentions.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Salisbury._
December 10, 1885.
Dear Lord S.,--I return you Lord Carnarvon’s memorandum, which was
carefully considered by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Smith,
and myself.
We came to the conclusion that if the Lord-Lieutenant insists on
the choice being made between the adoption of his policy and
resignation, the latter course becomes compulsory on us. If we go
out merely on the ground of our Parliamentary position, we remain
for the purposes of opposition to Home Rule, as a party, _totus
teres atque rotundus_; but if that blessed man sets the signal for
concession flying, our party will go to pieces, as it did on the
Irish Land Act. The only hope for the country is to keep this
present Tory party well together; and unfortunately Lord Carnarvon
has it once more in his power, as on two former occasions, to
disintegrate, demoralise, and shatter.
However, I wish to say for myself--and I feel pretty certain it
will be the view of Sir M. Hicks-Beach and Mr. Smith--that,
whatever course you may finally decide upon, I will gladly see it
through to the best of my ability, no matter what may be the
result.
Yours most sincerely,
R. S. C.
But Lord Salisbury preferred to face the consequences of the Carnarvon
resignation, whatever they might be. ‘The fact,’ he wrote (December 11),
‘that Gladstone is mad to take office, will force him into some line of
conduct which will be discreditable to him, and disastrous, if we do not
prematurely gratify his hunger. The Carnarvon incident is vexatious. I
hope he will be induced to stay with us till Parliament meets. But even
if he does not, I doubt if his retirement will produce any very serious
confusion. He will nominally retire on the ground of health or some
private reason. The truth may ooze out. But we shall not mend matters by
all retiring with him. The true reason will equally ooze out; and we
shall have proclaimed our own impotence very loudly.’
The Irish situation oppressed all minds and from every quarter doubt and
foreboding streamed in upon the Conservative leaders. Was it possible in
face of Mr. Parnell and his United Ireland, in face of Mr. Gladstone
and his ponderous meditations, in face of Lord Carnarvon and his open
sympathies, to remain utterly unyielding? Would it not be well to make
terms while time remained? Could not a joint conference of parties
arrive at some compromise in regard to Irish government? And if not, how
could the land be ruled? Everywhere during this month of December the
sands were shifting underneath men’s feet. Few were firm. Lord Randolph
Churchill was a rock.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Chief Justice
Morris._
_Very Confidential._
December 7, 1885.
My dear Chief Justice,--I am very grateful to you for your letter,
which I have sent on to Lord Salisbury for his consideration.
In a memorandum on the situation which I submitted to the Prime
Minister a week ago, I laid down as an axiom that with regard to
any policy towards Ireland in the nature of, or containing an Irish
Parliament, the attitude of the Tory Party could only be an
absolutely ‘non possumus’ one. You suggest a Committee of leading
men on both sides to inquire, and you base the suggestion on the
proceedings which took place with regard to the Reform Bill.
Two objections seem to me to arise.
1. With regard to Irish Government the Ministers cannot yet with
honour or even decency shift the responsibility from off their
shoulders on to Parliament. In so great a matter surely Ministers
must take the lead and state their policy or abdicate.
2. The precedent of the proceedings on the Reform Bill does not
yet, it seems to me, apply at all closely. Those proceedings were
taken to extricate Government, Opposition, and Parliament generally
from a deadlock and to avert a great constitutional crisis. In
this matter of Irish Government neither deadlock nor crisis has yet
arisen. In the event of their arising, the co-operation of parties
may well be resorted to, but this machinery would, I think, be
spoilt by premature recourse to it.
This may happen: Mr. Gladstone may persuade his colleagues and
party to a policy which Parnell might think too good to refuse
absolutely. The policy might be embodied in an amendment to the
Address and carried against the Government by a large majority.
What should be the course of Government under such circumstances?
To resign or to dissolve?
I should be strongly in favour of the latter if Royal sanction
could be obtained. If the Government resign, Gladstone succeeds in
forming an Administration and carrying a Bill through the Commons
by great majorities. Then will crop up again the eternal question
of resistance of the House of Lords to the will of the people, and
an appeal to the people on that ground will cause the essential
question of Repeal or no Repeal to be obscured or perhaps
altogether lost sight of. By dissolution, a clear issue is
presented to English and Scotch constituencies, and the House of
Lords is kept out of the battle.
Then there is no reason, it is true, why the agricultural
labourers, revolving many things in their anxious minds, should not
gladly agree to Repeal in order to obtain three acres and a cow,
and therefore no great change in the state of parties might result,
and the Tories would be definitely and decisively beaten on a
distinct issue. Well, what then? We should have fought our battle
as well as it could be fought, and the Repeal of the Union would be
the work of the people, the responsibility resting absolutely upon
them and not upon us.
This is my own way of looking at the situation, and why I adhere to
the policy, which you think will be ‘brushed aside,’ of changes in
County Government, &c. That policy may fail, but at any rate it is
a Conservative policy; the surrender to Home Rule, no matter how
you disguise it, is the reverse of conservative as you will be the
first to admit. The Disraeli epoch of constant metamorphoses of
principles and party has passed away.
Radical work must be done by Radical artists; thus less mischief
will arise.
Yours sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
‘I cannot say,’ wrote Lord Salisbury, to whom this correspondence had
been referred (December 6), ‘how heartily I agree in the tone of your
letter to Morris.’
The whole political situation was considered at a Cabinet Council on the
16th. Decision was taken to go on with the Government, to meet
Parliament and await results. The outlines of the Queen’s Speech were
considered. Lord Randolph was most anxious to assign a foremost place to
the reform of Parliamentary Procedure, as described in his memorandum.
The Cabinet, having listened to long speeches on Irish matters, were
tired and disposed to be irritable. The subject was one with which they
were very familiar and on which many of them had already committed
themselves. One Minister whom Lord Randolph thought he had conciliated
the day before, pronounced absolutely against it. Lord Salisbury
practised what he called ‘the decorous reserve proper to one who had
been so long out of the House of Commons.’ The whole question was
abruptly postponed. This defeat filled Lord Randolph with mortification.
He loved his own plans ardently. He cared too much for the objects at
stake to be skilful in personal diplomacy. He could fight; he could
lead; he could drive; but a stolid junta of Cabinet Ministers--‘holy
men,’ as he called them, vexed his soul. He was grievously disappointed
at what he took to be the summary dismissal of a most important subject.
He wrote in deep despondency to the Prime Minister. Lord Salisbury
consoled him in a letter almost affectionate in character. All would
come right if he drafted his proposals and chose a better opportunity of
taking the sense of the Cabinet upon them.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Salisbury._
India Office: December 17, 1885.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--I am very grateful for your kind letter, and
intensely relieved to learn that you consider the question of
giving to Procedure a prominent place in our programme as still
quite open. I shall do as you tell me, and place on paper
elaborated proposals for the more efficient and speedy transaction
of ‘business.’ You are, I know, quite right in blaming me for
having been precipitate on Tuesday. I cannot help it, and shall
never be able to attain to that beatific state of chronic
deliberation which is the peculiarity of * * *, * * * & Co., and
also of the Turk.
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.
Ministers meanwhile preserved an impenetrable silence. No one knew in
what spirit, with what intention or with what allies they would meet
Parliament. The Queen’s Speech still engaged the attention of the
Cabinet. Lord Randolph Churchill was indebted to a friend for a happy
suggestion, which he did not delay to forward to Lord Salisbury:--
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Salisbury._
India Office: January 14, 1886.
Mr. Buckle has just been to see me, full of an idea of his own
which struck me as good, and which I persuaded him not to spoil by
bringing it out in to-morrow’s _Times_.
[Sidenote: 1886 ÆT. 36]
He wishes the Queen’s Speech of 1833 to be imitated, when, after
the agitation of O’Connell, the Government declared in the Speech
their intention of maintaining the Union. I send you the paragraph
and also the paragraphs from the Speech of 1834, which seem still
more to the purpose. Mr. Buckle very forcibly argues that some
declaration of such a kind will force on the question at once, and
prevent Gladstonian shuffling being resorted to successfully. The
Irish would be obliged to meet such a challenge, and all parties
would have to declare themselves....
The paragraph which was finally adopted was modelled on the lines of the
Speech of 1834:--
_The King’s Speech, Feb. 4, 1834._
But I have seen, with feelings of deep regret and just indignation,
the continuance of attempts to excite the people of that country to
demand a repeal of the Legislative Union.
This bond of our national strength and safety I have already
declared my fixed and unalterable resolution, under the blessing of
Divine Providence, to maintain inviolate by all the means in my
power.
In support of this determination I cannot doubt the zealous and
effectual co-operation of my Parliament and my people.
_The Queen’s Speech, Jan. 21, 1886._
I have seen with deep sorrow the renewal, since I last addressed
you, of the attempt to excite the people of Ireland to hostility
against the Legislative Union between that country and Great
Britain. I am absolutely opposed to any disturbance of that
fundamental law, and in resisting it I am convinced that I shall be
heartily supported by my Parliament and my people.
But the Tory leader was meditating a more decided challenge. He proposed
to meet Parliament with a declaration of a Coercion policy which should
disperse all doubts as to the relations of his Government with the
Parnellites and should throw upon the Opposition the odium of defeating
a Government upon a measure affecting law and order. He may have been
led to this decision partly by a desire that the armies should face
each other squarely in the coming battle. Partly, no doubt, he was
persuaded thereto by the growing clamour and pressure of those sections
of his own party who are always powerful to urge repressive measures.
Sulky murmurs at the Carlton; loud complainings in the _Times_;
trumpeted advent of Loyalist and Orange deputations claiming the
protection of the Crown--all the storm-signals were flying. But there
was a considerable case upon the merits. When Lord Randolph Churchill
had visited Ireland in October he found the Viceroy anxious and alarmed
by the growing power of the National League, and that organisation was
now greatly extended. Throughout those parts of Ireland where the
National League was supreme, liberty and law were gravely endangered.
There was not, indeed, that kind of treasonable organisation which had
existed in 1865 and 1867; nor was there such an amount of capital crime
as culminated in the Phœnix Park murders; but a sullen, widespread,
and well-organised spirit of resistance to the laws of property had
taken possession of the Irish people and grew worse week by week. ‘There
were in Ireland, and there are in Ireland now,’ said Lord Randolph at
Paddington (February 13, 1886), ‘two governments--there is the
Government of the Queen and the government of the National League--and
the Government of the Queen is not the stronger government of the two in
many parts of Ireland.’
Lord Salisbury first mentions the subject on January 13. ‘I am very
perturbed,’ he writes, ‘about the state of Ireland.’ Three days later
he met the Cabinet with definite proposals. Lord Ashbourne had prepared
a Coercion Bill, and the Prime Minister had drafted a paragraph for the
Queen’s Speech announcing its immediate introduction. The Cabinet was
startled. Lord Randolph Churchill and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach had not
prepared themselves for such a departure, grave as they knew the
situation in Ireland to be. They were not satisfied that a case for
special legislation was disclosed, still less that it could be sustained
in the House of Commons. Both remembered their speeches of the previous
summer. Neither responded sympathetically to the militant and autocratic
temper of the mass of the party. The council was long and stormy and
Ministers separated without having come to any decision. Meanwhile the
resignation of Lord Carnarvon was publicly announced.
The decision of Lord Salisbury’s Administration to introduce a Coercion
Bill in January 1886 has been the subject of much hostile criticism. It
has been censured as a resort to extra-constitutional measures, not for
the sake of public safety, but as a party manœuvre. It has been
denounced as the callous and unscrupulous reversal of a policy of
conciliation so soon as the Irish vote had been cast at the election.
There is a degree of justice and truth in these harsh accusations, but
it is only a degree; and if the Ministers concerned require a defence,
that defence is best supplied by their own secret letters during these
days of perplexity and stress.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Salisbury._
Carlton Club: January 16, 1886.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--I cannot resist writing to you on Ireland
while the proceedings of to-day’s Cabinet are fresh in my mind. As
far as I could ascertain, the exact difference of opinion between
the view which you hold and the view which I ventured to express
amounts (in the measure of time) to a month at the outside. You
would announce and produce a Bill at once. It appears to me that at
present there is no sufficient Parliamentary case for a Bill,
estimated by the weight of facts adduced; and that the Bill which
you may decide upon now, upon your incomplete grounds, may and will
in all probability be utterly insufficient to meet the facts which
you will have to deal with in abundance in a period of time which
may be calculated by weeks and even days.
What I would like to know, if I am not asking too much, is
this--What influence or information not yet disclosed is compelling
you to lay such a heavy burden on your sadly inefficient colleagues
in the House of Commons? I assume as indubitable that you consider,
and almost entirely guide your action by, the state of parties in
the House of Commons--that is involved in the decision come to in
December to carry on the Government--yet I am certain that you know
that none of us could sustain a case for Coercion. Yet you press it
on us--for we could have come to an agreement to-day on Lord
Cranbrook’s suggestion, only that evidently it was not acceptable
or good in your eyes.
I wish I knew what you really wanted, and how you wished it to be
worked out. I have never thought of anything except the success, or
at least the credit, of _your_ Government; and, knowing how much
depends on the House of Commons, I am at the present moment only
occupied in imagining how the action which you seem to favour could
be effectively sustained from a House of Commons point of view. I
do not think you will accuse me of arrogance or conceit if I avow
my belief that, unless you show me the way very clearly, that
action must fail disastrously. I do not want it to fail so. I know
how very great and high your position is, what a really fine party
you have behind you, how great their confidence in you is (on these
points I do not believe I am capable of making an error), and I am
most anxious that that great instrument on which depends not merely
the item of Ireland, but also the interests of the entire Empire
and home community, should not be damaged or blunted by weak and
inefficient House of Commons action such as the immediate demand
for Coercion will in practice involve.
One word as regards the Government of Ireland. You think the
situation so serious that it demands a Coercion Bill. That
necessitates a strong Irish Government. That Government you have
not got. I think there are three men in the Government who would
answer to the requirements of the position--Lord Cranbrook, Mr.
Smith, and (please don’t be shocked) myself. Of the three I greatly
prefer Mr. Smith. But, assuming that you have decided it is your
duty to carry on the Government until you are turned out, I implore
you not to think of [the arrangement Lord Salisbury had suggested].
No extra laws could make that good or stable. I hope you won’t be
vexed with me for writing so freely. I am only anxious to find
myself on Monday loyally and strenuously supporting whatever you
may think best to be done; but I admit I have not been able
hitherto to refrain from shrinking to take part in an enterprise
desperate in its nature, involving certain and immediate
Parliamentary death, and which, if determined on, will only leave
you without one or two of your most faithful supporters in the
House of Commons. Not that they will refuse to obey what you order,
but that the order itself will be their ruin.
Yours most sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
_Lord Salisbury to Lord Randolph Churchill._
_Confidential._
Foreign Office: January 16, 1886.
My dear Randolph,--I cannot say how much touched I am by the great
kindness and loyalty of your letter. I cannot help feeling how
little I deserve it. I will tell you at once what my dominant
feeling is. It is that we should be a united Cabinet--if possible
with a united party. I have been throughout ready to postpone my
individual opinion to this primary consideration. We have no right
to the luxury of divided councils in a crisis such as this. It is
evident that the great majority of the Cabinet--and, I believe, the
great majority of the party--wish earnestly for a policy which will
show that we do not shrink from the duty of government, and that we
mean to stand by the Loyalists. The disaster I am afraid of is that
we should be driven from office on some motion insisting on the
necessity of a vigorous step, and our position in Opposition would
then be very feeble and we should be much discredited.
I really feel very strongly and deeply all the kindness you have
shown to me, and the great and most successful efforts you have
made to sustain the Government. I should differ from you and Beach
with the most extreme reluctance. But do not let us take any line
which will brand us in the eyes of our countrymen--or will enable
our opponents to do so--as the timid party, who let things float
because they dared not act. The time is coming on us when people
will long for government: do not let us get a character of
shrinking from responsibility.
The question of the _personnel_ of the [Irish] Government must be
considered, but the Speech presses for settlement in the first
instance. I should have thought that the notorious growth of this
‘second government’ throughout Ireland, overshadowing the law and
the Queen’s authority and securing its power by organised terror,
would have sustained a case for such a Bill as Gibson produced. If
you remain of the opposite opinion, let us consider whether some
such phrase as the enclosed could unite us.[50] It is merely a
suggestion. I confess I have a heavy heart in the whole matter. I
have serious doubts whether I am doing my duty. But my train is
going. Perhaps I may write again from Hatfield.
Ever yours very truly,
SALISBURY.
Lord Randolph now surrendered his view altogether. Never before or
afterwards did the two men stand in such cordial relationship. A
comradeship in anxiety had drawn these contrasted natures, each so
vehement and earnest after its own fashion, very close together:--
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Salisbury._
India Office: January 16, 1886.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--I am very grateful for your letter, which
enables me to enter more fully into the position from which you
view things than I have been able hitherto to do. I greatly like
the paragraph suggested, and believe firmly that it meets with
wisdom, tact, and courage the necessities and the possibilities of
the situation. But, _after all_, you are the head of the
Government, and have had a very long experience of public affairs;
and if you think it absolutely incumbent to go further--well,
then, further we must go. A collapse of the Government at the
present moment would be a catastrophe too hideous to contemplate.
I have said all that occurs to me at much too great length and with
far too much reiteration. _Kismet._
Yours most sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
There is a passage in the speech of Sir R. Peel on the Address in ‘33,
where the constitutional position required before a Coercion demand is
very clearly and weightily laid down.
He wrote to Beach accordingly. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was more
unyielding and his letter shows the variety of strong characters arrayed
against Mr. Gladstone:--
_Sir Michael Hicks-Beach to Lord Randolph Churchill._
January 17, 1886.
My dear Churchill,--Of course I should readily accept the sentence
Salisbury suggests. But though his letter touches and influences
me, it does not persuade me to anything more; and I am sorry your
reply goes so far. I do not in the least believe that, with such
Irish paragraphs as we are all ready to accept, any motion
insisting on the necessity of a vigorous step would be ever
proposed, much less carried, against us. I do not think in such a
matter we ought to be governed by the ignorant wish of ‘the great
majority of the party’ or be forced to action we do not approve for
fear of being branded as the ‘timid party.’ If these are
Salisbury’s reasons for Coercion, my opinion remains the same.
But his last sentences require explanation. If by ‘serious doubts
whether I am doing my duty’ he means that he is himself persuaded
that the moment has come when the government of Ireland cannot be
carried on without it, and that he ought not therefore to agree to
delay, that is another matter. I would yield my opinion, strong as
it is, to his convictions, but _only to his convictions_. And in
that case he _must_ have a man to govern Ireland.
Yours sincerely,
M. E. HICKS-BEACH.
Monday’s Cabinet was united upon the Queen’s Speech. Lord Salisbury
decided to entrust the Irish Office to Mr. Smith. Lord Randolph
Churchill, who had acquired much influence with him, was chosen to press
it upon him. The task was thankless and unpromising; the occasion
momentous; but the post of difficulty and peril was also the post of
honour. Gravely and reluctantly Smith accepted, and Lord Cranbrook
became Minister of War in his stead. ‘I saw Mr. Smith this morning,’
wrote Lord Randolph to the Prime Minister (January 20), ‘and used every
argument to persuade him to take in hand the government of Ireland. The
appointment should be settled to-day and announced to-morrow morning
without fail. If there is any weakness in our attitude on Coercion
(which I do not at all admit) it will be more than contradicted by the
appointment of Mr. Smith. This of itself will do much to restore
confidence. Please do not, if possible, allow any delay. On second
thoughts,’ added Lord Randolph mischievously, ‘would Lord Iddesleigh
like to go as Lord-Lieutenant?’
The appointment of the new Irish Secretary was announced on the morning
of the 21st, and that same day formal business, including election of
Speaker, having been previously completed, Parliament was opened in
state and the Session began.
The Government prolonged a precarious existence for five days. Both
parties were in a turmoil. On the one side Whigs and Moderate Liberals
endeavoured, without success, to extract from Mr. Gladstone definite
declarations upon Ireland. In the Tory camp the demand for a Coercion
Bill was loud and insistent. Although the party as a whole had been
beaten in the elections, the bulk of its members came fresh from
remarkable victories in the big towns. Their temper was aggressive. They
welcomed the declaration of the Chancellor of the Exchequer that Mr.
Smith would go to Ireland at once to consider what special measures were
necessary.
We are told that Mr. Gladstone did not resolve to overturn the Ministry
until they definitely declared for Coercion on January 26. That act, he
considered, imposed the responsibility of government upon him. But Lord
Randolph Churchill’s correspondence shows that he had information as
early as January 13 that some independent member would move an amendment
to the Address regretting that no announcement was made of provision for
the wants of the agricultural population. Whether this would fail, or
would gain the support of a united Opposition, could not be ascertained
till the House met. A few hours of Westminster were, however, sufficient
to convince the Tory leaders that the temper of the majority was
adverse to them, that virtual and effective agreement existed between
Mr. Gladstone and Parnell, and that Whig and Moderate Liberal support
would almost certainly be insufficient to sustain them. They had decided
on Coercion; they resolved, if possible, to place the details of their
policy and the case in support of it before the country. The adroit and
experienced Parliamentarians on the Treasury Bench used all their wits
to obtain the necessary delay. The Chancellor of the Exchequer had given
notice on the 21st that immediately on the conclusion of the debate on
the Address he would move resolutions for the Reform of Procedure and
that these would be pressed to the exclusion of other matters, ‘subject
to the intervention of any specially important or urgent business.’ On
the following day Lord Randolph Churchill suggested that the general
debate on the Address should be brought to a conclusion and that the
reforms in Parliamentary Procedure, the consideration of which Mr.
Gladstone had declared in his election address ought to take precedence
of legislation, might be decided before the amendments to the Address
were considered. The changes which Ministers proposed were in themselves
sufficiently startling to have absorbed the House in calmer times; and
Lord Randolph no doubt calculated upon this. But Mr. Gladstone found no
difficulty in persuading his party that Procedure reform might safely be
a little delayed. Lord Randolph’s proposal was ignored and the debate
continued.
On the 23rd Mr. Smith started for Dublin, which he reached on the
morning of the 24th. The imminent defeat of the Ministry had now become
certain. An amendment relating to Burma was moved on the 25th. Mr.
Gladstone, though recommending that no decision should be taken upon it,
as other more convenient opportunities of discussing Indian matters
would occur, indulged in acid criticism of the Burmese policy. ‘Shall I
answer him now?’ asked Lord Randolph, taking up the red box in which the
India Office papers reposed, ‘or shall I wait for the Indian Budget?’
‘Now or never,’ answered the Leader of the House; and Lord Randolph
thereupon, using the precise information of a great department with the
skill of a practised debater, made a vigorous rejoinder. Upon the spur
of the moment he managed to cite a number of instances from the record
of the late Government where they had themselves been drawn into warlike
operations, with, as Lord Randolph contended, far less justification
than was presented in Burma. Mr. Gladstone was much provoked by such
comparisons. He could not speak again himself, and as the Secretary for
India proceeded he was observed repeatedly turning to those about him
and behind him, explaining how this did not apply; how that was wholly
unfounded: how this, again, was a travesty; and so forth. The
Conservatives were delighted at Lord Randolph’s prowess. The attack was
repelled. On the next amendment the Liberal Front Bench abstained, and
the Government survived by twenty-eight. But this was the end.
Faced by approaching destruction, the Government cared only to rally
their friends, to make one last bid for Whig support, and to declare
plainly the issue on which they were to be dismissed. The Cabinet which
met on the morning of the 26th desired the immediate introduction of a
Coercion Bill. But Mr. Smith was not inclined to be hustled. He could
not realise the rapid developments which had taken place in his absence.
Harassed by telegrams, he appealed to Lord Randolph. The friendship
between them was steadily ripening. Of all the characters with which
this story deals, scarcely one improves so much upon acquaintance as
this valiant and honest man. He was the true type of what Disraeli calls
‘an English worthy.’ Here is his letter:--
_Mr. Smith to Lord Randolph Churchill._
_Private._
Chief Secretary’s Office, Dublin Castle: January 25, 1886, 6 P.M.
My dear Churchill,--I have had a telegram from Salisbury which
affords evidence of pressure for what is termed ‘prompt action,’
and I have replied by letter. Another telegram has just come in
from Beach, which cannot be deciphered before post leaves.
There is only one opinion here--that the League must be suppressed
and large powers obtained to protect life, property and public
order, unless the Government is prepared to treat for terms of
capitulation with the Parnellites. But the Land Question is at the
bottom of the trouble, and gives all the force to the agitation. As
at present advised, I should be unwilling to ask for large
repressive powers unless I had authority to promise a large land
scheme.
But these telegrams indicate restlessness in my colleagues. So big
a question cannot be decided offhand. It is more than peace or war
with a foreign Power. We are at a crisis in the relations of the
Imperial Government with Ireland. I may very possibly fail to do
any good, but I will not be hurried into a positive decision on
such momentous issues by the party or the papers; and if my
colleagues think the three or four days I propose to take too long,
I will return to London with pleasure. Let me hear from you either
by telegraph or post.
Yours sincerely,
W. H. SMITH.
The correspondence was continued by cypher telegrams:--
_Lord R. Churchill to Mr. Smith._
January 26.
Greatly obliged by your letter.
Absolutely necessary for Government to state to-night their
intentions with regard to Ireland--viz. suppression of National
League followed by Land Bill. This is the only method of averting
defeat on Jesse Collings. Notice should be given to-day of
introduction of repressive Bill on Thursday, coupled with revival
of rules of urgency. Telegraph to me your views. I would earnestly
press your return to London.
_Mr. Smith to Lord R. Churchill._
I think proposed action looks precipitate. There is no excessive
urgency here, and great care is required in framing and describing
measure. I should prefer, if possible, to provide against the
intimidation of League than denounce it by name. I cross to-night.
Lord Randolph replied from the House of Commons at six o’clock the same
day:--
Your telegram received half-hour after Cabinet separated. Beach has
just announced introduction of Bill by you on Thursday for
suppression of National League and other dangerous associations,
for the prevention of intimidation and for the protection of life,
property and order in Ireland.[51] Of course, great sensation.
It is not improbable, however, that we shall be defeated to-night,
in which case we shall resign. I showed your wire to Lord
Salisbury. We both agreed you would not wish unanimous decision of
Cabinet modified.
Mr. Smith arrived in London with the daylight, to read upon the early
placards that the Government was out.
The famous Jesse Collings Amendment produced an interesting debate; but
as the members listened to the opposing views of Mr. Chaplin and Mr.
Joseph Arch, of Mr. Goschen and Mr. Bradlaugh, of Mr. Gladstone and Lord
Hartington, they knew that behind the relevant arguments of the
speakers, behind all the talk of peasant-proprietors, allotments,
vegetables, and cows, stood a far greater issue. ‘If the result of this
division,’ said the Chancellor of the Exchequer, ‘should be unfavourable
to Her Majesty’s Government we shall accept that decision without
regret. We assumed office reluctantly, and we shall leave it willingly
as soon as we are assured that we do not possess the support of the
House. But the success of this motion will have another and graver
effect.... It will not only be a defeat of Her Majesty’s Government, but
it will be a defeat of the policy ... which they believe it to be their
duty to pursue with respect to Ireland.’
The Government were beaten on the division by seventy-nine votes,
notwithstanding that sixteen Liberals, including Lord Hartington, Mr.
Goschen and Sir Henry James, voted with them and fifty-six others stayed
away. The next day Lord Salisbury’s Cabinet resigned.
Thus, after a brief but exciting reign, fell the ‘Ministry of
Caretakers.’ They had confronted enormous difficulties with small
resources. They existed at the caprice of their enemies. They had
office, but not power. Yet they faced their task and their opponents
with courage and skill. Their Administration was defended by powerful
oratory; it was sustained--except in its dying moments--by sedate and
efficient Executive action. In a few short months the Conservative party
were freed from the reproach of irresponsibility and their capacity for
government was recognised by the country. The peace of Europe was
preserved amid grave embarrassments and under their guidance the nation
emerged safely and honourably from the Russian crisis. They legislated
with unexpected good fortune. They inaugurated a new policy, never since
abandoned, of Land Purchase in Ireland. They restored and greatly
strengthened the defences of India. They laid the foundations of
Australian Federation, and by a successful, inexpensive and almost
bloodless military expedition added a vast and fertile province to the
dominions of the Crown.
CHAPTER XIII
HOME RULE
‘Vote it as you please. There is a company of poor men that will
spend all their blood before they see it settled so.’--CARLYLE,
_Cromwell_.
On the last day in January Mr. Gladstone undertook to form his
Administration. Its complexion was indicated by the first of the new
appointments: for Mr. Morley became Chief Secretary to the
Lord-Lieutenant. This was followed, without delay, on the one hand by
the statement that Lord Spencer had acquiesced in the new Irish policy
and would be Lord President of the Council; and upon the other by
rumours of Whig refusals. For some days negotiations were protracted
with Lord Hartington, Mr. Goschen and Sir Henry James; but, whatever
signs of hesitation had marked their previous course, their action now
was decided. Sir Henry James was offered successively both the Lord
Chancellorship and the Home Secretaryship, and even more important
Executive offices were pressed upon the others. All were declined. Doubt
and reluctance were also manifested by Mr. Chamberlain and Sir George
Trevelyan and both required and received assurances that they were not
committed, by joining the Government, to the support of any Irish policy
which involved the creation of a separate Parliament. For the rest it
may be noticed that Sir William Harcourt became Chancellor of the
Exchequer; that Lord Rosebery went to the Foreign Office; and that
neither Lord Derby nor Mr. Forster was included in the Government.
The traveller who visits an old battlefield can never fully understand
what its various natural features meant to the combatants. He is shown,
perhaps, a rocky ridge which is called the key of the position. He reads
that it was taken and repurchased on hard terms more than once during
the day. But it is an ordinary object in the landscape. A dozen such
eminences have been seen during the morning’s ride. Was it really so
important? Were the fortunes of kingdoms actually for some hours
involved in the possession of those few acres of rank grass and
scattered stone? As he stands serenely on ground where once the bravest
soldier hardly dared to crawl, he can scarcely believe it. Yet, to the
men who fought, those rocks meant much more than life or death. Duty was
there; honour was there; and in the end victory. And if the smoky
curtain that hangs about the field were lifted and the view enlarged, it
might be seen that great causes of truth, or justice, or freedom, and
long tranquil years in smiling lands depended indeed upon this ragged
ridge, made famous by the blundering collision of two armies, worthless
except for the tactical purpose of the moment and probably ill-adapted
and wrongly selected even for that.
The actual provisions of the Home Rule Bill do not at all convey the
magnitude of the issue or explain the gravity with which it was
regarded. A proposal to establish by statute, subject to guarantees of
Imperial supremacy, a colonial Parliament in Ireland for the transaction
of Irish business may indeed be unwise, but is not, and ought not to be,
outside the limits of calm and patient consideration. Such a proposal is
not necessarily fraught with the immense and terrific consequences which
were so generally associated with it. A generation may arise in England
who will question the policy of creating subordinate legislatures as
little as we question the propriety of Catholic Emancipation and who
will study the records of the fierce disputes of 1886 with the superior
manner of a modern professor examining the controversies of the early
Church. But that will not prove the men of 1886 wrong or foolish in
speech and action.
The controversy of 1886 can never be resolved. Whatever may happen in
the future, neither party can be brought to the bar of history and
proved by actual experience right or wrong. The cases of Catholic
Emancipation, of the Great Reform Bill, of the Repeal of the Corn Laws,
are differently placed. We know that in certain circumstances a great
change was made and that that change was immediately vindicated by
events and afterwards ratified by posterity. The opponents of the change
stand condemned. No such assured conclusion of the Home Rule Question of
1886 can ever be reached, unless by some unthinkable coincidence the
actual circumstances of that time were reconstructed.
Mr. Gladstone ultimately succeeded in convincing not only his personal
friends and half his fellow-countrymen of his entire sincerity, but his
most capable opponents also. Yet at the time his motives were impugned,
and not without much reason. Concessions to Ireland made by any British
Government which depends for its existence on the Irish vote, will
naturally and necessarily be suspect. There must always be a feeling in
English minds that such a government is not a free agent, that it is
trafficking for personal or party advantage with what belongs to the
nation. In 1886 Mr. Gladstone’s Administration lay under deep suspicion.
His own appeals for an independent majority at the election; the sudden
conversion of his principal colleagues; the absolute dependence of his
power upon Mr. Parnell’s followers; the precipitate haste with which he
had taken office; all tended to confirm the distrust and prejudices of
his opponents. Whether his Bill was proposed upon its merits or not, it
was not considered, and could not be considered, upon them. It looked
like surrender--not advance; and surrender made shameful by the party
advantage that was its first-fruits. The violent scenes in the House of
Commons, the declarations of hatred towards England reiterated by Irish
Nationalism, however historically excusable, the long nightmare of
outrage and unrest through which Ireland was struggling, the American
gold, the dynamite explosions, the bloody daggers in the Phœnix
Park, had bitten deep into British minds and memories. The tireless
conflicts of Catholic and Protestant, of landlord and tenant, provoked
and disquieted statesmen of every complexion. Some there were who rose
to Mr. Gladstone’s level of enthusiasm, who shared his consciousness of
unswerving rectitude and dreams of glorious achievement; but by most of
the eminent men in England the Irish proposals of 1886 were regarded as
the surrender of national heirlooms at the compulsion of public enemies,
involving an act of practical secession with potential consequences of
revolution and civil war. And once this conviction was adopted, all
chance that the plan itself would be fairly weighed was inevitably
destroyed. Radicals who, like Mr. Chamberlain, were committed to all
sorts of schemes of devolution, who looked with favour upon National
Councils or Legislatures of the Canadian provincial type, were, by the
stroke of crisis, united with the ultra-Conservatives and
authoritarians. A state of war existed and political leaders selected
their positions upon tactical reasons alone. Here it was good to fight;
there it was bad. At this point a stand might be made; that it would be
well to concede. All question of a reasonable settlement vanished. Every
man chose his ground and fought upon it to win. ‘Never,’ said Lord
Randolph in after years to a friend, ‘have we approached the Irish
Question _avec de bonnes paroles et de bons procédés_.’
Thus it happened that in the tremendous enterprise upon which Mr.
Gladstone had now determined to embark, he found arrayed against him
nearly all the leading men and most of the strongest forces in England
and Scotland. When a party has been for many years supreme in the State,
it draws into itself by its prestige and authority many men who are not
really with it in sympathy and opinion. The Whigs and many moderate
Liberals had long been estranged. They were held by the force of party
associations alone and most of them welcomed a shock which ended the
strain and freed them from obligations they could no longer faithfully
discharge. The wealthy Whig Peers were glad to escape from Radical
associates and to be ranked in the mass of their order. Statesmen of the
old school like Mr. Bright, Lord Hartington and Mr. Goschen, with many
followers whose talents adorned the Liberal party, were quite unprepared
to adapt themselves to the new conditions which a democratic franchise
had imposed. The Home Rule proposals--already in themselves a sufficient
cause for final separation--were, besides, a convenient opportunity. All
this was to have been expected, and no doubt the Irish accession was
estimated to fill the gap. But a Radical defection was utterly
unforeseen.
Of all the men who followed Mr. Gladstone into the Lobby on the night
when the Jesse Collings amendment dismissed the ‘Ministry of Caretakers’
from office, Mr. Chamberlain stood to gain the greatest profit, both in
the furtherance of his political opinions and in his personal
advancement, from the turn events were taking. For five years he had
battled with the Whigs in the Cabinet; for five years they had checked
him. He had declared he would not serve with them again. Now they were
going. Their influence alone had enabled the Prime Minister to moderate
the Radical demands, of which he was the champion. In the place of that
influence was now to be substituted the party of Mr. Parnell. If Mr.
Chamberlain had been powerful before, what would he be in the Liberal
Governments of the future? If Mr. Gladstone had yielded much to his
insistence in the past, what must he concede thereafter? At the very
moment when the Radical movement was growing in strength, after an
election in which the ‘Unauthorised Programme’ had saved the counties
from the Tory triumph in the towns, the whole composition of the Liberal
party was to be changed--and changed wholly in his favour. The Prime
Minister was a very old man. The path was already almost clear. The
future of the party lay at the feet of the leader of thorough, precise
and militant Radicalism.
And if in one direction all prospects looked so bright, the other seemed
entirely barred. He was in acute antagonism with Lord Hartington. Lord
Salisbury had just called him ‘Jack Cade.’ The Whigs regarded him as the
cause of their undoing. To the Tories he was a warning of the wrath to
come. By many acts of his public life, by a hundred speeches, by the
affirmation of important principles and the support of definite
measures, he had cut himself off from Whigs and Tories alike. Many men
will wrestle with their own party or change to another party, but few
will face political extinction. That such a man, careless perhaps of
office, but ambitious for power, should in such circumstances quarrel
with Mr. Gladstone, tear his own Radical following to pieces and go
forth into the night-storm almost alone, was a fact not in human wisdom
to be known or imagined in dreams. Yet his reply to Parnell’s demand had
been prompt and plain. ‘If these, and these alone, are the terms on
which Mr. Parnell’s support is to be obtained,’ he declared as early as
September, ‘I will not enter into the compact.’
That Lord Randolph Churchill was consistent and sincere in his
opposition to Home Rule was at the time much questioned by both sides,
and some shadow of that suspicion has remained. He it was who had
rendered possible the co-operation between the Irish party and the Tory
Opposition, which had placed and maintained the late Government in
office. He was known to hold liberal views on Irish problems. He was
described as being unscrupulous in Parliamentary manœuvre. He had
opposed the renewal of Coercion. He had defended the Maamtrasna inquiry.
If it were true that the Conservative Government had had any Home Rule
dealings as a Government, he was reputed their agent. If any Minister
had trafficked independently, he was that Minister. Many Home Rulers and
Orangemen, agreeing in nothing else, agreed in believing that he at any
rate had been ready upon a Home Rule basis to bargain with Parnell.
These suspicions are injurious. No man was more vigorous in his public
resistance to Home Rule or more vehement in his language than Lord
Randolph Churchill; and if in the midst of his denunciations of Mr.
Gladstone, while he was rousing England and inflaming Ulster, it had
been true that he was fortified by no real conviction, and had been
ready a few months before to sell all that he now declared sacred, an
odious charge would have been brought home.
The documents printed in preceding chapters constitute an unassailable
defence. No Unionist politician has a clearer record. Lord Randolph
Churchill was perfectly willing to work with the Irish members. He
understood how much they had in common with the Conservative party, and
with the best part of the Conservative party. He had no prejudices and
many sympathies in their direction. But his arrangement with them, or
with any of them--for he counted on dividing their forces--would have
been social, religious or economic in its character. It would never have
been of a National character. To give the Irish the educational system
they desired, to court and coax the Bishops, to win the Catholic Church
to the side of the Conservative party--these were objects which all his
life he faithfully pursued. The first political pamphlet he wrote was on
Irish intermediate education. Whether as a Minister in 1885, or out of
office in 1888 and 1889, he will be found deep in schemes of Catholic
conciliation by Irish educational reform--primary, intermediate and
university. One of the last letters this account contains returns to and
reiterates this long-cherished idea. Almost his last speech in the House
of Commons was in defence of Catholic schools. But to the repeal of the
Parliamentary Union he was always unalterably opposed. He did not even
think it worth while to consider seriously the many modified
alternatives in which the times abounded. They might be wise or unwise;
but they were not, he thought, within the functions of the Conservative
party. He knew nothing of the Carnarvon incident, and was incensed to
discover it. His letter to Lord Morris of December 7, 1885, shows how
unyielding he was even to the suggestion of a conference, before the
great attempt was made. His correspondence with Mr. Chamberlain, who
always inclined to alternative proposals, proves him quite unconvinced
in later years by the course of the struggle or by the change in his own
position. ‘It would require circumstances widely different and pressure
of an almost overwhelming kind,’ he wrote in August 1887, ‘to induce any
portion of the Tories to look at any scheme of Home Rule. Gladstone
alone can deal with that measure; and I hope that if he does, and when
he does, he may be kept in check and controlled by a powerful
Opposition.’
The advent of this great crisis therefore threw him for the first time
into complete sympathy with the whole Conservative party. All his
energies and talents were freely expended in a cause for which he cared
intensely. Mr. Gladstone’s vast personal power may perhaps be measured
by the opponents by whom he was confronted, and by whom he was so
narrowly overborne. It would be profitless to compare the relative
services of the various distinguished men who now ranged themselves
against him; to observe that Sir Henry James made the heaviest
sacrifices, that Mr. Chamberlain ran the greatest risks, that Lord
Salisbury showed commanding wisdom or that Lord Hartington struck the
weightiest blows. But when the history of the famous battle for the
Union in 1886 comes to be worthily written, it will be found that no
single man fought with effect in more different quarters of the field
than Lord Randolph Churchill or was in the heart and centre of more
decisive frays.
Outside the walls of Parliament the issue was determined chiefly in the
cities of Birmingham and Belfast. The transference of the whole
political strength of the great Midland centre of Radicalism to the
Unionist cause and the fierce resistance of the Irish North, were the
two most serious obstacles which Mr. Gladstone encountered. In both
cities the conflict was marked by every circumstance of passion and
excitement. In both Lord Randolph intervened as a leader. He possessed
in an eminent degree many of the qualities which may be discovered in a
successful military commander. He could detect with almost unerring
skill the weak points in his enemy’s array. He could make up his mind
with bewildering rapidity and act upon the decision so formed with
absolute confidence. He knew well how to separate what was vital from
what was merely important or desirable. He was quite ruthless in casting
away smaller objects for the sake of a greater. Few men were better
suited to the storms of violent times. Till the explosion of Home Rule
in the early days of December, he was deep in schemes of educational
concession to the Catholic hierarchy--schemes which were in themselves
delicate and complicated and which, on account of the suspicion they
would have excited in Protestant Lancashire, were necessarily secret
while a General Election was pending. But no sooner did Mr. Gladstone’s
intentions become known with certainty than Lord Randolph looked towards
Ulster. All plans of Catholic Universities and nice correspondence with
princes of the Church had to be unceremoniously stowed away till calmer
weather. Christmas found him planning his visit to Belfast. By the New
Year the arrangements were completed. The Ulster Hall was prepared and
the Orange drums were beating. ‘I decided some time ago,’ he wrote
bluntly to FitzGibbon, on February 16, 1886, ‘that if the G.O.M. went
for Home Rule, the Orange card would be the one to play. Please God it
may turn out the ace of trumps and not the two.... I expect,’ he added,
‘your old Commission will go to the devil now.’
Lord Randolph was the first of the out-going Ministers to break silence
and in Paddington, on February 13, he defended the violent oscillations
in the Irish policy of the late Government--the contrast between the
policy of August 1885 and that of January 1886. The reader is already in
possession of the main features of that defence, but it is set forth in
this speech in a complete argumentative shape; and though it is
naturally a partisan account, it will be found to bear a close
comparison with the facts now published. The situation in Ireland in
August had not, he declared, necessitated the renewal of the Crimes Act.
The provisions of the Crimes Act were not suited to deal with the
National League; and by January the growth of that organisation required
the creation of new and different weapons. ‘If the hateful and malignant
domination of the National League had been finally and for ever
suppressed, if the restoration of order had been effective--then Lord
Salisbury’s Government were prepared to propose to Parliament measures
which would to a large extent have met the legitimate aspirations of the
Irish people, whether as regards Local Government or as regards the
further settlement of some portions of the eternal Land Question, or as
regards those wishes of the Catholics of Ireland on higher education
which a large concurrence of the opinion of this country is disposed to
look upon as right and reasonable.’ He concluded by appealing for the
support and encouragement of his constituents in his mission to Ulster
upon which he was about to embark.
Lord Randolph crossed the Channel, and arrived at Larne early on the
morning of February 22. He was welcomed like a king. Thousands of
persons, assembling from the neighbouring townships, greeted him at the
port. At Carrickfergus, where the train was stopped, he imitated--almost
for the only time--a historic example by addressing a ‘great crowd on
the platform.’ In Belfast itself a vast demonstration, remarkable for
its earnestness and quality and amounting, it is computed, to more than
seventy thousand people, marched past him. One who knew Ireland well
declared that he had not believed ‘there were so many Orangemen in the
world.’ That night the Ulster Hall was crowded to its utmost compass. In
order to satisfy the demand for tickets all the seats were removed and
the concourse--which he addressed for nearly an hour and a half--heard
him standing. He was nearly always successful on the platform, but the
effect he produced upon his audience in Belfast was one of the most
memorable triumphs of his life. He held the meeting in the hollow of his
hand. From the very centre of Protestant excitement he appealed to the
loyal Catholics of Ireland to stand firm by the Union and at the same
time, without using language of bigotry or intolerance, he roused the
Orangemen to stern and vehement emotion.
‘Now may be the time,’ he said, ‘to show whether all those ceremonies
and forms which are practised in Orange Lodges, are really living
symbols or only idle and meaningless ceremonies; whether that which you
have so carefully fostered, is really the lamp of liberty and its flame
the undying and unquenchable fire of freedom.... The time may be at
hand when you will have to show that the path of honour and safety is
still illuminated by the light of other days. It may be that this dark
cloud which is now impending over Ireland, will pass away without
breaking. If it does, I believe you and your descendants will be safe
for a long time to come. Her Majesty’s Government hesitates. Like
Macbeth before the murder of Duncan, Mr. Gladstone asks for time. Before
he plunges the knife into the heart of the British Empire he reflects,
he hesitates.... The demonstrations to-day will have a very useful
effect not only upon the public mind in England, but also on the
Ministerial mind, and many more of them must be held. And those
demonstrations ought to be imposing not only from their numbers, but
also for their orderly character. We are essentially a party of law and
order and any violent action resorted to prematurely or without the most
obvious and overwhelming necessity might have the most fatal and
damaging effect upon the cause which we so dearly value and might
alienate forces whose resistance would be beyond all price. The
Loyalists in Ulster should wait and watch--organise and prepare.
Diligence and vigilance ought to be your watchword; so that the blow, if
it does come, may not come upon you as a thief in the night and may not
find you unready and taken by surprise.
‘I believe that this storm will blow over and that the vessel of the
Union will emerge with her Loyalist crew stronger than before; but it is
right and useful that I should add that if the struggle should continue
and if my conclusions should turn out to be wrong, then I am of opinion
that the struggle is not likely to remain within the lines of what we
are accustomed to look upon as constitutional action. No portentous
change such as the Repeal of the Union, no change so gigantic, could be
accomplished by the mere passing of a law. The history of the United
States will teach us a different lesson; and if it should turn out that
the Parliament of the United Kingdom was so recreant from all its high
duties, and that the British nation was so apostate to traditions of
honour and courage, as to hand over the Loyalists of Ireland to the
domination of an Assembly in Dublin which must be to them a foreign and
an alien assembly, if it should be within the design of Providence to
place upon you and your fellow-Loyalists so heavy a trial, then,
gentlemen, I do not hesitate to tell you most truly that in that dark
hour there will not be wanting to you those of position and influence in
England who would be willing to cast in their lot with you and who,
whatever the result, will share your fortunes and your fate. There will
not be wanting those who at the exact moment, when the time is fully
come--if that time should come--will address you in words which are
perhaps best expressed by one of our greatest English poets:--
The combat deepens; on, ye brave,
Who rush to glory or the grave.
Wave, Ulster--all thy banners wave,
And charge with all thy chivalry.’
‘As I was bold enough to trouble you about your speech,’ wrote Lord
Salisbury the next day, ‘I may be allowed to say that I thought it
singularly skilful. You avoided all shoals, and said nothing to which
any Catholic could object--and yet you contrived to rouse a great
enthusiasm among the Protestants. And that I gather to be the general
opinion. I am sure the effect of the speech will be very great in
Ulster.’ Lord Salisbury made no secret of his opinion, and on March 3
publicly alluded to the Belfast speech as a ‘brilliantly successful
effort.’ The Ministerialists, upon the other hand, were furious. Lord
Randolph was accused of inciting to insurrection and treason and
denounced as ‘a rebel in the skin of a Tory.’ The Parnellites were
especially indignant that one whom they had been accustomed to regard
with friendly feelings, should so far forget his duty as to make an
inflammatory speech in Ireland; and as the delinquent entered the House
of Commons the next night, he was greeted by a loud demonstration of
hostility from the Nationalist benches, taking, if contemporary
descriptions may be trusted, the form of prolonged and dismal groaning.
[Illustration: “_Ulster will fight, & Ulster will be right._”]
On the 26th Mr. Sexton requested the Government to afford an opportunity
to the House for discussing a vote of censure upon Lord Randolph
Churchill; and the Prime Minister, in refusing, was careful to base
himself on the needs of public business alone. Lord Randolph, however,
persisted in his courses and a few weeks later, in a letter to a
Liberal-Unionist member, he repeated his menace in an even clearer
form: ‘If political parties and political leaders, not only
Parliamentary but local, should be so utterly lost to every feeling and
dictate of honour and courage as to hand over coldly, and for the sake
of purchasing a short and illusory Parliamentary tranquillity, the lives
and liberties of the Loyalists of Ireland to their hereditary and most
bitter foes, make no doubt on this point--Ulster will not be a
consenting party; Ulster at the proper moment will resort to the supreme
arbitrament of force; Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right; Ulster
will emerge from the struggle victorious, because all that Ulster
represents to us Britons will command the sympathy and support of an
enormous section of our British community, and also, I feel certain,
will attract the admiration and the approval of free and civilised
nations.’
The jingling phrase, ‘Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right,’ was
everywhere caught up. It became one of the war-cries of the time and
spread with spirit-speed all over the country. The attitude of the
Protestant North of Ireland became daily more formidable. The excitement
in Belfast did not subside. Dangerous riots, increasing in fury until
they almost amounted to warfare, occurred in the streets between the
factions of Orange and Green. Fire-arms were freely used by the police
and by the combatants. Houses were sacked and men and women were killed.
So savage, repeated and prolonged were the disturbances, breaking out
again and again in spite of all efforts to suppress them, that they
became in the end the subject of a Parliamentary Commission, the
evidence and report of which are not pleasant reading and proved, when
finally published, damaging to the Orange party.
The subject was not, however, discussed in the House of Commons until
May 20. An interlude in the Home Rule debate was required for the
passage of an Arms Bill which the state of Ireland generally, and of
Ulster in particular, had rendered necessary. Lord Randolph was, of
course, the object of severe attack from the Irish party and especially
from Mr. Parnell, who accused him of inciting, unintentionally, to
murder and outrage. To this charge, and to a statement of Sir Henry
James that his Ulster speech proved him ‘half a traitor,’ he replied
indignantly. He was able to cite the authority of Lord Althorp, Sir
Robert Peel, Mr. Morley and of the Prime Minister himself in support of
the contention that circumstances might justify morally, if not
technically, violent resistance or even civil war. He declined to recede
in any way from his words, and the Conservative party cheered him loudly
when he said so. Sir Henry James made a soft answer; but the
extraordinary feature in the debate was the intervention of the Prime
Minister. He did not arrive in the House until after Lord Randolph had
spoken, but without delay he launched out upon a sonorous denunciation
of his proceedings. He declared that such conduct reminded him of Mr.
Smith O’Brien, who in 1848 had risen in his place and announced that,
regarding constitutional means exhausted, he would forthwith return to
Ireland and proceed to levy war against the Queen. But Mr. Smith
O’Brien, argued Mr. Gladstone, was only a private member and a
representative of the people. How much more reprehensible was such
conduct when displayed by a former Minister of the Crown, by an
ex-Secretary of State and by a Privy Councillor! It almost seemed, from
the measured severity of the Prime Minister, that he intended to
conclude by intimating that he had advised the Queen to strike Lord
Randolph Churchill’s name from the list of the Privy Council. But he
avoided this natural conclusion to his argument. ‘If,’ he said, ‘we were
a weaker country, with less solid institutions, such occurrences as this
would, in my opinion, have called for severe and immediate notice.’ Mr.
Plunket from the Front Opposition Bench defended Lord Randolph, but the
Irish continued to attack him all the evening in an acrimonious fashion.
The next day Lord Randolph wrote to the Prime Minister, pointing out
some inaccuracies in the words attributed to him. Mr. Gladstone replied
tartly:--
10 Downing Street, Whitehall: May 21, 1886.
Dear Lord Randolph,--I have to acknowledge the receipt of your
letter of this day, and it would be a matter of great regret to me
if I had used words which misrepresented your statements on so
important a question as that of resistance to the law.
My words rested mainly on a recollection of your speech in Ulster,
and of your letter of May 7 to Mr. Young. To abridge or avoid any
controversy which is avoidable, I will at once say I am content to
take your opinions as you have yourself expressed them in the
closing paragraph of your letter to Mr. Young.
Let us, then, if you please, consider that paragraph as already
substituted for my words.
The only difference will be that to that paragraph I should feel
constrained to apply the words in which last night I endeavoured to
describe your opinions, without any subtraction or modification, in
lieu of applying them to the description from memory which on the
moment I endeavoured to give.
I remain, dear Lord Randolph,
Faithfully yours,
W. E. GLADSTONE.
There the matter ended, being crushed in the throng of greater events.
Constitutional authorities will measure their censures according to
their political opinions; but the fact remains that when men are
sufficiently in earnest they will back their words by more than votes.
‘I am sorry to say,’ said Mr. Gladstone in 1884, in defence of Mr.
Chamberlain’s threat to march 100,000 men from Birmingham to London in
support of the Franchise Bill, ‘that if no instructions had ever been
addressed in political crises to the people of this country except to
remember to hate violence and love order and exercise patience, the
liberties of this country would never have been attained.’
Lord Randolph immediately on his return from Ulster, at the end of
February, threw himself heart and soul into his favourite project of a
coalition. To bring all Unionists together in one line of battle,
strengthened by trust and comradeship, to spread with roses the path of
every man or Minister who would separate from Mr. Gladstone, was his
unwearying endeavour. He would not allow personal differences to
disfigure that array. As early as January he had made friends with Lord
Hartington, who was still deeply offended by the ‘boa constrictor’
speech.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Hartington._
India Office: January 13, 1886.
Dear Lord Hartington,--I learnt some time ago that you had
considered some remarks which I made in Manchester in November
concerning yourself in your public position considerably exceeded
the proper limits of political controversy. From your manner this
afternoon when we met I venture to think that you will not
misunderstand me when I endeavour to assure you that in case I am
open to blame in this matter I greatly regret it; and indeed will
admit that it is probable that on the occasion alluded to I dwelt
upon events which I feel must ever be to you of a deeply painful
memory in an unguarded and stupid manner.
There was, however, I hope you will believe, no intention on my
part to say aught that you could object to on these grounds, and I
am very sorry if it is the case that I gave you cause for
reasonable and just complaint.
Yours faithfully,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
This, of course, put everything right. Lord Hartington replied with much
cordiality, and the friendly relations thus re-established were
thereafter consistently preserved and improved.
On March 2 Lord Randolph visited Manchester again, was received by
enormous crowds in the streets and spoke at almost proportionate length
in the evening to upwards of 12,000 people in the Pomona Gardens--a
spot now occupied by the central pool of the Ship Canal. Certainly the
offer which, with Lord Salisbury’s consent, he made to the Whigs and
Liberal seceders could not well have been more fair or handsome. ‘Tell
us what you want,’ he said: ‘dictate your terms. We believe in your
hearts you are animated only by a desire for the welfare of the country;
we believe that you possess the capacity, mental and otherwise, for
contributing to that welfare. If you like to form a Government
yourselves, we will support you. If, on the other hand, you wish for our
personal co-operation in that Government, we will give it you. If there
are persons to whom you object and with whom you do not wish to serve,
those persons will stand aside cheerfully.’ And then he went on, in a
passage which those he so faithfully served ought not perhaps to
overlook, to urge the formation of a new party. ‘Do you not think,’ he
asked, ‘that the time has arrived--and fully arrived--when we might
seriously consider together how we might form a new political party in
England? Do you not think that that party might be an essentially
English party? I say English from no spirit of prejudice whatever. I
mean a party which shall be essentially English in all those ideas of
justice, of moderation, of freedom from prejudice and of resolution
which are the peculiarities of the English race. Do you not think that
such a party might be formed, which might combine all that is best of
the politics of the Tory, the Whig or the Liberal?--combine them all,
whether they be principles or whether they be men; and might not we call
that party by a new name--might not we call it the party of the Union?
Members of that party might be known as Unionists. Our opponents are the
party of Separation, and they may be known as ‘Separatists,’ because
they are a party who, in one form or another, would adopt a policy which
would be equivalent to the restoration of the Heptarchy--a policy which
would throw back our civilisation for centuries, and a policy which must
inevitably destroy that great fabric of empire which those centuries
have laboriously erected. I ask you to answer that proposition
seriously. Let us go in for a party of Union; and it is not only to be a
party of union of the United Kingdom, but it is also to be a party which
supports as its great and main and leading principle union with our
colonies and union with our Indian Empire. I offer this without further
elaboration to your most earnest attention, because I believe that it is
only by the union of all the subjects of the Queen in all parts of the
world and by the re-invigorated cooperation, cohesion and consolidation
of all parts of the widely scattered British Empire that you can hope to
restore to your commerce and to your industries their lost prosperity.’
Meanwhile the preparation of the Irish Bills was jealously guarded from
the public eye. Rumours and reports of their character, and of the
resistance they were encountering in the Cabinet, multiplied and
perished daily. Whigs and Moderate Liberals arraigned before anxious
local associations defended themselves in one way or another from
charges of ‘insubordination’ and ‘lukewarmness.’ Even those who had
refused great office were subjected to severe examination. But while the
agitation and excitement in the country mounted steadily, the
proceedings in Parliament were tame and dull. ‘Les jours se passent et
se ressemblent,’ wrote Lord Randolph. ‘Waiting on the G.O.M. is weary
work.’ Radical resolutions in favour of Disestablishment and the
abolition of the House of Lords failed to rouse the smallest interest.
All debates on other than Irish subjects were unreal; and as the
Government reasonably claimed sufficient time to present their policy in
due form, discussion on Ireland degenerated into desultory skirmishing.
A Scottish Crofters Bill and the colourless ‘Cottage Budget’ slipped
easily through. An unrestful hush preceded the storm.
In this interval Lord Salisbury retired to the Riviera and Lord Randolph
kept him supplied, as usual, with every kind of rumour, chaff, gossip
and circumstantial information, which his wide and various
acquaintanceship enabled him to collect. These chatty letters do not
lend themselves to reproduction. They are too full of sharp phrases and
personal confidences. But in the main they show only the utter
uncertainty and confusion that reigned in the political world and how,
even to those best able to judge, much that seemed trivial, turned out
to be true and important and much that looked substance, proved
moonshine.
Lord Salisbury himself was far-sighted, but not sanguine. He was
doubtful of a Whig coalition:--
It was said of the Peelites of 1850 [he wrote on March 16] that
they were always putting themselves up to auction and always buying
themselves in. That seems to me the Whig idea at present. I do not
think it is necessary to make any more advances to them. The next
steps must come from them.
I have great doubts about _your_ being the impediment. I observe
that Hartington, whenever he has the chance, dwells with so much
conviction upon my ‘rashness, &c.,’ that I suspect I am more the
difficulty than you. I believe the G.O.M., if he were driven to so
frightful a dilemma, would rather work with me than with you; but
that with Hartington it is the reverse.
And a fortnight later:--
It does not seem to me possible that we should attempt to govern by
a majority of which Hartington, Trevelyan and Chamberlain will be
important parts. On the other hand, a dissolution by us, as a
‘Government of Caretakers,’ would be hazardous. It would give both
the Chamberlain and Hartington sections an opportunity of wooing
back their old supporters by abusing us on some point or other that
is sure to arise and so escaping from the necessity of fighting the
election campaign mainly on Home Rule. It would be much better for
us that the dissolution should take place with Gladstone in power,
and upon the Home Rule question. It will then be impossible for the
three sections of Liberals to coalesce against us, and the moderate
men will be compelled to give us (at the election) some friendly
guarantees. But Gladstone may, if he is beaten, decline either to
dissolve or to go on. I see no hope of good Parliamentary
government in England unless the right wing of the Liberals can be
fused with the Tories on some basis which shall represent the
average opinion of the whole mass. But I see little hope of it. The
tendency to grouping, caused mainly by the exigencies of various
cliques of supporters, is becoming irresistible.
* * * * *
I doubt any popular stirring on this question. The instinctive
feeling of an Englishman is to wish to get rid of an Irishman. We
may gain as many votes as Parnell takes from us; I doubt more.
Where we shall gain is in splitting up our opponents.
But in the last week of March the situation cleared and hardened.
Descriptions more or less accurate and detailed of the Home Rule Bill
and its companion measure had leaked out. The division in the Cabinet
became open. Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Trevelyan had, it now appears,
already wished to resign on the 16th. Mr. Gladstone persuaded them to
remain, at any rate until the Irish proposals could be presented to his
colleagues in a concrete form. On the 26th the Prime Minister faced his
powerful lieutenant for the last time across the Cabinet table. The
differences of opinion and mood were not to be reconciled or covered by
verbal concessions, however ingenious. Even with goodwill on both sides
they could not honestly have come to an agreement. And by this time
personal goodwill had ceased to be the determining factor in the
decisions of either. The resignations were announced forthwith. Persons
were found, as is usual in such circumstances, to occupy rather than to
fill their places. Together, in the ensuing five years, Mr. Gladstone
and Mr. Chamberlain could have carried almost any measure of Liberal or
Radical reform upon which they were resolved. The champion of Tory
Democracy, the cautious leader of the Whigs, the astute Conservative
general, would have resisted them in vain. But the separation proved as
lasting as it was complete and the war declared upon March 26, 1886, did
not cease until after Mr. Gladstone had finally retired from the
political arena.
Ever since their reconciliation after the Aston Riots, Lord Randolph
Churchill and Mr. Chamberlain had been good friends. The Radical leader
had been the first to offer his congratulations upon the defeat of ‘the
old gang’ in June 1885. He had discountenanced the opposition to Lord
Randolph’s re-election on taking office, and had been displeased that a
contrary action should have been attributed to him. The bickerings and
wranglings of the General Election in Birmingham had left their personal
relations quite unaffected. They had fought with fairness, and even with
courtesy in public speech, and without rancour of any kind. The
friendship that existed between them was now to have an important
bearing upon the course of events.
In various ways Lord Randolph Churchill was the only prominent man in
the Conservative ranks with whom Mr. Chamberlain could easily deal. Lord
Salisbury represented opposite ideas, and his antagonism had been so
recent and marked that direct association was impossible, even in this
great crisis. But Lord Randolph had been so roundly charged, both by his
Conservative comrades and his regular opponents, with being ‘a Radical
in disguise,’ and was, in fact, so far advanced on many questions, that
Mr. Chamberlain could consort with him without embarrassment or flagrant
incongruity. Lord Randolph therefore became a natural and indispensable
link. The force of political circumstances was strengthened by personal
predilection. Both men liked each other’s company. Their moods and ways
of looking at things--to some extent their methods--were not altogether
dissimilar. Both were popular leaders drawing their strength from
democracy. Both were bold, determined, outspoken and impulsive by
nature. Both had been joined to their orthodox party colleagues by
slender and uncertain bonds. So long as Chamberlain was a Minister,
their communications were necessarily restricted; but as soon as he had
resigned, he was free, and the two came together in close and cordial
co-operation.
Mr. Chamberlain was not likely to be turned from his purpose by the
difficulties and dangers of his position. The determination of such men
is only aggravated by these elements. Their doubts are hardened into
convictions at the whisper of compulsion. He had made up his mind, and
he would certainly not have been bullied out of it. All sorts of
ingenious and substantial alternatives occupied his imagination. An
Irish National Assembly, sitting at Dublin, ‘free to make bye-laws,’ but
‘subject to the authority’ of Parliament--able to levy rates, but
leaving ‘the Queen’s taxes to be settled at Westminster,’ would not have
driven him away. But on the main point he would not budge, any more than
Mr. Gladstone. He would not on any account erect ‘another sovereign
authority similar to the Imperial Parliament.’ Rather than consent
thereto he would face political rain. And, indeed, it might have come
very near to that latter conclusion in the summer months of 1886.
Lord Randolph Churchill now set himself to work by every means in his
power to make the path of such an ally easy and smooth. To bring ‘the
great Joe,’ as he is so often called in the Churchill-Salisbury
correspondence, into the main line of the Union party seemed to him,
indeed, a worthy aspiration. He possessed in private life a personal
attractiveness and a wonderful manner--at once courtly, frank and
merry--which he did not by any means always display. Only his intimate
friends saw his best side. He now exerted himself to comfort Mr.
Chamberlain in the difficulties by which he was beset, and to make him
feel, in the midst of so much anxiety, that he was not without generous
friends in the Conservative party, who were ready to work with him in
this great fight without conditions or explanations of any
kind--without, indeed, one thought beyond the immediate overpowering
issue of the hour. The two men dined together often; they corresponded
freely; they consulted almost every day.
The Ministerial resignations and the imminence of the Parliamentary
crisis induced Lord Randolph to urge by telegraph Lord Salisbury’s
return. The latter was, however, not well enough to travel for several
days and in the meanwhile his lieutenants were in much perplexity. Lord
Randolph wrote to Lord Salisbury on March 29:--
Joe’s conversation last night was somewhat to this effect: He has
separated from Gladstone on account of the question of keeping the
Irish M.P.’s at Westminster. Chamberlain’s Parliament or Council
would be little more than a kind of central vestry, and the Irish
M.P.’s would remain at Westminster as they now are. Gladstone’s
Parliament is a real Parliament, and contemplates the departure of
the Irish M.P.’s. Chamberlain is very anxious, and cannot count for
certain on Radical support. He is rather ‘drawing a bow at a
venture.’ He is much exercised because G.O.M. will not let him make
any explanation of his resignation until after he has introduced
his Bill. Thus G.O.M. has the advantage of first bark. I am going
to dine with Joe to-night at his house, _tête-à-tête_, and shall
learn more. Last night there were too many others present for much
close conversation. Caine, on being asked to stand for Barrow, made
a _sine quâ non_ that he was to oppose Home Rule, and the Barrow
Liberals have accepted him on this platform. This is not without
significance. Gladstone declares he will have a majority of 100;
the Government Whips say 20; R---- says he will be beaten by 70.
Joe told me he had not exchanged a word with John Morley for six
weeks. Ashbourne was commenting last night on the fact that
Archbishop Walsh had swallowed John Morley’s atheism. ‘Ah,’ said
Morris, ‘John Morley spells God with a small _g_; but he spells
Gladstone with a big _G_, and that satisfies the Archbishop.’
I shall write to you again to-morrow and tell you what I hear
to-night.
_March 30._--I hope this will catch you before you leave Monte
Carlo. I learnt a good deal from my friend Joe last night.
Gladstone’s scheme, when Chamberlain retired, was roughly to this
effect: An Irish Parliament of one Chamber, with political powers
equal to the constitution of Canada, controlling all sources of
revenue, raising any taxes, with Ministers responsible to Irish
Parliament. Some kind of shadowy veto reserved to Crown. No other
guarantees or safeguards. The fiscal arrangement was to this
effect: At present Ireland pays by taxation 8,000,000_l._ to
Exchequer; of this England spends 4,000,000_l._ on expenses of
Irish Government, and takes the balance towards service of debt,
army and navy. In future Ireland is to pay 3,500,000_l._ to the
Exchequer towards these three latter objects, and to pay for her
Government as best she can.
The land scheme contemplated the issue of Consols to selling
landlords at a rate which was the same all over Ireland, but which
was to some extent influenced by the size of the holding. If
everybody interested in land took advantage of the scheme
simultaneously, the amount of Consols to be issued would be
220,000,000_l._; but by various dodges this was not to take place,
and the estimated gross issue of Consols was placed at
120,000,000_l._ On this advance Ireland would have to pay 3 per
cent. interest and 1 per cent. sinking fund, or something over
4,000,000_l._ a year. So that the total payments to the Exchequer
would be about what Ireland pays now--viz. 8,000,000_l._--for which
she would receive the land of Ireland and political independence.
Chamberlain thought the whole scheme might be altered by the G.O.M.
between last Friday and Thursday, 8th; but such it was in rough
outline when he left them. Can you imagine twelve men in their
senses silently swallowing such lunatic proposals?
Chamberlain said he could not support opposition to the
introduction of this Bill; so that, I suppose, no such opposition
will be pressed. He said that it was everything that the country
should see the G.O.M. had had the fairest of fair play. He is going
to reply to the G.O.M. on the 8th, and I could see he contemplates
a smashing speech--in fact, a speech for dear life.... No doubt
Chamberlain’s defection has increased Hartington’s numerical
following, and it has also rather fluttered him, for fear he should
be cut out by Chamberlain taking the lead. Chamberlain told me that
there was not a chance of his ever serving in the same Cabinet with
Goschen. This will make a reconstruction of the Liberal Government
under Hartington impossible.
Political apprehension increased as the date for the declaration of the
Irish policy drew near. This event, after various postponements, was
finally fixed for April 8. Early in the month Lord Randolph persuaded
Mr. Chamberlain and Lord Salisbury to meet. The Turf Club was the
neutral ground selected. Thither Lord Salisbury repaired--not, as it
appears, without trepidation and misgivings, and in the little dingy
downstairs room where visitors are received, was begun that strange
alliance afterwards so powerfully to affect the course of history. ‘I
was very anxious to see you to-day,’ wrote Lord Randolph to Mr.
Chamberlain on the 5th, ‘but learn you are gone home. Your friends, of
whom you have many, of whose existence you are not perhaps aware, are
desperately anxious that in any reply which you may make to Gladstone on
Thursday, you should not commit yourself to, or acknowledge the
authorship of, any alternative scheme. It would be a very dangerous
piece of manœuvring with such a skilful opponent as the G.O.M., and
besides might scatter dissension among the allies without conciliating
estranged Radicals or infuriated Irish. Don’t be cross with me for
troubling you. The situation is so critical for everybody that any
genuine opinion is worth consideration.’
And again later from the House of Commons:--
‘My anxiety about Thursday forces me to write to you again to remind
you, in case of forgetfulness among many other anxieties, that the
Queen’s consent to a detailed explanation of Cabinet proceedings is
required, which consent I am informed on high authority must be asked
for in a formal letter.... The G.O.M. is capable of trying to trip you
up on any formality.’
Mr. Chamberlain replied on the 6th. He was vexed with Lord Hartington,
who had changed his mind about the arrangements of the debate and who
now wished to follow Mr. Gladstone immediately. To this Mr. Chamberlain
had assented, not without irritation. ‘The whole matter,’ he wrote, ‘is
rendered more uncertain by the fact that the permission from the Queen
is curiously worded. It seems to preclude reference to Land Purchase;
and as this is bound up with the scheme of Home Rule, I shall decline to
say a word unless I am free to tell the whole story. I have written to
Mr. Gladstone, but at present have no idea whether or when I shall
speak.’
Lord Randolph answered:--
House of Commons: April 7, 1886.
I and my friends pressed very strongly on Hartington and his lot
your indefeasible title to speak after G.O.M. if you chose to do
so, and last evening they finally agreed to this. Now things are
again in confusion ... if we do not act symmetrically and in union,
we shall all get muddled up. Lord H. tells me he is going to see
you this evening. I want to see you first. Could you meet me at the
Athenæum, and, if so, at what hour? Send reply by bearer to
Carlton.
Lord Salisbury tells me G.O.M. has no right to prevent you from
making a full explanation of your reasons for quitting H.M.’s
service, and that if you write direct to H.M. and send it by
special messenger he (Lord S.) is pretty certain she will give you
leave, and you can snap your fingers at the G.O.M.
The irresolution and indecision of the Whigs is most baffling. I am
certain Hartington means nothing but what is right and fair towards
you, but you know there are one or two round him who are very
jealous of you. Don’t blame him, and if you see him this evening
before I see you don’t let him think you are riled with him.
We shall have a desperate fight with this artful G.O.M., and
nothing will win but the wisdom of the serpent.
But in the meanwhile Mr. Chamberlain had abandoned all idea of speaking
on the first day. The uncertainty as to whether the Bill had been
changed or not seemed to him a good reason for delay. His doubts about
the Land Bill had, moreover, been removed. ‘Mr. Gladstone,’ he writes
(April 7), ‘makes no objection to my referring to the Land scheme; so
this difficulty will not arise.’
The debate was marshalled with the utmost care. Lord Randolph feared
lest some trifle might make the mutual relations of his two powerful
allies more difficult than they were already. He understood how easily
vast consequences may in times of strain and emergency arise from
personal matters.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Salisbury._
Turf Club, Piccadilly, W.: April 7, 1886.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--Hartington is to see Chamberlain to-night,
and will let me know the result of the interview here about twelve
this night.
He anticipates great difficulty with Chamberlain, because it
appears now that he wants himself to move the adjournment on
Thursday night, and that he may cut up very rough if again
interfered with. Lord H. says if Joe refuses to give way on this
point he (Lord H.) will not press it, and will decide to follow on
immediately after the G.O.M.
I trust it may be arranged in accordance with my views, because,
from my knowledge of the House of Commons under the Gladstone
spell, if the angel Gabriel was to follow the G.O.M. to-morrow
nobody would report him or care what he said; but by Friday morning
all the glamour will have disappeared, and the Hartington
brandy-and-soda will be relished as a remedy for the intoxication
of the previous evening.
I have written to Chamberlain asking him to see me this evening
before he sees Lord H.
I shall send you a line this evening about twelve in case anything
of interest ‘transpires.’
Yours most sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Salisbury._
April 7, later.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--I had a long and most satisfactory interview
with Chamberlain this evening. In consequence he met Lord H. in a
friendly manner, and arranged as follows: that he (Joe) will move
the adjournment on Thursday evening, and that Lord H. is to speak
Friday, either before or after dinner--for preference before.
Trevelyan will speak to-morrow. Lubbock and Lymington will also
represent Whig impartiality and patriotism if required.
Therefore we have to find dinner-hour speakers, and Plunket as a
ten o’clock man. The debate is to be carried into next week. If
G.O.M. insists upon Monday for his Budget, Tuesday will be taken
for Home Rule.
I hope you may approve of all this.
Yours most sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. C.
The famous ‘Bill for the better government of Ireland,’ after various
delays, came before the House of Commons on April 8, and was expounded
by the Prime Minister with his usual power and more than his usual
restraint. The Chamber, crowded from floor to ceiling with persons of
distinction and authority, the purlieus of Parliament invaded by an
excited throng, reflected the anxiety of his opponents and enforced the
memorable importance of the day. It was discovered that the Irish
members had taken possession of many places on the Conservative benches
above the gangway. The group of ex-Ministers, clustered together as if
on an island, seemed surrounded on every side by the exultant cheers of
their opponents. And as they listened to the oratory of their grand
antagonist and to the loud applauses which were raised from all parts of
the House, more than one heart sank at the onslaught which must now be
met.
Mr. Chamberlain did not speak till the following afternoon. Lord
Randolph’s anxiety about the exact terms of the Royal permission was
justified by the event. So soon as Mr. Chamberlain, in the course of his
explanation, found it necessary to refer to the Land Bill, ‘a very
startling proposal, involving the issue of 120,000,000_l._ Consols,’ Mr.
Gladstone rose at once to remind ‘his right honourable friend,’ as he
was always careful to call him, that the permission obtained from the
Queen on his behalf had no relation whatever to the Land Bill, but
referred to the Government of Ireland Bill alone. Mr. Chamberlain at
once asserted that he had resigned on the Irish policy as expressed in
the two Bills, and his explanation could not be complete unless he was
allowed to refer to both. He asserted that he had asked the Prime
Minister to obtain for him permission to read his letter of March 15,
which dealt exclusively with the Land scheme, and that Mr. Gladstone had
consented to this. The Prime Minister suavely observed that he could not
recollect what letter was written to him on March 15, and that he had no
power to extend the Queen’s permission beyond the limits of the
Government of Ireland Bill. The situation was painful and acute. Mr.
Chamberlain found himself in a position of astonishing difficulty. Quite
apart from the painful nature of a misunderstanding upon matters almost
of personal honour between distinguished men who had hitherto belonged
to the same party, his whole speech--the ‘speech for dear life,’ on
which so much depended--must at every step in the argument be
interrupted, restricted and recast. In the hush of a great assembly,
stirred by passions the fiercer that they were restrained, surrounded by
political opponents and personal enemies, menaced by the rancorous
attitude of the Nationalist members, and confronted by the greatest
Parliamentarian of the age, the resigning Minister had to make up his
mind whether to go on and defy the Prime Minister, whether to sit down
at once and refuse to attempt a mutilated explanation, or whether to
submit and say what could be said as well as possible. He chose the
last, and he succeeded in delivering a speech of nearly an hour which
proceeded by steps of close and sustained argument to a triumphant
conclusion. Lord Randolph Churchill’s admiration for this memorable
personal and Parliamentary feat was boundless. ‘By a supreme and
unequalled effort,’ he wrote at once, ‘you have reasserted your position
as leader of the Radical party, and on questions of Imperial policy you
have gained the confidence of the country. I never heard anything
better.’
In spite of all its unexpected restriction the speech of the resigning
Minister had proved damaging to Bill and policy. But a more formidable
shock was to follow. Mr. Chamberlain has been censured for having joined
the Government of 1886 at all; and at the time, while passion was hot,
he was freely accused of having joined it in order to wreck it. The
letter which he had written to the Prime Minister before accepting
office on January 30, asserting his opinions in perfectly unmistakable
terms upon the Irish Question, and the ‘unlimited liberty of judgment
and rejection’ which Mr. Gladstone had formally accorded him, are in
themselves a powerful defence of his action. But Lord Hartington, who
had from the very first held aloof, occupied a far stronger position;
and from that position, with the ‘hereditary virtue of the whole House
of Cavendish,’ in his usual temper of sober integrity, and in that style
of homely yet profound argument which has always influenced the English
mind, he now delivered a tremendous blow. For a long Parliament he had
led the Liberal Opposition; for almost a generation he had filled great
office; on a hundred important occasions he had been the spokesman of a
Government and a party, and yet until he sat down after his speech on
the introduction of the Home Rule Bill, no one on either side of the
House knew what he could do. Mr. Chamberlain could answer the Prime
Minister, Lord Randolph could attack him and fight him, Mr. Goschen
could rate him; but Lord Hartington on this occasion did that to Mr.
Gladstone which no other living man could do, and which Disraeli himself
had seldom done--he rebuked him.
Beside these speeches the rest of the debate, distinguished as it was by
so much wit and vigour, lay somewhat in shadow. The Chief Secretary, as
the living embodiment of the new Irish policy, was heard with the
greatest attention when he closed the discussion for that evening. In
arraigning the late Government for their bewildering changes of mood and
action towards Ireland, he fastened upon Lord Randolph a sharp
adaptation of a famous verse which was devoid neither of justice nor
severity:--
Stiff in opinions, often in the wrong,
Was everything by turns, and nothing long,
And in the course of one revolving moon
Was green and orange, statesman and buffoon.
Lord Randolph, when he resumed the debate next day, chose, like a good
general, other ground to fight upon than that selected by his adversary
as suited to attack. He spoke with unusual moderation, paying many
elaborate tributes to the Prime Minister’s eloquence and glory, and
dealing mainly, in laborious detail, with the fiscal and financial
proposals of the Bill. He contrived, without actually applying the
quotation, to remind the Chief Secretary of Grattan’s description of a
speech of Lord Clare. ‘Great generosity of assertion, great thrift of
argument, a turn to be offensive without the power to be severe--fury in
the temper and famine in the phrase.’ He kept his most effective retort
till the end. Mr. Morley had suggested that the consequences of the
rejection of the Bill might be an outbreak of crime and outrage in
Ireland, and against those responsible for its defeat. Lord Randolph
rejoined with force and dignity that such considerations ought not to
influence the House. ‘Are these new dangers? Have we never known of a
“No Rent” Manifesto? Have we had no experience of dynamite explosions?
The right honourable member for Bury can tell the House how we were
providentially, and almost miraculously, preserved from an awful
disaster. But the dynamiters--the people who were inculpated in these
atrocities--are now undergoing what has been called a living death....
Then, sir, as to assassination. Assassination is one of the rarest
incidents in modern political life. It used to be a common method of
political warfare; but the growth and progress of civilisation has
demonstrated its utter folly and inutility. A man in public life ought
not to be deterred by the knowledge that by some mischance some day or
other he might be the mark of a lunatic or criminal, any more than
anybody contemplating a railway journey would be deterred by the fear of
an accident.’ All this was greatly approved. ‘I think you must be quite
satisfied,’ wrote Lord Salisbury, ‘that your care over your speech was
not thrown away. Everybody acknowledges it to have been admirably
judicious.’ But Lord Randolph did not set much store by his effort. ‘It
appears,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘to have been rather a _succès d’estime_
than anything else; but the Whigs were very grateful to me for not being
abusive of the G.O.M. or violent.’ And again to FitzGibbon: ‘I fear you
must have thought my speech dull, but I was under an apprehension of
saying anything to hurt the susceptibilities of timorous Whigs and
Radicals, which made me very ineffective.’
No division was taken upon the first reading out of consideration for
these same susceptibilities, and the debate was terminated on the 13th
by Mr. Gladstone in another great oration. The introduction of the Bill
being thus formally agreed to by Parliament, the agitation in the
country and the fusion of the opposing forces proceeded amain. On the
next day a meeting was held in Her Majesty’s Theatre, at which Lord
Hartington appeared on the same platform as Lord Salisbury. The chair
was taken by Lord Cowper, Mr. Gladstone’s late Viceroy, and he was
supported by such representative men as Mr. Smith, Mr. P. Rylands and
Mr. Goschen. The great company who assembled, mainly Conservative in
their character, had no difficulty in coming to agreement upon a
resolution hostile to the measure. Lord Randolph Churchill, for reasons
which do not appear, thought this demonstration, known to history as
‘the Opera House meeting,’ a mistake, and he describes it in his private
letters as a ‘piece of premature gush.’ He was inclined to attach more
importance to a private conclave of Whig Peers which was held two days
later at Derby House, which he attended, and of which he kept a record.
All Mr. Gladstone’s Peers were present, there were scarcely any
absentees and much practical business was settled. The Duke of Argyll
and Lords Derby, Hartington, Camperdown, De Vesci, Ribblesdale and
Selborne, all spoke. Lord Hartington explained that there was no
question of a coalition. He said that nothing could exceed the loyalty
and good faith of Lord Salisbury and the Tories. In his opinion they
were fighting for the unity of the Empire, and not for personal
advantage. He could not make any definite statement; but he told them
they might take it for granted that the Tory party would loyally
support all Unionist candidatures. The Lords were urged not to be afraid
to use their influence upon local Liberal leaders; to tell the members
that their seats would be unsafe if they supported the Bill; and to
attend meetings, if possible, under Liberal auspices. If the Bill ever
reached the House of Lords great efforts must be made to reject it
unanimously. Meanwhile it was arranged that opposition to the measure
was to be fanned by all imaginable means. The meeting separated in much
enthusiasm and determination. ‘The feeling against the whole policy,’
wrote Lord Randolph to FitzGibbon the next day, ‘grows steadily; it is
an undercurrent which the outside public cannot detect.’
Upon the Parliamentary tactics Lord Randolph had the clearest views:--
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Hartington._
April 14, 1886.
Dear Lord Hartington,--I hope you will not think me officious or
presumptuous if I venture to urge upon you my views of the enormous
desirability of your giving notice to-morrow of your intention to
move the rejection of the Bill. Such a move will be the best answer
to the event of last night and the logical result of the meeting
this evening.
I cannot refrain from expressing the opinion that this Bill ought
to be dealt with on its merits, quite apart from any Land Bill, and
that delay in giving notice of rejection until after Friday would
be open to misinterpretation.
There are many waverers. The only way, to my mind, of leading such
persons is by resolute, prompt and decisive action.
Please forgive me for troubling you with these lines.
Yours very truly,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
The second half of Mr. Gladstone’s Irish policy--the Land Bill--was
brought before Parliament on April 16. The Prime Minister had shown no
apparent eagerness to make public this plan, and was credited by his
opponents with intending to hold it back till after the Easter Recess,
in order that the consideration of the Home Rule Bill might not be
prejudiced and complicated. Any misgivings which he may have felt, were
fully justified by the event. The measure was on all sides ill received.
The landlords, whom it was meant to conciliate, would have nothing to do
with it. Radicals disliked buying them out at such a price. Economists
deplored the drain on national credit. The Irish members denounced the
appointment of a Receiver-General. The Press, Metropolitan and
provincial alike, was almost uniformly hostile. The Bill scarcely
survived its birthday. No further progress was made or attempted with it
in Parliament. It perished meanly, and its carcass was kept by enemies
only in order to infect its companion.
The Easter holiday was a period of intense political activity. The Prime
Minister must, of course, have known from the beginning that the Home
Rule Bill would be thrown out in the Lords. The stakes were high. A
direct conflict between the two Houses and a dissolution thereupon was
an inevitable and perhaps an indispensable consequence of his policy. A
defeat in the Commons would shield the Lords from the responsibility.
They would not be concerned in any way. The issue would be confined to
Home Rule alone, and democratic wrath could fall only upon the members
of a representative assembly. It was therefore vital to Mr. Gladstone to
secure the passage through the House of Commons of at least one of the
two Bills, and every exertion was made by both sides to win the
dissentients who held the fortunes of the struggle in balance.
The machinery of the Liberal party acted as machinery is intended to
act. If the changes the leader of the party had proposed, had been twice
as vast, and half as reasonable, it would have been equally obedient. If
he had been an ordinary politician, instead of a great and famous man,
he would, consciously or unconsciously, have controlled it still.
Although Mr. Gladstone knew little of its ordinary workings, and would
have been disquieted had he known more, it responded readily to his
will. All its gigantic force began to grind up against the men who
withstood him, and to it was added the fierce wave of enthusiasm that
his magic drew from the Radical electorate. Nothing availed his
opponents within their own party. Long, distinguished, faithful service,
earnest agreement on all other subjects, the comradeship of battles
scarcely ended, the chances of victories yet to come--all ceased to be
worth consideration. Local Associations hastened to pass resolutions of
confidence in the Prime Minister. To all members who were declared or
reputed opponents of his measures--right or wrong--a hard and growing
pressure was applied. Lord Hartington was required to explain his vote
on the Jesse Collings amendment and his presence at the Opera House
Meeting to the satisfaction of the Rossendale Liberal Council. ‘I have
retracted,’ he said, ‘no word of condemnation or censure which I have
uttered in regard to Conservative policy; and in regard to any question
which is at issue between Liberals and Conservatives outside this
question of the future government of Ireland, I hold that I am as free
and as uncommitted as I ever was. Much as I value the unity of the
Liberal party, I value the unity of the British Empire much more, and I
will not be prevented by any party consideration from doing what, in my
opinion, may be best fitted to maintain that union.’ Yet these brave,
honest words from a representative so long trusted, preceded as they
were by a letter from John Bright himself declaring that Lord
Hartington’s attitude was thoroughly consistent with true Liberalism,
failed to win a vote of confidence, and the most that could be obtained
from the Rossendale Liberals was an expression of thanks for their
member’s address.
The course of events in Birmingham was, for reasons some of which belong
to this narrative, more remarkable. In all the arts of political
warfare, especially in that which concerns the management of
constituencies and electoral machinery, Mr. Chamberlain was unrivalled.
The forces at his disposal were small; but he did not throw away a man
or a chance. The introduction of the Land Bill gave him the opportunity
of reading his letter of March 15 which Mr. Gladstone had formerly
denied him, and of making many damaging criticisms upon that measure.
Yet the tone which he adopted was more friendly than had been generally
expected and his closing words, in which he expressed a hope that the
differences between him and the Prime Minister would not prove
irreconcilable or lasting, were warmly cheered from the Liberal benches.
Mr. Chamberlain has stated with the utmost frankness, in an interview
with Mr. Barry O’Brien,[52] that his intention ‘all the time’ was to
kill the Home Rule Bill. ‘I was not opposed to the reform of the land
laws. I was not opposed to Land Purchase. It was the right way to settle
the Land Question. But there were many things in the Bill to which I was
opposed on principle. My main object in attacking it, though, was to
kill the Home Rule Bill. As soon as the Land Bill was out of the way, I
attacked the question of the exclusion of the Irish members. I used that
point to show the absurdity of the whole scheme.’ The belief in an
accommodation was therefore baseless, and neither Mr. Chamberlain nor
the Prime Minister could share the hopes of their followers.
The war on both sides was fair and fierce. Mr. Chamberlain was
throughout at heart uncompromising; but he practised a conciliatory
manner so that he might carry Birmingham with him. The Prime Minister,
on his part, was duly grateful for his ex-colleague’s kindness; but he
allowed the necessary preparations to go steadily forward for twisting
from Mr. Chamberlain’s hands the organisations, local and national, he
had so long controlled. ‘Gladstone,’ wrote Lord Randolph to FitzGibbon
on the morrow of the Land Bill debate, ‘is pretending to make up to Joe,
in order to pass his Bill; and Joe is pretending to make up to
Gladstone, in order to throw out his Bill. Diamond cut diamond.’
On April 21 the Liberal ‘Two Thousand’ assembled in the Birmingham Town
Hall to hear their member’s explanations. The meeting, which densely
crowded the building, had been organised by Mr. Schnadhorst, and the
exertions of that astute person to obtain a vote favourable to the Prime
Minister had been unremitting. The speaker was not slow to understand
the dangerous blow by which he was threatened. He excelled himself. If
speeches rarely turn votes in Parliament, it is otherwise in the
country. The man himself, their fighting leader, their most
distinguished fellow-citizen, appealing for support from his own people,
using arguments which none could answer, with a skill which none could
rival, was irresistible. Mr. Chamberlain turned the meeting. Some were
moved by the hopes--which he was careful not to destroy--that, after
all, there would be peace. Others resolved to share with him the
fortunes of the struggle. They came to curse; they remained to bless.
Before he had finished, it was evident that he had won. The officials
on the platform saw themselves almost deserted. In vain they pleaded for
delay, for an adjournment, for anything rather than a vote from an
assembly so moved. But Chamberlain demanded an immediate decision, and
the meeting thought his demand was just. By an overwhelming majority--it
is said, with only two dissentients--they passed a resolution of
‘unabated confidence’ in their member, and later a resolution which,
though courteously worded, was in effect a condemnation of the Land
Bill.
On May 3 Mr. Gladstone published a manifesto practically declaring that
the Land Bill was no longer an essential article of the Liberal faith,
and that in the Home Rule Bill all questions of detail were subsidiary
to the one vital principle--the establishment of a legislative body in
Dublin empowered to make laws for Irish as distinguished from Imperial
affairs. On paper this should have met Mr. Chamberlain’s principal
objections. Yet two days later, without waiting for any fresh
declaration from him, the official Gladstonians carried at a special
meeting of the National Liberal Federation a series of resolutions
pledging that body--upon which Mr. Chamberlain’s influence had hitherto
been supreme--to an unconditional support of the Government. The policy
of making diplomatic concessions while fleets and armies are moving into
advantageous positions, seldom leads to peace, and Parliament met after
the Easter Recess more confused and divided than ever before.
The Second Reading of the Home Rule Bill had been fixed for May 6, the
anniversary, as Lord Randolph Churchill lost no time in pointing out, of
the Phœnix Park murders. It was postponed until the 10th, and on that
day began the protracted and memorable debate that ended the Parliament
and shattered the Liberal party. Up to the time when the Land Bill was
introduced Ministers believed that they would certainly carry Home Rule
through the House of Commons. But day by day the Parliamentary situation
grew darker. Lord Hartington moved the rejection of the Bill in an
impressive speech. Fifty-two Liberal and Radical members met Mr.
Chamberlain on the 12th to concert resistance and request him to
negotiate no longer. Sixty-four, including thirty-two who had been at
the former meeting, assembled at Devonshire House on the 14th. By the
18th Lord Hartington felt himself strong enough to make at Bradford
declarations which foreshadowed a hostile vote. On the 22nd the National
Liberal Union was formed of the principal Liberal dissentients all over
the country; while in Birmingham Mr. Chamberlain actually created an
entirely new democratic caucus of his own, to replace the organisation
which Mr. Schnadhorst had wrested from him.
But at the last moment everything came near being thrown into the
melting-pot again. On May 27 Mr. Gladstone called a meeting of the
Liberals at the Foreign Office. Above 260 members attended. The
proceedings were harmonious, and the speech of the Prime Minister most
conciliatory. He said that the Government desired by a vote on the
Second Reading no more than to establish the principle of the measure,
which was the creation in Ireland of a legislative body for the
management of affairs exclusively and specifically Irish. If the Second
Reading were affirmed, no further steps would be taken for passing the
measure that session; it would be withdrawn, and could be proceeded with
in an autumn session, or reintroduced in a new session with the clauses
which presented most difficulty remodelled or reconstructed. Moreover, a
vote for the Second Reading of the Irish Government Bill given by an
independent member, left the giver absolutely free as to his vote on the
Land Purchase Bill.
The plan was at once practical and alluring. The House was invited to
pass little more than an abstract resolution. The controversy of the
Land Bill was put aside; many of the controversies of the Home Rule Bill
would be relegated to the Committee stage. Yet, once the Second Reading
was passed, the Government would be immensely strengthened. A great
decision favourable to them would have been taken by Parliament. Above
all, there would be delay. Time would be secured to the Government to
win back their followers by blandishments and concessions, as well as by
the pressure of local organisations. Time was offered to the waverer and
the weakling--and among all the plain men jostled and buffeted in this
fierce contention there were many such--to put off the evil and
momentous hour of decision and to cling for a while to a middle course.
Time, too, would be at work among the slender new-formed Unionist
alliances. Was it strange that the rank and file of the Liberal party
should welcome this easy yet honourable escape and certain respite amid
alternatives so full of hazard?
The dangerous character of this manœuvre, not less than its extreme
ingenuity, was patent to the Unionist leaders. The Whigs were
embarrassed and perplexed, and Mr. Chamberlain’s position became one of
aggravated and peculiar difficulty. On all sides forces laboriously
accumulated threatened to dissolve. In this crisis Lord Randolph
Churchill’s instinct and resolution were decisive. One course opened
perfectly clear and distinct before him. A hot debate must be forced at
once and at all costs in the House of Commons. Mr. Gladstone must be
stung into reply; and then, what with the taunts and interruptions of
the Opposition and the powerful influence of the Irish audience--not
represented at the Foreign Office meeting--he would in all probability
be driven to a more uncompromising declaration. As soon as he came down
to the House on Friday the 28th, he thrust this forward upon his
colleagues on the Front Opposition Bench and urged that Smith or Beach
should move the adjournment without delay. The others hesitated. The
movers of the adjournment would be on very weak ground and possessed, as
it seemed, but a slight and doubtful pretext. The skill of the Prime
Minister in explanations soothing to all parties was measureless and
unrivalled. A Parliamentary rebuff at such a moment might have the most
serious consequences. But Lord Randolph clinched the matter.
At the conclusion of questions Sir Michael Hicks-Beach rose and invited
the Prime Minister to declare definitely his intentions in regard to the
Bill. Mr. Gladstone’s reply was suave, and ended as follows: ‘Reference
must be made elsewhere before I proceed to give authoritative
information to the House; but there is nothing at all improper in asking
for that information, and on an early day I may be in a position to give
it.’ Forthwith Sir Michael Hicks-Beach asked leave to move the
adjournment of the House, and in spite of the angry cries of ‘No’ which
were raised by Ministerialists he handed to the Speaker a written notice
of motion, which the Speaker somewhat doubtfully accepted. All the
members on the Opposition benches and a few on the Government side of
the House rose amid much cheering and some laughter in its support. Sir
Michael then delivered a vigorous and provocative speech. Mr. Gladstone
had said that the Bill was urgent: yet now it was to be postponed for
five months. He had declared that the Government had a plan, that no one
else had a plan, and that their plan held the field: yet now the House
was asked to give an indefinite vote on some undefined principle of
autonomy for Ireland, which might mean anything or nothing and was, in
fact, a mere abstract resolution. If the Second Reading of the Bill were
carried under conditions like that, it would be nothing more nor less
than a ‘Continuance in Office Bill.’
This was all received with great Opposition cheering, and Mr. Gladstone
laid aside the letter he was writing and rose to reply. He began in his
most majestic manner. He was struck by the warmth of the speech to which
they had listened. He would not imitate it. The imputation that the
Government were considering their own continuance of office was one he
would not condescend to discuss. That he left to the generous
consideration of his countrymen. But as his speech proceeded, the cheers
of his followers and the wealth and splendour of his language and ideas
produced an exhilarating effect. ‘We have before us a conflict in which
we are prepared to go through to the end--(_loud cheers_)--and in which
we are perfectly confident of the final issue. (_Renewed cheers._) But
we will not take our tactics from the Opposition.’ (_Cheers._) And then
followed a passage which proved of momentous importance. ‘The right
honourable gentleman says that we are going to give an indefinite vote,
and that the Bill is to be remodelled. I think that happy word is a pure
invention. I am not aware that there is a shadow or shred of authority
for any such statement.’
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL: Reconstructed.
MR. GLADSTONE: The noble lord says ‘reconstructed’ was the word. It is
quite true that the word ‘reconstructed’ was used. (_Loud Opposition
cheers and laughter._) What confidence these gentlemen who use those
means of opposition must have in the rectitude of their own cause and
the far-seeing character of their own statesmanship! (_Cheers._) The
word ‘reconstructed’ was used. Does the noble lord dare to say it was
used with respect to the Bill?
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL: Yes.
MR. GLADSTONE: Never! Never! (_Cheers._) It was used with respect to one
particular clause of the Bill. This grand attack, founded upon the fact
that our Bill was to be remodelled, therefore fails. What a woeful
collapse! It is not the Bill that is to be remodelled, it appears, after
all. (_Home Rule cheers and laughter._) The noble lord spoke boldly of
my speech, but now it turns out that he read it wrong. (_More
laughter._)
Seldom has rhetorical success been more dearly purchased. If Mr.
Gladstone had made a lame and ineffective speech, if he had contrived to
sit down leaving the impression that he was hesitating and uncertain,
the course of history might have run very differently. The support of
wavering friends might have been secured. A word would have reassured
Parnell. The Second Reading might have been carried. But the very
excellence of his arguments defeated his schemes and his uncompromising
statements settled the fate of the Bill. ‘Never! Never!’ was the last
word in the negotiations with the Liberal and Radical Unionists; it was
the wrench which broke finally and for ever the many ties of sentiment
and interest which bound them to their party: henceforth they looked
back no more, and strode forward into the future, anxious but not
undecided.
Some realisation of the possible effect of his words seemed to come to
the Minister after they were spoken, for he lapsed into ambiguity and
reservations; ‘and,’ said he before sitting down, ‘if we had made some
great error in the management of this Bill, the right honourable
gentleman would not have interposed to-day with his motion for
adjournment, but would probably have sat with folded arms, delighted to
see how we walked into some one of the many snares set for us.’
Lord Randolph Churchill followed in debate. It was not possible then to
know how deep was the impression made upon the Liberal-Unionists by the
uncompromising statements of the Prime Minister, and Lord Randolph, in a
speech which provoked the occupants of the Treasury Bench, which many
mistook for a mere taunting attack, but which was, in reality, a very
adroit and skilful performance, endeavoured with no little success to
extort from Mr. Gladstone and the Home Rulers repeated admissions that
the division on the Second Reading was to be a real trial of strength
and repeated denials that the Bill was to be dropped or reconstructed.
To do this it was necessary to assert the contrary in an exaggerated
form--yet without exciting suspicion; and anyone who may chance to read
the speech from this point of view will discern the artifice lurking in
every part. The offer which the Government made to the House was, he
suggested, this: ‘If you vote for the Second Reading of this Bill, we
will withdraw the Bill, and you shall never hear of it again’; and when
this excited protests he swiftly changed his ground and declared that
the Prime Minister was speaking with two voices--‘a voice to the Irish
members that the Bill is not to be reconstructed--[_No!_]--a voice to
the Liberals below the Gangway that it is to be reconstructed.’ [_No!
No!_] He asked Mr. Gladstone why he would not ‘present a fair issue and
stick to his guns,’ adding, amid a storm of Ministerial wrath, ‘we are
being jockeyed.’ Why was it necessary to delay the Bill? ‘The right
honourable gentleman says he has no time. Why has he no time? To whom is
it principally due that this debate has been so protracted? Who refused
to take it _de die in diem_? Who interposed every obstacle which
Parliamentary experience and ingenuity could suggest? Why, sir, if it
had not been for the obstacles interposed by the Prime Minister himself,
we might have divided on this Bill a week ago. And what is the remedy?
“The question,” says the Prime Minister, “is very urgent. I still hold
to the doctrine of extreme urgency; but we have no time to deal with it
this summer and we will therefore put off further dealing with it till
the end of the year.” [_Mr. Gladstone dissented._] The Prime Minister is
very captious about dates. We will put off dealing with the Bill then to
some period in the future marked out for us by those “limitations which
are imposed upon us by the revolutions of the heavenly bodies.” The
right honourable gentleman complains of want of time, and he says: “We
will not send the Bill up to the House of Lords in August.” Because why?
Because the House of Lords will seek refuge in the excuse that they
cannot consider the measure in the time at their disposal. [MR.
GLADSTONE: ‘Hear! Hear!’] Sir, I dare say that the Prime Minister is far
better acquainted with Peers than I am. He has made a great many of
them--but whatever course the House of Lords may take will not, I am
certain, be based upon such frivolous grounds as that, and I am
perfectly convinced that he need not have the smallest fear whatever
that the question of time will be raised. I have not a doubt about it
that the decision of the House of Lords upon this Bill will be serious,
calm, immediate and final.’ After complaining that information should be
given to one group of members at the Foreign Office and refused to the
House of Commons as a whole, Lord Randolph proceeded: ‘What has been the
great bribe offered by the Prime Minister--a bribe as great as any
offered at the time of the Act of Union? “If you vote for the Second
Reading of a Bill which you do not approve of in your hearts and which
you disbelieve in, I promise that at any rate for another twelve months
you shall not be sent back to your constituencies.” This is the noble
policy of the right honourable gentleman, and the noble motives by which
he appeals to Parliament: “Vote for anything you like; you are committed
to nothing.”’
MR. GLADSTONE: Oh no.
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL: What? Then they are committed!
MR. GLADSTONE: Certainly.
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL: The Prime Minister surprises me. I did not
think it possible to be surprised by him. Does he contend, from a
Parliamentary point of view, that members by voting for the Second
Reading of the Bill can be committed to the Bill if that Bill dies or is
withdrawn?
MR. GLADSTONE: The principle of the Bill.
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL: Never was such a view held in Parliament
before. I venture to say never; and that is why the Prime Minister holds
out to members the bribe that if they will only vote for the principle
of the Bill, which they disapprove of, and which is going to be
withdrawn and possibly never heard of again, he will consent to give
them a little longer lease of political life. The manœuvres of the
Government were such as might be expected from ‘an old Parliamentary
hand’; they were not those which statesmen like Lord Russell, Lord
Althorp or Sir Robert Peel would have contemplated; and, having drawn
forth one final demonstration from the Ministerial benches by protesting
in a concluding sentence against this attempt to ‘hocus’ the House of
Commons, Lord Randolph sat down well satisfied.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer rose to reply. In his most impressive
style he undertook to administer a solemn rebuke for the use of such
words as ‘jockey’ and ‘hocus.’ ‘This, sir,’ he said portentously, ‘is
the language of the Derby.’ ‘No,’ retorted Lord Randolph across the
table, in one of those penetrating half-whispers with which he so often
riveted his hearers, ‘it is the language of the Hoax.’ It was some time
before Sir William Harcourt was able to regain the serious attention of
the House.
The manœuvre had indeed been successful--but how successful could not
yet be known. Mr. Chamberlain summoned a meeting of his followers for
May 31, finally to determine whether to vote against the Bill or to
abstain. ‘Everything,’ he wrote to Lord Randolph (May 29), ‘turns on
Monday’s meeting’; and it is clear from his letter that he had not
absolutely decided upon his course. He even states elaborately the
reasons which made for abstention instead of a direct vote. Lord
Randolph ventured upon a final appeal. He wrote:--
May 29, 1886.
I feel almost certain that if you remain as firm in the future as
you have been in the past the Bill will be destroyed now; otherwise
it will only be ‘scotched,’ and will wriggle about more venomous
and mischievous than before. I think you must be satisfied with
your decision to delay your meeting and your speech. I am sure that
the greater bulk of your followers will stick to you, and stick to
you with all the more admiration and fidelity, if you keep your
foot down. Every day is showing more distinctly what madness it is
to trust the G.O.M.... It seems to me that if you allow your party
to give way, now that they know that the Bill in the autumn will
not be a reconstructed Bill, but the same Bill, both you and your
party will occupy a position of much humility, and you will have
missed at the last moment the prize which was actually in your
grasp. If you have any who are very weak about their seats let me
know the names, and I will do my best to secure them from Tory
opposition. But I do implore you to stick to your guns.... You
won’t mind my troubling you with these lines.
All went well at the meeting. A letter from Mr. Bright is said to have
turned the scale. Fifty-five gentlemen attended, and their resolve to
vote against the Second Reading doomed the Bill. Radical Associations
might assert their loyalty and support; democratic enthusiasm might rise
to fever-heat in the country; but, so far as Parliament was concerned,
the issue was settled. After this eventful interlude there was little
left but to go to a division, and at the end of the next sitting Sir
Michael Hicks-Beach announced that the Front Opposition Bench would take
no more part in the debate. Yet the discussion was prolonged throughout
another week, in the hopes that wavering rebels might return; and to
that end every influence which the Government could employ, from the
personal power and charm of the Minister to the discontent of local
organisations, was sedulously employed.
At last the day of decision came. An anxious crowd hung about the
precincts of Westminster. The House was packed in every part. A final
sensation remained. Mr. Parnell had waited till the end of the debate
and he had something in reserve which might well have shaken opinion.
‘When the Tories were in office,’ he said, in the course of one of his
ablest speeches, ‘we had reason to know that the Conservative party, if
they should be successful at the polls, would have offered Ireland a
statutory legislature with a right to protect her own industries, and
that this would have been coupled with the settlement of the Irish Land
Question on the basis of purchase, on a larger scale than that now
proposed by the Prime Minister.’
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, when his turn came to conclude the debate on
behalf of the Conservatives, met this statement with the bluntest of
denials. ‘I must for myself and my colleagues,’ he said, ‘state in the
plainest and most distinct terms that I utterly and categorically deny
that the late Conservative Government ever had any such intention.’
Parnell’s answer was staggering. ‘Does the right honourable gentleman
mean to deny that that intention was communicated to me by one of his
own colleagues--a Minister of the Crown?’ ‘Yes, sir, I do,’ said the
Leader of the Opposition at once; and then he added prudently, ‘to the
best of my knowledge and belief; and if any such statement was
communicated by anyone to the honourable member, I am certain he had not
the authority to make it.’ ‘Name! name!’ cried the members imperiously
in their excitement. ‘Will the honourable member,’ said Sir Michael, ‘do
us the pleasure to give the name to the House?’ ‘I shall be very glad,’
replied Parnell, amid renewed cries of ‘Name!’ from all sides, ‘to
communicate the name of that colleague when I receive that colleague’s
permission to do so.’ Every eye was turned upon Lord Randolph Churchill,
sitting on the Front Opposition Bench. But he remained gravely silent,
twisting his moustache moodily. Not until Lord Carnarvon’s explanations
two days later in the House of Lords was he relieved from a suspicion so
injurious to his character.
This was the end; and after it Mr. Gladstone brought this great debate
to a close in a manner worthy of its memorable importance and surpassing
all the fire and eloquence which had illumined its progress.
‘I do not deny,’ he said, ‘that many are against us whom we should have
expected to be for us. I do not deny that some whom we see against us
have caused us by their conscientious action the bitterest
disappointment. But you have power, you have wealth, you have rank, you
have station, you have organisation, you have the place of power. What
have we? We think that we have the people’s heart; we believe and we
know we have the promise of the harvest of the future. As to the
people’s heart, you may dispute it, and dispute it with perfect
sincerity. Let that matter make its own proof. As to the harvest of the
future, I doubt if you have so much confidence, and I believe that there
is in the breast of many a man who means to vote against us to-night a
profound misgiving, approaching even to a deep conviction, that the end
will be as we foresee, and not as you--that the ebbing tide is with you,
and the flowing tide is with us. Ireland stands at your bar, expectant,
hopeful, almost suppliant. Her words are the words of truth and
soberness. She asks a blessed oblivion of the past, and in that
oblivion our interest is deeper than even hers. My right hon. friend Mr.
Goschen asks us to-night to abide by the traditions of which we are the
heirs. What traditions? By the Irish tradition? Go into the length and
breadth of the world, ransack the literature of all countries, find, if
you can, a single voice, a single book--find, I would almost say, as
much as a single newspaper article, unless the product of the day, in
which the conduct of England towards Ireland is anywhere treated except
with profound and bitter condemnation. Are these the traditions by which
we are exhorted to stand? No, they are a sad exception to the glory of
our country. They are a broad and black blot upon the pages of its
history, and what we want to do is to stand by the traditions in which
we are the heirs in all matters except our relations to Ireland, and to
make our relations to Ireland conform to the other traditions of our
country. So I hail the demand of Ireland for what I call a blessed
oblivion of the past. She asks also a boon for the future; and that boon
for the future, unless we are much mistaken, will be a boon to us in
respect of honour no less than a boon to her in respect of happiness,
prosperity and peace. Such, sir, is her prayer. Think, I beseech
you--think well, think wisely, think not for a moment but for the years
that are to come, before you reject this Bill.’
The House proceeded immediately to the division. A Whig and a Radical
were named jointly tellers for the ‘Noes.’ The whole Conservative party
with two exceptions--one because of divergence and the other through
serious illness--passed into the Lobby. Yet such had been the strain of
the conflict, so many the uncertainties, so powerful this last supreme
appeal, that--pledges, agreements, careful calculations
notwithstanding--the issue seemed to hang in the balance; and Lord
Randolph Churchill, staring at the crowd as they shuffled by, thought
them so shrunken that he loudly exclaimed: ‘There are not three hundred
men with us.’ So great, indeed, was the excitement and apprehension that
after they had quitted the Lobby scores of Unionist members, instead of
going to their seats in the Chamber, remained massed about the doorway,
eagerly counting with the tellers; and when the three hundred and
thirty-sixth man was told, and it was certain that the Bill was
rejected, such a shout went up as Parliament has seldom heard. The
Government was defeated by 341 votes to 311.
Like Sir Robert Peel forty years before, Mr. Gladstone must now face the
spectacle, melancholy even to an opponent, of the break-up of a great
party. Few were left to him of all that able band who in such good heart
had joined his Government of 1880. Bright had parted from him; Forster
was dead; Hartington and Goschen and James were gone; Chamberlain was a
bitter and formidable foe. The Liberal party was shattered. The Whigs
had marched away in a body. The Radicals were torn in twain. The
Parliament so lately returned in his support had destroyed itself,
almost before it had lived, rather than follow him further. His friends
estranged, his enemies united, the faithful in jeopardy, the deserters
confident; the wealth, the rank, the intellect of England embattled and
arrayed against him; the Bill on which he had set his heart cast out by
the House of Commons; what wonder, then, that this proud old man,
feeling that the years were drawing to a close, yet remembering his
triumphs and conscious of his power, should reach out for the
sledge-hammer of democracy, and fiercely welcome the appeal to the
people!
Parliament was dissolved on the twenty-seventh of June.
CHAPTER XIV
LEADER OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
‘Solos imperantium Vespasianus mutatus in melius.’--TACITUS.
‘It is an assured sign of a worthy and generous spirit whom honour
amends.’--BACON.
The General Election of 1886 surpassed, in the importance of the issue,
in the confusion of parties and the sincerity of the combatants, any
election since the first Reform Bill. Partisanship had grown rancorous
during the eventful course of the controversy; rancour was fanned into
passion by the excitement of decision; and to all was added the extra
and unusual bitterness of a party split. The Liberal dissentients were
brought at once to the uttermost wrench. Everywhere their own
organisations turned against them. Everywhere they struck back with all
their force. Everywhere they and the bold minority who stood by them,
looked for the aid of their former opponents. The Conservative leaders,
on their part, grudged nothing and neglected nothing that could
contribute to the strength of the seceders. To every member who voted
against the Bill they had promised whole-hearted support; and such was
their authority and the discipline of their followers that in nearly
every case the local associations obeyed them. Tory candidates withdrew
patriotically in favour of their late antagonists. Others were frowned
and hustled from the field. Old comradeships and old prejudices faded
together. Life-long friends drummed each other out of political clubs.
Life-long opponents fought side by side. Home Rule was the one and vital
test. The whole force of the machinery of the Liberal party--national
and local--was used uncompromisingly. No Liberal-Unionist who could be
attacked with any prospect of success, was spared. The purge was
complete.
The Home Rulers entered upon the struggle in good hopes. They were
assured of the obedience of the organisations. They saw the intense
enthusiasm--‘never before equalled’--of the Liberal and Radical masses.
They counted vastly upon the Irish vote in the English boroughs; and,
above all, they trusted in Mr. Gladstone’s mighty personality. But the
forces against them were tremendous. The statesman who would effect a
revolution in Great Britain must not only persuade a party, he must
convince the nation; and opposed to Mr. Gladstone were almost all the
men whose names were widely known or had been long respected--John
Bright, by himself a tower; Salisbury and Hartington; Beach and James
and Goschen; Chamberlain and Churchill! All the protagonists of former
conflicts were formed in one line of battle.
Lord Salisbury in the closing years of his life once said that Mr.
Gladstone in struggling for Home Rule, ‘awakened the slumbering genius
of Imperialism.’ Beneath the threshold of domestic politics during the
long years of Liberal prosperity the modern conception of Britain as a
world-power, the heart of an Empire, the inheritor and guardian of a
thousand years of sacrifice and valour, had lived and grown. It had been
cherished by the somewhat tardy recognition of Lord Beaconsfield. It had
been violently stimulated by the disastrous events of the Parliament of
1880. Although Lord Randolph Churchill was never what is nowadays called
an Imperialist and always looked at home rather than abroad, his
followers in the Tory Democracy were already alive with the new idea. A
single touch sufficed to rouse it into a vital and dominant activity
which for nearly twenty years has shaped the course of British history,
and in spite of extravagances, puerilities and even turpitudes, has left
a permanent imprint upon the national mind. It was this rising temper of
opinion that Mr. Gladstone’s Irish policy, embodied in his own majestic
personality, seemed now to challenge directly.
The personal element was the keynote of Lord Randolph Churchill’s
address. That surprising document was made public on June 20, and as a
specimen of savage political invective is not likely soon to be
excelled.[53] It will no doubt be severely judged, now that nothing
remains except the ashes of the great blaze of 1886. At the time many
eminently respectable people who stood some distance from the actual
fighting, as eminently respectable people are apt to do, were horribly
shocked. Even Mr. Chamberlain was startled. ‘Your manifesto,’ he wrote,
‘was “rather strong”; but I suppose the Tories like it.’ But if the Tory
candidates blushed when they read it in the morning paper, they did not
forget to quote it at the evening meeting. Its jingles and its
arguments--for it abounds equally in argument and in abuse--ran like
wildfire along the skirmish lines. The working man laughed over them in
his home and disputed with his mate upon them in the workshop. People
remembered epithets who could remember nothing else, and uttered taunts
when other ammunition failed. One phrase at least, ‘An old man in a
hurry,’ has become historic. If the address was vulgar, it was also
popular. If it was reprobated, it was also used. The anger of that time
has cooled, and its expression is worth preserving, though it may now
provoke nothing worse than a smile.
Lord Randolph spoke only twice during the election, for the exertions of
the Session forced him to seek a rest. He visited Manchester on June 28
and, although he had been there often in the last three years, so great
were the crowds that the traffic of the city was completely suspended
while he made a triumphal progress through the streets. Two days later
he addressed his own constituents in Paddington. His most important
work, however, in the 1886 election lay in Birmingham, where only six
months before he had led the Conservative attack against Mr. Bright and
Mr. Chamberlain. The Tory party in that city, by tremendous efforts,
then first asserted itself as a political force; and, although beaten in
every division, their minorities were well organised and enthusiastic
and amounted in the aggregate to more than 20,000 voters. They did not
easily forget that for years and years they had been kept by the Caucus
and by the genius of Mr. Schnadhorst in a condition of political
subjection. They had almost triumphed in 1885. The turn of events now
threw their arch-enemies absolutely into their hands, and there were not
wanting among their leaders those to whom the divided state of the
Radical party offered the strongest temptations. It was fortunate for
the Unionist cause that there was at hand an influence to which the
whole Conservative party in Birmingham would readily respond.
Disagreeable speeches made by local politicians filled Mr. Chamberlain
with anxiety, and the difficulty and isolation of his own position
inclined him at first to take a gloomy view. Lord Randolph hurried down
to Birmingham on June 19, and by his influence and that of Mr. Rowlands,
the leader of the Conservative party in Birmingham, all difficulties
were smoothed away. ‘I have seen the Birmingham Tories to-day,’ he wrote
to Mr. Chamberlain (June 19). ‘Henry Matthews has consented, after much
pressing, to stand against Cook. We shall run no other candidate and
shall give all our support to the Liberal-Unionists, asking for no
return and making no boast or taunt.’ This letter he signed ‘Yours
ever’--an unusual subscription with him. Again the same day: ‘I will
engage that all your Unionist candidates shall have the full support of
our party. I have telegraphed to Rowlands to see me on Monday.
Schnadhorst’s only chance is that you should seem to be afraid of him.
Why does not Mr. Bright intervene? I am looking forward most anxiously
to the account of your meeting and speech to-night. I think there is a
great deal of froth about the Gladstone proceedings, and all my
information up to now makes me confident that the voting will be heavy
against him. Don’t get down-hearted.’
‘Thanks to your intervention,’ replied Mr. Chamberlain (June 20),
‘matters look better here. The meeting last night was a tremendous
success. Only fifty or one hundred dissentients out of 4,000, all
electors marked off on register. This meeting will, I hope, have a great
effect in other divisions, and I think we shall get Collings chosen in
Bordesley. If so, we ought to carry seven Unionists for Birmingham....’
‘I was greatly relieved,’ replied Lord Randolph (June 21), ‘to see by
your letter this morning that you were in better spirits. Your meeting
was indeed a tremendous success, and your speech, as usual, most
excellent. I hope my address has not given you a fit. I have only said
what you and Hartington are longing to say, but dare not.... My own
opinion is that we shall roll the old man over.’
So in the end it proved. The elections began on July 1, and from the
very first the results were disastrous to the Liberal party. The
enthusiasm of the Liberal and Radical masses and the obedience of the
organisations were unavailing. They sufficed only to drive from the
Liberal ranks into irreconcilable opposition every man who would not
accept the Irish policy. They were unable to secure a majority for Home
Rule. They wrought havoc, but failed to achieve victory. The bulk of
both parties voted in the ordinary way, according to their colours and
their watchwords; but in every constituency men who had hitherto fought
for the Liberal cause fought fiercely against it. The margin in many
seats was so narrow that the resolute resistance of individuals and
their adherents turned the scale. The dissentient Liberals with their
personal following, supported by the whole Conservative vote, proved the
most secure of any class of candidates. Of ninety-four who had voted on
June 8, sixty-three were returned to the House of Commons. It had been
asserted, and to some extent believed, that the Irish vote would turn
the balance in forty constituencies. It was, however, discovered that
the entire Irish vote in Great Britain could scarcely exceed 40,000
persons, of whom three-fourths were resident in London, Liverpool and
Glasgow, while the remainder were too scattered to be effective. The
great city of Birmingham returned a solid body of Unionists in the place
of an equal number of Liberals elected in 1885. London became
overwhelmingly Tory. The English and Welsh boroughs, which in the
previous autumn had returned 118 Conservatives and 118 Liberals, now
returned 169 Unionists and only 67 Liberals. The counties were not less
remarkable. The 1885 election had returned 152 Liberals and 101
Conservatives; six months later the results showed 81 Liberals and 172
Unionists. Even in Scotland, Mr. Gladstone’s stronghold, his immediate
followers fell from 61 to 43. The British Gladstonians (191), with the
Nationalists (85), were in a minority of 40 as compared with the
Conservatives (316), without counting on either side the 78 dissentient
Liberals who followed Lord Hartington or Mr. Chamberlain. The opponents
of the Irish policy numbered 394, as against 276 in its favour, and the
Unionist majority was therefore 118. Face to face with this decision,
which in such a short space of time had altered--and altered, as it
proved, for more than a generation--the whole complexion of the English
constituencies, Mr. Gladstone did not linger. A Cabinet Council
assembled on July 20 and formally decided to resign. The resignations of
Ministers were accepted the next day, and Lord Salisbury was for the
second time summoned by the Queen.
Lord Randolph, who was himself returned for Paddington by a majority of
more than three to one,[54] did not wait for the results of the
elections. While politicians crowded around the tape machines in the
London clubs or harangued excited meetings in the country, he fled
silently and swiftly abroad, and by a Norwegian river awaited the
result without impatience or anxiety. To his wife he wrote:--
Torresdal: July 10, 1886.
It is certainly a tremendous journey up here. We arrived last
Wednesday, at about eleven o’clock at night, after a very long
drive, in carrioles, of seventy miles. We calculate we are about
1,500 miles from Connaught Place. I caught three fish on
Thursday--12 lbs., 12 lbs., and 15 lbs.--and lost three; yesterday
I killed three--20 lbs., 18 lbs., 20 lbs.--and lost one. The
weather has been rainy and raw, but on the other hand we have no
flies; I believe, if it is hot, the flies here are terrible. I have
heard no election news since Tuesday, when things seemed to be
going well. This is doing me a lot of good. I felt very seedy
leaving London, and it took me some days to get right.... This is a
most delightful spot, and very solitary; no tourists, no natives.
The house, which is rough to look at, is comfortable enough inside,
and Tommy is as amiable and charming as ever. On Saturday, by law,
you may not fish after six in the evening till six on Sunday
evening. It certainly is very curious having broad daylight at
midnight. Fishing after dinner is very pleasant if the night is
fine, and I am very glad to have seen this part of the world....
Post has just come in with telegrams from Moore and Rothschild.
Certainly most satisfactory news, which confirms all my
expectations.... I believe my address did no end of good, but, of
course, no one in London will agree. I expect the Tories will now
come in, and remain in some time. It seems to me we want the
5,000_l._ a year badly. But really we must retrench. I cannot
understand how we get through so much money....
From Norwegian delights he was soon recalled to the business of
Cabinet-making.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Justice
FitzGibbon._
_Very private._
2 Connaught Place, W.: July 25, 1886.
It was very pleasant to me to find on my return yesterday morning
your very interesting letter. I showed it to Smith and Beach, who
were much impressed. Things at the present moment are chaotic, and
will not commence to resolve themselves into order until Lord S.
returns from Osborne to-morrow.
Hartington and Co. definitely decline to join us, but will be the
most efficient buttress. They mean to have their own Whips and
their own organisation and probably will sit below the gangway on
the Ministerial side of the House. If we play our cards well, we
ought to remain in office for a long time. I am much in favour
myself of the immediate resumption of the policy of January 26, and
going on at once with the remaining business of the Session,
instead of waiting till October. It will be a big fence to clear,
but the horse is fresh; and, once cleared, the government of
Ireland would be much simplified.
I fear the ‘periplus’ is very doubtful this year, and might have to
be undertaken under the auspices of the R. I. Constabulary assisted
by Scotland Yard. Possibly Londonderry will become Lord-Lieutenant.
All this, besides being very doubtful, is quite secret.
Lord Salisbury accepted the commission from the Queen in 1886, with
leave to resign it, if necessary, to Lord Hartington. Forthwith he
strongly pressed the leader of the Whigs to form a Government and
assured him, if he did so, of Conservative support. Lord Hartington knew
that any Government he could form would be practically Conservative in
its composition, and must be called by that name. He believed that in
these circumstances the Liberal Unionist party would dissolve, Mr.
Chamberlain and the Radical section splitting off and probably rejoining
the Liberals. He therefore declined; but the fact that the offer had
been fairly made placed him in much closer relation with Lord Salisbury,
and seemed to secure for a Conservative Administration definite
assurances of Whig and Liberal Unionist support. Lord Salisbury, having
explained these proceedings to the satisfaction of a meeting of his
party at the Carlton Club, then proceeded to form a regular Conservative
Ministry. As is usual on these occasions, every rumour found its
believers and every conceivable appointment had its advocates. Lord
Randolph was variously named for the Indian, the Irish and the Foreign
Secretaryships. It was also spitefully suggested in many newspapers that
an intrigue in his interests was on foot to eject Sir Michael
Hicks-Beach from the Leadership of the House of Commons.
After the meeting at the Carlton Lord Salisbury sent for Sir Michael
Hicks-Beach and Lord Randolph Churchill. ‘I declined,’ wrote Sir Michael
Hicks-Beach in after years, ‘to continue Leader of the House of Commons.
I felt that Lord Randolph Churchill was superior in eloquence, ability
and influence to myself; that the position of Leader in name, but not in
fact, would be intolerable; and that it was better for the party and the
country that the Leader in fact should be Leader also in name. Lord
Salisbury very strongly pressed me to remain, saying that character was
of most importance, and quoting Lord Althorp as an instance; but I
insisted. I had very great difficulty in persuading Lord Randolph to
agree. I spent more than half an hour with him in the Committee Room of
the Carlton before I could persuade him, and I was much struck by the
hesitation he showed on account of what he said was his youth and
inexperience in taking the position. He insisted on my going to Ireland,
pointing out that I could only honourably give up the Leadership by
taking what was at the moment the most difficult position in the
Government.’ The matter was arranged accordingly, and Lord Randolph
became in addition Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Leadership of the
House of Commons having been settled, other appointments proceeded
rapidly. Lord Randolph secured the appointment of Mr. Henry Matthews to
the Home Office. Mr. Raikes took the Post Office ‘with a growl.’ Mr.
Chaplin indignantly declined the Presidency of the Local Government
Board[55] because the offer was unaccompanied by a seat in the Cabinet;
and Lord Salisbury, having consulted with Lord Randolph, appointed Mr.
Ritchie to that office. Mr. Chaplin received from the Chancellor of the
Exchequer a fatherly letter of remonstrance, written more in sorrow than
in anger, which he may have read over with satisfaction by the light of
subsequent events. One letter on these delicate matters may, perhaps,
be printed without impropriety:--
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Salisbury._
2 Connaught Place, W.: July 30, 1886.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--Your letter received this morning contains so
much good news that I am encouraged to press you very earnestly to
consider--if possible, favourably--the arrangement of Stanhope for
India, Holland for the Colonies, with Gorst as Education Minister.
I feel certain that this arrangement would be agreeable to all your
colleagues and encouraging to the party, while to the general
public it gives an appearance of symmetry to the Government which
the appointment of ---- would hopelessly disfigure....
I do not press Gorst for Education, because, if Stanley takes the
Board of Trade, you may want to put Ritchie or Forwood at the
Education Office; but I feel certain you would be pleased with the
effect of Holland and Stanhope in the two high offices. In case you
should wish to see me, I shall be in town until four o’clock this
afternoon.
Yours most sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
Lord Randolph Churchill accepted the responsibilities of his high
offices without elation. ‘How long will your leadership last?’ asked a
Liberal friend. ‘Six months,’ replied Lord Randolph gaily. ‘And after
that?’ ‘Westminster Abbey!’ He had neither the time nor the inclination
to dwell upon the many twists of fortune that had served him or the
dangers and obstacles he had escaped. If he had cherished the ambition
of leading a great party, he had not scrambled for place. He had driven
Sir Stafford Northcote from the House of Commons, but he had not counted
upon being his successor. He would have been perfectly content to serve
under Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. He had fought fiercely and ruthlessly for
his opinions and to have things settled as he thought they should be
settled; but not consciously for his own interests. These had followed
in the track of the fighting. His advancement had been the result, and
not the reason, of his exertions. Real leaders of men do not come
forward offering to lead. They show the way, and when it has been found
to lead to victory they accept as a matter of course the allegiance of
those who have followed. His personal ascendency was not the result of
calculations. It was natural; and it was everywhere recognised, even by
those who disliked and distrusted him--and that was a numerous band--as
a fact ascertained and indisputable. It could not have been created by
any process of scheming. Indeed, as this account has witnessed, he had
more than once offered to stand aside to promote a coalition which must
have excluded him for years from any chance of leading the House of
Commons. He had lingered at his salmon-fishing, after the election was
determined, in the expectation of a coalition and anxious not to disturb
it.
It is easy to deal with men whose motive is self-interest. Others can
cypher out the chances, too. The influence which Lord Randolph Churchill
exerted upon the men with whom he came in closest contact, upon Lord
Salisbury and upon Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, could never have been
acquired by a self-seeker, however brilliantly endowed. A veil of the
incalculable shrouded the workings of his complex nature. No one could
tell what he would do, or by what motive, lofty or trivial, of
conviction or caprice, of irritation or self-sacrifice, he would be
governed; and in these good days of fortune the double fascination of
mystery and success lent him an air of authority which neither
irreverent language nor the impulsive frankness of youth could dispel.
He became Leader of the House of Commons, not because he had schemed for
it, nor because it was his right in lawful succession, not assuredly
because the Conservatives loved him or felt they would be safe in his
hands. He _was_ the leader at that moment--natural, inevitable and, as
it seemed, indispensable.
Yet the world, when confronted with the result, was astonished. No
appointment--not all the appointments together--created such a stir of
interest and dispute. Not only at home, but in Europe and in the United
States, it was universally the subject of anxious or sympathetic
comment. In the House of Commons, where men eye each other so narrowly
and where capacity can be judged so exactly, the fact was accepted
without demur. It was right, it seemed, that the prizes of that assembly
should go to those who were in fact its leading spirits. The part he had
played in the decision of the Home Rule battle had been unsurpassed in
importance. He had never wavered. He had named the Unionist Party. He
had been a principal agent in the electoral compact on which it was
based. He was the link with Chamberlain. His authority had roused
Belfast and soothed Birmingham. His dexterous energy had foiled Mr.
Gladstone’s last attempt at compromise. Much, though not all, of this
was understood by politicians.
To the Tory Democracy no news could be so good as his success. The
English like to be governed by men they know. The working-class
electors, who had voted at two rapidly succeeding elections against Mr.
Gladstone, saw in Lord Randolph Churchill their favourite and champion.
They recalled the disasters and depression of their party in the past
and the political convulsion from which it had at length emerged. They
saw it triumphant where it had lately been despised. They saw it united
where it had lately been distracted; and, with what measure of reason
the reader can judge, they attributed this revolution to Lord Randolph
Churchill more than to any other man.
But other classes have to be considered in Great Britain besides
politicians and working men. All sorts of persons of influence and
station in their different spheres had been offended by the very process
which had attracted the democracy. ‘An insular people,’ wrote Disraeli
in ‘Endymion,’ ‘subject to fogs and possessing a powerful middle class,
requires grave statesmen.’ And there were many who saw in Lord Randolph
only an audacious fellow, whose methods were shocking to serious folk,
whose violence impaired the dignity of public life and whose headlong
career seemed strewn with the wreckage of overturned authority. How,
they asked, was such an impatient person to endure the vexations of a
Parliamentary session? How could a young man of thirty-six possess or
obtain the knowledge necessary to deal with the varieties of complicated
questions upon which a Leader is required to pronounce? How was this
spirit of strife and revolt to reconcile differences between colleagues
and exact discipline from a party? How was the flagrant obstructionist
of 1884 to direct the course of business in 1886? How was the writer of
the letter to Lord Granville and the erstwhile leader of the Fourth
Party to maintain the dignity and principles of Unionist and Imperial
administration? To all these questionings an answer was found even in
the very short time that remained.
Much was also said of his going to the Treasury. It is amusing to read,
by the light of after days, the lectures, kindly yet severe, in which
the Times sought to warn him against fiscal temptations. ‘A Budget on
ordinary lines, framed with the aid and advice of experienced permanent
officials,’ would alone avoid ‘injurious innovations’ and ‘the raising
of disquieting problems.’ He was adjured to remember how utterly fatal
to the Unionist alliance any departure from ‘sound principles of
finance, understood and acted upon by successive Administrations,
Conservative as well as Liberal,’ would inevitably prove. For the sake
of the Liberal-Unionists, for the sake, at least, of Mr. Chamberlain, he
must forbear. Other newspapers reminded him of his declarations in
favour of economy. ‘The first and most vital interest of the nation,’ he
had said, ‘is finance. Upon finance everything connected with government
hinges. Good finance ensures good government and national prosperity;
bad finance is the cause of inefficient government and national
depression.’ And, again: ‘I should like to see the House of Commons
devote one or even two entire sessions to nothing but finance. I should
like to turn the House of Commons loose into our public departments on a
voyage of discovery. I should like to see every one of our public
departments rigorously inquired into by small Committees of about seven
experienced and practical members of Parliament each.... I firmly
believe that such an inquiry would demonstrate that those useful
arrangements of economy of time, economy of labour and economy of money
are absolutely unknown in our public departments.’ How would all these
fine opinions fare now that he was himself the Minister responsible? And
the Liberal papers did not delay to prophesy ‘his certain repudiation in
office of every principle of economy and of that policy of inquiry which
he had so eloquently professed in Opposition.’ And that, again, was a
matter which time would soon resolve.
One shrewd warning came from a friend. ‘Can Goschen by any means
whatever,’ wrote Lord Justice FitzGibbon on July 27, ‘be induced to take
the Exchequer? I suppose you think me uncomplimentary in such a
suggestion. I am not. Age and financial experience have immense weight
in that post out-of-doors, and I confess I fear that you would bring
down upon yourself a weight of hostility from the front, and would have
a dead weight of jealousy from behind and beside you, that might make
the place unbearable to yourself or so laborious that you could not
stand it. Of course, if “the lead” must not be separated from the
Exchequer, it can’t be helped; but if I were you I would rather not be
obliged to carry as Leader the financial reputation of the State in
addition to the rest of the load. The English are your sheet-anchor, and
finance is their pole-star; and a middle-aged commercial Chancellor
would make them easy in their minds, when you could not.’ Of this more
anon.
The re-election of Mr. Matthews on his appointment to the Home Office
caused various embarrassments in East Birmingham and elsewhere. His
opponent, Mr. Alderman Cook, who had been defeated as a Gladstonian
Liberal at the General Election, now promised to oppose anything like
the Land Bill of the late Government, to insist upon the retention of
the Irish members at Westminster and to grant to Ireland only a
Parliament subordinate to the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Mr.
Chamberlain was thus placed in a position of extreme difficulty, for it
was clear that without his support the Home Secretary would probably be
defeated; and yet how could Mr. Chamberlain oppose the Radical candidate
who had almost exactly adopted his platform? Lord Randolph Churchill,
however, put the greatest possible pressure upon him. ‘The election of
Matthews,’ he wrote (August 7), ‘is almost _vital_ to me; and I feel
sure, if other things are equal, you will stretch a point in my favour.’
And again on the 9th: ‘This much arises clear and plain out of all that
is doubtful and dark in Birmingham politics. If Matthews wins, the
credit goes to you; it is your victory. If he loses, it is Schnadhorst’s
victory, and a pretty hulla-balloo he will make.’ Thus exhorted Mr.
Chamberlain took a very definite and decided step forward. The Radical
Unionists refused at his instance to support Mr. Cook, and the Home
Secretary was ultimately returned unopposed. ‘I am delighted,’ wrote
Lord Randolph (August 12). ‘I expect the Midland Conservative Club will
put up a statue to you, which I shall have to unveil.’
Mr. Matthews’ appointment caused heart-burnings in another quarter.
The Secretary of the Scottish Protestant Alliance wrote in haste to Lord
Randolph Churchill:--
I have the honour to inform you that at a meeting in Glasgow
yesterday of the directors of the Scottish Protestant Alliance the
recent appointment of a Roman Catholic to the Cabinet office of
Home Secretary was considered, when the following resolution was
unanimously adopted: ‘That as the Papacy claims universal supremacy
over all Sovereigns and their subjects, as Roman Catholics can no
longer render an undivided allegiance to Protestant Princes, and as
the avowed aim of the Papacy is to reduce Britain to the subjection
of the Vatican, this meeting protests against the elevation of
Roman Catholics to positions of power and trust in the British
Empire.’
The Chancellor of the Exchequer sent an answer without undue delay:--
Treasury Chambers, Whitehall: September 9.
Sir,--I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter enclosing a
copy of a resolution passed by the directors of the Scottish
Protestant Alliance, and, in reply, to remark that I observe with
astonishment and regret that, in this age of enlightenment and
general toleration, persons professing to be educated and
intelligent can arrive at conclusions so senseless and irrational
as those which are set forth in the aforesaid resolution.
I am, Sir,
Yours faithfully,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
Of the two courses which lay open--to reassemble in October for an
autumn session or to sit through August and obtain enough money at once
to last till February--the Cabinet selected the second. In the interval
necessitated by the re-election of Ministers the policy to be submitted
to Parliament was settled.
_Lord Salisbury to Lord Randolph Churchill._
_Confidential._
10 Downing Street, Whitehall: August 20, 1886.
My dear Randolph,--It has occurred to me, thinking over the list of
measures of private members you read to me this morning, that if we
have to make up our Cabinet mind over all of them we shall have a
great deal of trouble and possibly some friction. A difficulty
arises specially in the case of the Peers. With these small
measures the Peers can practically do what they like. But what they
like may very often be inconvenient for the Cabinet to profess and
act upon in the House of Commons. It may often happen that some of
the followers, or even of the members, of the Government in the
Commons could not, without offending their constituents, take the
line which the Conservative Peers would naturally take, and which
they will not be withheld from taking without a great deal of
discontent. I want you to think whether the following _modus
vivendi_ might not be possible. Our position as a Ministry is very
peculiar. We have not a majority except on certain vital questions.
Might we not fairly say that we will only be responsible for the
guidance of Parliament on the questions which we ourselves submit
to it? All questions submitted by independent members, unless they
affect our Executive action or the measures we have proposed, we
shall treat as open questions, taking no collective responsibility
for the decision of Parliament upon them. This is in the sense of
Chamberlain’s recommendation that we should have _no_ vital
questions. We cannot go quite as far as that, but it is sound
advice up to a certain point. Open questions were much more common
when I entered Parliament than they are now; but as we are entering
again upon the period of precarious majorities the system will have
to be resumed. Pray think of this. I see great difficulties if we
have to decide, as a Government, on all the fads.
Yours very truly,
SALISBURY.
The new Parliament, having re-elected Mr. Peel Speaker on August 5, met
for the transaction of business on the 19th. The Royal Speech briefly
declared that the ordinary work of the year had been interrupted, ‘in
order that the sense of Her Majesty’s people might be taken on certain
important proposals with regard to the government of Ireland,’ and that
the result of that appeal had been ‘to confirm the conclusion to which
the late Parliament had come.’ In view of the ‘prolonged and exceptional
labours’ to which the members had been subjected, the Sovereign
abstained from recommending any measures except those which were
essential to the conduct of the public service during the remaining
portion of the financial year. As, furthermore, the Chancellor of the
Exchequer drily announced that ‘for the convenience of honourable
members’ the Government would take on themselves the responsibility of
putting down notices of opposition to all the private members’ Bills and
notices of motion which appeared on the order paper, the only task
demanded of the House of Commons was to terminate the provisional
arrangements which had been made for Supply and to vote the remaining
Estimates of the last Parliament.
The Address to the Crown was moved by Colonel King-Harman. Lord Randolph
Churchill arranged that Mr. Maclean, the member for Oldham, who had
formerly opposed him at such a critical moment on the Council of the
National Union, should second it. Mr. Gladstone spoke with admirable
temper, as not forgetting ‘what is due to a Government which has just
taken office.’ But the interest of the assembly was concentrated upon
the young Minister who had cut so swift and strange a path to power.
When Lord Randolph rose, as Leader of the House, to follow Mr.
Gladstone, an intense hush of expectancy and anxiety prevailed. In spite
of all his skill and ease as a speaker, his nervousness was apparent.
Mr. Smith dwells on it in a letter to his wife which has since been
published. But he spoke with dignity and strength and his lucid, ordered
statement left no feeling of inequality in the minds of those who had
just listened to the greatest of Parliamentarians. Although the Irish
were inclined to interrupt derisively, the House was generally
sympathetic; and loud and long were the Tory cheers when the speaker
ended.
The policy towards Ireland which he declared, was definite and simple.
It is the same policy which the reader will already have remarked in a
memorandum to Lord Salisbury after the election of 1885, from which
during the remainder of his life Lord Randolph never diverged either in
one direction or the other. The Irish Question presented itself, he
said, in three aspects--social order, the Land question and Local
Government. The late Administration were of opinion that these three
questions were indissolubly connected and their policy was to deal with
them all by one measure. The new Government proposed to treat them to a
very large extent as separate and distinct. The law was to be
uncompromisingly maintained, whether against Orangemen in Belfast, which
was still distracted by savage riots, or against Nationalists in Kerry,
where a grave increase in ‘Moonlighting’ and boycotting had been
recorded. Sir Redvers Buller would be sent forthwith to take all
necessary measures. In regard to land--which subject a Royal Commission
was also to examine--the Government would not encourage any extension of
the principle of revision of rent by the direct interposition of the
State; but would rather aim at the creation of a general system of
single ownership by the influence and leverage of the credit of the
State. The material resources of Ireland were to be developed after
inquiry by grants from the British Exchequer in three distinct channels:
first, the creation of a deep-sea fishing industry on the west coast of
Ireland by the construction of harbours of refuge and the connection of
those harbours with the main lines of rapid communication; secondly, the
improvement and extension of the railway, light railway and tramway
system; and, thirdly, the construction of those great arterial drainage
works for the Shannon, the Bann, and the Barrow, which prosperous
agriculture seemed to require, but which were far too considerable to be
attempted by the resources of single localities.
Upon Local Government, decisive action would be taken. ‘When Parliament
reassembles at the beginning of February next, the Government are
sanguine that they will be prepared with definite proposals on that
large question. Their object will be, as far as possible, to eliminate
party feelings and to secure for the consideration of the question as
large an amount of Parliamentary co-operation as can be obtained; so
that whatever settlement may be arrived at may not be regarded as a
political triumph of either party, but rather in the nature of a final
and lasting settlement.... The great sign-posts of our policy are
equality, similarity and, if I may use such a word, simultaneity of
treatment, so far as is practicable, in the development of a genuinely
popular system of government in all the four countries which form the
United Kingdom.’ He ended by declaring in simple terms that the verdict
of the constituencies for the maintenance of the Parliamentary Union
must be considered final and irreversible.
Such was the policy which Lord Randolph Churchill was permitted to
declare with the assent of the Prime Minister and of the Cabinet. In
order that there might be no misunderstandings, he took the precaution
of writing out the actual words and submitting them beforehand to the
principal Ministers. It was the policy of his own heart. It is the
policy which, in spite of some lamentable lapses, of many purposeless
and vexatious delays and of more than one incident of prejudice or even
tyranny, has upon the whole, as history records, been carried
laboriously forward by Unionist Administrations during nearly twenty
years and which in the end, whatever problems it has left unsolved, has
notably advanced the social, political and economic stability of the
Irish people.
Lord Randolph Churchill was much praised for his speech. The
Conservatives were in high spirits, and the newspapers next morning
emphasised the favourable impression which had been produced. Yet he
does not seem himself to have been much affected by these tributes; for
on being asked the next day ‘whether it is the intention of the
Government to introduce any changes in the fiscal laws of the country by
placing duties on imported manufactures, by taxing foreign corn, by
countervailing bounties or in any other respect,’ he replied, with an
odd gleam of foresight or of humour: ‘The ways and means for the year
1887-8 which the Government will propose to Parliament, will be
communicated to the House on or about March 31 next by the
person--whoever he may be--who at the time happens to be Chancellor of
the Exchequer.’
[Illustration: _Reproduced by permission of the proprietors of ‘Punch.’_
THE GRAND YOUNG MAN.
SHADE OF ‘DIZZY,’ _loquitor_:
You stand--at your age--where I stood after years
Of waiting on Fortune and working on fools.
Not forty! Unwearied by failures or fears.
To him who can use them are ever the tools,
But there’s an advantage you’ll scarce understand
In having the tools ready shaped to your hand.
_Punch_, August 7, 1886.]
The debate on the Address and its amendments was protracted. It had
opened with much calmness; but as it progressed the smouldering fires of
the great encounter began to sparkle. In this flicker the deep
antagonisms which the election had made permanent between friends and
parties, became visible. Lord Harrington’s speech on the third night was
uncompromising. Standing in the midst of his old colleagues on the Front
Opposition Bench, with much formal courtesy and weighty argument he made
it plain that he would exert his whole strength to sustain the Ministry
in power. He was heard by his party in moody silence, broken from time
to time by Irish interruptions and Tory applause. Mr. Parnell, who moved
next day an amendment of his own, took pains to cast back disdainfully,
as trash unworthy of notice, the material aid to Irish resources which
the Chancellor of the Exchequer had proffered. He spoke of the
‘dishonesty of bolstering up the system of landlord and tenant in
Ireland by the expenditure of large sums of money the repayment of which
is quite uncertain and highly problematic,’ and of the ‘folly of
building harbours of refuge for fishing-boats that do not exist.’ He
derided the proposal to spend three-quarters of a million on the
arterial drainage of the Bann and the Shannon, where nothing less than
ten millions would suffice. Fed by such fuel, an ugly glow grew
gradually in the House.
The sixth day of the debate on the Address was stormy. It began with an
unexpected motion for the adjournment of the House as a protest against
the despatch of Sir Redvers Buller to Kerry. The member who moved it,
Mr. Edward Russell, made an elaborate and indignant speech. He enlarged
on the iniquity of employing a military officer accustomed to dealing
with savage tribes to discharge duties which properly belonged to the
civil magistrate. Lord Randolph dealt with this motion in a summary and
even audacious manner. ‘In the opinion of the honourable gentleman,’
said the Chancellor of the Exchequer, ‘the appointment of Sir Redvers
Buller is a startling innovation in our Constitution, a serious blow to
civil and religious liberty, a wilful invasion of the immutable
principles of justice, and other things of that serious kind. He holds
strong opinions and he prophesies the most alarming results. He declares
that all Kerry will immediately take an active part in the proceedings
of the “Moonlighters” and that all Ireland will very shortly be involved
in a general conflagration. Now, sir, I do not complain of the
honourable member holding these opinions; they are opinions he is
perfectly entitled to hold and to express. What I want the House to do
is to compare the opinions he holds with the course he suggests. What is
the course he proposes? He proposes that the House of Commons should
immediately adjourn. What will be the effect of that course on Sir
Redvers Buller or his appointment? Absolutely none. The House would
adjourn, if they agreed with the honourable member, and, like the
Emperor Titus, might exclaim that they had lost a day; but, before the
House met again, Sir Redvers Buller would be well on his way to Kerry.
‘As to employing military officers in civil positions, had not Mr.
Gladstone after the London riots appointed Sir Charles Warren, an
officer on the active list, liable to be called away at any moment on
military service, not to look after “Moonlighters,” but after the
civilised inhabitants of London?’ He suggested that the motion had been
brought forward to delay the speech which Mr. Chamberlain, who had
obtained the adjournment on the previous night, was known to be about to
deliver. No greater compliment could be paid to a member than that his
opponents should show that they feared what he was going to say. ‘I have
to announce,’ he concluded, ‘that Her Majesty’s Government entirely
decline to take any part in the discussion.’
This was hard hitting, but it succeeded. ‘Lord Randolph Churchill,’ said
the _Times_ the next day, ‘pricked the bubble with a Disraelian
dexterity of touch.’ Angry speeches in reply failed to sustain the
debate. The fate of the motion was never for a moment doubtful, and on a
division it was rejected by a majority of 241 against 146.
The motion for the adjournment being thus brushed aside, the
consideration of Mr. Parnell’s amendment was resumed. The treatment
accorded to Mr. Chamberlain’s speech afforded some foundation for Lord
Randolph’s charge. He was repeatedly interrupted both from above and
below the gangway. Mr. Speaker was invited to notice the smallest
deviation from the strictest relevancy. Cries of fierce derision saluted
him from the Irish benches. The men around him did not conceal their
discontent. And in his turn he struck back with dexterous severity.
Ceremonious language, much ‘right honourable be-friending,’
smoothly-turned sentences, soft, purring accents, ineradicable
antagonism; such was his speech. It was the first of many similar
episodes in this new Parliament. Yet some respect is due to the
forbearance of the Liberal majority. For six weary years the
Liberal-Unionist leaders sat on the Front Opposition Bench. Their
followers held the balance of every division. Their authority sustained
the Conservative Government. Their debating skill was always at hand
when all else failed. They supported Coercion; they justified
Mitchelstown; they even defended the Special Commission; and with
decisive effect. Yet never once, not even at times of sharpest
indignation, were they denied by those who surrounded them their freedom
of debate.
The Government were naturally delighted at this decided support. ‘You
made a splendid speech last night,’ wrote Lord Randolph to Mr.
Chamberlain (August 27). ‘It is curious, but true, that you have more
effect on the Tory party than either Salisbury or myself. Many of them
had great doubts about our policy till you spoke.’
On September 1, Mr. Sexton brought forward an amendment drawing
attention to the Belfast riots, and this, of course, served as a
convenient peg on which to fasten an almost interminable series of
attacks upon Lord Randolph Churchill. At least twenty-five persons had
been actually killed in the streets and many hundreds injured or
arrested. All was attributed to the epigram, ‘Ulster will fight and
Ulster will be right.’ Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was able to make a good
defence. In spite of a long and solemn denunciation from Sir William
Harcourt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer remained silent; but the
debate ran on, full of life and spite, until on September 3 Mr.
Labouchere sought to provoke him by embodying a direct charge in a
special amendment. ‘Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any
bird,’ said Lord Randolph piously; ‘and of all the unskilful and clumsy
Parliamentary fowlers of whose manœuvres it has been my lot to be a
witness, I never met a sorrier practitioner than the honourable member.
In the various snares and wits and wiles with which he distinguished
himself in the last Parliament he only succeeded in this--that he made
himself the laughing-stock of the Parliament and of the public; and he
appears to be desirous to add to-night to his already great reputation.’
‘There was not,’ the speaker declared, with some boldness, ‘a shred of a
shadow of a shade, or a shade of a shadow of a shred’ of foundation for
such charges. So the attacks were brushed contemptuously away, and the
Government majority did not fail in the Lobby to endorse their Leader’s
disdain.
On September 3 the Chancellor of the Exchequer moved a resolution
securing precedence for the Committee of Ways and Means and of Supply.
So far as form was concerned, he based himself upon the precedent of
1841. But he ventured further upon an earnest yet restrained appeal to
the House. ‘We have pledged ourselves as a Government to produce at the
meeting of Parliament next year such schemes of legislation as we may be
able to decide upon and mature in the autumn and winter. If the
proceedings of this session were to be greatly protracted and if the
energies of members and Ministers were to be greatly exhausted by them,
it would become very difficult for the Government to summon Parliament
as early next year. I ask no consideration on behalf of the Government,
but in the interests of Parliament and of the country. This motion is
intended to wind up, with as much expedition as is reasonable and
decent, the business of the session, and to allow members to separate in
time for the annual recess. I would not for a moment wish the House to
understand that I am advocating a rapid or slovenly discussion of the
Estimates. I have always protested against that and always shall. I ask
only that the House will concentrate its attention on the Estimates and
proceed without unusual dilatoriness and loss of time. The difficulties
which lie in the future before the Government, are very great indeed. No
one can be more deeply impressed with their magnitude than my colleagues
and myself; and certainly I see no possibility of arriving at anything
like a solution of those difficulties unless the House is prepared to
give a reasonable amount of time during which the Government may take
thought for a future so anxious and grave.’
The effect of this appeal, conjoined as it was with a promise that Mr.
Parnell should have an opportunity for bringing forward his Tenants’
Relief Bill, was to induce the House to consent without a division to
endow the Government with full control over public time. Lord Randolph,
however, thought it proper to write a special letter of explanation to
Lord Hartington, fearing apparently lest the Whig leader should become
suspicious of any compact with the Nationalist party:--
Treasury Chambers, Whitehall, S.W.: September 5, 1886.
Dear Lord Hartington,--You will have observed in the papers that
the Government gave a promise to Parnell to afford him facilities
(_i.e._ a night) for laying his land proposals in the form of a
Bill before Parliament.
Whether this promise was a wise one or not, I will not say. There
were no doubt grave objections to any concession to Parnell of any
sort or kind, but I think if you had been in the House last week
you might have been of opinion that the objections to a course of
stolid resistance on the part of the Government were perhaps
greater.
However this may be I own that I am extremely anxious that (if
possible) when the Bill does come on, the Government may receive
your support in opposing it. Of course the Bill will only be
Parnell’s original amendment to the Address in another form, and
the Government will not give way an inch to him under any
consideration.
But Parnell has undoubtedly hopes, which if they are unsound cannot
be too clearly and speedily demonstrated to be unsound, that he can
make out a case so plausible for the tenants on the score of
inability to pay that he may secure the support or at least the
abstention of the Liberal Unionists; and of course if he were
successful in this the moral strength of the Government would be
seriously diminished, with corresponding disadvantage to other,
greater and more common interests.
I therefore trouble you with these few lines now, though I do not
suppose the discussion on the Bill can arise till next week at the
earliest.
Believe me to be
Very faithfully yours,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
A friendly message emboldened the Minister to write more freely of his
difficulties:--
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Hartington._
_Private._
September 13, 1886.
The position of this Government must always be most precarious. It
may have a long life; but it is a rickety infant, requiring the
most careful handling. The condition of the House of Commons, the
recklessness and utter lack of all sense of responsibility on the
part of the Opposition, their guerilla character and the want of a
leader who can control, is most alarming. There is no precedent
that I know of in our history of such a combination of ominous
circumstances. I hear you are going to India; and if this means
your absence from the House till March or April, I think it right
to tell you that without your support in Parliament this Government
cannot last. The assaults of an Opposition unrestrained by your
presence will be too desperate for me to sustain. A state of great
confusion will arise; the Government will go, and you will have to
try your hand. I feel awfully alone in the House of Commons, and am
glad to grasp an opportunity of placing things before you as I look
at them.
_Lord Hartington to Lord Randolph Churchill._
_Private._
Brantingham Thorpe, Brough, Yorkshire: September 14, 1886.
My dear Churchill,--I received your letter this morning before
leaving London, and am glad to know so fully your opinions on the
position in the House of Commons. It is quite true that I have some
doubt, which I expressed to Sir M. Hicks-Beach, as to resisting the
whole of Parnell’s Bill. I do not think that you can leave
expediency out of the question in dealing with the rights of Irish
landlords. They have very few friends; and if they are encouraged
to strain their rights, and if disorder could justly be put down to
their account, they would have still fewer.
It is quite clear that the intention is to fight the Nationalist
battle on the question of the land during next winter, and it will
be to Parnell’s advantage that there should be as many evictions as
possible. Your best chance is that he will not succeed in inducing
tenants who can pay to risk eviction. But if landlords evict
wholesale tenants who cannot pay, he may succeed in getting up
another very dangerous agitation. I thought, therefore, that this
was to a great extent a question for the Irish Government, and if
they considered a check on eviction necessary I should have been
inclined to grant it. But, as I understand, they think that the
Courts have already a considerable discretion which may be
sufficient, and undoubtedly any concession to Parnell would do harm
unless the evil of resistance is still greater.
I do not think that I misunderstood your action in giving Parnell a
day for discussion of his Bill, though I do not know the exact
reasons for the decision. But I certainly thought that, while you
were quite right to keep your absolute freedom of action in regard
to the Bill, you were not precluded from accepting any part of it
which the Irish Government might on further consideration think
necessary.
I shall always be very glad to communicate with you on
Parliamentary matters when you think it desirable, and can very
well understand the anxiety and responsibility of your position.
Yours very truly,
HARTINGTON.
The Address was disposed of in the first week of September and the House
plunged at once into Supply. Forthwith obstruction became patent and
flagrant. A select, determined and well-organised band, among whom Mr.
Labouchere was the best known, took charge of national interests. They
did not disdain trifles, however small; nor grudge study, however
laborious. It was the last chance of a minority under the unreformed
procedure. No Supply Rule, automatically fixing limits, regulated the
votes. No Closure aided the Minister. The Committee debated to their
hearts’ content, and on after that till they were sick and weary.
Business crawled forward on its belly in the small hours of the morning.
Any attempt on the part of the Leader of the House to accelerate its
passage was met by alternate motions to report progress and to adjourn.
Lord Randolph was teased with mischievous satisfaction upon all the
former manœuvres of the Fourth Party. It was a severe, if
appropriate, expiation. Nothing but imperturbable temper and physical
endurance availed. The Leader of the House was always in his place. He
listened to all the discussions. He defended every detail of the Civil
Service Estimates himself. On warlike stores, on public accounts, on
salaries in the House of Lords, on secret service and town holdings and
polluted rivers, on poor ratepayers and gold coinage, he was found
suave, adroit, and well informed.
‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer,’ observed the _Times_, not always a
friendly critic (September 17), ‘is making great progress in the art of
so answering questions as to keep the House in a good temper. This he
does sometimes by judicious concessions, sometimes by a sly turn of
humour, sometimes by a touch of good-natured irony.’ Indeed, he used
every Parliamentary art and all the resources of his many-sided
character. Sometimes he coaxed and sometimes he complained. Sometimes he
resisted with vehemence only to make surrender an hour or two later more
valued. Once, as has been shown, he appealed earnestly and with success
to the House. Once he rapped out that the tactics of the obstructionists
were ‘not conceived in the public interest,’ and after an angry debate
made a reconciliation with them and secured incidentally some progress.
He knew the House in all its moods. He humoured it and offended it and
soothed it again with practised deliberation. Yet he always appeared to
be its servant. Ministers and Governments were but the respectful
stewards of the public service. Parliament had rights and authority over
them, to which, however capriciously asserted, they must bow: ‘My own
opinion,’ he said when his attention was roughly drawn to a criticism of
the Public Accounts Committee on some departmental practice, ‘is that
the Comptroller and Auditor-General and the Public Accounts Committee,
acting together, ought to be a superior authority to the Treasury; and
that, if they distinctly lay down a rule as to the expenditure of money,
it is the business of the Treasury to acknowledge that authority as
superior to their own.’ The member, Mr. Arthur O’Connor, who had
complained, was so contented with this soft answer that, after
congratulating the Chancellor of the Exchequer ‘upon the breadth of view
with which he always looks at matters of this kind,’ he withdrew his
motion for the reduction of the vote. Thus, inch by inch, Supply crept
forward.
The Irish members watched Lord Randolph hourly. He and they had
obstructed so often together that both sides knew enough of each other’s
ways not to be deceived by blandishments or manœuvres which would
captivate the innocent spectator. Soured and indignant as they were--not
unnaturally--by the turn of events, in their hearts they nourished a
certain secret sympathy for the conqueror. They enjoyed seeing the game
played scientifically, and they realised how different their new
antagonist was from the prosaic authoritarians who chafe the hearts of
Celtic peoples. At last the Estimates were done. ‘It is due to the
Chancellor of the Exchequer,’ said the _Times_ (September 16), ‘to say
that no Leader of the House of Commons in recent years has met
obstruction, open and disguised, with more exemplary patience.’
The general satisfaction of the Conservative party at Lord Randolph’s
management of the House of Commons found expression in much solicitude
for his health. ‘Don’t worry yourself and get knocked up,’ wrote Mr.
Chamberlain (September 1). ‘I do not believe that the Irish will keep
you sweltering very much longer.’ ‘You really must take more care of
yourself,’ Mr. Balfour insisted. ‘Now that the main business of the
Address is got over, I cannot see why you should spend so much time in
your place in the House.’ And Lord Salisbury on the 14th: ‘I am afraid
your work is getting intolerably hard. Don’t sit up too much.’
‘I am particularly commanded,’ said Lord Iddesleigh, writing from
Balmoral on the 16th, ‘by the Queen to say that Her Majesty was greatly
amused by the contents of your box last night. I suppose you won’t
understand this message without the gloss--there was a sprinkling of
tobacco in it.
‘Her Majesty is very sympathetic over the sufferings of our friends in
the House of Commons. You have indeed a very hard task and it is not
very clear how it is to be lightened.’
Only Mr. Parnell’s Bill remained after the Estimates were passed. Two
days (September 20 and 21) were occupied in its discussion. The Bill was
badly drawn. Mr. Gladstone supported it in principle; but was forced to
object to nearly every detail. Lord Hartington was severe in his
condemnation. The Government declared they would have nothing whatever
to do with it. Mr. Morley alone was fortunate in his advocacy. It was
rejected by 297 to 202. Ministers were much advantaged by having
persuaded their opponents to expose themselves to the perils of
constructive policies.
Lord Randolph Churchill ended the session amid golden opinions.
Congratulations and goodwill flowed in upon him from all sides. He
himself was in high spirits. ‘You must find it very hard work,’ said an
admirer, ‘leading the House and at the same time being at the
Exchequer.’ ‘Not half such hard work as it was getting there,’ was the
droll answer. The party newspapers were loud in their praises. All
doubts about his tact and patience were dispersed, and Conservative
members hurried off to the country feeling that a great man had arisen
among them, and that ‘Elijah’s mantle’ had lighted upon no unworthy
shoulders. The Sovereign wrote him an autograph letter of exceptional
favour:--
Balmoral Castle: September 22, 1886.
Now that the session is just over, the Queen wishes to write and
thank Lord Randolph Churchill for his regular and full and
interesting reports of the debates in the House of Commons, which
must have been most trying.
Lord Randolph has shown much skill and judgment in his leadership
during this exceptional session of Parliament.
[Illustration: Balmoral Castle:
Sept: 22, 1886.
Now that the session is just over the Queen wishes to write and thank
Lord Randolph Churchill for his regular and full and interesting reports
of the debates in the House of Commons, which must have been]
[Illustration: most trying. Lord Randolph has shown much skill and
judgment in his leadership during this exceptional session of
Parliament.]
Difficulties abroad were soon added to the difficulties at home. At the
end of August foreign affairs in Eastern Europe were suddenly plunged
into crisis through the kidnapping of Prince Alexander by Bulgarian
officers under Russian influence, and his consequent abdication. The
Chanceries of Europe throbbed with excitement and apprehension. To
Lord Randolph Churchill the news was specially unwelcome. He did not
concern himself too much about Constantinople, and cared nothing at all
for Turkey. The sentiments which had in 1878 induced him to write to Sir
Charles Dilke, offering, if the Liberals would support him, to move a
vote of censure upon Lord Beaconsfield’s foreign policy, were unaltered.
The freedom and independence of the Slav, Bulgarian and Hellenic peoples
seemed to him still a wise and lofty object; but any sympathies which he
had for stifled or struggling nationalities were strictly controlled.
Great Britain should not shrink from her share in the responsibilities
of Europe; but no duty of isolated intervention lay upon her. He had,
moreover, been deeply impressed by the satisfactory manner in which the
Afghan frontier dispute had been settled. He had become much more
hopeful of a good understanding with Russia than when he had first gone
to the India Office. Above all, he was resolved to offer no wanton
provocation which might lead by Russian reprisals in Asia to the
reopening of a question of such grave importance to the tranquillity of
the Indian Empire.
The proceedings of the Foreign Office seriously disquieted him. As early
as September 4 he wrote to Lord Salisbury: ‘I have just read Lord
Iddesleigh’s telegram to Lascelles, telling him to prevent Alexander
from abdicating and to cause him to appeal to the Great Powers. I think
this is very unfair on Alexander. Iddesleigh knows perfectly well that
the Great Powers won’t move a finger, and he knows we cannot act outside
a most Platonic range. I am afraid of our incurring moral
responsibilities towards the Prince and his people which may lead us on
far without previous calculation.... I do most earnestly trust that we
may not be drifting into strong and marked action in the East of Europe.
It will place us in great peril in the House of Commons, politically and
financially.’ And again on the 6th: ‘Iddesleigh’s last telegram to
Lascelles is really _un peu trop fort_. I do think we ought to have an
immediate Cabinet before such messages are sent. I look at the series
together; the two first were startling, but recognised European concert,
which the last altogether flings aside. W. H. Smith concurs strongly
that the Cabinet ought to meet. Any moment it may leak out at Sofia that
we are taking strong action.... Lord John Manners made a remark to me at
4.30 this afternoon symptomatic of surprise that there had been no
Cabinet. As you know I loathe Cabinets, you will feel that this is
disinterested; but I own to being frightened.’ The Prime Minister
consented to summon his colleagues, adding merely that he and Lord
Iddesleigh were agreed as to the policy, but that the Cabinet could
overrule them if it thought fit. The Cabinet, however, cleared the air
and led to better understandings.
Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Salisbury.
Treasury Chambers, Whitehall, S.W.: September 15, 1886.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--Another desperate night in the H. of C. You
may imagine how bad was the Irish conduct when Beach’s last words
to me were: ‘I am now all for a strong Clôture.’ ...
M. de Staal has just been to see me. He declaimed against White....
I said that in view of our occupation of Egypt it was necessary
that we should have a representative at Constantinople of character
and resolution. He said the Bulgarians had done something or other
rude to the Emperor’s portrait at Sofia. He spoke of the great
difficulty Russia had in coming to an understanding with Austria on
account of the Hungarians, who thought of nothing but ‘49.’ He
tried to ascertain my views as to our interests in the Balkan
territories; my reply was (speaking only for myself) that our chief
interests were Egypt and India, and that anything which affected
our interests in those countries would necessitate very strong
action on our part. Speaking generally, I said that with Ireland on
our hands, our foreign policy, except under great pressure, would
naturally be pacific. He asked about the position of the
Government. I told him that Gladstone was hopelessly out of it, and
was no longer young enough to get into it again; that his principal
supporters were hopelessly discredited and divided; that Hartington
possessed great balancing influence, but could not look to forming
a Government himself; that whether this particular Government
lasted or no, power was with the Conservative party, whose
political organisation and strength were increasing and improving
every day; that such a fact as London returning forty-three
Conservatives against four Gladstonians ought to have great weight
with him in appreciating the Conservative position.
Finally, I hinted at an understanding with Russia by which she
should give us real support in Egypt, abandon her pressure upon
Afghanistan, in which case she might settle the Balkan matters as
she would--or, rather, as she _could_!
Yours most sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
A few days later Lord Salisbury was able to retire to his villa near
Dieppe, although the situation still continued critical and obscure. The
Chancellor of the Exchequer, delighted by Lord Salisbury’s proposal to
change the British Agent at Sofia, seems to have made great efforts to
bring his opinions nearer to those of his chief. On the 23rd he reports
an interview with Count Hatzfeldt. ‘I told him that I had been thinking
much over what had passed between us about the East of Europe, and that
I had come to this conclusion as a member of the House of Commons and
from a House of Commons point of view: Any anti-Russian policy which
involved England taking the lead ostensibly on the side of Turkey,
either about Bulgaria or even Constantinople, would probably place the
Unionist party in great peril, might fail to receive the support of the
constituencies, and would be savagely assaulted. An anti-Russian policy,
however, in which Austria took the lead supported by Germany, we could,
I thought, well fall in with, and hold our own easily in the House of
Commons. He said: ‘That is all very well; but what will be wanting, will
be Germany’s support of Austria. Our eyes are riveted on France.’ I
said, if that was really so, of course we could not play; but that it
occurred to me that it was not impossible that if Germany and Austria
took the lead against Russian advance and in defence of Bulgarian
independence, and we followed and joined loyally and thoroughly, I
thought that would seem to entail logically action on our part,
diplomatic or otherwise, against France if she tried to be nasty. He
seemed much interested by this, and I impressed upon him at parting not
to forget that it must be to Germany’s interest that the Unionist party
and the Government should endure and remain strong; that foreign policy
on our part which followed the lead of Germany and Austria would not try
that strength too high, and might be carried far; but that foreign
policy against Russia in the East of Europe which left the initiative to
England would be a policy too dangerous, seeing the other great
interests we had to defend, for us to contemplate. I told him these were
mere House of Commons views, for his own private information for
whatever they were worth, and that he was not to consider them in any
other light.
‘I don’t know whether you will think this expression shows any change of
views from what I have expressed to you recently. I do not think it does
really....’
‘If Russia attacked Constantinople,’ wrote the Prime Minister in a
letter approving generally of this discourse, ‘and all the other Powers
refused to intervene, I am rather disposed to the idea that we should
have to act in the Dardanelles; but I hope the contingency is too
improbable to require us to trouble about it.’ The Chancellor of the
Exchequer replied meekly that he would be quite agreeable to ‘a
piratical seizure of Gallipoli.’ ‘There is,’ he adds, ‘a practical
flavour about such a step which would commend it to the most Radical and
peace-loving House of Commons.’ Lord Salisbury detected a flavour of
levity in this answer.
‘You are naturally sarcastic,’ he wrote on the 28th, ‘on my Dardanelles,
and I hope the matter will not come up in our time. But the possession
by Russia of Constantinople will be an awkward piece of news for the
Minister who receives it. The prestige effect on the Asiatic populations
will be enormous, and I pity the English party that has this item on
their record. They will share the fate of Lord North’s party.
‘At the same time I know the great military objections there are to the
Dardanelles scheme.’
Further activity at the Foreign Office renewed the correspondence. On
the 30th Lord Randolph wrote again urgently to the Prime Minister:--
I have read with the utmost dismay Iddesleigh’s telegram to
Lascelles instructing him to inform the Bulgarian Government that
our Government approve of the reply sent by them to the Russian
Note.
What is the reason for this apparently isolated and certainly most
risky action? I cannot make out that an opinion was ever asked for
directly, which makes such instructions all the more strange. Have
we any right to express approval in so pointed and uncalled for a
manner, without at the same time letting those poor Bulgarians know
that beyond the merest diplomatic action we cannot go? I thought,
when you told me some days ago that Lascelles was to be changed
that that meant a modification of policy. I see no use in changing
the agent in this case, if the policy to which objection has been
taken is to be even more accentuated.
Why cannot Iddesleigh consider the propriety of trying to act at
Sofia in conjunction with the Austrian, German and Italian
Governments, and, if joint action is for the moment impossible,
abstaining from any action at all? We shall never get joint action
while Iddesleigh keeps rushing in where Bismarck fears to tread.
What I would like to see aimed at would be a Second Berlin
Memorandum--this time addressed, not to Turkey, but to Russia, and
England joining in. But all chance of such a document, which would
imply irresistible forces, fades further and further into the
distance.
Our action with Austria means war with Russia. Our action with
Austria and Germany means peace. But I feel sure that our present
niggling, meddling, intriguing, fussy policy is gaining for us the
contempt and dislike of Bismarck every day. I do pray you to
consider these matters. It was supposed that Lord Iddesleigh would
act under your direction. I feel certain that much that he has done
has been done on his own account. After all, it is very fine for
him now; but the day of trial will come when all this has to be
explained and defended in the House of Commons.
Now I have risked your wrath by inflicting this jeremiad upon you,
but it is the last, for I go abroad Sunday and shall know no more
till I return.
‘Like you,’ replied Lord Salisbury from Puys, on October 1, ‘I am not
happy about foreign affairs, but not entirely for the same reason. I do
not wholly take your view about our attitude towards Russia. I consider
the loss of Constantinople would be the ruin of our party and a heavy
blow to the country: and therefore I am anxious to delay by all means
Russia’s advance to that goal. A pacific and economical policy is up to
a certain point very wise: but it is evident that there is a point
beyond which it is not wise either in a patriotic or party sense--and
the question is where we shall draw the line. I draw it at
Constantinople. My belief is that the main strength of the Tory party,
both in the richer and poorer classes, lies in its association with the
honour of the country. It is quite true that if, in order to save that
honour, we have to run into expense, we shall suffer as a party--that is
human nature. But what I contend is, that we shall suffer as a party
more--much more--if the loss of Constantinople stands on our record....
I am therefore rather uneasy about foreign affairs--for I am afraid you
are prepared to give up Constantinople: and foreign Powers will be quick
enough to find that divergence out. On the other hand I sympathise with
you in some uneasiness as to the course of the Foreign Office. Many
things, I fear, are not done--and I am disquieted at the result ... when
I get back to England I may be able to exert a stronger influence.’
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Salisbury._
Treasury Chambers, Whitehall, S.W.: October 3, 1886.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--I was not able to write yesterday and thank
you for your letter, as I had to go down to Dartford.
You must not think that I in any way disagree from what you urge
about Constantinople. It is only that I have a great doubt whether
the particular method and scheme of policy which was carried out at
the time of the Crimean War, and again to a great extent in
1876-78, is the best. I doubt whether the people will support that
method; and it seems to have this enormous disadvantage, that it
enables Austria to lie back.
We can, I think, perfectly defend Constantinople by going in for
the independence of Bulgaria; and we can best obtain that
independence by persuading Austria to take the lead.
But no doubt the proceedings of Lascelles, and the probable
proceedings at Constantinople of Sir W. White, are more in
accordance with the old policy, which I fear is now impracticable,
than with a modification of that policy.
Please do not suspect me of indifference to a matter on which you
feel so strongly. My only business and object are to bring, in the
best way I can, any policy which you wish carried out into favour
with the House of Commons and the constituencies, so far as it may
be possible for me to influence either. You must remember that you
have not spoken on these matters either in the Lords or the
country, and I am only anxious that you should find a _terrain_
well prepared.
I am off to-morrow night and out of reach of everybody till 23rd.
Lord Randolph Churchill’s speech at Dartford (October 2) was probably
the most important of his life. Upwards of twenty thousand Conservatives
were gathered to receive him. Nearly a hundred addresses from all parts
of the country were presented to him by deputations. The town was bright
with flags by day and fireworks by night. Standing upon an improvised
platform among the picturesque glades of Oakfield Park, and backed by
the solid phalanx of Conservative members which Kent had returned to
Parliament, the Chancellor of the Exchequer unfolded to an audience,
variously computed at from twelve to fourteen thousand persons, the
future legislative programme of the Government. He extolled the loyalty
of the Unionist Liberals. He reiterated the declarations upon Ireland
which he had made to the House of Commons. In order that the Unionist
party might legislate, as he described it, upon ascertained facts and
not, like Mr. Gladstone, by intuition, he recounted the appointment of
the four Royal Commissions on Irish Land, on Irish Development, on
Currency and on Departmental Expenditure. He urged a complete reform of
House of Commons procedure, including the institution of the Closure by
a simple majority. He announced that the Government would introduce a
Bill which should provide facilities, through the operation of local
authorities, for the acquisition by the agricultural labourer of
freehold plots and allotments of land. And in this connection he spoke
gratefully of the pioneer work which Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Jesse
Collings had performed. He held out the promise of an alteration in the
law of tithe, so that payment should, in the first instance, be demanded
of the landlord; and a threat to remodel railway rates so that the home
producer should not be undercut by the foreigner. He mentioned a Land
Bill for making the transfer of land easy and cheap; a broad
reorganisation of Local Government with a new assessment and application
of local taxation; and finally he said: ‘I will not conceal from you
that my own special object, to which I hope to devote whatever energy
and strength or influence I may possess, is to endeavour to attain some
genuine and considerable reduction of public expenditure and consequent
reduction of taxation. I shall be bitterly disappointed if it is not in
my power after one year, or at any rate after two years, to show to the
public that a very honest and a very earnest effort has been made in
that direction.’ Such was the Tory Democratic programme. Nor should it
be supposed that these were the unauthorised views of a single Minister.
All these legislative projects had received the consent of the Cabinet.
Nearly all have since been passed by Conservative Administrations into
law.
Then the speaker turned to foreign affairs, and here he contrived,
without doing violence to his own convictions, to support faithfully and
effectively in its general tenor Lord Salisbury’s policy: but he used
very different arguments from those which Conservative audiences were
accustomed to applaud.
‘We had every reason to hope,’ he said, ‘that the union of Eastern
Roumelia with Bulgaria under the sovereignty of Prince Alexander would
develop a prosperous and independent nation, in the growing strength of
which might ultimately be found a peaceful and true solution of the
Eastern Question. Those hopes have been for the moment to a great extent
dashed. A brutal and cowardly conspiracy, consummated before the young
community had had time to consolidate itself, was successful in
this--that it paralysed the governing authority of the Prince and
deprived Bulgaria of an honoured and trusted leader. The freedom and
independence of Bulgaria, as well as of the kingdoms of Servia and
Roumania, would appear to be seriously compromised. It has been said by
some, and even by persons of authority and influence, that in the issues
which are involved England has no material interest. Such an assertion
would appear to me to be far too loose and general. The sympathy of
England with liberty and with the freedom and independence of
communities and nationalities, is of ancient origin, and has become the
traditional direction of our foreign policy. The policy based on this
strong sympathy is not so purely sentimental as a careless critic might
suppose. It would be more correct, indeed, to describe such a policy as
particular, and, in a sense, as selfish; for the precious liberties
which we enjoy, and the freedom of Europe from tyranny and despotism,
are in reality indissolubly connected. To England Europe owes much of
her modern popular freedom. It was mainly English effort which rescued
Germany and the Netherlands from the despotism of King Philip of Spain,
and after him from that of Louis XIV. of France. It was English effort
which preserved the liberties of Europe from the desolating tyranny of
Napoleon. In our own times our nation has done much, either by direct
intervention or by energetic moral support, to establish upon firm
foundations the freedom of Italy and of Greece.... A generation ago
Germany and Austria were not so sensitive as they are now to the value
of political liberty. Nor did they appreciate to its full extent the
great stability of institutions which political liberty engenders; and
on England devolved the duty--the honourable but dangerous duty--of
setting an example and of leading the way. Those were the days of Lord
Palmerston; but times have changed, and the freedom and the independence
of the Danubian Principalities and of the Balkan nationalities are a
primary and vital object in the policy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Those things being so, it may well be that England can honourably and
safely afford to view with satisfaction that Power whose interests are
most directly and vitally concerned, assuming the foremost part in this
great international work. We must, of course, take it for granted, as I
am doing, that the liberty-giving policy of the Treaty of Berlin will be
carefully and watchfully protected. Whatever modification this great
fact may enable us to make in our foreign policy, whatever diminution of
isolated risk or sole responsibility this may enable us to effect, you
may be certain of one thing--that there will be no sudden or violent
departure by Her Majesty’s present Government from those main principles
of foreign policy which I have before alluded to, and which for nearly
three centuries mark in strong, distinct and clear lines the course of
the British Empire among the nations of the world.
‘There are Powers in Europe who earnestly and honestly desire to avoid
war and to preserve peace, to content themselves with their possessions
and their frontiers and to concentrate their energies on commercial
progress and on domestic development. There are other Powers who do not
appear to be so fortunately situated, and who, from one cause or
another which it is not necessary to analyse or examine, betray from
time to time a regrettable tendency towards contentious and even
aggressive action. It is the duty of any British Government to exhaust
itself in efforts to maintain the best and the most friendly relations
with all foreign States and to lose no opportunity of offering friendly
and conciliatory counsels for the purpose of mitigating national
rivalries and of peacefully solving international disputes. But should
circumstances arise which, from their grave and dangerous nature, should
force the Government of the Queen to make a choice, it cannot be doubted
that the sympathy--and, if necessary, even the support--of England will
be given to those Powers who seek the peace of Europe and the liberty of
peoples, and in whose favour our timely adhesion would probably, and
without the use of force, decide the issue.’
It would be hard to say whether this speech made more stir at home or
abroad. For more than a week the declarations upon British foreign
policy were the chief theme of the Continental press. And in Berlin,
Vienna and Rome they received a measure of welcome which grew as their
phrasing was more carefully examined. Lord Randolph’s outspoken
condemnation of the Bulgarian kidnapping conspiracy was declared to give
a satisfaction to the moral feelings of Christendom which had been
looked for in vain in the late utterances of European statesmen. The
announcement that Great Britain would take her part in the work of
preserving international peace, and that her influence would be
exerted upon the side of the Central Powers--not for the sake of the old
pro-Turkish policy, but in the name of the liberties of the Balkan
peoples--was accepted with the utmost satisfaction in Berlin. The style
of the declaration created an impression of calm authority; and
‘Palmerston Redivivus’ is an expression which repeatedly appears in the
foreign despatches and articles of that time.
[Illustration: _Reprinted by permission of the proprietors of ‘Punch.’_
‘YOUTH ON THE PROW AND PLEASURE AT THE HELM!’
_Punch_, August 14. 1886.]
At home the Conservative party was too much astonished to give vent
immediately to any effective opinion. The party newspapers generally
applauded the proposals and tone of the speech as ‘temperate,
reasonable, and practical.’ The _Times_ observed that the programme in
its scope and fulness ‘recalled the palmy days of Mr. Gladstone.’ The
Opposition, with evident disgust, denounced the Chancellor of the
Exchequer as ‘an unscrupulous opportunist’ who had stolen the policies
of his Radical opponents and had calmly appropriated their famous motto
of ‘Peace, Retrenchment and Reform.’ It was not until some days had
passed that the perplexed anxiety in Tory circles found expression in
grumblings that the Prime Minister was being effaced by his lieutenant.
But even then no sign could be discerned in any quarter of a wish or
intention to repudiate the policy declared.
From all this buzzing, friendly and unfriendly alike, Lord Randolph fled
secretly and silently. For more than a week he was lost to the public
eye. It was rumoured that he had passed through Paris and Berlin on
October 7; but it was not until the 12th that ‘Mr. Spencer,’ an English
tourist, who with his friend Mr. Trafford had been looking at picture
galleries, museums and theatres at Dresden and Prague, was identified
with the orator of Dartford.
Few things were more remarkable in Lord Randolph Churchill’s brief
career than the quickness with which he acquired a European reputation.
All over the Continent he was already regarded as the future master of
English politics. The tension in the East was unrelieved and the
diplomatic skies were grey and shifting. Here was the second personage
in the British Cabinet, fresh from a most important public statement,
travelling _incognito_ through Germany and Austria. What had he done in
his passage through Berlin? Had he a mission to Bismarck? Had he been to
Varzin or not? From this moment his movements were watched with the most
minute and provoking curiosity and the fullest details were telegraphed
to every capital. The press revived memories of Gambetta’s journey to
Frankfort, and perhaps beyond, two years before his death. We learn from
the foreign intelligence of the _Times_ of October 13 that ‘Mr. Spencer’
and Mr. Trafford, ‘the two travellers whose every step is watched by the
European press,’ have been ‘residing at the Imperial Hotel [Vienna]
since yesterday.’ They had been received by a crowd at the station, and
several persons who had seen Lord Randolph Churchill in England had
‘maintained most positively’ that ‘Mr. Spencer’ was identical with the
Chancellor of the Exchequer. We are told that ‘Mr. Spencer’ looked
somewhat fatigued, and retired to rest after telling the landlord ‘in
emphatic terms’ that he had come to Vienna for nobody, and proposed
without exception to receive no one; that he walked about the town both
in the morning and afternoon, and visited among others the shop of Herr
Weidmann ‘where the most exquisite Vienna leather goods are made’; that
in the evening he had heard Millöcker’s operetta ‘The Vice-Admiral’ at
the Theater an der Wien; and that he was everywhere dogged by
journalists, who gave the public elaborate descriptions of his person,
the shape of his hat and the colour of his coat.
‘I am hopelessly discovered,’ wrote Lord Randolph to his wife (October
12). ‘At the station yesterday I found a whole army of reporters, at
whom I scowled in my most effective manner. Really it is almost
intolerable that one cannot travel about without this publicity. How
absurd the English papers are! Anything equal to the lies of the _Daily
News_ and _Pall Mall_ I never read: that _Pall Mall_ is most
mischievous.... W. H. Smith is here, and we had a long talk last night.
I have got him to go and see Paget--who wanted me to go and dine with
him--and tell him that as I saw no one at Berlin I did not wish to see
anyone here. The reporters have been besieging the hotel this morning,
but I have sent them all away without a word. The weather is fine and
bright, though there is an autumn chill in the air.... This pottering
about Europe _de ville en ville_ suits me down to the ground, if it
were not for the beastly newspapers.’
His holiday was a short one. On his way back through Paris he had an
interview which would certainly have interested those curious folk who
had pried so zealously upon his unguarded leisure:--
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Iddesleigh._
Hôtel Bristol, Paris: October 19, 1886.
Dear Lord Iddesleigh,--This morning Count d’Aunay called upon me. I
think, from what he said, that he had been sent by Freycinet, I
used to know D’Aunay very well when he was in London. I left him to
begin what he had to say, and kept talking about _la pluie et le
beau temps_. At last he rapped it out. He said the Egyptian
Question was going to be ‘re-awakened.’
I asked what question.
He said the reorganisation of the administration, the tribunals,
the customs, the army.
I said I did not see that any of these pressed; that Wolff and
Mukhtar had got to make their report, which would take some time to
consider; that, in the meantime, everything was going on quietly;
that the country was progressing; that the payment of the coupon in
full would be resumed next year; and that I could not conceive what
object there was in raising the Egyptian Question in a critical
manner now.
He said that the French were most desirous to co-operate with
England in the re-establishment of Egypt; that they wished to be
perfect friends with us, but that M. de Freycinet felt that Egypt
was a continual _pierre d’achoppement_, and that there would always
be great difficulties until it was got out of the way; that public
opinion in France was now much agitated on the question; that they
suspected we meant to take Egypt altogether; and that they must
know what we intended to do about retiring.
I replied that it was impossible to reconcile this great desire on
M. de Freycinet’s part for friendship with the tone of the French
Press on the proceedings of French agents at Constantinople; but
that, in any case, of this he might be certain--that these things
did not influence our policy in the least; that we did not intend
to retire from Egypt until a stable Government had been constituted
there, able to maintain itself and to pay its way; and that we
should not ‘budge an inch’ from that resolution _pour quoi que ce
soit, ni pour qui que ce soit_; that the work would take a long
time, perhaps three years, perhaps five years, or perhaps ten
years, or longer; but that till it was done our occupation of Egypt
would continue.
He appeared much pained and upset by this, and argued for a long
time that we could do nothing in Egypt on any question without
French assistance.
I said we were most anxious for French assistance, although up to
now we had managed to rub along without it; but that if there was
to be any understanding for the solution of Egyptian questions
between the two Governments, it must be upon the basis of our
continued occupation of Egypt until certain definite and practical
results were obtained which would be a reward to us for all the
loss of money, men, time and trouble which our occupation had
entailed on us.
He said we ought to fix a date for evacuation; that that would
remove all suspicion of bad faith; that the French were obliged to
press the point on account of their enormous interests and their
numerous colony; that in the time of the ‘condominium’ they had
occupied a perfectly satisfactory position, which they wished to
regain.
I reminded him that they had deliberately abdicated that position
when M. de Freycinet was Minister before; that they had left us all
the trouble and all the danger, and that they must accept the
logical results of that policy; that I saw no good in fixing a
date for evacuation; that I did not think such a step would be
honest, as we might not be able to abide by our pledge; that it was
much better to define the work which had to be done, and to adjourn
all questions of retirement until the completion of the work.
He went on pressing about the date in a curiously imploring manner.
He said that it might be _aussi éloigné que vous voulez_, but that
if we would only fix a date M. de Freycinet _sera parfaitement
satisfait_, that he would work loyally with us, and that all would
go differently.
I then said that this question of the date, to which he evidently
attached so much importance, was a new one to me; that I could not
tell what your opinions were, nor Lord Salisbury’s; that personally
I saw immense and insuperable objections to such a course; that it
would really introduce a new element of uncertainty, and probably
lead to great trouble. In conclusion, I entreated him not to be
under any illusion as to our determination to remain in Egypt and
to pursue our work there steadily; that the present Government,
unlike Mr. Gladstone’s, was very strong in Parliament, and would
not yield to pressure; and that, till the French thoroughly grasped
this fact, they would fail to understand the A B C of the Egyptian
Question.
He said he should tell M. de Freycinet all I had said. He asked me
if I wished to see M. de Freycinet, to which I replied in the
negative.
I thought you would wish to know all this, and I hope you will
approve of what I said. I return to town on Tuesday.
Yours very truly,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
‘You seem to have defended the pass well, and the position you hold is a
sound one,’ replied Lord Iddesleigh in a letter which appears to be the
last that passed between them.
Short as his absence from England had been, Lord Randolph found some
difficulties aggravated on his return. The orthodox portions of the
Conservative party had become articulate. Mr. Chaplin was denouncing the
Closure by a simple majority as unconstitutional and improper. The
_Times_ had made up its mind against such a change, which it regarded as
‘irreconcilably at variance with the fundamental principle of freedom of
debate.’ It expressed itself anxious to know what would have been the
opinion of the former leader of the Fourth Party on the proposals of the
new Chancellor of the Exchequer. The ‘Dartford programme,’ as the
principles and measures expounded in Kent had already come to be called,
notwithstanding the full approval which it had previously received from
the Cabinet, had been exposed to various attacks in quarters usually
believed to derive their information from official sources. The Carlton
Club was reported to be vexed and sulky. Everywhere the question was
asked: What would the Chancellor of the Exchequer say to the conference
of Conservative Associations at Bradford? Would he be discovered in
retreat or standing to his guns? Would he enlarge upon the Dartford
programme or would he explain it away?
The conference met at Bradford on October 26. Lord Randolph made three
speeches during the day. At the evening meeting he said he was very
sorry he had made the Dartford speech. ‘If I had not made it at Dartford
three weeks ago, I might have made it here to-night.’ He stood to the
policy then declared in every detail. He welcomed Mr. Jesse Collings as
an ally in the Allotments Bill. He asserted that Closure by a simple
majority was the ‘motor muscle’[56] of any reform in Parliamentary
Procedure. He ridiculed the complaints of the Liberal party. ‘All they
can do apparently is to exclaim with impotent rage, “How unfair! how
shameful! how unprincipled! You have stolen our programme.” Why “their
programme,” I should like to know? Since 1880 they have been in office,
and they did not make an attempt to carry out a single item. They tell
us that the programme I sketched at Dartford is a Radical programme;
that the Tory party have turned their coats and abandoned their
principles and adopted the principles of the Radical party; and
quantities of sentences of that kind and of equal stupidity. All I know
about the programme of policy, foreign and domestic, which I endeavoured
to outline at Dartford three weeks ago is this--that it was a mere
repetition of the programme of Lord Salisbury at Newport in 1885. All I
know about my speech at Dartford which I can say in reply to what I am
told as to its being a total adoption of Radical principles and measures
is this--that it was a mere reiteration and elaboration of the Queen’s
Speech of January last, when Lord Salisbury’s first Government was in
office, and of the speeches of the Ministers who supported the policy
which was contained in that speech.’
These statements were greeted by the loud and continuous acclamations of
an audience of Conservative delegates representing, it was calculated,
fully a million and a half electors.
This determined speech and its thunderous endorsement silenced for the
moment all hostile criticism. Some of Lord Randolph’s colleagues
expressed to him their disapproval of the attacks upon him from within
the Conservative ranks. Others assured him of their agreement. Even the
Lord Chancellor was satisfied. ‘I have just finished reading your speech
at Bradford,’ he wrote (October 27). ‘There is not a word that is not
sound, good Toryism--aye, and old Toryism, too. The truth is that the
enemy have been so long dressing up a lay figure which they have
invested with their notions of what a Tory ought to be, that they do not
recognise the genuine article when they see it.’
It is a pity not to end the story here. Lord Randolph Churchill seems at
this time to have been separated only by a single step from a career of
dazzling prosperity and fame. With a swiftness which in modern
Parliamentary history had been excelled only by the younger Pitt, he had
risen by no man’s leave or monarch’s favour from the station of a
private gentleman to almost the first position under the Crown. Upon the
Continent he was already regarded as the future master of English
politics. His popularity among the people was unsurpassed. He was
steadily gaining the confidence of the Sovereign and the respect and
admiration of the most serious and enlightened men of his day. His
natural gifts were still ripening and his mind expanding. The House of
Commons had responded instinctively to the leadership of ‘a great member
of Parliament.’ Alike in the glare and clatter of the platform and in
the silent diligence of a public department he was found equal to all
the varied tasks which are laid upon an English Minister. If he were
thus armed and equipped at thirty-seven, what would he be at fifty? Who
could have guessed that ruin, utter and irretrievable, was marching
swiftly upon this triumphant figure; that the great party who had
followed his lead so blithely, would in a few brief months turn upon him
in abiding displeasure; and that the Parliament which had assembled to
find him so powerful and to accept his guidance, would watch him creep
away in sadness and alone?
Still, for an interval the sun shone fair. The clouds were parted to the
right and to the left, and there stepped into the centre of the world’s
affairs--amid the acclamations of the multitude and in the hush of
European attention--the Grand Young Man.
CHAPTER XV
THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER
‘Those who live to the future most always appear selfish to those
who live to the present.’--EMERSON.
At the Treasury the appointment of the new Chancellor of the Exchequer
had been received with no little apprehension. Every great department
has an atmosphere and identity of its own. No politician, however
popular in the country or influential in Parliament, can afford to be
indifferent to the opinion formed of him by the Civil Servants through
whom and by whom he works. Concealed from the public eye among the
deeper recesses of Whitehall, seeking no fame, clad with the special
knowledge of life-long study, armed with the secrets of a dozen
Cabinets, the slaves of the Lamp or of the Ring render faithful and
obedient service to whomsoever holds the talisman. Whatever task be set,
wise or foolish, virtuous or evil, as they are commanded, so they do.
Yet their silent judgments of their masters and their projects do not
pass unheeded. Although the spell still works, it loses half its potency
if these spirits are offended or alarmed; and padded walls of
innumerable objections, backed by the masonry of unanswerable argument,
restrain the irreverent or unworthy from the fullest exercise of the
powers they may have won by force or favour.
Over all public departments the department of finance is supreme.
Erected upon the vital springs of national prosperity, wielding the
mysterious power of the purse, the final arbiter in the disputes of
every other office, a good fairy or a perverse devil, as ‘My Lords’ may
choose, to every imaginative Secretary of State, the Treasury occupies
in the polity of the United Kingdom a central and superior position. No
school of thought is so strong or so enduring as that founded on the
great traditions of Gladstonian and Peelite finance. Reckless Ministers
are protected against themselves, violent Ministers are tamed, timid
Ministers are supported and nursed. Few, if any, are insensible to the
influences by which they are surrounded. Streams of detailed knowledge,
logic and experience wash away fiscal and financial heresies; and a
baptism of economic truth inspires the convert not merely with the
principles of a saint but--too often--with the courage of a martyr.
To many who had spent their lives at the Treasury, Lord Randolph’s
arrival was a shock. They regarded him, we are told, as ‘an impossible
man,’ as ‘one whose breath was agitation, and whose life a storm upon
which he rode.’[57] They had instinctively resented the assaults he had
delivered against Mr. Gladstone, ‘the best friend the Civil Service ever
had.’ They remembered that, not long before, Lord Randolph had made
himself the mouthpiece of a harsh attack upon one of their number. He
was known to have expressed privately a candid opinion that they were ‘a
knot of damned Gladstonians.’ Lastly, they had read his Fair Trade
speeches; and, notwithstanding the reputation he had made at the India
Office as a departmental chief, he still appeared in the eyes of
Treasury officials as a Minister who would ride roughshod over their
habits and violate all their most cherished financial canons.
This mood was short-lived. The disquieted officials found a Minister
assiduous and thorough in work and scrupulously patient and quiet in
discussion. He possessed the very rare gift of keeping his mind
exclusively devoted to the subject in hand, and impressed on all those
with whom he worked the idea that the business on which they were
employed was the only one of interest to him. No time spent with the
Chancellor of the Exchequer was ever wasted. No interruption of any sort
was suffered. No one ever left his room after an interview without
having at any rate gained a clear knowledge of his views and intentions.
Around all played an old-fashioned ceremony of manner, oddly mingled
with a sparkle of pure fun, which charmed everybody. In a month the
conquest was complete. Every official worked with enthusiasm in his
service and all their mines of information were laid open to his hand.
It has often been said that Lord Randolph won his popularity among
permanent officials by his subservience to their views. This is by no
means true. If he cast away altogether as vicious and unpractical the
Fair Trade opinions which he had urged, and which commanded so much
support among the Tory democracy, it will also be seen that he was able
to enlist the interest and positive support of his subordinates in
schemes far outside the orthodoxy of the official mind. His stay at the
Treasury was short; but his memory was long respected. He left behind
him golden opinions and dearly treasured reminiscences. He took away
with him friendships which lasted him his life.
‘Our anxiety,’ wrote Lord Welby in 1896, ‘as to our new chief was soon
dispelled. He met us from the outset with perfect frankness, which soon
became cordiality; and I cannot recall a word or a line of his during
his autumn office which I should have wished unspoken or unwritten. Not
that he was an easy or an unexacting chief. He expected subjects to be
laid before him fully, clearly and intelligently; and he was keen to
mark default. He was, in short, a Minister of the type that Civil
Servants appreciate. He ruled as well as reigned. He had a mind, and
made it up; a policy, and enforced it. He was quick in acquiring
information, quick in seizing the real point, quick in understanding
what one wished to convey to him, impatient in small matters and details
and contemptuous if one troubled him with them. Above all, he was
accessible; ready and willing to hear what one had to say, whether it
accorded with his own views or not. Doing business with him was most
interesting. Not being a respecter of he criticised freely and
pointedly men and matters.... In “chaff” he was unsurpassed. He was
singularly free from affectation of knowledge he did not possess. Could
one fail to take an interest in a chief “who always showed us sport”?’
Many tales of Lord Randolph in these days have been preserved. We have a
glimpse of his first meeting with a rather dismayed subordinate in the
historical Board Room at the Treasury--the stiff and formal cut of his
frock-coat, the long amber cigarette-holder, so soon produced, the
eternal cigarette, and ‘an old-world courtesy of manner’ which surprised
and disarmed a preconceived dislike. We see him going down to the City
with Sir Edward Hamilton to lunch formally with the Governor and
Directors of the Bank of England and hovering for half an hour outside
in a panic of nervousness which robbed him for the time of his
self-confidence. We see him once, and once only, when the Court of
Exchequer, presided over by its Chancellor, settles the list from which
Sheriffs are selected, in his robes of office--those imposing and
expensive robes which seem to assert the opulence which should result
from thrift, rather than thrift itself. His cynicism was disarming. We
are told how, when the dreadful subject of bimetallism cropped up, he
turned to Sir Arthur Godley and said: ‘I forget. Was I a bimetallist
when I was at the India Office?’ When he received an influential
deputation of sugar-refiners and sugar-planters in protest against the
foreign Sugar Bounties, he created general consternation by inquiring,
with immense gravity, ‘Are the consumers represented upon this
deputation?’ We are even told how he complained to a clerk who put some
figures before him that they were not clear and he could not understand
them. The clerk said that he had done his best, and, pointing them out,
explained that he had reduced them to decimals. ‘Oh,’ said Lord
Randolph, ‘I never could make out what those damned dots meant.’ But
this was surely only to tease.
[Illustration: _Reproduced by permission of the proprietors of ‘Punch.’_
BELLEROPHON JUNIOR.
‘I THINK THIS’LL FETCH ’EM!!’
‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer states to the Board that Her Majesty’s
advisers desire to satisfy themselves that the clerical establishments
of the Civil Service, of the Naval and Military Departments, and also of
the Revenue Departments, are organised generally upon a principle which
secures efficiency without undue cost to the public.’--_Treasury
Minute_, Sept. 14.
_Punch_, September 25, 1886]
From the very commencement of his career at the Treasury Lord Randolph
began the exertions for economy to which he felt himself bound by his
electoral pledges. In his private affairs he was usually extravagant and
often unbusiness-like; but public money seemed to him a sacred trust.
The character and extent of Treasury control over expenditure is very
often misunderstood. It is represented sometimes almost as a statutory
or constitutional power over the other departments. Such an idea is a
complete delusion. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is able to exert his
influence in two ways: first, over administration. In small matters not
connected with policy, the Treasury acts upon a set of well-defined
rules and principles, which the spending departments recognise and
endeavour not to infringe and which are enforced more or less strictly,
according to the relative authority of the Chancellor of the Exchequer
and the other Ministers concerned. Secondly, there is the wide domain of
policy; and in all great matters the control of the Treasury is neither
more nor less than the personal influence of the Chancellor of the
Exchequer upon the Cabinet. Of Lord Randolph’s attempt to assert that
influence the next chapter must give some account; but in the meanwhile
he laboured with industrious severity to effect administrative
economies. On September 14 a Treasury Minute announced the appointment
of a Royal Commission to inquire into the establishment and organisation
of the great spending departments: ‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer
states to the Board that Her Majesty’s advisers desire to satisfy
themselves that the clerical establishments of the Civil Service, of the
Naval and Military Departments and also of the Revenue Department, are
organised generally upon a principle to secure efficiency without undue
cost to the revenue.’ A variety of petty economies were effected by his
personal authority. He discovered, among other things, that Government
specie had to be conveyed in merchant ships, at much expense, because an
old custom entitled naval officers to a high percentage. His indignation
at hearing that Her Majesty’s gold could not be conveyed in Her
Majesty’s ships because of claims by Her Majesty’s officers led to
immediate action, and the practice was reformed forthwith.
A remark by the Comptroller and Auditor-General in one of his reports to
Parliament drew his attention to another abuse. Of old times sums were
issued out of the Civil List to the Secretary of the Treasury for secret
service. No public account was rendered of the money thus expended. In
1783, many evils being alleged, Parliament, under the influence of
Burke, was persuaded to limit this grant to 10,000_l._ a year; and that
amount was yearly issued to the Secretary of the Treasury from 1783 to
1886. This branch of secret service was, of course, political and was
quite distinct from that which is ordinarily known as foreign secret
service. The money was used for the purposes of political organisation
by the party which happened to be in power. Such a custom could not on
any valid ground be defended. Yet for over a century the grant had never
been seriously questioned. It might have been urged that the Liberals
had always profited by this sum during their long period of power and
that many famous men had assumed responsibility for it. Lord Randolph
brushed such wire-puller’s arguments aside. Before he had been in office
a month he introduced a Bill, which passed rapidly through Parliament,
abolishing this payment altogether, and it has never since been renewed.
Until 1886 there had existed an octroi duty on coal coming into the
Metropolis, the proceeds of which were divided between the City and the
Metropolitan Board of Works. The principle of this duty was not
unpleasing to the Conservative party. Its abolition was roundly
denounced by the _Standard_ and in high Tory circles. The Metropolitan
authorities were glad to get money in an easy and painless manner.
Powerful interests objected to a rise in the rates, while the abolition
of a duty upon a necessary of life which affected the poor consumer, did
not elicit much enthusiastic support. Lord Randolph took some time to
make up his mind. He decided that an octroi duty was out of date, that
it was a survival of a financial policy that had been emphatically
condemned. He declined to countenance its renewal. His speech to the
deputation may be read with profit by any who care to see the arguments
against such an octroi put tersely, forcibly and without reserve. His
impressions at the Treasury seem to have stimulated his mind to great
activity and to have aroused in him a keen financial instinct. All sorts
of plans were being moved forward by his agency towards and into the
sphere of political action. He contemplated the purchase of Irish
Railways by the State and their use as an instrument of economic
development and of political and strategic control; and Lord Salisbury
himself seems to have been persuaded by his arguments. He paid the
closest attention to the coinage, and harboured a deadly design against
the half-sovereign--‘that profligate little coin’--which he believed was
an expensive and unnecessary feature of British currency. But there was
one great scheme which overshadowed all the rest.
Parliament had no sooner risen than Lord Randolph turned to the
preparation of his Budget. He knew that the duties of leadership in the
next Session would demand his whole attention and physical strength;
and, in spite of the labours of the memorable year, 1886, he succeeded,
by what Sir Algernon West has described as ‘a performance never
equalled,’ in getting ready and laying before the Cabinet his financial
proposals for the year 1887-8. For nearly twenty years his projects have
been veiled in mystery. The silence of the Treasury has remained
unbroken. The few high officials who were admitted to his confidence and
whose sympathy was enlisted in his plans, have kept their own counsel.
Lord Randolph did not choose in any public speech to reveal what he had
purposed. He is the only Chancellor of the Exchequer who never
introduced a Budget; and in his lifetime rumour alone asserted that he
had ever formed one. The time has now come when the abandoned Budget of
1887-8 may be fully unfolded in the form in which, during November,
1886, it received the provisional assent of Lord Salisbury’s Cabinet.
The reader who has accustomed himself to the giant Budgets of modern
times must turn his mind and contract his fancy to the humbler figures
of a vanished age. The cost of governing the United Kingdom and of
providing for the defence of the Empire during the early ‘eighties
fluctuated between eighty and ninety millions a year. This was in itself
a distinct increase on the estimates of Lord Beaconsfield’s
Administration; and Tory speakers were wont to dwell with genial malice
upon the fact. The various wars which had disturbed Mr. Gladstone’s rule
had left their marks upon the economy of the Army. The money raised by
the Vote of Credit in 1885 had been scattered with a lavish hand, and
prominent men in both parties were concerned to notice some apparent
relaxation in the strictness of Treasury control. Few, indeed, thought
so seriously of the future as Lord Randolph Churchill, and his
prediction that a ‘Hundred-million Budget’ would be an event of the
future was generally regarded as unduly pessimistic. But nevertheless
the times were not unfavourable to retrenchment, and there was a healthy
demand for departmental reform. With estimates standing at under ninety
millions small economies were not disdained. The Ministers of those days
had not learned to expand their view of the public resources. A saving
of a hundred thousand pounds was regarded as a matter of legitimate
congratulation. A reduction of a million was an achievement.
Yet at the same time the narrow scrutiny to which expenditure had been
so long subjected and the habitual reluctance of statesmen to enlarge
its bounds, left no very obvious opportunities to the new Chancellor.
The field had, except for some small patches, been well and thriftily
gleaned. Nor did it seem at first sight that the system of taxation
which had for five years received Mr. Gladstone’s approval would readily
lend itself to striking or sensational treatment.
On the other hand, however, more than one great tendency to change was
apparent. The whole question of the Sinking Fund was ripe for
reconsideration. The remodelling of the death duties thrust itself
before every Chancellor each succeeding year. Above all, the inevitable
and swiftly approaching departure in Local Government, involving as it
did a complete readjustment of national and local finance and the
transference of large responsibilities and resource from Whitehall to
the County and Borough Councils, required a strong and daring mind at
the Treasury.
Certainly Lord Randolph Churchill’s plan did not err on the side of
timidity. He contemplated nothing less than a complete reconstruction of
the revenue. The general rate of expenditure and the whole condition of
the National Debt were examined anew by a searching and audacious eye.
Hardly a single tax was left untouched. The death duties, the house
duties, the stamp duties, the wine duties, were all the subject of
reform. Immense reductions were proposed in existing taxes. Numerous new
taxes were devised. All these changes were not a mere meddlesome and
vexatious shifting of burdens from one shoulder to the other. They were
each and all essential parts in a vast financial revolution.
The first object of the Chancellor of the Exchequer was to effect a
large and substantial reduction in taxation. He desired especially to
diminish those taxes which fell upon the lower middle class. He laboured
to transfer the burdens, so far as possible, from comforts to luxuries
and from necessaries to pleasures. He applied much more closely than his
predecessors that fundamental principle of democratic finance--the
adjusting of taxation to the citizen’s ability to pay. His second object
was to provide a much larger sum of money for the needs of local bodies,
so that the impending measure of Local Government might be wide and real
in its character. His third object was to effect a certain definite
economy in the annual expenditure.
The estimates with which he was confronted amounted to 90,400,000_l._
The income which the existing taxes were expected to yield was
90,000,000_l._ The Chancellor of the Exchequer proposed to augment his
income by extra taxation aggregating 4,500,000_l._--namely, by an
increase in the death duties of 1,400,000_l._, and in the house duties
of 1,500,000_l._; by extra stamps to yield 284,000_l._; and by a wider
application of corporation duty, worth 315,000_l._; by the revival of a
tax on horses to produce 500,000_l._; by an increased tax on wine to
produce 250,000_l._; and by certain minor taxes, to be considered later,
which were estimated to produce 300,000_l._ He proposed to diminish his
expenditure by withholding the 2,600,000_l._ local grants-in-aid, for
which a new provision was to be made; by a reduction in the charge for
the debt of 4,500,000_l._; and by a direct economy of 1,300,000_l._ He
had, therefore, raised his income to 94,500,000_l._, and reduced his
expenses to 82,000,000_l._, thus becoming possessed of a surplus income
over expenditure of 12,500,000_l._ This surplus he intended to
distribute variously. 5,000,000_l._ were to be available for the
purposes of Local Government, in lieu of the old grants-in-aid of
2,600,000_l._ The indirect taxpayer was to be relieved by a reduction of
the tea duties from 6_d._ to 4_d._, costing the revenue 1,400,000_l._;
and by a reduction of 4_d._ in the tobacco tax, costing 500,000_l._ The
income-tax payer received the greatest advantage, for by a remission,
costing no less than 4,870,000_l._, the rate of the income-tax was to be
lowered from 8_d._ in the pound, at which it stood in 1886, to 5_d._ in
1887. These outgoings together aggregated 11,770,000_l._, and the
Treasury was left with a final surplus of 730,000_l._
These proposals require to be more closely examined. The principal
feature of the new taxation was the re-grading and increase of the death
and house duties. The death duties in force in 1886-7 were four in
number--namely: (1) Probate duty upon the _personal_ property passing on
the death of any person, irrespective of destination; (2) the account
duty, imposed since 1881 chiefly as a preventive to evasion of probate
duty, and chargeable in respect of personalty included in voluntary
settlements--death-bed gifts, &c.; (3) the legacy duty, upon benefit
derived by the successor to _personal_ property of the deceased at rates
according to consanguinity; and (4) the succession duty, upon benefit
derived by the successor to settled personalty and to the _real_
property of the deceased, also at rates depending on consanguinity,
chargeable, however, on the life interest and not on the capital value.
Lord Randolph Churchill approached this complicated system of taxation
with the double object of obtaining a larger revenue by a simpler
method. He wanted more money and less machinery, fewer taxes and an
increased return. His early inquiries at Somerset House and the
discussion of the first suggestions which, coming fresh to the subject,
he
[Illustration:
Expenditure
90. 400 000
deduct 2. 600 000 lord grants in
4. 500 000 charge for do
1. 300 000 diminished
-------------
82. 000 000
Surplus income over expenditure
12. 500,000
liquor licenses
remit to local bodies 5. 000 000 other ---
3d. income tax 4. 870 000 [words illegible]
2d. off. tea duties 1. 400 000
4d. --tobacco-- 500 000
-------------
11 770 000]
[Illustration:
Budget (Facsimile).
Income
90. 000 000
add
Extra taxation
1. 400 000 death duties
1. 500 000 House duties
204 000 extra stamps
315 000 Corporation duty
500 000 horses
300 000 Sundries
250 000 wine
-----------------
94 500 000.
12 500 000
11 770 000
-----------
730 000 Surplus income.]
put forward, served to convince him that a higher symmetry and
co-ordination were required. He saw that any scheme which involved four
or five different duties, and which attempted to deal with _personal_
estate by means of a graduated _ad valorem_ tax on the estate as a
whole, and later with _real_ estate by means of consanguinity on
individual benefits, would not bear controversial examination. The death
duties had grown up in a series of successive expedients. They were an
admitted patchwork, but a patchwork to which the House of Commons had
become accustomed. So long as they were left untouched, their anomalies
and entanglements would be tolerated, or even admired; but if they were
to be remodelled, re-graded and, above all, increased, they would have
to stand fire, their whole structure would be criticised, and a new plan
would be damned because it resembled an old plan long respected. The
Chancellor of the Exchequer, therefore, began next to inquire as to the
‘possible effect of a graduated _ad valorem_ tax on _real_ estate
corresponding to the graduated tax on _personal_ estate,’ and his mind
was soon determined in favour of such an assimilation of the death
duties on the two classes of property. The method by which to achieve
this object involved, of course, the whole question of graduation.
Should graduation be regulated by the total mass of property passing by
any one death, whether composed of realty or personalty; or partly of
one and partly of the other; or should it be governed by the total
benefit received by an individual on succession, whether out of realty
or personalty, or both combined? Should the rate of duty depend upon the
total wealth of the testator or upon the respective windfalls of the
heirs? These questions have been long and fiercely debated. The Childers
Budget of the year before had aimed at an equalisation of the death
duties on _real_ and _personal_ property by means of an extension of the
account duty, but it contained no element of graduation. The rate of
duty was to be the same for large properties as for small (except very
small) estates, and was to apply equally to realty as to personalty.
Lord Randolph did not adopt this idea. His scheme was to graduate the
duty according to the value of the individual succession. What the
living man got, not what the dead man left, was to be the unit of
graduation.
If, for example, by the death of A., X. took 2,000_l._ _personalty_ and
3,000_l._ _realty_, Lord Randolph would have combined the two, and have
applied the rate (say, 3 per cent.) levied on a succession of 5,000_l._
If by the same death Y. took 20,000_l._ _personalty_ and 30,000_l._
_realty_, Lord Randolph would have applied the rate (say, 6 per cent.)
for a succession of 50,000_l._; and so on, always graduating the rate
according to any one person’s succession; so that the successor to a
small benefit would pay a low rate of duty, and the successor to a large
benefit a high rate of duty. In short, Lord Randolph was for a graduated
succession duty instead of a graduated estate duty. The Finance Act of
1894 has asserted and established the opposite principle. Sir William
Harcourt looked simply at what a dead man left or liberated, and on the
aggregate of that amount the graduation now in force depends. Thus it
may very well happen, and often does happen, that a successor to a small
benefit--perhaps a succession worth no more than 500_l._--pays the
highest rate (8 per cent.) of estate duty; because his succession is
part of an aggregate estate worth one million. The principle which
governs the Finance Act of 1894 was laid very plainly before Lord
Randolph in 1886. But he rejected it in favour of the graduation on the
individual succession, saying, after one long discussion at Somerset
House, ‘My instinct tells me that it is wrong.’ It is curious that his
instinct, whether right or wrong on the technical question, anticipated
the principal objections which Mr. Balfour and Mr. Chamberlain urged
against Sir William Harcourt’s Bill, and indicated the line of principle
to which the whole Conservative party was subsequently committed.
This choice being made, the Chancellor of the Exchequer turned his
attention to the principle of consanguinity. Why should graduation be
regulated by kinship? Does not kinship find its adequate expression in
the dispositions made by the testator? Does not the testator naturally
select his wife and children as the objects of his bounty in preference
to relations of remoter degree? Why should the State complicate its
affairs by recognising the principle of consanguinity in a taxing
statute? Lord Randolph Churchill therefore proposed to discard the
principle of consanguinity altogether. All existing duties on
properties of whatever kind, passing by death after a given date, and in
dispositions taking effect after that date, were to be swept away. Real
property was to be placed on the same footing as personalty, and
chargeable no longer on life interest, but on capital value. The one
graduated succession duty, graduated on amount of benefit received and
not depending at all upon consanguinity, was to replace them all. The
old probate, account, legacy, inventory (Scotland) and succession duties
were to be left to work themselves out by lapse of time, that process
being accelerated by a liberal system of discounts.
It is, perhaps, of some interest to contrast this scheme with that which
now holds the field. We now enjoy a duty called ‘estate duty’; an extra
duty, levied in certain circumstances on settled property, called
‘settlement estate duty’; and, finally, the legacy and succession
duties, depending on the consanguinity existing between the donor and
the donee. We now assert the vicious principle of taxing property
instead of persons. We try to tax the dead instead of the living. The
State refuses to consider for purposes of graduation anything so
personal as the sacrifice of the heirs, and bases itself on the mass of
the inheritance. Conjoined with this in utter contradiction we have a
cumbrous and elaborate recognition of such a purely personal and private
principle as consanguinity.
Lord Randolph would have replaced these four or five duties of great
complexity by one intelligible tax. He would have substituted one Act
of Parliament for thirty or forty. He would have secured a far greater
flexibility in case further increases of direct taxation were necessary.
A vast simplification of the accounts required would have notably
diminished the expenses of lawyers, valuers, accountants and actuaries,
now attendant on the payment of death duties. The just complaint of the
small inheritor from a great estate would have been prevented; and for
various illogical or contradictory methods the one simple principle
would have been erected, that taxation should be proportioned to ability
to pay and to benefit received. The increase which Lord Randolph
contemplated in the death duties would have been unpopular with the
Conservative party. He was informed that the estate of nearly every
member of the House of Lords would have been prejudicially affected
thereby. But, in view of what befell in 1894, it is clear that wealthy
people would not have been in the long run the losers by an early
settlement.
The tax upon inhabited houses was respectably ancient in its origin. It
had been first imposed in 1696, and had continued at various rates till
1834. Repealed in 1834, it was reimposed in 1851 by Sir Charles Wood on
the abandonment of the duty on windows, and at the rate of 6_d._ for
shops, beer-houses and farmhouses, and 9_d._ for dwelling-houses (those
under 20_l._ annual value being exempt), it yielded in the financial
year 1885-6 1,867,377_l._ to the revenue. Lord Randolph proposed to
repeal the existing Act, thus cutting away the many important
exemptions it contained, and by a new Act to restore the house duty to
what it formerly was--namely, a tax on all houses inhabited either by
day or night. He intended to revert to the old principle of graduation,
to the old definition of an inhabited house and to the old lowest limit
of taxable value. The new Act would further have repealed the provision
in the law under which only one acre was to be included with the house
for purposes of valuation--excepting the case of agricultural lands
attached to farmhouses. Mills and warehouses used for storing goods were
to be exempt; but it was provided that any person on the register of
voters in respect of the occupation of a tenement should be liable to
assessment for that tenement or part of a building; including even all
who were entitled to vote under the service franchise as occupiers of
apartments in Militia or other barracks. The scale of duty was lower for
shops than for private houses, and progressed rapidly as the value
increased. Value under 20_l._: shops, 3_d._; cottages, 4_d._ Value over
20_l._ and under 50_l._: shops, 6_d._; private houses, 9_d._ Value over
50_l._ and under 150_l._: shops, 1_s._; private houses, 1_s._ 6_d._
Value over 150_l._ and under 300_l._: shops, 2_s._; private houses,
3_s._ Value 300_l._ and upwards: shops, 2_s._ 6_d._; private houses,
3_s._ 6_d._ This new tax was estimated to produce, on existing
valuations, an additional revenue in the first year of 1,500,000_l._,
and, what was of even more importance (having regard to future Budgets),
was estimated to rise to 2,380,000_l._ in the second and subsequent
years.
Under the heading of ‘extra stamps’ the Chancellor of the Exchequer
proposed: (1) An alteration in the scale of duty upon patent medicines.
The scale then in force under an Act of George III., and continued to
this day, presses rather heavily on the 1_d._ and 2_d._ boxes, &c., of
medicines sold in poor neighbourhoods. Lord Randolph’s new scale would
have afforded relief to these small parcels, and have more than recouped
itself on the larger and more costly.[58]
The yield of the old duty had been steadily increasing in later years.
In 1869-70 it had produced 72,000_l._; in 1879-80, 135,000_l._; in
1885-6, 178,000_l._ It was estimated that Lord Randolph’s duty would
produce an increase of between 50,000_l._ and 70,000_l._ in the first
year (not, of course, complete) and of 100,000_l._ in the second year.
But the yield of the future would have been much richer. The old scale
of duty still in force produced in 1904-5 not less than 331,000_l._ Had
Lord Randolph’s scale been in force the extra revenue would probably by
now have exceeded 250,000_l._ a year.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer also proposed: (2) A 2_s._ per cent.
stamp duty on the share capital of joint-stock companies. He estimated
this to produce 100,000_l._ yearly, and 58,000_l._ in the year 1887-8.
This plan was adopted by Mr. Goschen in 1888. The results exceeded
expectation, and the tax yielded in the first year 158,000_l._ In 1899
the duty was increased to 5_s._ on share capital, and extended at
half-scale to loan capital. The yield for 1904-5 was 388,000_l._ from
share capital and 73,000_l._ from loan capital.
(3) A group of proposals comprising an extension of receipt duty to sums
between 10_s._ and 2_l._; the repeal of certain exemptions, such as a
receipt written upon a bill of exchange, or upon a duly stamped
instrument, acknowledging receipt of consideration money therein
expressed; a duty on tickets of admission to places of amusement (French
plan) and upon certain documents in the nature of vouchers, e.g. those
given to persons making purchases at stores and other large trading
establishments; a duty on certificates of proprietorship of shares, and
upon letters of application for stock; and an assimilation of the duty
on transfers of debenture and ordinary stock. This last has been since
effected. The others, with all that may be urged in their behalf, must
stand upon their mere recital. This group of revised duties was
estimated to produce an additional 150,000_l._ a year, and the whole of
the alterations in the stamp duties would have yielded 284,000_l._ in
the first year and above 400,000_l._ in the next.
A yearly tax of 5 per cent. was imposed in 1885-6 on the income of
corporations as an equivalent for the death duties, which they escape.
The yield in the first year was 34,000_l._ Municipal corporations were,
however, exempted, although they paid income-tax on their realised
property. By repealing this exemption Lord Randolph Churchill would have
considerably increased the yield of the duty. Taking the accounts of ten
municipal corporations of mixed sizes and importance, it was found that
the average income derived from rentals, waterworks, gasworks, tolls,
&c., exclusive of interest on investments, was 38,000_l._ Assuming there
were 275 corporations--an assumption which left an ample margin--the
gross income assessable would have been 10,450,000_l._, yielding a
revenue of 522,000_l._ From this, however, a large deduction had to be
made for interest paid on loans raised on the security of the property
apart from the rates, leaving as the result of the tax a net addition to
the revenue of 315,000_l._
The Chancellor of the Exchequer proposed also to revive the tax upon
horses and the special tax on racehorses which had been abandoned by Sir
Stafford Northcote in 1874, from which a sum of 500,000_l._ would accrue
to the State. In 1888, when Mr. Goschen endeavoured to re-introduce this
duty, no serious objection was raised by the House of Commons. Strong
opposition was, however, excited by the wheel and van tax which he
suggested at the same time. In the hope of carrying the unpopular tax by
linking it with one more favoured, Mr. Goschen declared that the two
taxes must stand or fall together.
But the House was not to be cajoled. Both projects were withdrawn, and
the transfer which has since taken place of all analogous duties to
local authorities, seems permanently to have interfered with any attempt
to secure this convenient source of revenue for Imperial purposes.
Two other classes of proposed extra taxation remain to be considered. If
every one of the 70,000,000 cartridges which were used each season had a
1_d._ revenue stamp pasted over the shot end, the national resources
would be enriched by 280,000_l._[59] in a complete year. The sportsman
whose unerring aim never required a second barrel, except for another
bird, would in poetic justice enjoy a comparative immunity. But while
his unskilful companion blazed away he might remember that at each
discharge the stamp blown to pieces by the explosion would carry its
tribute to the public treasury. Besides this, mainly with a view to
putting a stop to their reckless use by boys and others, pistols were to
be taxed 1_l._ a year and pistol-dealers 20_l._ a year; and brokers,
whose responsible functions seemed to deserve some recognition from the
State, were to be duly licensed at 5_l._ a year. By these sundries
300,000_l._ would be secured immediately, and about 400,000_l._ in a
complete year. The augmentation of the wine duties by various devices,
falling chiefly upon the higher quality wines, so as to yield an
additional quarter of a million, raised the total of the new taxation to
4,500,000_l._ in the first year, with a considerable natural growth in
prospect.
Of the steps by which Lord Randolph designed to diminish his expenditure
only one need be considered here; for the transference of the
2,600,000_l._ grants-in-aid to another and larger fund is a matter
chiefly of book-keeping, and the definite economy of 1,300,000_l._ which
he regarded as so important belongs to another part of the story. But
the proposal to reduce the Sinking Fund by no less than 4,500,000_l._ is
startling enough to compel attention.
The condition of the National Debt was in 1886 peculiar. When Sir
Stafford Northcote, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, in 1875 reorganised
the service of the debt, he had, in order to make ‘steady and continuous
efforts for its reduction,’ assigned a fixed annual sum of
28,000,000_l._, covering both interest and Sinking Fund, and payable,
unless Parliament should in the meantime otherwise determine, as long as
any debt remained outstanding. On March 31, 1875, the National Debt
amounted to 769,000,000_l._; and if Sir Stafford Northcote’s scheme as
it stood on the statute book had remained unaltered, if no war or other
disturbing element had intervened, this debt, without any addition to
the yearly charge of 28,000,000_l._, would have been entirely paid off
about the year 1930. This was the arrangement which Lord Randolph now
proposed to revise, and it therefore requires closer examination. The
full charge of 28,000,000_l._ came into operation in 1877-8. It was
divided between interest and Sinking Fund. At the outset the proportion
assignable to interest and management was between 23,000,000_l._ and
24,000,000_l._, and the proportion assignable to Sinking Fund between
4,000,000_l._ and 5,000,000_l._; but this proportion steadily changed by
the automatic working of the scheme. Year by year as the debt capital
was reduced by the amount of successive Sinking Funds, that part of the
28,000,000_l._ required for interest diminished, and that part available
for Sinking Fund proportionately increased. According to the moderate
computations of Sir Stafford Northcote when presenting his scheme to the
House, 230,000,000_l._ of the debt would have been paid off by the
present year--1904-5. In that case the capital of the debt would now
stand at about 540,000,000_l._, the interest proportion of the
28,000,000_l._ would amount to sixteen and a half millions, and the
Sinking Fund proportion to about eleven and a half millions. Thus the
scheme, which in the beginning imposed a charge on the taxpayer
equivalent to 2½_d._ in the 1_l._ for the purposes of a Sinking Fund,
automatically progressed until that burden would have become equivalent
to 5_d._ in the 1_l._ at the present time, and rising further to 1_s._
or more in the 1_l._ before it reached its consummation. While already
himself attaining a high degree of financial virtue, Sir Stafford
Northcote indicated to his successors a standard three and four and five
times as exalted.
Each generation, almost each decade, claims its right to revise its
standards; and as the rate of human improvement was less rapid than the
growth of Sir Stafford Northcote’s Sinking Fund, it had in 1886 become
clear that the public would not acquiesce in the logical result of the
1875 scheme, or regard as a sacred obligation the exact fulfilment of a
plan which, snowball fashion, rolled on with ever-accumulating weight
and ended by requiring the exaction from the taxpayer during a small
number of years of an amount in repayment of debt which sound reasoning
could not justify. Already the scheme itself had yielded to the pressure
of a passing emergency. Mr. Childers had suspended the Sinking Fund in
great part during the Egyptian War and the Russian panic of 1885-6; Sir
William Harcourt had permitted a smaller suspension in 1886-7. Indeed,
Sir Stafford Northcote seems to have felt that his scheme could not be
maintained in its fulness to the end, and that when the Sinking Fund had
risen to a certain figure, the taxpayer of the day would claim to share
with it the benefit resulting from the progressive diminution in the
interest of the debt. If, then, it were conceded that the Northcote
Sinking Fund could not be maintained in its entirety till 1930, the
revision of the scheme became simply a question of the manner, the
measure and the tune.
These considerations were strengthened by another set of arguments. In
1887 the funded debt amounted to 637,000,000_l._ A large part of this
debt--probably 150,000,000_l._--was held by public departments; another
large part was held by banks, insurance companies and by trustees. It
was computed later by skilled authorities that the holdings on this
account were not less than 200,000,000_l._ As these holdings were
practically not offered on the market for sale, the field for purchases
of stock was comparatively narrow. If a large amount of Sinking Fund
were applied to purchases of stock in this narrow field, the prices of
Consols would be quickly and unnaturally inflated. This condition was
actually reached in later years, when the public credit was so esteemed
that the State enjoyed the privilege of paying 113_l._ to redeem 100_l._
of its own debt.
Lord Randolph decided that the time had come for a revision of the
Northcote scheme. He found himself possessed of a lever capable of
exerting on one occasion--and on one occasion only--a giant’s power. He
was anxious that it should be made the instrument of great and
substantial reform, and not wasted gradually for the sake of convenience
or popularity. For the purposes, therefore, of effecting a reduction and
a general readjustment of taxation and as an integral part of his Budget
scheme, Lord Randolph proposed to reduce the total immediate charge of
the debt from 28,878,000_l._ to 24,417,000_l._, thus effecting a saving
of 4,461,000_l._, or, roughly, four and a half millions. The Northcote
Sinking Fund would thus have been reduced by two-thirds to 2,160,000_l._
The reduction of such a great weapon of financial reserve as the Sinking
Fund has proved in tunes of warlike emergency was practically replaced
by the gain in expansive power supplied by an income-tax as low as
5_d._ The positive economy on naval and military estimates clears the
Chancellor of the Exchequer from any charge of laxity or indulgence. His
judgment on the main question of revision was ratified within two years
by the high and severe financial authority of Lord Goschen, and was
further confirmed eleven years later by Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. The
former reduced the fixed charge from 28,000,000_l._ to 25,000,000_l._;
the latter reduced it again from 25,000,000_l._ to 23,000,000_l._, at
which figure it stood when the South African War broke out. But these
reductions, aggregating 5,000,000_l._ a year, were enforced, the one for
the purpose merely of affording a petty relief to the taxpayer of the
year, and the other to find ways and means for the growing expenditure
of a Government, and not, as Lord Randolph had designed, for the sake of
a large and harmonious reform.
By these methods, however they may be regarded, the Chancellor of the
Exchequer would have become possessed of a surplus of noble proportions.
And the distribution of the 12,500,000_l._ which he had secured is the
coping-stone of the whole financial scheme. Tea and tobacco are familiar
friends to the students of Budgets. Year after year their fortunes
fluctuate in sympathy with those of the nation. In the year 1886-7 tea
was taxed 6_d._ in the pound and yielded 4,514,874_l._ A reduction of
2_d._ upon tea is a generous boon to every poor household. The tiny
packet is a farthing cheaper. The careful spoonfuls may be more freely
bestowed; and the relief is gratefully acknowledged by an immediate
increase in consumption. Lord Randolph had estimated that his reduction
would cost the revenue 1,400,000_l._; but this seems to have been an
over-estimate, for when Mr. Goschen four years later was able to make
this desirable change the loss to the revenue was only 1,100,000_l._,
owing to the greater indulgence of the people.
Who is there, of those who pay it, that will not look back with envy
from these days of 1_s._ income tax, almost as a permanent charge in
times of peace, to times when a tax of 8_d._ was regarded as abnormally
high; when one Chancellor of the Exchequer was resolved to reduce it to
5_d._, and when his successor (Mr. Goschen) declared that, except for
purposes of war, 6_d._ was a proper limit? Of all Lord Randolph’s
proposals none, it may be safely said, would have been greeted with more
general approval than his intended reduction of the income-tax from
8_d._ to 5_d._ At that time incomes below 150_l._ a year were exempt,
but incomes of 150_l_. and less than 400_l._ were allowed an abatement
of 120_l._ Incomes of and above 400_l._ a year had to pay on the full
amount. Official statistics have always been silent as to the total
number of income tax payers, it being apparently impossible to frame a
trustworthy estimate. It is nevertheless probable that the bulk of
persons who are called upon to pay this impost are included in the
150_l._-400_l._ class. It was to this considerable class, composed
mainly of persons emerging into an independence they have earned for
themselves, and rising by their own industry from the level of
exemption to that of income-tax-paying means, that Lord Randolph’s
sympathies were directed. The small householder, pinched by having to
pay in the early days of January the landlord’s tax under Schedule A,
which he cannot recover till he pays his rent at the end of March; the
petty tradesman or struggling professional man who defends a precarious
respectability by a systematic thrift too often unknown to the burly
wage-earner; these are the special beneficiaries from such a reduction,
and they share in a peculiar degree in the general expansion of comfort
and energy which must follow when five millions of money are surrendered
by the State and left to fructify in the pockets of the people.
The largest claim upon the surplus was in respect of Local Government.
Lord Randolph proposed to assign the revenue received from a large
number of Excise licence duties to the various local authorities about
to be established. As it was undesirable to saddle the new-born
authorities with the difficulty and expense of collecting many duties
for which they possessed no adequate machinery, he arranged that a large
number were still to be collected by the State, and the proceeds, less
the cost of collection, were to be afterwards transferred. Dogs, guns,
game, carriages, servants, armorial bearings, auctioneers, hawkers,
patent medicine vendors, plate dealers, refreshment houses, pawnbrokers,
tobacco and sweets dealers, beer, wine and spirit dealers, and the new
tax on horses, aggregating in all 2,700,000_l._, were to be thus for
the time being reserved. But all licences which the local bodies could
collect without any additional cost or trouble were to be handed over at
once. 1,544,000_l._ worth of liquor licences fell into this latter
class. They were to be granted, as heretofore, only on the production of
a magisterial consent, and nothing was simpler than to make the paying
of the duty and the obtaining of the consent simultaneous. Lord
Randolph’s schemes on this point travelled beyond both the Budget and
the Local Government Bill, and embraced local option in the drink
traffic. He believed that the liquor laws ought to be intimately
connected with Local Government. He wished to entrust local authorities
with very large powers to regulate the sale of liquor in their
districts; and he thought that if the revenue which arose from liquor
licences was made an important source of revenue for the local
authority, a salutary check would be provided against hasty or fanatical
action, leading perhaps upon a popular impulse to total prohibition, and
upon the rebound to an unrestricted sale. ‘When you are legislating,’ he
said a year later at Sunderland (October 27, 1887), ‘about subjects
which interest human beings, it is just as well not to leave altogether
out of account human nature.’ The transfer by different methods of these
sources of revenue, together with the contribution of 800,000_l._ in aid
of the indoor poor, provided the round sum of 5,000,000_l._ as the
foundation upon which Local Government was to be erected.
The preparation of such a Budget required an extraordinary exertion.
Scheme after scheme was formulated, only to break down in discussion and
to be dismissed. Many days--wrested by an effort from other pressing
occupations--were consumed in study and reflection. But at length all
was in order and the plan was in detail settled and complete. In every
respect--in the definite economy, in the reduction in the expenditure on
armaments, in the increase in the proportion of direct taxation, in the
immense diminution of public burdens, in the enormous simplification of
the death duties and the introduction of a logical system of graduation,
in the ample provision for the needs of Local Government--it was a
democratic Budget. Yet it was cunningly contrived. The importance and
cohesion of the scheme would have secured it a momentum of its own.
Objections upon detail could at every point have been answered by
general principles. The low income-tax balanced the diminished Sinking
Fund. The economies in public charges justified the remissions of
taxation. The tremendous appeal to the middle classes of a 5_d._
income-tax would have provided the driving power needed from within the
Conservative party. Nevertheless, it was in a grave and nervous mood
that the young Chancellor introduced it to the Cabinet in the early days
of December. He spoke long and earnestly. He exerted all his power of
luminous and attractive exposition. The whole proposal was unfolded. His
colleagues seemed for the moment fascinated. Objections and doubts were
silenced together. No one cared to assail in detail a scheme all parts
of which hung so closely together and which, in the mass, displayed such
novel and spacious outlines. Even Lord Iddesleigh, the creator of the
threatened Sinking Fund, consented to its dissolution for the sake of
the integrity of the scheme. Lord Randolph had come prepared for an
uncertain and protracted battle. He seemed to have won the victory at a
single charge.
His friends at the Treasury waited anxiously for his return. Startled as
they had been by some of his views, foreign to their traditions as was
his treatment of the debt, they had been drawn into the momentum of what
was, after all, a great design. They were prompt to offer their
congratulations upon the Cabinet acquiescence. But Lord Randolph was far
from confident. The silence of his colleagues oppressed him. ‘They said
nothing,’ he told Lord Welby, ‘nothing at all; but you should have seen
their faces!’ He proceeded to give instructions for checking every
figure and recasting every calculation from the beginning, as if he
apprehended some tardy attack, against which preparations should be
made. This arranged, as was his habit he pushed the whole matter from
his mind. ‘There,’ he said grandly to Sir Algernon West later in the
day, ‘are the materials of our Budget. They are unpolished gems; put the
facets on them as well as you can; but do not speak to me on the subject
again until the end of the financial year.’
CHAPTER XVI
RESIGNATION
Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call to-day his own--
He who, secure within, can say:
‘To-morrow do thy worst, for I have lived to-day.
Come fair or foul, or rain, or shine,
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself over the past hath power;
But what has been has been, and I have had my hour.’
_Lines from Dryden copied out by Lord Randolph
Churchill about 1891._
On the morning of December 23 all who took an interest in politics--and
in those days these were a very great number--were startled to read in
the _Times_ newspaper that Lord Randolph Churchill had resigned the
offices of Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of
Commons and had retired altogether from the Government. As the news was
telegraphed abroad, it became everywhere the chief subject of rumour and
discussion, and Cabinet Ministers--dispersed on their holidays--hurried
back to London to find out the truth of the matter and to prepare for
the changes that must follow. To the political world the event came as a
complete surprise. No important issue had arisen in foreign or domestic
affairs; no great question likely to lead to such a breach was before
the country; there had been hardly a whisper of Cabinet dissension. But
if the reader has followed this account with any considerable measure of
agreement or sympathy, he will see in this resignation no inexplicable
mystery, no deep-laid intrigue, no explosion of temper; but the logical
and inevitable consequence of all that had gone before.
Everything may go well with a liberal-minded man who belongs to the Tory
party while his party is in Opposition. The natural disagreements which
arise upon so many questions between the Government of the day and their
political opponents make a broad platform on which the Democratic Tory
and the old-fashioned Conservative can fight side by side in
combination. When to those disagreements were added the danger of an
Imperial disaster, acutely realised, and the antagonism which Mr.
Gladstone inspired in all who did not worship him, the combination
ripened into comradeship; and out of comradeship was born a sense of
agreement which, after all, was pure illusion. It is not until men who
really differ, try to work together at the business of government that
their worst troubles begin. Even in the short Administration of 1885 the
divergence between Lord Salisbury and Lord Randolph Churchill had been
plain. But the ‘Ministry of Caretakers’ was in a minority. It was in a
sense an Opposition rather than a Government. It had never exercised
power. The disruption of the Liberal party and the decision of the
electors had vitally altered the political situation. The Conservative
party, with their Unionist allies, were now supreme. They had achieved
great power. What would they do with it?
Many of the letters which passed between Lord Randolph and the Prime
Minister during their varied and eventful association have been printed
here. A change, distinct and palpable, is to be noticed in the tone of
their communications after the election of 1886. It is still friendly
and open; Lord Randolph’s letters still preserve their unvarying air of
respect towards a higher officer of State and of deference to an older
and far more experienced man. Yet it is less the correspondence of a
lieutenant with his chief and more like that between separate
authorities. The two men were, in fact, sustained by two different, and
to some extent conflicting, sets of forces, and they stood for different
ideas. Nor were those forces on which Lord Randolph Churchill counted so
inconsiderable as the event might seem to prove. Tory Democracy had
gained repeated victories in the past three years over the more
Conservative element in the party. Lord Salisbury himself, under
pressure, personal and of circumstances, had advanced vastly from his
political position in the early ‘eighties. He had gone as far as
Newport. He had gone as far as Dartford. It did not seem improbable
that, if pressed, he would go still further and that without any serious
damage to party unity the liberalizing process which had already
effected so much in the composition, character and prospects of the Tory
party might continue. The ‘old gang’ was now widely scattered. Some had
retired; some were in the Lords. Others had not been included in the
Government. The Cabinet had been largely formed of men whose speeches
and general views were democratic. The younger and more active elements
in the party were adventurous and progressive. Many of the members
returned by the constituencies, and especially by the boroughs, had
given pledges to the electors at which ‘high and dry’ Tories stood
aghast.
A careful examination of the Conservative majority in the House of
Commons justified the belief that it was neither unfitted nor unwilling
to be the instrument of large constructive reforms. It seemed, moreover,
that the alliance with the Unionist Liberals and Radicals, on which the
existence of the Government depended, would strengthen powerfully the
more Liberal elements in the Conservative ranks and would even require
an increasing measure of Liberal legislation as a condition of support.
Mr. Chamberlain and his immediate followers were also a very important
factor; and Lord Randolph, as the principal link which united them to
Lord Salisbury’s Government, had every reason as well as every
inclination to study their wishes. Looking broadly at the situation
during the autumn of 1886, it was not unreasonable to hope that an era
of domestic reform might be safely and prosperously inaugurated. But, in
any case, Lord Randolph’s own position was perfectly well understood.
His declarations had been clear and full. He had made no secret of his
opinions; and upon finance, upon Local Government, upon Ireland, upon
land and liquor, upon questions connected with property and labour, they
were unmistakably declared. Yet with the full knowledge of his opinions
and every indication which the past could supply that he would fight
sternly for them, the Prime Minister had invited him to undertake the
second post in his Government, and Lord Randolph’s acceptance had been,
with unimportant exceptions, endorsed and even acclaimed by the whole
party. Why should it ever have been supposed that he would have
abandoned forthwith all his liberal views, would have repudiated or
ignored all his pledges of economy and would have settled down to the
adroit manipulation of a Parliamentary majority for strictly
Conservative ends and the elaboration of ingenious excuses for
departmental and administrative scandals. The Prime Minister and the
party must have known--and they did know when Lord Randolph Churchill
was called to lead them in the House of Commons--that he could only lead
them in one direction, and that direction, so far as domestic affairs
were concerned, a Liberal direction.
It is no doubt true that he rated his own power and consequent
responsibility too high. Like many a successful man before him--and some
since--he thought the forces he had directed in the past were resident
in himself, whereas they were to some extent outside himself and
independent. But this error was shared by his colleagues and by the
Prime Minister. They had no idea what he could do, or how hard he could
hit if he were assailed. They remembered his previous withdrawals and
how he had always come back stronger than ever. They saw how often in
the last few years his judgment had proved right and how he had always
won in the end, no matter how slender were his own resources and how
strong the confederacy by which he was opposed. They feared him greatly.
But they were Tory Ministers; and they did not intend, whatever
happened, to be dragged out of their own proper sphere and committed to
large reforms and democratic Budgets. Better far Lord Hartington and the
Whigs! Better even the Grand Old Man!
In all that concerned the management of individuals, Lord Salisbury
excelled. No one was more ready to sacrifice his opinion to get his way.
No one was more skilful in convincing others that they agreed with him,
or more powerful to persuade them to actual agreement. His experience,
his patience, his fame, his subtle and illuminating mind, secured for
him an ascendency in his Cabinet apart altogether from the paramount
authority of First Minister. The Leader of the House of Commons,
triumphant in Parliament, almost supreme in the country, found himself
often almost alone in the Cabinet. The disproportion perplexed and
offended him. He believed that he had got the majority together. He
wanted to see it used well and boldly in correcting abuses, in carrying
great reforms, and moving always onwards. He believed that unless the
Conservative party gave proof of their zeal for popular causes the
constituencies, so painfully won over, would revert to Radicalism, that
the Unionist alliance would collapse and that Mr. Gladstone would return
to power. And he would be held responsible for the disaster!
From the very outset the new Administration was uneasy. Discord stirred
restlessly behind the curtains of Cabinet secrecy. Sir Michael
Hicks-Beach had his own views about Ireland and Irish landlords, and
they differed from those of the Prime Minister. He was, so Lord Randolph
described him to Lord Salisbury in a letter on August 22, ‘afraid of
being forced to administer Ireland too much on a landlord’s rights
basis.’ He had been upset by the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s statement
that any revision of rents by State interposition was altogether
excluded from Conservative policy. He would not agree to the principle
that any permanent guarantee of the judicial rent was conveyed to the
landlord in 1886. Lord Randolph, however, persuaded him that these
questions did not arise seriously for immediate decision.
The autumn Councils were not harmonious, whether upon foreign or
domestic affairs. The proposed changes in Parliamentary procedure, and
especially the question of the Closure, provoked awkward differences,
nearly every prominent member of the House of Commons holding strong
personal opinions based on long personal experience. One Minister felt
unable to be responsible for proposing Closure by a simple majority,
and recommended that the Government should leave the matter as an open
question to the House. Others disputed on the relative merits of a
two-thirds or three-fifths majority. The tangled controversies connected
with the details of English and Irish Local Government proved even more
troublesome. To lighten the ship it was decided to confine the Bill to
county government alone. For a long time it seemed impossible to
reconcile the divergent views of the Prime Minister and the Irish
Secretary, and, as it was intended that Sir Michael should himself take
charge of the Bill, the difficulty was grave. ‘I wish there was no such
thing as Local Government,’ wrote Lord Salisbury pathetically to the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, after an elaborate ‘eirenicon’ which he had
proposed had been abruptly rejected by his colleagues.
Besides these internal differences, the alliance with the
Liberal-Unionist leaders, upon whose goodwill the existence of the
Government depended, required careful and unremitting attention. In
November Lord Hartington, who felt the need of meeting Mr. Gladstone’s
demand for a constructive Irish policy with positive proposals, if the
Liberal and Radical Unionists were to be kept solid against the Home
Rulers, pressed that a Local Government Bill for Ireland should be
promised in the Queen’s Speech. He suggested that this should provide
for the establishment of Irish County and District Councils, with
liberty to two or more to act together for certain specified purposes
affecting their several jurisdictions; but no further. He pointed out
that, as Irish Local Government would necessarily proceed on more
‘Conservative’ lines than English Local Government, the Irish
settlement, if first effected, would afford a safer model for the
English measure. This argument much impressed the Prime Minister; but
Lord Randolph Churchill, who also appreciated its force, objected for
that very reason to giving Irish Local Government precedence over the
English Bill, and he succeeded, by the influence of a friend, in
persuading Lord Hartington to abate his Irish claims. Mr. Chamberlain
also intimated, through Lord Randolph, that while prepared to give the
Government policy a generous consideration, whether on foreign affairs
or on the necessity for Coercion, he could not support anything that he
considered reactionary in Local Government. The principal members of the
Cabinet, including the Prime Minister, Lord Randolph Churchill and Mr.
Smith, then agreed upon an extensive proposal for England, with the
understanding that an Irish Local Government Bill should be promised in
the Queen’s Speech, but introduced _after_ England and Scotland had been
dealt with.
One difficulty was thus removed; but, as the month drew on, continual
divergences arose on questions of domestic policy. The Dartford
programme was indeed, like the Budget--in principle, at least--accepted
formally by Ministers. But their reluctance to embark on such policies
betrayed itself in all sorts of small objections. The survivors of the
‘old gang’ were not inclined to forget the treatment they had received.
The ‘Plan of Campaign’ against the payment of rent, which had been
started in Ireland as the Nationalist reply to the refusal of Home Rule,
was spreading; and the difficulties of the Irish Government, divested of
the exceptional coercive powers of former years, were such that Beach,
on whom Lord Randolph counted greatly, was often obliged by his Irish
duties to be absent from meetings of the Cabinet. The Chancellor of the
Exchequer felt sorely the want of a friend. His delight when, at his
continued request, Lord Salisbury brought Mr. Balfour into the Cabinet
led him (November 17) to send the news to the _Times_ before the Queen’s
consent had been obtained, and a breach of etiquette was narrowly
averted.
Many of the lesser members of the Government were Tory Democrats; and
much of the draft legislation that came before the Cabinet was Liberal
in its character. Lord Randolph, however, had to fight single-handed for
every point. A Minister who was called to one of the Cabinets on the
Local Government Bill described to me the pleadings and arguments by
which the Chancellor of the Exchequer strove tirelessly to extend its
scope to the widest limits. ‘We must not overweight the Bill,’ said the
Prime Minister at length. ‘It is a heavy Bill already.’ ‘A heavy Bill!’
repeated Lord Randolph, balancing the draft upon his fingers and letting
it flutter to the ground, while everyone else sat silent. ‘A heavy
Bill!’ He was, in fact, always the devil’s advocate. ‘I am appalled,’
he wrote to the Prime Minister (December 2), ‘at the strength of your
disapproval of poor Long and Onslow’s Allotments Bill. We shall have to
cut it down like anything.’ The concessions which were made to his
insistence, disturbed his colleagues without satisfying him. The
deference which he often showed to high Tory views, was forgotten amid
disagreements so many and grave. When the last word had been said, no
matter what compromise had been reached, this fundamental difference
remained--that he regarded Liberal measures as things good and desirable
in themselves; while many of his colleagues, and certainly his chief,
looked upon them as so many unholy surrenders to the powers of evil.
‘Alas!’ wrote Lord Randolph sadly to the Prime Minister on November 6,
‘I see the Dartford programme crumbling into pieces every day. The Land
Bill is rotten. I am afraid it is an idle schoolboy’s dream to suppose
that Tories can legislate--as I did, stupidly. They can govern and make
war and increase taxation and expenditure _à merveille_, but legislation
is not their province in a democratic constitution.... I certainly have
not the courage and energy to go on struggling against cliques, as poor
Dizzy did all his life....’
Lord Salisbury replied with great care and kindness; but he had little
consolation to afford, and this letter seems to have been his last
attempt:--
November 7, 1886.
My dear Randolph,--I did not get your note of yesterday till I got
to town in the afternoon--and then it was too late to catch you. I
saw Beach, however, and ... led him to tell me what had passed with
Ritchie. It appears that the latter has abandoned the ground plan
which he told me in September he was fully resolved on--namely,
that if owners are to have half the taxation they should have half
the representation too. This, as you remember, was a principle for
which Beach contended vigorously last winter--and which was
generally accepted by the then Cabinet. Beach thinks the
abandonment of it would have specially injurious influences in
Ireland.
For the rest, I fully see all the difficulties of our position. The
Tory party is composed of very varying elements, and there is
merely trouble and vexation of spirit in trying to make them work
together. I think the ‘classes and the dependents of class’ are the
strongest ingredients in our composition, but we have so to conduct
our legislation that we shall give some satisfaction to both
classes and masses. This is specially difficult with the
classes--because all legislation is rather unwelcome to them, as
tending to disturb a state of things with which they are satisfied.
It is evident, therefore, that we must work at less speed and at a
lower temperature than our opponents. Our Bills must be tentative
and cautious, not sweeping and dramatic. But I believe that with
patience, feeling our way as we go, we may get the one element to
concede and the other to forbear. The opposite course is to produce
drastic, symmetrical measures, hitting the ‘classes’ hard, and
consequently dispensing with their support, but trusting to public
meetings and the democratic forces generally to carry you through.
I think such a policy will fail. I do not mean that the ‘classes’
will join issue with you on one of the measures which hits them
hard, and beat you on that. That is not the way they fight. They
will select some other matter on which they can appeal to
prejudice, and on which they think the masses will be indifferent;
and on that they will upset you. My counsel therefore is strongly
against this alternative; and it would be the same if I had no
interest in the matter, and was merely an observer outside the
Ministry advising you. Your _rôle_ should be rather that of a
diplomatist trying to bring the opposed sections of the party
together, and not that of a whip trying to keep the slugs up to the
collar....
Yours very truly,
SALISBURY.
Yet the first session of a Parliament and the first year of an
Administration are the most critical. Men are not really bound together
in a Government until they have made mistakes in common and defended
each other’s failures; and it is possible that, unless definite and
urgent disagreements had arisen, the evil hour might have been long
averted. But Lord Randolph Churchill was not only responsible for the
House of Commons; he was responsible for national finance. And from the
Treasury a second set of questions necessarily involving sharp
differences with his colleagues now began to arrive.
The reader will not fail to recognise how vital a definite economy was
to the character and success of Lord Randolph Churchill’s Budget. The
reduction of the Sinking Fund and of taxation generally could only be
defended in association with a lower expenditure. Circumstances now
within our knowledge seem to show that the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s
margin was larger than he had dared to expect. But so many novel sources
of revenue, tapped for the first time, introduced uncertain factors into
his calculations. His public declarations before the general election
had been unmistakable. He was pledged to the hilt in the cause of
economy, and the actual conditions fortified his sentiments. Even before
the Bradford meeting, the tension was apparent.
_Mr. Smith to Lord Randolph Churchill._
_Confidential._
Greenlands, Henley-on-Thames: October 24.
My dear R. C.,--I shall probably see you in Arlington Street
to-morrow, but I may not have an opportunity of begging you not to
indicate too precisely at Bradford the results you may anticipate
from economies in army administration. I shall do everything I can
in that direction, but I am anxious, as you must be, as to the
aspect of affairs, and I think the policy you are anxious to carry
out is best supported by the organisation of the strength we
possess than by allowing the present unready condition to continue.
As to this I must have a serious talk with you when you come back
from Bradford. I contemplate method, management,
arrangement--rather than large present expenditure; but, unless you
see your way through the difficulties in Turkey and as to Egypt
easily and peaceably, it would be unwise, I think, to announce
reductions in military Budgets which would be interpreted, as the
Paris _Temps_ suggests, as presaging a withdrawal of England from
the positions she has taken up. It may be necessary to take such a
course, but it can only be done after the most grave deliberation:
it almost involves a recognition of the fact that we are no longer
one of the Great Powers.
I prefer to say these things to you alone than to talk of them
before Salisbury. Our diplomacy is no doubt very weak, but this
does not entirely explain our powerlessness in Europe....
Yours very sincerely,
W. H. SMITH.
All through the month of November the annual conflict between the
Treasury and the spending departments was maintained with unusual
vigour and with varying fortune. On the 3rd a Treasury Minute
accelerated the preparation of the estimates:--
Treasury Chambers, Whitehall, S.W.:
November 3, 1886.
In view of the probability of the meeting of Parliament being fixed
for the middle of January, the First Lord of the Treasury and I are
of opinion that the Army and Navy Estimates should be considered by
the Cabinet before Christmas. Will you therefore kindly direct that
the estimates decided upon by the War Office should be ready by the
first days of December? We shall then be well ahead of our work.
‘Do you observe,’ wrote Smith on the 7th, ‘that under pressure our
people in Egypt see their way now to a great reduction of military
expenditure? Only a fortnight ago they were the other way minded.’ And
again on the 20th, when some Treasury probing had touched a tender
spot:--
‘This departmental extravagance is not mine, but my predecessor’s, and
full _private_ notice has been given repeatedly since August. I hope I
may yet save something, but the cake was eaten before I got here. We
will talk about it when we next meet.’
Other departments had to face a not less searching examination, and the
Navy and Colonial Office estimates were the subject of prolonged and
animated correspondence. There was, of course, nothing unhealthy, or
even unusual, in all this. It is the business of the Treasury to canvass
all proposals which involve expenditure and to compel those who bring
them forward to show, not merely that they are necessary and desirable,
but that they are more necessary and more desirable than other necessary
and desirable projects. Without such severe controversial examination of
estimates, the finances of the wealthiest country would soon be in
disorder and the money of the taxpayer squandered irretrievably. But it
may well be believed that, with all the good-will in the world, the
month of November is a stormy period for the Chancellor of the Exchequer
and brings him daily into acute antagonism with his colleagues. In such
circumstances only the closest sympathy and support from the Prime
Minister can sustain him. He is one against many, and must otherwise
submit or resign. But on this occasion, when there should have been the
most intimate alliance, there opened vast and comprehensive differences;
and the Chancellor of the Exchequer became continually more isolated and
from that very cause more combative. The money clauses of the Local
Government Bill--affecting as they did so many settled interests,
interwoven as they were with the whole finance of the year--led to
vexatious and protracted discussions. Behind all loomed the vague yet
formidable shadow of the Budget itself. By the end of the month it was
evident that a crisis was approaching.
‘Salisbury,’ wrote Lord George Hamilton on the 25th, ‘is getting to the
position where he will be pressed no more. If a rupture takes place, it
will damage us almost irretrievably; for he would carry with him a large
portion of the party, and your position would be very much, as you
yourself said, like to that of Sir Robert Peel, who, though he carried
Free Trade, was without a party afterwards. Gladstone cannot live for
long and if we only hold together we shall utterly foil him.
‘I write feelingly, for if we break up, my vocation of peacemaker
between the different sections of the party is gone and I should take up
some other line of work than politics. Things are, I fear, worse than we
thought two days back; however, you will see for yourself and act
accordingly.’
The definite collision took place just before the estimates of the Navy
and Army were finally presented. Lord Randolph Churchill insisted upon
some reduction and made no secret that he would set his official
existence on the issue. Hamilton replied that 50,000_l._ was the utmost
further variation that could be expected at the Admiralty. Smith wrote
as follows:--
_Private._
December 14, 1886.
My dear R. C.,--I am very sorry to say that the first review of my
figures affords no hope whatever of any reductions in W. O.
estimates as compared with 1886-7.
We lose 100,000_l._ of Indian money, and have to meet extra charges
for leap year--Volunteers, Reserve, and other automatic
increases--which are enough to drive one wild, without entering
upon the questions of giving small-arm ammunition and defence.
I shall be able to give you a rough idea of the probable gross
estimate on Thursday or Friday, but it will not be a pleasant one.
Yours very sincerely,
W. H. SMITH.
And again on the 16th, in a remarkable letter showing that he, too, was
prepared to go to extremes:--
_Private._
December 16, 1886.
My dear R. C.,--I have been thinking a good deal over your letter
of yesterday.
I am as much committed to economy as you are, but I cannot be the
head of a great department in times like these and ask for less
than the absolute minimum required for the safety of the country.
I will go into figures with you if you like--but it is out of the
question for you to talk of retiring. If one of us goes, I shall
claim the privilege; and you may rest assured that if a man can be
found to take my place, I shall be delighted to give all the help
in my power to a successor brave enough to assume responsibility
which I am not prepared to bear.
I will speak to you after the Cabinet to-morrow.
Yours very sincerely,
W. H. SMITH.
Bear in mind that in the House--if I am there--I do not ask you to
defend my estimates or to excuse them.
‘You will shortly have to decide,’ wrote Lord Randolph in a
good-humoured letter to the Prime Minister, December 15, ‘whose services
you will retain--those of your War Minister or those of your Chancellor
of Exchequer.
‘Smith informs me of his inability to make reductions in the Army
Estimates; I have informed him of my absolute and unalterable inability
to consent to any Army Estimates which do not show a marked and
considerable reduction.
‘George Hamilton has made me a reduction in the Navy Estimates of over
700,000_l._ If these things can be done at the Admiralty, the attitude
of the War Office becomes intolerable. Generally speaking, however, I am
anxious to submit to you to-morrow the draft of a Treasury minute to the
public departments calling their serious attention to their increasing
expenditure and requiring marked and immediate economies.’
Lord Salisbury’s reply indicated clearly the side to which his
sympathies inclined:--
Hatfield: December 15, 1886.
My dear Randolph,--I will be in Downing Street at half-past three.
I have got to go to Windsor at a quarter to five. There was nothing
for it but to consent to the Egyptian expenditure, though it is
very lamentable--all Gladstone’s fault. The Cabinet, happily, not
I, will have to decide the controversy between you and Smith. But
it will be a serious responsibility to refuse the demands of a War
Minister so little imaginative as Smith, especially at such a time.
It is curious that two days ago I was listening here to the most
indignant denunciations of Smith for his economy--from Wolseley. I
am rather surprised at George Hamilton being able to reduce so
much. I hope it is all right.
Ever yours very truly,
SALISBURY.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, however, showed no signs of yielding
and his colleagues, feeling that the crash was coming, evidently took
counsel with one another and broadened the ground upon which they stood
and might have to fight. The Budget had meanwhile been passed through
the Cabinet. But now doubt and hesitation seemed to have overtaken those
Ministers who were concerned in the Estimates dispute. On the 18th Lord
George Hamilton wrote that he thought the Budget ‘exceedingly well
balanced and comprehensive,’ but on that very account the more likely to
be attacked by the various interests concerned, and he asked for certain
returns as to the incidence of taxation. It is significant that Mr.
Smith wrote a similar letter on the same day, and Lord Salisbury on the
day following:--
_Mr. Smith to Lord Randolph Churchill._
War Office: December 18, 1886.
My dear R. C.,--I think you should send us a printed memorandum of
your Budget proposals, in order that they may be considered
carefully during our short holiday.
They are too large and important to be determined upon after a
conversation across the table. It would not be fair to you nor to
your colleagues, some of whom may not have fully realised all your
proposals.
Yours very sincerely,
W. H. SMITH.
_Lord Salisbury to Lord Randolph Churchill._
Hatfield House, Hatfield, Herts: December 19, 1886.
My dear Randolph,--In the course of discussions on the Local
Government Bill you have two or three times expressed the belief
that the country gentlemen would be consoled for all they might
lose under that Bill by the financial arrangements which were to be
proposed; or, as you expressed it, that ‘the pill would be gilded.’
I think you have overlooked the fact that your local taxation
proposals will relieve the towns more than the rural districts. At
least, I have looked up the figures for Hertfordshire, Suffolk, and
Devonshire, and enclose a statement of them. The result is (if I
rightly understood your proposals) that the ordinary country
gentleman will have an extra burden of ninepence in the
pound--which is gilding of a negative kind.
Ever yours truly,
SALISBURY.
The situation was fast becoming acute. At a dinner on the 18th, when the
Prime Minister was Lord Randolph’s guest, shrewd observers had noticed,
underneath much personal courtesy, an air of harsh political antagonism.
The effect of these letters was decisive. Lord Randolph forwarded the
figures which Lord Salisbury had enclosed to the Treasury and called for
a memorandum in reply. His pencilled comment on the paper is, ‘Lord
Salisbury’s figures are incomprehensible.’ The Treasury answer required
a little time to prepare; but the next day Lord Randolph wrote back:--
Treasury Chambers, Whitehall, S.W.: December 20, 1886.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--I know the country gentlemen, like the
farmers, always think they are being plundered and ruined. The
facts are, however, that whereas the ratepayers used to receive in
gross three millions from the taxes, they would in future under my
scheme receive over five millions. Of course the towns will get the
bulk of the indoor pauper contribution.
Real estate pays succession duty on an average about once in thirty
years. We do not estimate that the change in the succession duty
will add more than a million a year to the present yield of
800,000_l._, and it will take at least twelve years to work up to
this amount. When the succession duties were first voted by
Parliament, they were estimated to produce 2,000,000_l._ I believe
the produce has never exceeded 900,000_l._ The assimilation of the
incidence of death duties on real estate to that which falls upon
personal estate has not of late years been resisted in principle
even by the strictest sect of the Tories.
I enclose you the G.O.M.’s reply to my communication. I hear
rumours that he is contemplating the policy of throwing over the
Home Rulers.
Yours most sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
That same afternoon the Chancellor of the Exchequer was summoned to
Windsor. Travelling thither, he met by chance in the same railway
carriage Lord George Hamilton. Lord Randolph, who was in excellent
spirits, said briskly that he intended to resign that day. Hamilton was
much shocked, and urged patience, delay and so forth. Lord Randolph
remained inscrutably gay. That night the Queen showed him most gracious
favour, and kept him long in conversation. He spoke of many matters of
policy--of the new Procedure rules, of Ireland, even of the prospects of
the coming session--but of his determination not one word escaped him.
It was late when he retired, yet he proceeded forthwith to write his
letter of resignation to Lord Salisbury. Hamilton, who came to press him
once again, was treated with extreme good-humour, and had it all read
out to him before it was despatched:--
Windsor Castle: December 20, 1886.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--The approximate Estimates for the Army and
Navy for next year have been to-day communicated to me by George
Hamilton and Smith. They amount to 31 millions--12½ millions for
the Navy, 18½ millions for the Army. The Navy votes show a
decrease of nearly 500,000_l._, but this is to a great extent
illusory, as there is a large increase in the demand made by the
Admiralty upon the War Office for guns and ammunition. The Army
Estimates thus swollen show an increase of about 300,000_l._ The
total 31 millions for the two Services, which will in all
probability be exceeded, is very greatly in excess of what I can
consent to. I know that on this subject I cannot look for any
sympathy or effective support from you and I am certain that I
shall find no supporters in the Cabinet. I do not want to be
wrangling and quarreling in the Cabinet, and therefore must request
to be allowed to give up my office and retire from the Government.
I am pledged up to the eyes to large reductions of expenditure, and
I cannot change my mind on this matter. If the foreign policy of
this country is conducted with skill and judgment, our present huge
and increasing armaments are quite unnecessary, and the taxation
which they involve perfectly unjustifiable. The War estimates might
be very considerably reduced if the policy of expenditure on the
fortifications and guns and garrisons of military posts, mercantile
ports and coaling stations was abandoned or modified. But of this I
see no chance, and under the circumstances I cannot continue to be
responsible for the finances.
I am sure you will agree that I am right in being perfectly frank
and straightforward on this question, to which I attach the very
utmost importance: and, after all, what I have written is only a
repetition of what I endeavoured to convey to you in conversation
the other day.
Believe me to be
Yours most sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
Early the next morning both Ministers left Windsor and returned to
London. Lord Randolph bought, as was his custom, a number of
newspapers, but found that neither he nor Hamilton had any change. The
train was about to start, and the bookstall keeper, who knew both his
customers by sight, cried: ‘Never mind, my lord--when you come back next
time will do.’ Lord Randolph looked sideways at his companion and said,
with a quaint smile, ‘He little knows I shall never come back.’
It happened that at this time Sir Henry Wolff was at home from his
Egyptian mission, and he and Lord Randolph consorted together daily.
Both went down to the City on Wednesday, the 22nd; for the Chancellor of
the Exchequer had to pay an official visit to the Master of the Mint.
Lord Randolph proposed returning by the Underground Railway, and it was
while they were pacing the platform, waiting for a train, that Wolff
asked some chance question about the Treasury intentions. ‘Upon my
word,’ said Lord Randolph abruptly, ‘I don’t know now whether I am
Chancellor of the Exchequer or not.’ But otherwise he never told a
soul--not Beach, his trusted friend; not Chamberlain, his ally; not his
mother; not even his wife. Lord Salisbury’s answer did not come till
eight o’clock on Wednesday. He had delayed in order to write to his
principal colleagues, sending copies of Lord Randolph’s letter, made
laboriously with his own hand, and perhaps just in order to delay. It is
certain that he did not regard the matter as settled. He wrote to Beach
on the 21st that he was not sure whether Lord Randolph would persist. He
sent no word to the Queen. Yet his answer, when it came, seemed
conclusive. It proposed no compromise; it did not even suggest an
interview; and the expression of regret with which it closed might apply
either to the actual resignation or to the expressed intention to
resign:--
Hatfield House, Hatfield, Herts: December 22, 1886.
My dear Randolph,--I have your letter of the 20th from Windsor. You
tell me, as you told me orally on Thursday, that 31 millions for
the two Services is very greatly in excess of what you can consent
to; that you are pledged up to the eyes to large reductions of
expenditure, and cannot change your mind in the matter; and that,
as you feel certain of receiving no support from me or from the
Cabinet in this view, you must resign your office and withdraw from
the Government. On the other hand, I have a letter from Smith
telling me that he feels bound to adhere to the Estimates which he
showed you on Monday, and that he declines to postpone, as you had
wished him to do, the expenditure which he thinks necessary for the
fortification of coaling stations, military posts and mercantile
ports.
In this unfortunate state of things I have no choice but to express
my full concurrence with the view of Hamilton and Smith, and my
dissent from yours--though I say it, both on personal and public
grounds, with very deep regret. The outlook on the Continent is
very black. It is not too much to say that the chances are in
favour of war at an early date; and when war has once broken out,
we cannot be secure from the danger of being involved in it. The
undefended state of many of our ports and coaling stations is
notorious, and the necessity of protecting them has been urged by a
strong Commission, and has been admitted on both sides in debate.
To refuse to take measures for their protection would be to incur
the gravest possible responsibility. Speaking more generally, I
should hesitate to refuse at this time any supplies which men so
moderate in their demands as Smith and Hamilton declared to be
necessary for the safety of the country.
The issue is so serious that it thrusts aside all personal and
party considerations. But I regret more than I can say the view you
take of it, for no one knows better than you how injurious to the
public interests at this juncture your withdrawal from the
Government may be.
In presence of your very strong and decisive language I can only
again express my very profound regret.
Believe me
Yours very sincerely,
SALISBURY.
Lord Randolph Churchill never doubted the meaning of the answer he had
received, and treated it as a formal acceptance of his resignation. He
concluded, as will appear, that the delay had been due to communications
with the Queen, and that the whole matter was now ended. He sat down at
once and wrote to Lord Salisbury a letter of farewell:--
Carlton Club: December 22, 1886.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--I have to acknowledge the receipt of your
letter of to-day’s date accepting my resignation of the
Chancellorship of the Exchequer.
I feel sure you will believe me when I express my deep and abiding
appreciation of the unvarying kindness which you have shown me, and
of the patience and indulgence with which you have always listened
to the views on various public matters which I have from time to
time submitted to you.
The great question of public expenditure is not so technical or
departmental as might be supposed by a superficial critic. Foreign
policy and free expenditure upon armaments act and react upon one
another. I believe myself to be well informed on the present state
of Europe, nor am I aware that I am blind or careless to the
probabilities of a great conflict between European Powers in the
coming year. A wise foreign policy will extricate England from
Continental struggles and keep her outside of German, Russian,
French or Austrian disputes. I have for some time observed a
tendency in the Government attitude to pursue a different line of
action which I have not been able to modify or check.
This tendency is certain to be accentuated if large estimates are
presented to and voted by Parliament. The possession of a very
sharp sword offers a temptation, which becomes irresistible, to
demonstrate the efficiency of the weapon in a practical manner. I
remember the vulnerable and scattered character of the Empire, the
universality of our commerce, the peaceful tendencies of our
democratic electorate, the hard times, the pressure of competition
and the high taxation now imposed; and with these factors vividly
before me I decline to be a party to encouraging the military and
militant circle of the War Office and Admiralty to join in the high
and desperate stakes which other nations seem to be forced to risk.
Believe me, I pray you, that it is not niggardly cheese-paring or
Treasury crabbedness, but only considerations of high state policy
which compel me to sever ties in many ways most binding and
pleasant.
A careful and continuous examination and study of national finance,
of the startling growth of expenditure, of national taxation
resources and endurance, has brought me to the conclusion from
which nothing can turn me, that it is only the sacrifice of a
Chancellor of the Exchequer upon the altar of thrift and economy
which can rouse the people to take stock of their leaders, their
position and their future.
The character of the domestic legislation which the Government
contemplate in my opinion falls sadly short of what the Parliament
and the country expect and require. The foreign policy which is
being adopted appears to me at once dangerous and methodless; but I
take my stand on expenditure and finance, which involve and
determine all other matters. And reviewing my former public
declarations on this question and having no reason to doubt their
soundness, I take leave of your Government, and especially of
yourself, with profound regret, but without doubt or hesitation.
Yours most sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
After writing this letter he went down to the _Times_ office, imparted
his priceless information to Mr. Buckle, authorised him to make it
public, and so to bed. Lord Salisbury received this second letter at
half-past one in the morning of the 23rd, and realised that the breach
was definite. He posted the news at once to the Queen; but he was
already too late. With the first light of the morning the announcement
appeared in the _Times_.
This action of Lord Randolph Churchill in resigning the office he held
in such a manner and on such an occasion has two aspects--a smaller and
a larger. Both are partly true: neither by itself is comprehensive. The
smaller aspect is that of a proud, sincere, overstrained man conceiving
himself bound to fight certain issues, at whatever cost to
himself--believing at each movement that victory would be won, and drawn
by every movement further into a position from which he could not or
would not retreat. The larger aspect deserves somewhat longer
consideration. The differences between the Chancellor of the Exchequer
and his colleagues were matters of detail and might easily have been
compacted. The difference between the Leader of the House of Commons and
the Prime Minister was fundamental. It must be plain to the reader who
has persevered so far. It glows through the correspondence included in
this chapter. It was a difference of belief, of character, of
aspiration--and by nothing could it ever have been adjusted. There were
many considerations and influences which worked powerfully for their
agreement. In the Union they found a common cause; in Mr. Gladstone they
faced a common antagonist. Lord Randolph’s fiercest invective did not
jar upon the ‘master of flouts and jeers.’ Neither could be insensible
to the personal fascination of the other. Both rejoiced in a wide and
illuminating survey of public affairs; both dwelt much upon the future;
both preserved a cynical disdain of small men seeking paltry ends. But
the gulf which separated the fiery leader of Tory Democracy--with his
bold plans of reform and dreams of change, with his record of storm and
triumph and slender expectations of a long life--from the old-fashioned
Conservative statesman, the head of a High Church and High Tory family,
versed in diplomacy, representative of authority, wary, austere, content
to govern--was a gulf no mutual needs, no common interests, no personal
likings could permanently bridge. They represented conflicting schools
of political philosophy. They stood for ideas mutually incompatible.
Sooner or later the breach must have come; and no doubt the strong
realisation of this underlay the action of the one and the acquiescence
of the other.
I have tried to show that this profound difference found expression on
many specific points. The Cabinet of 1886 had sat together only five
months, yet here already were five important matters of
disagreement:--The policy to be pursued in the East of Europe; the
complexion of the Local Government Bill; the attitude towards the Whigs;
the character of the Budget; and lastly, the direct cause of rupture,
the expenditure upon armaments. Longer association threatened merely a
multiplication and aggravation of divergences. But though patience could
not have ended in agreement, it might have brought disagreement to
another end. And it is from this point of view that Lord Randolph
Churchill’s action requires most careful examination.
The differences upon specific points, regarded singly, were serious; and
together they became vital. But they were differences less of principle
than of degree. No clear and abrupt dividing-line was presented; and the
questions were always of ‘more or less,’ not of ‘yes or no.’ Why should
Lord Randolph Churchill not, then, have kept his offices? Would he not,
by so doing, have had a much better chance of imparting to Conservative
policy the complexion he desired? Much was to be gained by waiting.
Every day his position was becoming more assured. At every stage and
turn of Cabinet discussion he could have laboured to deflect the course
of legislation; and the House of Commons might be guided more easily
than his colleagues. In a hundred small ways he could, without any
breach of confidence, have served the ends he had in view. But his gorge
rose at it. It was almost impossible to him to defend courses of which
he disapproved: and in the position he held every act of the Government
must be constantly and whole-heartedly defended by him. Imagination
might foresee this new Administration, which he more than any man had
called into being, drifting irresistibly towards military ambitions and
European entanglements, ending perhaps at last in war: and in all this
he must be the principal agent--the man who had to make the House of
Commons consent. No--at the very outset a decision must be taken and a
pacific and progressive domestic policy established. Without that
assurance the honours and amenities of power--and no one enjoyed them
more--seemed valueless; and the money--a matter, as we have seen, in
itself from other points of view of much consequence--a thing not to be
considered for a moment.
Of course, he hoped the others would give way--would, at any rate, make
some considerable concession, which would leave him proportionately
strengthened. ‘With respect to Local Government,’ he wrote to Mr.
Chamberlain on the 19th, ‘I pressed Lord Salisbury and Mr. Goschen very
hard to give up the idea of _ex officio_ representation, and’ (a
significant sentence) ‘possibly my arguments may not be altogether
without effect.’ How could they do without him? Who was there to fill
the Treasury? Could Smith make head against Gladstone in Parliament?
Was Lord Salisbury the man to maintain the alliance with the Chamberlain
of 1886? Would Stanhope vindicate the Government in the constituencies?
Balfour was unknown: Beach was ailing: Goschen was ‘very hard to
please’: and the Whigs doubtful and contrary. Beyond all question he was
the most powerful and efficient instrument at the disposal of the Prime
Minister--probably, as it seemed, the only instrument which would be
effective. And since so powerful and necessary, and moreover being
possessed of a complete scheme and temper of political thought largely
accepted among the people, he was bound to put it to the proof whether
he should not exert an influence upon policy compatible with his public
pledges and proportioned to his usefulness to the Government. But still
a more patient man would have waited.
Undoubtedly he expected to prevail. What he asked was in itself a small
thing: ‘Cannot this vote for coaling stations, for instance, stand over
till next year?’--some petty economy; but still an economy, and an
economy in armaments. He knew that if they had wished to meet him, they
could easily have compounded. Reductions greater than would have kept
him, were made after he was gone. And since it was thus revealed that
his colleagues did not wish to act with him, what a prospect of vexation
and disappointment and special pleadings the future unveiled!--unless
the matter could be settled at the very beginning and a peaceful and
progressive policy assured.
It seems, however, very surprising that Lord Randolph Churchill should
at this period have overlooked the anger and jealousy that his sudden
rise to power had excited. In little more than a year two
Administrations had been formed from the Conservative party. In the
making of both of these his influence had been almost supreme; and it
had been an influence which, from the point of view of ordinary
Parliamentary promotion, had been disturbing and even revolutionary. Men
who in quieter tunes would have received office had been disappointed.
Others who had enjoyed what they considered almost prescriptive right,
had been forced out. The former leader of the Conservative party had
been driven from the House of Commons. Mr. Matthews had been raised from
private life to one of the highest posts in the Cabinet. This one,
hitherto unknown, had been jumped up: that one, so long respected, had
been thrust down. Malice proved a stronger motive power than gratitude;
and, although unquestioned success had crowned the struggle, bitterness
and resentment gathered behind the conqueror.
Nor, indeed, do we think he should have counted much upon the good-will
of the plain member. He was often--and seemed to be, more often
still--in things political a hard man, reaping where he had not sown,
severe to exact service and obedience, hasty in judgment, fierce in
combat; and many a black look or impatient word had been remembered
against him by those of whose existence he was perhaps scarcely
conscious. Friends he had in plenty--some of them true ones; but, for
all the personal charm he could exert at will, his manner had added to
his enemies. Venerable Ministers saw a formidable intruder who had
entered the Cabinet by adventurous and unusual paths. Austere
Conservatives shrank from this alarming representative of the New
Democracy. Worthy men thoughtlessly slighted, tiresome people ruthlessly
snubbed, office-seekers whose pretensions had been ignored,
Parliamentary martinets concerned for party discipline, all were held in
check only so long as he was powerful. His position had been won by the
sword, and he must be armed to keep it.
Yet at this moment, when he proposed to try conclusions with all the
strongest forces in the Conservative party, he seems to have taken no
single precaution to safeguard himself. He gave the Cabinet long and
ample notice of his intention. He reiterated his determination at
intervals through the autumn. He knew that Smith and Hamilton took
counsel together: he knew that they had prevailed upon Lord Salisbury;
and that if in the end they should resist stubbornly, their resistance
would not be ill-considered or unprepared. Upon the other hand, he made
no effort to rally his own friends. A third at least of the Government
were men of his own choice. Beach would have made great exertions on his
behalf. But no one was consulted. He was in constant and intimate
intercourse with Chamberlain. Their views at this tune were almost
identical; their relations most cordial. Yet he gave him no knowledge
of the situation, nor dreamed of inviting his support: so
strictly--quixotically even--did he interpret the idea of Cabinet
loyalty.
Few men then alive were more skilled in political tactics, or knew
better how to deal with a crisis. If he had made up his mind to break
with the Government, there were many ways in which the severance might
have been made effective. First, as to time. I have said a more patient
man would have waited; a more unscrupulous man would most certainly have
waited. The power of a Leader of the House of Commons whose chief is in
the House of Lords, always immense, is far greater when Parliament is
sitting. He is the general in the field at the head of the army. The
other waits at home, trying to make what he can of the despatches.
Moreover, the House of Commons, for all its staid and sober qualities,
is sometimes, and was particularly in times like these, an organism of
impulse. A sudden announcement; a brilliant and persuasive speech;
powerful support coming from an unexpected quarter; panic, emotion, or
excitement, and fine majorities may crumble into dust.
He could with perfect ease and candour have postponed the issue; and had
he done so the danger to the Government must have been enormously
increased. He resigned, however, at Christmas-time, when politicians
were scattered far and wide on their holidays, when the temperature was
low, and when three clear weeks intervened before the reconstructed
Government would have to meet Parliament, and before he would have an
opportunity of explanation. It was scarcely possible to have chosen a
season better suited to the interests of his colleagues or more
unpromising to his own.
Then as to the ground of battle. I have tried to show that this
insignificant reduction of a military vote, on which he insisted, was
the peg upon which the tremendous issues of a peaceful domestic
administration as against an ambitious foreign policy supported by
growing armaments depended. But what a bad peg to have chosen! Granted a
divergence not to be compacted between Lord Randolph and the Cabinet,
how many more promising issues presented themselves! Questions of Local
Government, questions of Coercion, questions of taxation, rose thorny
and menacing on every side. Indeed, it is clearly evident that Lord
Randolph neither formed a deliberate plan nor expected to supplant Lord
Salisbury or overthrow the Government; but that, on the contrary, in so
far as he was careful at all, he was more careful of their interest than
of his own.
There is scarcely any more abundant source of error in history than the
natural desire of writers--regardless of the overlapping and inter-play
of memories, principles, prejudices and hopes, and the reaction of
physical conditions--to discover or provide simple explanations for the
actions of their characters. It would be a barren task to set forth the
motives of this affair in a schedule. Yet the main causes
emerge--shadowy perhaps, but unmistakable. Lord Randolph Churchill did
not think of himself as a man, but rather as the responsible trustee
and agent of the Tory Democracy; and this temper, overpowering even the
most attractive personal associations, impelled him by deliberate
steps--yet not without deep despondency--towards a fateful issue: and
all the while a feeling, partly of sombre pride, partly of loyalty,
forbade him to take the necessary and obvious steps to protect himself.
Ambushes, intrigues, cabals, might suit the free-lance of Fourth Party
days; but an official leader of a great party could only state the terms
on which his assistance could be obtained, and, if it were not worth
while to grant them, could only go.
It may no doubt be observed that this was the highest imprudence; that
it agreed very little with much that he had done before, and not at all
with the impression formed in the public mind. If he had put away for a
season his pledges and his pride, both might have been recovered with
interest later on. As it was, he delivered himself, unarmed, unattended,
fettered even, to his enemies; and therefrom ensued not only his own
political ruin, but grave injury to the causes he sustained. Yet it is
noteworthy that he never repented of the course he had taken. Bitterly
as he regretted the consequences, and felt the abuse and
misrepresentation of which he was the object, and the exclusion from the
fascinating and exciting life into which he had been drawn, he was not
wont by word or letter to admit that he was wrong to resign, or assert
that, having again the opportunity, he would do otherwise. He looked
upon the action as the most exalted in his life, and as an event of
which, whatever the results to himself, he might be justly proud. ‘I
had to do it--I could be no longer useful to them.’
It should, indeed, not escape notice that there was among the principal
characters in English politics during this momentous time a high and
disinterested air, very refreshing in contrast with the humiliating
antics of the place-hunters and trinket-seekers who surrounded them, and
more admirable than the selfish ambitions of the statesmen of a sterner
age. Sir Michael Hicks-Beach refuses the Leadership of the House of
Commons, and insists upon serving under a younger man who in his opinion
can better fill the place. Sir Stafford Northcote in the interests of
party union voluntarily effaces himself in a peerage. Lord Salisbury
twice offers to be a member of a Hartington Administration, and Lord
Hartington twice refuses to be the First Minister of the Crown. Sir
Henry James on a matter of principle severs himself from Mr. Gladstone
and refuses the Wool-sack. Lastly, Mr. Chamberlain leaves the party of
which he must one day have been the leader, relinquishes the great
office and power he had already obtained, and, confronted at every step
by distrust and pursued at every step by obloquy, sets forth upon his
long, eventful pilgrimage. Among all these indications of the healthy
and generous conditions of English public life, so full of honour for
our race and of vindication for its institutions, the resignation of
Lord Randolph Churchill need not suffer by any impartial comparison.
CHAPTER XVII
THE TURN OF THE TIDE
‘The rising unto place is laborious; ... the standing is slippery,
and the regress is either a downfall or at least an eclipse which
is a melancholy thing.’--BACON.
Lord Randolph Churchill had divested himself by a single short letter of
all that authority which is centred in a political chief and a Minister
of the Crown. The solid array of Conservative members who had stoutly
sustained him, ‘proud to follow a leader who was proud to lead them on’;
the wise and busy secretaries of a great department with their hives of
fact and counsel; hundreds of sharp pens, thousands of friendly voices;
the vast, pervading, persisting machinery of party, all hitherto
obedient in his service, now in a moment fell away. He was only the
representative of a Metropolitan constituency who possessed some skill
in speaking and a small house overlooking Hyde Park. He had cast away
all advantages. He had neglected every preparation. He had chosen bad
ground and the worst time. Moreover, as shall be seen, he had bound
himself hand and foot. Yet such was the personal importance this man had
acquired, so highly were his services valued, so much was his hostility
feared, that for a time the British Government tottered and his place
remained unfilled.
_Mr. Chamberlain to Lord Randolph Churchill._
Highbury, Moor Green, Birmingham: December 23, 1886.
My dear Churchill,--Whew! The cat is among the pigeons with a
vengeance.
My sympathies are entirely with you, and I think you may rely on my
cordial co-operation, if it can be of any value.
I have to speak to-night, and must express my first thoughts on
what is an entirely changed situation.
I wish I was able to communicate with you beforehand, but if you
have any wishes or ideas as to immediate action let me know. If
necessary we will arrange a meeting, and I will run up to London
again.
The Government is doomed, and I suspect we may have to re-form
parties on a new basis. You and I are equally adrift from the old
organisations.
Yours ever,
J. CHAMBERLAIN.
_Mr. Chamberlain to Lord Randolph Churchill._
Highbury, Moor Green, Birmingham: December 26, 1886.
My dear Churchill,--Yours of 24th with its very interesting
enclosures only reached me to-day.
The breach was inevitable. There is much to be said _pro_ and _con_
about the estimates, but you were altogether in a false position.
You had to fight--alone and single-handed--for every point, and
were necessarily condemned to gain on each a partial victory, which
left you with all the responsibility, but without a consistent and
thoroughly defensible policy.
You will have a hard time to go through. Your case will be mine
almost exactly, and I can tell you it is a bitter pilgrimage which
is in prospect. The party tie is the strongest sentiment in this
country--stronger than patriotism or even self-interest. But it
will all come right in the end for both of us.
I assume that you will maintain an independent position, and in
that case you will be a power that your party cannot ignore. The
_Standard_ has a right to be angry, and the Caucuses will denounce
you; but in their hearts they know you are indispensable, and when
they find they cannot bully you into submission they will come to
your terms. Next time, however, that either you or I join a Cabinet
we must be certain of our majority in it.
My speech has fluttered the dovecotes tremendously, and my
correspondence shows that many of the Gladstonians are very
uncomfortable and anxious to come to terms. But I do not believe
that there will be any practical result. Mr. Gladstone does not
give way on the main point--neither will I.
Whenever I come to London I will let you know, and we will have
another talk. Meanwhile you have made the situation intensely
interesting.
With all good wishes,
Yours sincerely,
J. CHAMBERLAIN.
_Mr. Labouchere to Lord Randolph Churchill._
_Private._
10 Queen Anne’s Gate: December 23.
Dear Churchill,--In your own interests think it over. This would
have been all very well if you had not been Leader of the House, or
if you had been Leader for some years. In the former case, you
might have upset your friends and been Leader; in the latter case
you would have become a fetish.
Parties just now do not hang together by principles. They are gangs
greedy of office. You got your lot in--there is a wide difference
between this and aiding in getting them out.
You and Chamberlain seem to me both to make the same mistake. You
ignore the power of the ‘machine.’ It has crushed many an able
man--Horsman, Lowe, Goschen, and Salisbury himself.
Whether Hartington joins or not, he will not be sorry that you have
resigned, and he will be all the more inclined to help the
Government. They only want thirty Unionists to have a good working
majority. The tendency of the Government will be to yield a little
more to him in order to revenge itself on you.
Joe is of no good to you. You have no idea of the feeling of the
Radicals against him. There is a good deal of sentiment in these
things; and just as Gladstone is their Christ, Joe is their
Anti-Christ. They will laugh to scorn his ‘Grand Councils.’ They
are, indeed, absurd. There are only two policies for
Ireland--Coercion, or a domestic legislature, &c. All else is
intrigue. You are not a Radical; on that line Joe will always cut
you out.
I don’t think that the occasion you have selected is a good one.
There is a strong public opinion, even amongst Liberals, for an
expenditure on armaments. It is true that Salisbury may wish to
obtain the money in order eventually to join in some absurd
European war, but this cannot be proved, and the basis of politics
is ‘hand to mouth.’
I should have thought that your game was rather a waiting one.
Sacrifice everything to becoming a fetish; then and only then, you
can do as you like. Hartington must go to the Lords. There is no
such thing in politics as burning boats, until there have been
explanations in the House of Commons. A Conservative Government
must spend, and generally a Liberal Government suffers from not
spending.
I write this--not, as you will perceive, in the interests of my
party, but in your individual interests. Surely when it is a
question of figures, and the figures are not known, there are the
elements of an arrangement.
Yours truly,
H. LABOUCHERE.
Lord Randolph Churchill’s resignation had been received with universal
surprise; but astonishment was swiftly succeeded by anger. His
enemies--and they multiplied rapidly--raised an exultant chorus of ‘I
told you so!’ His friends everywhere found themselves without an answer.
The Unionist Press was unanimous in its censures, and the London clubs
were loud in their abuse. The cohorts of tale-bearers and gossips on the
flanks of a Government were eager to impute the worst and meanest
motives, and his action, already difficult to vindicate, was variously
attributed to temper, to treachery, and to both. The whole strength of
the party organisation was exerted against him. The public was informed
through a thousand channels that he had aimed a deadly blow at the Union
upon an impulse of personal ambition or of personal spite. His rupture
with Lord Salisbury was utter and complete. The Queen was grievously
offended by his premature disclosure to the _Times_; and in the mood
that was abroad he found, like Macaulay before him, that to write on
Windsor Castle paper may sometimes be accounted as a crime. Yet,
although he was thus the object of so much reproach, he was of course
unable to defend himself. He requested permission to publish his letters
of resignation.
‘I cannot agree,’ replied Lord Salisbury by telegraph. ‘It would be
entirely at variance with the accepted practice, according to which such
explanations should be reserved for Parliament. You clearly cannot do it
without the Queen’s leave.’
‘Obviously,’ rejoined Lord Randolph, ‘the letters have been shown to the
_Standard_.’
‘No,’ was the answer. ‘Your supposition is incorrect; the letters
referred to have not been seen by anyone.’
The Prime Minister was plainly within his rights in his refusal; yet
while Lord Randolph Churchill was prevented by constitutional observance
from publicly anticipating the explanation to be made in Parliament, and
so from making any effective reply to his traducers, that explanation
was being discounted in a dozen informal versions, disparaging sometimes
by lavish falsehood, sometimes by ungenerous truth.
After accepting the resignation of the Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord
Salisbury turned at once to Lord Hartington. He had hitherto, as we have
seen, resisted the introduction of the Whigs into the Ministry; but the
situation was now critical, if not indeed desperate, and he accepted the
necessity. He therefore telegraphed to Lord Hartington, who was in Rome,
and invited his co-operation, offering either to make such Cabinet
arrangements as might suit him and his friends, or to serve under him if
he would himself undertake to form a Government. Above all, he pressed
for his immediate return to England. Lord Hartington responded to these
appeals without alacrity. He tarried in Rome till the night of Sunday
the 26th. Thence he proceeded to Monte Carlo ‘to pick up his letters.’
On the 28th he resumed his journey. It was not until the evening of the
29th that he arrived in London. His deliberation was justified by
events.
The Prime Minister, having collected his Cabinet together from all parts
of the country, met them on Tuesday, December 28, with a statement of
his views upon the situation. ‘Master of tactics,’ as Lord Randolph
called him, he rigidly confined the dispute to the single special
question of the Estimates. The Ministers responsible for the defence of
the Empire demanded a certain sum. The Minister responsible for the
finances had refused that sum. The head of the Government, having to
choose between them, was bound as a patriot to stand by the Empire. In
the face of a vast Imperial issue and of the grave crisis in European
affairs, the ordinary disputations of party politics--and, indeed, all
personal predilections--must stand aside. The coaling stations, on which
the British fleet depended for its world-wide mobility, were at stake.
To defend them or not to defend them--that was the question: and who
would hesitate in his answer, especially when the sum involved was
remarkably small? Such, at least, was the version semi-officially
communicated to the public and faithfully reproduced in every form of
artistic variation by the party press, from the _Times_ newspaper to the
remotest ramifications of the provincial and local journals.
Lord Salisbury also informed his colleagues that he was in communication
with Lord Hartington, and he laid before them the nature of the offers
he had made. The proceedings of the Cabinet were reported to be so
harmonious that the _Times_ and many other Ministerial journals came to
the conclusion that a Coalition with the Whigs was certain, and devoted
many columns of print to preparing the minds of their readers for so
excellent an arrangement. It was not until the next day that it dawned
upon the journalistic world that numerous and influential members of the
Government were very much averse on public grounds--the Empire, and, no
doubt, the European crisis--from that ‘wide reconstruction’ which a
Coalition or a Hartington Administration incidentally, but necessarily,
involved. This reluctance was shared, not without reason, by the
Conservative party generally, and voiced by the large number of members
of Parliament whom the crisis had drawn to the Carlton Club. The
Conservative party, although wanting thirty-five of an absolute majority
in the House of Commons, were nevertheless by far the strongest and most
compact party in the country; and they were by no means ready to
acquiesce in their leader’s disinterested willingness to surrender the
chief place in the Administration and to work on equal terms with a
party which only numbered seventy. By the time that Lord Hartington’s
train reached Charing Cross, on the night of the 29th, a Coalition
Government had become excessively unpopular, and the _Times_ was forced
to admit, with a blush for the frailty of political mankind, ‘that Lord
Salisbury’s foresight and patriotism were a good deal above the level of
the rank and file.’ Lord Randolph Churchill had counted upon Tory
Democracy. It was not Tory Democracy that stopped the Coalition; but
Tadpole and Taper.
[Sidenote: 1887 ÆT. 37]
By December 31 all prospect of a Coalition Ministry had been definitely
abandoned. Lord Hartington’s prudent and dignified delay had alone
prevented him from being placed in a false position. During the whole of
the 30th he consulted his friends and considered the reports which
reached him of the temper of the Conservative party. He had no
difficulty in coming to a decision. Even if the opinion of the Tory
party had been as favourable as it was unfavourable, it was certain that
the Liberal Unionists were not ripe for a Coalition, and that any
attempt to force them forward would lead to their disruption, and
certainly end in a separation from Mr. Chamberlain and his followers.
There was another obstacle--small, but not insignificant. Lord
Hartington’s position at Rossendale was not so secure as to make his
re-election certain. A Coalition was, in fact, so difficult and
undesirable that it could only be attempted in the last resort. And
until Lord Salisbury’s Government had been defeated in the House of
Commons no one could say that all alternatives had been exhausted. Lord
Hartington therefore declined, on January 1, the various propositions
which Lord Salisbury had made to him.
Three courses were now, according to the _Times_, open to the Prime
Minister: ‘To endeavour to induce Mr. Goschen to take the post of
Chancellor of the Exchequer; to come to an understanding with Lord
Randolph Churchill; or to reconstruct the Ministry from the Conservative
ranks.’ All three were strenuously debated throughout the country. The
idea of a reconciliation on some compromise between Lord Randolph
Churchill and Lord Salisbury obtained powerful support. Rumour was
tireless in formulating the terms on which peace might be made--was to
be made. The _Morning Post_, always an ardent and faithful friend to
Lord Randolph Churchill, never ceased to urge reunion with all the
weight of its unimpeachable Toryism. Every movement of the Prime
Minister and his late colleague was watched with cat-like attention. No
one could call at Arlington Street or Connaught Place without the
closest scrutiny; and when it became known that Lord Abergavenny, Lord
Rowton and Sir Henry Wolff had visited both houses, the gossips and
quidnuncs of the clubs thought the dispute as good as settled.
It was pointed out at this time that the circumstances of Lord Randolph
Churchill’s resignation bore a very curious resemblance to those in
which Lord Palmerston had resigned the Home Secretaryship in 1853. Lord
Palmerston had resigned on December 15, ostensibly on certain details of
the Reform Bill. It was asserted that he differed from the Cabinet upon
its policy in Eastern Europe; and this was strenuously denied by the
adherents of the Ministry. Lord Palmerston’s resignation was made public
before he had heard that it had been accepted by the Queen. Inspired
articles attacking Lord Palmerston appeared in the _Times_. Lord Derby,
writing to Lord Malmesbury, observed that Lord Palmerston is ‘much, and
justly, annoyed’ at this. ‘As _his_ lips are sealed, Aberdeen has no
business to speak through the newspapers.’ To cap all this, there were
on both occasions heavy falls of snow, which made communications
difficult and slow. After some days of suspense Lord Palmerston was
prevailed upon to withdraw his resignation and to resume office. Would
the parallel be completed?
Lord Randolph Churchill had so little expected to fail in his conflict
with the Cabinet that he had not clearly thought out how he would stand
in that event. Lord Salisbury’s acceptance of his resignation, without
interview, remonstrance, or offer of compromise, had surprised him; but
he faced the situation calmly. Not to be behindhand in determination, he
had clinched matters by himself publishing the news. He realised at once
how serious were the consequences and how narrowed and difficult his
position had become. He found himself, alone and unprepared, on ground
most unfavourable; yet he did not seek to avoid the issue. He made no
suggestions of reconciliation. Even after the failure of the Hartington
coalition he would lend himself to no overtures. He forbade his friends
to concern themselves in the affair. He rebuked Wolff with unnecessary
violence for an unauthorised attempt, not ill-received by Lord
Salisbury, to make peace: ‘Do you think you can manage me like one of
your Cairene Pashas?’ During the whole fortnight that the Cabinet was in
flux he abstained from the slightest action, covert or overt, which
could aggravate the crisis.
To remodel the Government and to allow the excitement to cool down,
Ministers prorogued Parliament from January 13--the date which Lord
Randolph had fixed--till January 27, and the time when an explanation
could be offered was further delayed. But in face of harsher
misrepresentation and abuse than has been directed against any
politician since, Lord Randolph remained absolutely silent to the
public. He said nothing, he did nothing: and yet there were many close
observers of politics who thought more than once that all would fall
back into his hands, that Lord Salisbury would be forced to invite him
to rejoin upon terms or leave him to form a Government of his own.
To Chamberlain, who had spoken of him in words of warm appreciation a
few days before--saying, among other things, that Lord Randolph
Churchill’s position in the Government had been a guarantee that they
would not pursue a reactionary policy--he wrote with complete candour:--
December 24, 1886.
Your letter just received and your speech gave me equal delight. I
told you that a Ministerial crisis was coming when you dined with
me, but I own I did not think that I should have failed to persuade
Lord S. to take a broad view of the situation. I had no choice but
to go; he had been for weeks prepared for it, and possibly courted
the crash. I did my best for his Government while I was in it, but
I had ceased to be useful.... Their innate Toryism is rampant and
irrepressible.
Party papers seem to think the most awful crime which a modern
politician can commit is to have a spark of principle or a regard
for former pledges.... I feel much in the dark as to the future;
my position is completely _déclassé_. I hear the Carlton would like
to tear me limb from limb; and yet does no blame or responsibility
attach [to Lord S.?] The anxiety of the last two days has made me
very seedy.
His mother had, as usual, a somewhat more hopeful account.
Treasury Chambers, Whitehall: December 28, 1886.
I have as yet no news. Hartington may join. Goschen is to meet him
in Paris to-morrow; it all depends whether he can be re-elected or
not. Wolff is too faithful for description. I am pleased with the
general tone of the Press. I expected it to be much worse. I can’t
bear to leave this room, where I can sit and think and hear
everything quickly. The matter is very critical, but by no means
desperate, and may drag on indefinitely for some days.
I am very well and in very good spirits. Please do not worry about
me or put off your journey.
The pleasant party at Howth, to which he had been looking forward, must
be forsaken.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Justice FitzGibbon._
Treasury Chambers, Whitehall, S.W.: December 24, 1886.
You see my Irish hopes are shattered. I mean the Howth hopes. I
have nothing to do but to keep very quiet for the moment, and
pleasure is out of the question.
I hope you do not blame me hastily. It was certain to come, and
delay produced danger.
I should like to tell you all about it; it is too long to write.
I feel rather seedy, as the anxiety has wearied me awfully; so do
not write more.
Treasury Chambers, Whitehall, S.W.: December 26, 1886.
I cannot manage Howth this year, though you must know what a
disappointment to me it is not to join you. But I should be a
wet-blanket altogether, and, moreover, I could not stand the
‘Tutissimus.’[60] He would drive me wild with his airs of moral
triumph and success.
What a time we are having! Lord S. has committed a capital blunder
in again prostrating himself before Hartington. Why did he not set
his back to the wall and go on, _coûte que coûte_? Still, you must
not think I have any illusions about myself. In inflicting on the
old gang this final fatal blow, I have mortally wounded myself. But
the work is practically done; the Tory Party will be turned into a
Liberal Party, and in that transformation may yet produce a
powerful governing force. If not, G.O.M., Labby, anarchy, &c., are
triumphant.
Interesting times, my dear FitzGibbon! I wonder what old Ball says.
So far as the political world was concerned, he contented himself with
writing a private letter to Mr. Akers-Douglas for the assurance of his
political friends and for the information of Conservative members of
Parliament who might inquire. It is remarkable that this letter has
never yet been published:--
Treasury Chambers, Whitehall, S.W.: New Year’s Day, 1887.
My dear Douglas,--Having noticed in the newspapers this morning a
variety of mischievous nonsense taking the form of statements as to
my reasons for quitting the Government, my views as to what would
be necessary to secure my return to the Government, and suggestions
as to terms of reconciliation, I think it proper in the public
interest, and as much for purposes of future record as for any
other more immediate object, to lay before you my views on the
position.
The primary object of all government at the present moment is to
maintain the Union, to maintain it not for a session or for a
Parliament, but for our time. The maintenance of the Union is, to
my mind, in no way a question of men, but entirely a question of
measures and administration. Mr. Gladstone has identified the
Liberal party with the policy of Repeal; he has behind him
Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and no inconsiderable portion of
England. In the event of the Conservative Government and party
pursuing in the coming session a policy, foreign and domestic,
which for one reason or another becomes unpopular with, and is
discredited in the eyes of, that great portion of the English
electorate which, after a tremendous struggle, has been kept true
to the principle of the Union, the inevitable result will be that
at the next election Mr. Gladstone and the Liberal party will
return to power, pledged to immediate Repeal, and in a position to
give immediate effect to their pledge.
The composition of the present Parliament renders it a matter of no
insuperable difficulty to carry on the government of the Queen for
a session or two, or even longer, _tant bien que mal_; but such a
proceeding, so limited and so narrow in its view, would be, to my
mind, the most fallacious and dangerous of statesmanship. From the
time when I joined the Government I have never taken my eyes off
the next General Election. My one desire has been that Lord
Salisbury should be in a position to go boldly to the country at
any moment, confident of popular support. To this end every word of
advice on any subject which I have ever offered him has been
directed, and it was only when it was forced upon me that these
views did not practically commend themselves either to him or his
colleagues that I took the grave and serious step of releasing
myself from all responsibility for a policy which in two or three
years would, as far as human judgment may be exercised in such a
matter, have led straight to Repeal.
A foreign policy which may at any moment involve this country in a
European war; a domestic policy which would be marked by stagnation
rather than progress; free expenditure, necessitating continued
high taxation, when combined with the defence of the Union, would
without doubt weigh down and crush out of all popular life that
great and vital Imperial principle. Not only so, but a policy of
which the above were the main characteristics not only involved so
insignificant a person as myself in a marked violation of pledges
given to the public, but also to all intents and purposes the
entire Conservative party in the House of Commons. From 1880 to
1885 every Conservative speaker on every public platform has
proclaimed, with every variety of style and paraphrase, that the
Liberal party have been false to their traditions, and that ‘Peace,
Retrenchment and Reform’ could only be practically given effect to
by the Tories. Nor can it be doubted that this persistent iteration
of a political position which, so far as the Liberals were
concerned, could be demonstrated by facts, produced an immense
effect upon the masses in the great English towns. Should, however,
the results of a year or two of Tory government show that the
accusations against the Tory party so constantly made by the
Liberals--namely, that the Tory party are the war party, that they
are the extravagant party, that they are the do-nothing and
obstructive party--can be demonstrated by actual facts and events,
it seems certain that the great town electorate, which we have had
so much trouble in winning, will sway back violently to the Liberal
party, their earlier love, and that the disaster of 1880 will be
repeated on a larger scale and with more deadly effect.
To avert such a disaster there is nothing I would not do, nothing I
would not sacrifice; but if the catastrophe must come, I will not
that anyone shall be able to say that any large portion of
responsibility rested upon me.
It was if possible by a desperate effort (so profoundly was I
convinced of the magnitude of the peril into which the Tory
Government and party were drifting by looking too much to tiding
over the difficulties of the moment, and not at all to the next
General Election) to rouse my friends to a sense of the position
that I resigned my office and incurred with much equanimity the
tornado of slander, obloquy and every variety of misrepresentation
that friends, and possibly even colleagues, have let loose upon me.
I seek for no re-entry into the present Government; I decline to
commence any undignified or unworthy bargaining and huckstering as
to the terms of reconciliation; but this I say--that if by any
coalition, fusion or reconstruction a Government is formed which by
its composition and its policy will be an earnest and a guarantee
to the country that a period of peaceful progressive administration
has in reality set in, I would serve that Government with the
utmost loyalty in any capacity, however humble, either as a member
or a follower, only too glad that by any sacrifice or any action of
mine I might possibly have averted danger to the State.
Furthermore, this I add: that whatever course the Prime Minister
may take at this moment, he need not for one moment fear the
smallest opposition, direct or indirect, from me, in Parliament or
in the country. I shall make no further attempt to defend my
action, lest by any such attempt I might, even by one iota,
increase the difficulties which surround him; but, recognising to
the full my great fallibility of judgment, I shall watch silently
and sadly the progress of events.
Believe me to be
Very sincerely yours,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
Mr. Chamberlain’s comment was characteristic:--
Highbury, Moor Green, Birmingham: January 3, 1887.
My dear Churchill,--I return your very interesting Memorandum. If I
had been you I do not think I should have added the last paragraph.
When a man says that in no case will he return a blow, he is very
likely to be cuffed.
However, I dare say Lord Salisbury will not take you too literally
at your word, and will avoid any extreme test of your most
Christian disposition.
I heard before I left that Goschen was likely to join. He will
certainly carry no one else with him, but he may be able to commit
Hartington to a more unqualified support than he would otherwise
have given to a purely Tory Government.
I understood that one cause of his hesitation was his fear that you
would be actively hostile, if he took your place. Probably he has
since been reassured by a sight of your letter to Akers-Douglas.
I do not know yet whether anything will come of negotiations
between the Gladstonians and the Radical Unionists. I never felt
less like ‘a surrender’ in my life, and Labouchere and his crew may
put what interpretation they like on the matter, but they will not
be able to show that I have advanced one iota from the position of
my telegram to the Unionist meeting, extended as it was by my
speech in Birmingham.
The future is still obscure to me, but the game is exceedingly
interesting at this moment.
Yours sincerely,
J. CHAMBERLAIN.
Another explanation was not neglected:--
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Sir Henry Ponsonby._
2 Connaught Place, W.: January 13, 1887.
Dear Sir Henry Ponsonby,--I saw His Royal Highness the Prince of
Wales to-day, and from an observation which he made I learnt for
the first time on authority that the publication of the news of my
resignation took place before the matter had been made the subject
of official communication to Her Majesty, and that in so far as my
action was responsible for such publicity the Queen had cause for
displeasure with me.
I am much grieved at this news, and anxious to place on record the
facts bearing upon the matter as they are known to me. On Thursday,
December 18, I had a long conversation with Lord Salisbury, in
which I intimated to him that the expenditure proposed for the
Army and Navy was considerably higher than what I could be
responsible for in view of my reiterated public pledges as to the
necessity for and possibility of retrenchment. On Monday, the 20th,
I had a long conversation with the Secretary of State for War, and
a written communication from the First Lord of the Admiralty which
confirmed me in the views which I had communicated to Lord
Salisbury on the previous Thursday.
On Monday, the 20th, in the evening, I wrote from Windsor to Lord
Salisbury intimating my desire to withdraw from the Government.
It would have been a source of immense relief to me if I had been
able to acquaint Her Majesty with what was passing when I had the
honour of dining at Windsor, but my great want of experience of
official life led me to believe that had I initiated so grave a
matter in the conversation which Her Majesty was graciously pleased
to hold with me I should have been guilty of a most unusual breach
of etiquette and of Ministerial practice and decorum: all the more
as no opening presented itself for bringing up the subject, though
in truth my mind was entirely absorbed by it.
Lord Salisbury received my letter early Tuesday morning, the 21st,
and no answer from him reached me till eight o’clock on Wednesday
evening--a considerable interval, remembering the proximity of
Hatfield either to Windsor or London. Lord Salisbury’s answer was
of a most definite character, accepting my resignation; and bearing
in mind the interval which had elapsed, I made perfectly certain
that the fullest communications on the subject had passed between
Her Majesty and Lord Salisbury, and that Lord Salisbury’s answer
was written with Her Majesty’s knowledge. In fact, it never crossed
my mind that the reverse could be the case, and I thought myself
justified in no longer making any secret of the fact that I no
longer had the honour of belonging to the Government. If I erred in
this, it was from ignorance and from misunderstanding, and not the
least from design and I would be intensely distressed if it might
be supposed that by any action of mine I had been wanting in that
profound respect to Her Majesty which it is the high and grateful
duty of all to render, and which Her Majesty’s most gracious
treatment of myself on several occasions doubly and trebly imposed
upon me.
Perhaps indeed I am doing wrong in making you this communication.
If so, I trust to your kindness to inform me on the subject before
making any use of this letter.
Believe me to be
Yours very truly,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
The reply was frigid:--
_Sir Henry Ponsonby to Lord Randolph Churchill._
Osborne: January 15, 1887.
Dear Lord Randolph,--The Queen has read your letter relating to the
announcement of your resignation before it had been accepted by Her
Majesty; and commands me to thank you for your explanation.
Yours very truly,
HENRY PONSONBY.
It was about this time, when many from whom he might have expected
service were falling away, that Lord Randolph received the sympathy and
support of an able man with whom during the next four years he was to be
associated, and from whom he was ultimately destined to part in very
gloomy circumstances. Mr. Louis Jennings, the Conservative member for
Stockport and a full-blooded Fair Trader, looked upon ‘Tory Democracy’
as a living political faith. He was a man of strong character and
extensive information who had reached the House of Commons late in life,
after a varied career. He had travelled widely, and had taken an active
part in the politics of other countries than his own. As the editor of
the _Times of India_ he had been largely concerned in the agitation
which had led to the suppression of the Juggernaut ceremonial. With the
_New York Times_ as his weapon he had broken up, by a prolonged and
pitiless audit of their accounts, the Tammany Ring in 1871; and, after a
struggle in which his life was said to be in danger, he had hunted the
notorious ‘Boss’ Tweed to the gaol in which he died. Taught alike by
experience and study, a man of action and a writer, Mr. Jennings was
well fitted to become an effective political force, and, as the editor
of the Croker papers, he did not lack recognition in the world of
letters. He now made himself known to Lord Randolph Churchill in a style
which expresses the sincerity of his feelings and reveals the
slenderness of their acquaintance:--
73 Elm Park Gardens, S.W.: December 31, 1886.
My Lord,--At a time when all the busybodies and nobodies in the
country are thrusting advice upon you I am very reluctant to appear
to join the throng. I hope, however, you will permit me to assure
you that I have tried to keep my own constituency from committing
the gross injustice of condemning a man before he is heard. For my
own part, it will take a great deal to convince me that in the
great sacrifices you have made, and the grave responsibilities you
have incurred, you have not been actuated by a high sense of duty
and by the purest and best motives. If this be so--as I feel sure
it is--there will be a reaction against all this wild clamour, and
the people will do you justice.
I am, my Lord,
Yours very truly,
L. J. JENNINGS.
Lord Hartington’s determination having been made public, Lord Salisbury
next turned to Mr. Goschen. Mr. Goschen’s position was different and
distinct from that of Lord Hartington. He was not tied to any particular
constituency, and in respect of a seat could avail himself of the large
resources of the Conservative party. He had for several years been out
of tune with the Liberal policy and, more than any other Whig, he had
been alarmed and estranged by the growing influence of Radicalism. He
had not joined the Government of 1880, and he was free alike from
responsibility for its failures and resentment towards its assailants.
Lord Hartington was the leader of a party with the obligations and
restrictions of leadership. Mr. Goschen was eminent, but detached.
Moreover, his high financial authority would strengthen the Government
at the very point where it had been most seriously weakened. He was now
invited to go to the Treasury, and it was generally believed that,
whatever temporary arrangements were made, the leadership in the Commons
would soon devolve upon him.
Mr. Goschen nevertheless showed some hesitation in joining the
Government. To participate in a regular Coalition in company with
political friends wore a different complexion from entering the Cabinet
of the opposite political party alone. He desired most strongly to
preserve his relations with Lord Hartington and his character as a
Liberal; and even when reassured on these points he stipulated that two
other Whigs should be included in the Cabinet to give him countenance
and support. Places were thereupon offered to Lord Northbrook and Lord
Lansdowne. But at this the Conservative party, so far as it was
represented by the Carlton Club, again showed such disapproval that
these peers felt it their duty to decline office, and in the end Mr.
Goschen was fain to join without them. For the rest, Mr. Smith became
First Lord of the Treasury, with the leadership of the House of Commons;
Stanhope took the War Office and Sir Henry Holland the Colonies; while
Lord Salisbury himself assumed, none too soon, the direction of foreign
affairs.
Mr. Goschen’s acceptance of office definitely put an end to the Cabinet
crisis. ‘The new Chancellor of the Exchequer,’ observed the _Times_
tartly, ‘will take Lord Randolph Churchill’s place in more senses than
one.’ The Government was completely reconstituted, and no expectation of
overtures or reconciliation could be entertained. It has in consequence
often been represented that this appointment was to Lord Randolph a
contingency utterly unforeseen. The saying, so often attributed to him,
‘I forgot Goschen,’ is interpreted as a key to deep designs. In an
elaborate calculation he had overlooked a vital factor. In the moment of
success he was ruined by an inexplicable neglect. The evidence upon
these pages does not sustain this view. He marshalled no forces against
the Prime Minister. With an imprudence born of repeated success, he
prepared no combination, either of circumstances or men, to support his
demands. He went into battle without allies or armour. He set his
unaided personal power--as he had often done before--to back his
opinions, and awaited the issue with an easy mind. He had not, of
course, considered Mr. Goschen’s financial reputation in connection with
a vacancy at the Exchequer; but, so far from forgetting Mr. Goschen
himself, he was constantly solicitous for him. A Coalition with all or
any of the Whigs had been for three years his consistent and persistent
aim. After the election of 1885 he was willing to resign, that Mr.
Goschen might join the Administration. In his memorandum written before
the first meeting of Parliament in 1886 he again strongly pressed upon
Lord Salisbury that places should be offered to the Whigs, including Mr.
Goschen. In November he was concerned that Mr. Goschen should be elected
to Parliament and urged Lord Salisbury to put him forward for a seat
which might soon be vacant. And lastly, on December 18, two days before
his letter of resignation, when the dispute in the Cabinet was at its
height, both Lord Salisbury and Mr. Goschen were his guests at a dinner
the avowed object of which was to bring them together. However decisive,
however disastrous to Lord Randolph the inclusion of Mr. Goschen in the
Government at this time may have been, it was no surprise; for he had
always been its advocate. It was not fatal to his schemes; for there
were no schemes.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Dunraven._
2 Connaught Place, W.: January 12, 1887.
My dear Dunraven,--I consider honestly that you are quite as good a
judge as to what the political position requires from moderate
progressive politicians as I am. You have seen all the
correspondence between me and Lord Salisbury, as well as my letter
to Akers-Douglas, about which last Lord S. says it makes the breach
unbridgeable. Therefore my explanation, when it comes, will add
little or nothing to your knowledge.
With respect to persons like ----, ----, &c., whom I look upon as my
friends, I have been most careful to check any tendency to follow
my example, for resignation might be fatal to their political
career, on which they depend almost for social existence, and I was
most fearful of any responsibility attaching to me for having led
them to extinction.
With you I feel in a different position. You have a social and
political position of your own, which the holding of a minor office
in the Government by no means enhances, and which the loss of such
an office would by no means affect.
Tory Democracy may be a bad name, but it represents to you and me
and many more certain distinct political principles which you and I
hold very strongly. That those principles are in the utmost peril
just now there can be no doubt. We know what Lord Salisbury is, and
we know what Goschen is, and we know that our views are regarded by
both with unrelenting distrust and aversion.
On the whole, I think you are in a position to try a bold course;
and you must not undervalue your strength in the country, where you
are well known, followed by many, and greatly regarded by all.
However, let us talk it over this afternoon at the Carlton.
Yours ever,
RANDOLPH S. C.
Eventually Lord Dunraven decided to resign the office which he held, of
Under-Secretary for the Colonies; but his partnership with Lord
Randolph Churchill proved in the end more noticeable at Newmarket than
at Westminster.
Perhaps some day it may be possible to publish in a complete form the
letters, some of which have been quoted in these pages, which passed
between Lord Salisbury and Lord Randolph Churchill during their eventful
association. Although the period scarcely extended above two years, the
correspondence would attain considerable dimensions. Yet the reader
would be wise to persevere: for when we consider the easy yet forceful
pens employed; the profound and secret knowledge of political movements
and forces at work which both possessed; the importance, range and
fascinating variety of subjects; the changing relationships and
antagonisms of the writers; above all, the free and candid style of
their intercourse--whether in regard to men or things--one cannot
imagine any compilation which would more truthfully illuminate the dark
and stormy history of those times. All that, however, is a matter for
the future. Such as it had been, the correspondence was now to close,
for hardly any communication--and that only of a formal nature--was
desired on either side in the years which followed. Nevertheless, its
conclusion was not unworthy.
Lord Iddesleigh had been apparently forgotten in the reconstruction of
the Cabinet. In the strife and excitement of these harsh days this
unwarlike figure had dropped out of men’s minds. Lord Salisbury’s
assumption of the Foreign Office necessarily displaced him; and he was,
perhaps not unreasonably, offended to read the first news of it in the
daily papers of January 12. It was said by the wags that ‘Randolph had
driven him from the House of Commons in his rise, and from the Cabinet
in his fall.’ Tragedy, never very far behind the curtain, came forward
swiftly on the heels of this. That same afternoon Lord Iddesleigh called
upon Lord Salisbury at Downing Street, and, being overtaken in the
anteroom by the heart disease from which he had so long been afflicted,
he expired in the presence of the Prime Minister.
The disputes between Lord Randolph Churchill and Sir Stafford Northcote
have been very fully recorded in this story; and I fear their harsh
features cannot truthfully be softened or smoothed away. They must be
judged as a whole and in relation to the circumstances of the time. Here
is the last word upon them:--
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Salisbury._
2 Connaught Place, W.: January 13, 1887.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--Although a great and wide political
difference has separated me from you officially, I cannot refrain
(even possibly at the risk of being misunderstood) from writing you
a line to express how greatly I grieve for the shock you must have
experienced owing to the melancholy occurrence of yesterday
afternoon. It seems very hard on you that this grave event should
have come now to add its own weight to the many other troubles and
worries which circumstances purely political have occasioned.
I felt much the old Lord’s death, for he had for years past gone
through much bother, disappointment, and probably vexation, nor
can I conveniently repress the reflection _quorum pars magna fui_.
But this I can say from my own knowledge, consisting of the
recollection of many facts and conversations, that never in public
life did any man have a truer friend and colleague than Lord
Iddesleigh had in you; and certainly if rewards, honours and the
praise of men are sources of satisfaction, Lord Iddesleigh enjoyed
them in a fuller measure than any other contemporary, and that he
did so I consider to be mainly owing to the unwavering loyalty with
which you invariably supported him, checked all depreciation, and
stimulated constant recognition of his public services.
I like to place this on record, though possibly it may be deemed
somewhat presumptuous, for it has been my fortune in the last two
or three years to see as much almost perhaps as anyone into the
inner and more concealed working of our party life.
Believe me to be, with much sympathy,
Yours most sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
_Lord Salisbury to Lord Randolph Churchill._
Hatfield House, Hatfield, Herts: January 14, 1887.
My dear Randolph,--I am very grateful for the kind sympathy
expressed in your letter of yesterday, and very much touched by it.
Your testimony to my bearing towards our old friend in the past is
thoughtful and generous.
It was a very painful scene that I witnessed on Wednesday in
Downing Street. I had never happened to see anyone die before--and
therefore, even apart from the circumstances, the suddenness of
this unexpected death would have been shocking. But here was, in
addition, the thought of our thirty years’ companionship in
political life; and the reflection that now, just before this
sudden parting, by some strange misunderstanding which it is
hopeless to explain, I had, I believe for the first time in my
life, seriously wounded his feelings. As I looked upon the dead
body stretched before me I felt that politics was a cursed
profession.
I have received very kind and considerate letters from his family.
Thanking you again for the thoughtfulness of your letter,
Believe me
Yours very truly,
SALISBURY.
As the time for the meeting of Parliament drew near, it was necessary
for Lord Randolph to think very carefully upon the explanation he would
offer for the unexpected events of the Recess. Circumstances complex and
adverse made his position one of extreme disadvantage. It was hardly
possible for him to move in any direction without estranging friends or
exposing himself to enemies.
The spirit of his differences with Ministers was vital, but the actual
matter in dispute could only be regarded as trivial. Two courses
therefore presented themselves at the outset: either to fight on the
large ground of the unsatisfied aspirations of Tory Democracy, as set
forth in his letter to Mr. Akers-Douglas, or upon the small ground of
the Estimates. The first involved a downright assault upon the
Conservative Government, an irreparable breach with its leaders, and the
breaking of many old friendships and associations. The second whittled
the difference down to a question of not very important figures, on
which Parliament must soon decide. The one promised a chance of
successful strife, the other offered a prospect of reconciliation; the
one led soon into very deep waters, the other lay among the shallows.
But, in all respects save one, the first was the path of courage, of
consistency and perhaps of prudence also. It suited his nature. It freed
his hands. It justified and explained his action in a manner which the
people could easily understand. ‘I fondly hoped to make the Conservative
party the instrument of Tory Democracy. It was “an idle schoolboy’s
dream.” I must look elsewhere.’
No doubt that was the road to tread. It might have ended in Liberalism;
but from that he would not at a later date have shrunk. Chamberlain and
Rosebery were better friends to him personally and politically than
Smith or Hamilton or Balfour could ever be. To act with the Conservative
party meant political paralysis, perhaps for years. To stand
independently, or upon a moderate Liberal platform, putting away once
and for all any thought of reconciliation, meant usefulness, support and
growing power. But one great barrier interposed. The Union was a cause
to which he was pledged, not only by memorable votes and speeches, but
by profound and unalterable conviction.
So this first course, with its various chances, was forbidden. The
second was scarcely more satisfactory and far less congenial. In
whatever proportion he restricted the dispute to a mere question of
expenditure, he deprived himself of the power of defending his
resignation, and therefore weakened his position with the country. To
fight on finance alone, when the other differences were known to his
late colleagues, looked like repentance and admission of error. It was a
course which counted on generosity where generosity was lacking; which
counted on gratitude for past services, while in politics present and
proximate utility is mainly considered; and it was a course requiring in
an unusual degree patience and restraint. But, so far as outside
influences could avail, this course was made easy for him. His friends
and his family besought him not to break with his party. Ministers
addressed him in terms uniformly friendly and considerate. ‘The subject
on which he parted from us,’ wrote Lord Salisbury to the Duchess of
Marlborough on January 11, ‘is one which the House of Commons must
decide one way or the other very shortly, and no one would dispute that
its decision, once gained, must be accepted. After that it will be quite
open to Randolph to rejoin this or any other Conservative Ministry as
soon as opportunity occurs.’
And Mr. Smith on the 13th:--
You have a perfect right to hold the views you expressed to me in
my room. I differed then and now from you, but it may turn out that
you are right and that I am wrong, and I shall accept a
demonstration of that fact without the very slightest personal
annoyance.
But, however that may be, all that has happened is an incident in
the career of a young politician of quite a temporary character,
and, unless my life is cut short as Northcote’s has been, I look
forward with confidence to a future--and the sooner it comes the
better--when I shall be in the retirement I long for, and you will
be leading a great party with prudence and firmness and courage.
Lord Randolph chose to follow the second course; he avowed himself an
independent supporter of the Government, and his formal request for
permission to explain made no allusion to differences on foreign policy
or legislation.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Salisbury._
2 Connaught Place, W.: January 18, 1887.
Dear Lord Salisbury,--May I ask you to be so kind as to obtain for
me Her Majesty’s permission to make to the House of Commons the
necessary explanation of my reasons for quitting the Government? I
propose, if this permission is granted, to state briefly the nature
and amount of the expenditure to which I objected, to answer with
equal brevity certain precipitate criticisms on that resignation to
which many Members of Parliament and much of the Press are
committed, and to conclude by reading the three letters which
passed between us, viz. mine of the 20th, yours of the 22nd, and my
reply of the same date.
Believe me to be
Very truly yours,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
_Lord Salisbury to Lord Randolph Churchill._
10 Downing Street, Whitehall: January 19, 1887.
My dear Randolph,--In pursuance of a message I got from you through
Douglas I asked and obtained the requisite permission when I was at
Osborne the other day. The form in which you propose to give your
explanation seems to me quite correct.
Believe me
Yours very sincerely,
SALISBURY.
Mr. Goschen having failed to secure election at Liverpool, Parliament
met upon January 27 without a Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Speaker
had indicated the proper time for explanation; and when Lord Randolph
Churchill rose, immediately after the notices of motion, from the second
bench above the gangway, the appearance of the House was a proof of the
interest with which that explanation was awaited. He followed
punctiliously the course he had indicated in his letter to the Prime
Minister; and his tone, though a little sarcastic, was not at all
unfriendly to the Government. As a statement his speech was
unexceptionable in all respects; as an explanation it was necessarily
inadequate. Little was added to the knowledge of the public; and
although the calm antagonism of the letters on both sides was not
without its effect upon the House, the general feeling when he sat down
was of disappointment. This impression, which was deepened by a most
dreary fog which invaded the chamber, found abundant record in the
prints of next day.
He spoke again three days later in the debate on the Address, following,
as it happened, in succession to Mr. Bradlaugh. Preserving throughout a
jaunty air of independence, he nevertheless made it perfectly clear that
he intended to remain a supporter of the Union and of the Conservative
Administration. He derided the Plan of Campaign, and defended and
eulogised, with humour and effect, the policy of the Chief Secretary,
who had been, as usual, assailed by the violence of one Irish party and
by the suspicions of the other, and who was, moreover, suffering from
the severe affection of the eyes which was soon to necessitate his
retirement. He pointed out that the Procedure proposals, for which he
had been personally so much attacked, were in precisely the same form as
when he resigned, and that the legislative programme of the gracious
Speech ‘bore a strong family resemblance to that set forth in a certain
speech made in Kent not long ago.’ He noticed the revival of the old
paragraph that the Estimates had been framed _with due regard to economy
and efficiency_. ‘They must have been greatly altered,’ he observed,
‘since I left the Cabinet.’ He spoke, in characteristic words--the truth
of which has not been unpaired by time--of the difficulties which the
House of Commons encounters in any attempt to control or even criticise
expenditure.
But the passage of greatest significance referred to the Chamberlain
overtures and negotiations with the Gladstonian Liberals, which were at
that time taking the form of the celebrated Round Table Conference. ‘I
notice,’ he said, ‘a tendency of the party of the Union to attach too
much importance to precarious Parliamentary alliances, which are as
transient and uncertain as the shifting wind, and too little to the far
more important question how to keep the English people at the back of
the party of the Union. When I was in the Government I made it my
constant thought and desire to make things as easy as possible for the
Liberal Unionists, to introduce such measures as they might
conscientiously support as being in accordance with their general
principles, and to make such electoral arrangements as might enable them
to preserve their seats. But I frankly admit that I regarded the Liberal
Unionists as a useful kind of crutch, and I looked forward to the time,
and no distant time, when the Tory party might walk alone, strong in its
own strength and conscious of its own merits; and it is to the Tory
party, and solely to the Tory party, that I looked for the maintenance
of the Union.’ He went on to say that Mr. Chamberlain, in these
negotiations, was pursuing ‘an erroneous and mistaken course.’ ‘The Tory
party will, I think, never follow a line of policy which by any
reasonable construction can create in Dublin anything in the nature of
an Irish Parliament. That is our clear position, from which, under no
pretence of local self-government, shall we depart; and it would be well
for the right honourable gentleman the Member for Birmingham, who is now
indulging in such extraordinary gyrations, to recognise that, whatever
schemes of Home Rule for Ireland may commend themselves to him, they are
not, under any circumstances, likely to commend themselves to members on
this side of the House.’
These somewhat discursive observations were in themselves brilliantly
successful and were heard by the House with keen pleasure and attention.
‘Very many thanks for last night,’ wrote Beach; ‘you are a good friend.’
But in spite of this, and although the intervention attracted so much
notice from subsequent speakers as to excite the remark that the debate
proceeded less upon the Queen’s Speech than upon Lord Randolph
Churchill’s, it cannot be called well conceived. The weak, and at the
same time the strong, point was the ‘crutch.’ Those who were independent
of such support laughed and laughed again; but the Liberal-Unionist
members, and those who owed their seats to Liberal-Unionist votes, were
at once offended and alarmed. Although intended in a spirit of sober
candour, it had about it a suspicion of reckless mischief, which his
many opponents were not slow to turn to profit. Mr. Chaplin belaboured
him vigorously in reply. The Unionist newspapers adopted uniformly an
attitude of solemn rebuke; and while Government speakers in a long
succession denounced or deplored such disrespect of loyal allies, Mr.
Jennings alone among his friends was able to offer an effective defence.
Moreover, the Liberal Unionists at this stage of their transition were
the natural and legitimate associates of a Democratic Tory. They looked
to the progressive elements in the Conservative party to make the
Unionist alliance easy in Parliament and to give them countenance in the
constituencies. Their leaders were far from being unsympathetic to the
cause of economy; and Chamberlain especially, who had shown himself
willing and anxious to co-operate in various ways, and whose position at
this time was difficult, delicate and insecure, had, it must be
admitted, good grounds for his complaint.
_Mr. Chamberlain to Lord Randolph Churchill._
_Private._
40 Prince’s Gardens, S.W.: February 2, 1887.
My dear Churchill,--Why will you insist on being an Ishmael--your
hand against every man? Why did you go out of your way on Monday to
attack me?
You know that I am the mildest of men, but I have a strong
inclination to hit out at those who strike me, and my experience
teaches me that no private friendship can long resist the effect of
public contest.
You and I have plenty of enemies. Is it not possible for us each
to pursue his own way without coming into personal conflict?
Surely we shall have our hands fully occupied without tearing out
each other’s eyes.
Yours sincerely,
J. CHAMBERLAIN.
Lord Randolph seems to have realised that there was for the moment
nothing that he could usefully do; and on the morrow of his speech he
came suddenly to a decision.
_To his Mother._
2 Connaught Place, W.: February 2, 1887.
After great reflection and balancing of everything I have decided
upon a little holiday abroad and am off to-morrow night. I shall be
away, I expect, about six weeks, and H. Tyrwhitt and I contemplate
going to Algiers, Tunis, Malta, Palermo, Naples, and so home. It
will, I think, be a grand rest for me, and good for the nerves. I
don’t see that I can do any good by hanging on here day after day.
The Address will go on for a long time; then will come Procedure,
then Coercion; so that when I come back they will not be much
further ahead than they are now. I think my speech last night did a
lot of good, and H. Chaplin’s violent attack shows how much the
enemy is alarmed. I am told H. C. did not go down very well, and
Jennings answered him capitally. George[61] will watch after my
interests, and I shall ask him to take charge of my correspondence.
I have no information as to what is passing inside Ministerial
circles, but I have an instinctive feeling that all is not right
and that they will come to grief. Beach was very grateful to me for
what I said about him.
I wish I could have seen you before going, for a farewell talk over
everything. I have a lot to do to put things in order and to get
ready.
To Chamberlain he wrote (February 3) in amicable terms, not withdrawing
in any way from his discouragement of the Round Table Conference, but
indicating his difficulties and announcing his project. ‘I do not think
I said anything which ought even to ruffle our private friendship,
which--though it may seem a paradox to say so--is one of the chief and
few remaining attractions of political life. For the moment I am quite
tired and worn out. “Many dogs have come about me, and the council of
the wicked layeth siege against me.” Therefore I seek a temporary refuge
and repose in a flight to the south and to the sun.’
His friends, for the most part, thought him right to go. ‘Be of good
cheer,’ wrote the warm-hearted Jennings; ‘you are by no means alone. As
for the men whom you have put into office, or who would not be in office
but for you, their conduct makes me sick. I am very glad you are going
away for rest and change. It will give time for events to shape
themselves; and when you are gone, you will be missed, and kinder
feelings will enter into the consideration of your position. You could
not do much good just now, and anything that went wrong would be laid on
your shoulders. You will come back in time to save both party and
Ministry from the consequences of their own incapacity. My deepest
sympathies will always be with you in your unequal, but just and
honourable, struggle. I would stake my life upon your ultimate
success.’ Sometimes, perhaps, these wagers are accepted.
The next night--February 3--Lord Randolph left England, and I shall not
offer to the reader other accounts of his wanderings than his own.
_To his Wife._
February 9, 1887: Hôtel Régence, Algiers.
...It is certainly very pleasant getting away from the cold and
worry of London. I have hardly given two thoughts to politics since
I left; but I wonder whether there is still much carping going on
against me, or whether my flight has disarmed my enemies.
_To his Mother._
Biskra: February 15, 1887.
I suppose this will find you back in London. I was so glad to get
your letter, long and interesting, from the Castle. I expect you
must have found it pleasant there on the whole. If anything could
remove any lingering doubts I may have had as to the prudence of
leaving the Government, it would be the charm of this place, which
I should not have experienced except for that rather strong
proceeding.
The weather is beautiful--the air quite cold, and the sun not too
hot. We shall remain here till the end of the week. Harry Tyrwhitt
is a most amiable companion, and possesses the additional
qualification of being fond of chess, so we are never at a loss to
pass the time.
We had a long drive from Batna, twelve hours, but through an
attractive and varied country. This place is right in the true
desert, and is a great grove of palm-trees of all sorts, shapes and
sizes, difficult to get to, but well worth the trouble. In another
two years they will have finished the railway right up to here,
and then the quiet of the place will probably be spoilt.
We shall leave Friday or Saturday for Constantine, and then on to
Tunis. I saw in a French paper that Goschen had got in, but it did
not give the numbers. However, I confess I do not think much of
politics, and rejoice over my freedom and idleness--which I hope
will not shock you.
_To his Mother._
Constantine: February 21, 1887.
I was so glad to find here, on arrival last night, your two letters
of the 10th and 12th. I read and pondered very carefully all you
wrote about what Ashbourne said. But I do not think there will ever
be any question of my rejoining the present Government. When the
old gang with their ideas are quite played out and proved to be
utter failures, then, perhaps, people will turn to the young lot.
Till this time comes, and I do not think it is far off, I must wait
patiently. I consider my position a very good one, and, though it
may seem a strange thing to say, better than if I was in my old
place in the Government. I am not mixed up or responsible for their
policy or their proceedings, which are, I think, faulty and feeble
and hopelessly inadequate to what the times require. I am very glad
Dunraven resigned. He is a man of considerable importance, and has
made a position for himself with the working men.
I am so glad you liked Ireland, and I delight to hear of
Castlereagh’s success. I always felt sure he was admirably fitted
for the post. George writes me invaluable reports on House of
Commons affairs. I should like to form a Government, if only to
give him a real good place; his letters are most able. If you are
giving any little dinners, I wish you would ask Jennings, M.P. He
is a very clever man, and would interest you.
This is certainly a pleasant and amusing country to travel in, if
only the hotels were a little better. The weather, though bright,
is not warm, and I wear thick clothes, as in England.
We go to Tunis to-morrow. I am feeling very well, I am thankful to
say, and keep blessing my stars I am not in the House of Commons.
If people only knew how little official life really attracts me,
they would judge one’s actions differently.
_To his Wife._
Tunis: February 25, 1887.
We have decided to go on to Palermo to-night, for there is no other
boat till to-day week; and if it was stormy weather then, we should
have to cross whether we liked it or no--whereas now the weather is
beautiful and calm, so we take advantage of it to get over the
Mediterranean and hope to arrive at Palermo Saturday evening....
This is a more interesting place than any we have yet seen--much
more truly Eastern. The old native bazaar is delightfully curious.
I bought you a few pieces of stuff which will serve to cover
cushions or to make portières. Having once seen the town, there is
nothing much more to see, and I do not know how we should pass a
week here.... We passed through much beautiful country coming here
from Constantine; it is all well worth seeing. Last night we went
to see Aïss Sawa, an extraordinary troop of fanatic Arabs who dance
and yell, cut themselves with swords, and eat nails, broken glass
and scorpions. I think there is a good deal of humbug and trickery
in it; but it was very curious and very barbarous, and for noise a
pandemonium....
_To his Wife._
Palermo: March 2, 1887.
I have to-day got hold of a whole week’s file of the Times, down to
the 25th, which has posted me up in political matters. I think the
Government are earning a rather second-rate kind of _succès
d’estime_, but I fancy I detect signs of feebleness and
inefficiency, which will become obvious when real difficulty
arises. I own W. H. Smith has done better than I expected, for I
expected a complete breakdown; but, having made that admission, his
speeches read to me most commonplace, and I think before long the
House and the party will get much bored with him. I am amused at
the Government surrender about my Army and Navy Estimates Committee
in reply to a question from George C.[62] I expect the Burnley
election quickened their sluggish economic impulses. The election I
look upon as very significant, and as bearing out what I wrote to
A. Douglas. They may plod on in Parliament, but they are losing
their hold on the imagination and enthusiasm of the country
generally. However, all this is speculation. In any case, I am in
no hurry to come home--and am, too, thankful I went away. Really I
have had a nice time hitherto....
_To his Mother._
Messina: March 9.
Here we are, caught like rats in a trap. Just as we were packing up
yesterday to leave for Naples it was announced that on account of
cholera at Catania quarantine had been imposed in Sicily, and that
we could not leave. This is a great blow, for we do not know how
long we may be detained here. There is nothing to see or do, and
the hotel is dirty and uncomfortable. We are in despair....
_To his Wife._
Naples: March 12, 1887.
I send you the enclosed under what the Foreign Office calls ‘Flying
Seal,’ which means you are to read it and send it on; it will tell
you of our proceedings. At last we have got here, but without
either servants or luggage; goodness knows when they will come.
Harry T. and I made up our minds we would not stand being detained
prisoners indefinitely at Messina. We made a fruitless application
to the Ambassador at Rome to be exempted from quarantine; all
regular steamboats had been taken off, and even if we had got a
passage we should have had to do five days’ quarantine at Gaeta--a
horrible prospect. So we went to the Consul--a character he is! He
introduced us to a man who knew a man who knew some Sicilian
fishermen who for a consideration would put us across the Straits.
_Nous n’avons fait ni un ni deux_, but pursued the project. We
embarked in an open boat at eight o’clock on Wednesday evening in
Messina harbour, with nothing but a tiny bag and a rug, with a
dissolute sort of half-bred Englishman and Sicilian, to act as
interpreter and guide, and six wild, singing, chattering Sicilian
fishermen. We reached the Calabrian coast about 9.30; but the
difficulty was to find a landing-place where there were no
gendarmes or coastguards or inhabitants awake. The last danger was
the greatest, for the peasantry are awfully superstitious about
cholera, and are a wild, savage people; and we might have had rough
treatment if any number of them happened to see us.
At last we found a little fishing village where all was quiet. In
we ran, out we jumped, and off went the boat like lightning. After
clambering up some precipitous rocks, fortunately without waking
anyone or breaking our necks, we found temporary shelter in a
miserable inn, where we represented ourselves as having come by
boat from Reggio, and being unable to get back on account of the
strong Sirocco wind which was blowing. We had to wait about an hour
here all alone, with two wild men and a wild woman, while our guide
was quietly endeavouring to find a conveyance. At last he got a
common cart, and about eleven o’clock we started for the house of
an Englishman at San Giovanni who has a silk mill, and to whom we
had a letter from the Consul. The innkeeper and his companions
asked a lot of tiresome questions and seemed very suspicious, but
in the end let us go quietly. Just after starting we met two
gendarmes, and afterwards two coastguards, but fortunately, they
asked no questions; so everything went well for some four or five
miles, except for the awful jolting of the cart, which exceeded
anything in the way of shaking you ever dreamt of. All of a sudden
the peasant who was driving the mule ran the cart against a great
stone, and sent us all flying into the road. I never saw such a
sprawling spill. Fortunately we were only shaken and dirty, but the
driver was much hurt, which served him right, and he groaned and
moaned terribly for the remainder of the journey; being a big fat
man, he had fallen heavily, and I should not be surprised if he had
since died.
At last, at one in the morning, we reached the house we were
looking for, and had a great business to awaken the people; nor did
we know how we should be received, arriving in so strange a manner.
The Englishman, however, was very good, took us in, gave us supper,
and we lay quiet until the evening of the following day, when we
slipped into the direct train for this place, which we reached
without further trouble. But what a thing it is to have an evil
conscience! I kept thinking that every station-master and gendarme
on the road scrutinised us unnecessarily; and what a trouble and
scandal it would have made if we had been arrested and put in
prison! However, all is well that ends well, and I had the delight
of finding an immense bundle of letters from you and others at the
post here. We had to buy shirts and socks and everything, for we
were without change of any kind; and what the hotel people here
thought of us I cannot imagine. But they were civil and made no
remark. Our quarters are very comfortable after the filth of
Messina, and I think that our journey was adventurous enough to
have taken place a hundred years ago.
I can quite understand the political situation, having read all you
and Curzon and Jennings wrote. For me it is not unsatisfactory; but
for the general Tory prospects it is most gloomy. What a fool Lord
S. was to let me go so easily!
Give Winston the enclosed Mexican stamp.
_To his Mother._
Naples: March 14, 1887.
I was very glad to get your letter of the 7th the day before
yesterday. We are very comfortable and happy here. The weather is
lovely and the hotel most comfortable.
We have heard nothing yet of our servants and luggage, and conclude
they are still at Messina, unable to get away. How fortunate it was
for us that we made the bolt we did! I have not seen anyone here I
know, except one of the FitzGeorges. We have been to the opera and
the circus; both very good. We amuse ourselves by contemplating
excursions to Pompeii and even Vesuvius; but we are both such lazy
sightseers that I doubt whether we shall ever go there. Sitting in
the gardens listening to the band, or driving along the coast, is
more our line.
I have just received a long and most interesting letter from
George. I cannot think for what political reasons anyone should
wish me to return; I could do no good. I make out from the papers
that since I left the Government the Estimates--Army and Navy,
supplementary and annual--have been reduced by over 700,000_l._ If
this is so, some friend in the House should proclaim it. If George
looks at two letters from Jackson[63] just after I went out, among
my papers, and at my speech on resignation, and compares them with
the Estimates actually produced, he will find out if I am right in
my supposition. He might ask Jackson, privately, as a friend, the
truth of the matter. You see, the Government have adopted my
suggestions as to the printed statements of Estimates and as to
Parliamentary Committee; so altogether my action is not unjustified
by events.
Smith seems to make a poor Leader as far as debate goes. He seems
to leave the management of procedure to Raikes and Ritchie and to
be unable to take any part himself. I think they were very foolish
to accept that amendment of Hartington’s; it makes them look more
than ever like a patronised and protected Government. Coercion will
be very difficult for them in view of the reported evidence of the
Cowper Commission. Many Tory M.P.s are pledged against Coercion,
and fear to lose their seats. Beach is a great loss to them in
respect of this question. However, all these things do not interest
me much. _Che sarà sarà._
I shall probably stop a few days in Paris, so as to let the House
rise for the Easter holidays, before I get back. I suppose I must
make a speech in Paddington in the holidays. George might ascertain
from Fardell what would be a good day.
How men may for a time prosper continually, whatever they do, and then
for a time fail continually, whatever they do, is a theme in support of
which history and romance supply innumerable examples. This chapter
marks such a change in the character of the story I have to tell.
Hitherto the life of Lord Randolph Churchill has been attended by almost
unvarying success. His most powerful enemies had become his friends. His
instinct when to strike and when to stay was unerring. Fortune seemed to
shape circumstances to his moods. The forces which should have
controlled him became obedient in his service. The frowns of age and
authority melted at his advance, and rebuke and envy pursued him idly.
All this was now to be changed. During the rest of his public life he
encountered nothing but disappointment and failure. First, while his
health lasted, the political situation was so unfavourable that,
although his talents shone all the brighter, he could effect nothing.
Then, when circumstances offered again a promising aspect, the physical
apparatus broke down. When he had the strength, he had not the
opportunity. When opportunity returned, strength had fled. So that at
first, by sensible gradations, his political influence steadily
diminished; and afterwards, by a more rapid progress, he declined to
disease and death.
When a politician dwells upon the fact that he is thankful to be rid of
public cares, and finds serene contentment in private life, it may
usually be concluded that he is extremely unhappy. Although Lord
Randolph’s letters to his mother, to give her pleasure, were written in
a cheery and optimistic vein, there is no doubt that he felt very
bitterly the sudden reversal of his fortunes and the arrest of his
career. During this voyage, of which he gives so gay an account, he was
afflicted by fits of profound depression and would often sit by himself
for hours plunged in gloomy thought. And I think he had good reason to
be dejected; for although he had parted from his colleagues under all
guise of courtesy and good-will, he knew well that enormous barriers
were building themselves against him, and that no talents, no services,
no needs--short of the bluntest compulsion--would induce them to share
their power with him.
Lord Randolph Churchill procured by his resignation almost every point
of detail for which he had struggled in vain in the Cabinet. The
reductions of 700,000_l._ in the Navy Estimates, which had been conceded
to his insistence, were ratified and maintained by his successor. The
Estimates for the Army, which had been declared utterly irreducible,
were reduced by 170,000_l._ after his resignation. The Supplementary
Estimate of 500,000_l._ for the defences of the Egyptian frontier, to
which he had long demurred, was promptly rejected by Mr. Goschen as an
unauthorised charge on British funds. He might therefore claim with
perfect truth that he had saved the taxpayers 1,400,000_l._; and
although our sense of financial proportion has been largely modified by
time, this was considered in those days a not insignificant sum. It is
not necessary here to examine the policy of these economies. It is
sufficient that they were strongly resisted, in spite of his advocacy,
while he was a member of the Government, and admitted on their merits
after he had resigned.
The coaling stations--of such vital urgency in December 1886--were left
untouched by additional expenditure until 1888, and strengthened then
only to an inconsiderable extent. Seven coaling stations which figured
in the estimates presented to Lord Randolph Churchill--namely, Halifax,
Jamaica, St. Lucia, Esquimault, Ascension, Trincomalee and Sierra Leone,
have been in the light of modern experience reduced (1905) by
Conservative Ministers, the heirs of the Government of 1886, to
‘skeletons,’ on which no money is to be spent in peace time.
The objections which Lord Randolph had entertained to the Eastern policy
which Lord Iddesleigh seemed inclined to pursue, were justified by Lord
Salisbury’s action at the Foreign Office. All idea of interference in
the internal affairs of the Balkan States vanished so completely from
the minds of Conservative statesmen that it was held libellous to assert
that it had ever existed; and the instructions that were sent by the new
Foreign Minister to Sir William White, were of such a nature that Lord
Randolph could say of them, ‘the English people may now be certain that
they are not likely to be involved in any European struggle arising out
of Bulgarian complications.’ The new Procedure rules, which he had been
accused of forcing upon unwilling colleagues, were presented to
Parliament unaltered; the Local Government Bill took the extensive form
he had desired; the introduction of a Whig element into the Cabinet was
secured; and the Dartford programme, for which he had been condemned as
a Radical in disguise, became the prosperous and successful policy of
the Conservative party. The spirit of the Administration and the aims
which it pursued--at home, in Ireland, and abroad--in policy and in
administration, were indeed widely different from those of any
Government he would have guided; but in so far as the special points in
conflict were concerned, Lord Randolph Churchill’s resignation was
vindicated in the most definite and tangible manner by the actions of
those who had most strenuously opposed him.
All this availed him nothing. Ministers in plenty had quitted English
Governments before without dissociating themselves from the party to
which they belonged; but whether their course was inspired by honest
principle or dictated by unworthy motives, whether it was marked by
support of their successors or by intrigues and assaults to procure
their overthrow, scarcely one was more relentlessly assailed than Lord
Randolph Churchill. Even more pertinent and remarkable than the
resignation of Lord Palmerston in 1853 is the case of Lord Salisbury
himself. The Derby-Disraeli Ministry was in 1867 in a minority in the
House of Commons and their position was highly insecure. The question of
Reform pressed upon them, urgent and inevitable. A failure to deal with
it effectively, still more an attempt to shirk it, might have inflicted
enduring injury upon the Conservative party. Lord Salisbury met the Bill
with uncompromising opposition. When Mr. Disraeli stood firm, he
immediately resigned--and not alone; for by his personal influence he
carried with him both Lord Carnarvon and General Peel. In this crisis
nothing but the determination of Disraeli sustained the Government. Yet
Lord Salisbury by writings, by vigorous and even violent attacks, by
co-operation in Parliament with Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright, did not
hesitate to compass its defeat. And he was wrong! But how was he
treated? His good faith was never challenged; his disinterested
abandonment of great office was admired; his error was condoned. When
Disraeli returned to power in 1874 he allowed no prejudice or
consideration of former hostility to separate him from the man who had
dubbed him a ‘political adventurer,’ and it was upon that
association--stamped into the imagination of the people by the Congress
of Berlin, that Lord Salisbury’s chief claim to leadership afterwards
rested.
Why, then, was Lord Randolph Churchill so hardly used by the party which
owed so much to his efforts up till the year 1887, and might have often
been grateful for support, and more often still for silences,
afterwards? Why was such unusual and uncompromising advantage taken of
the false step he had made? No doubt much must be set down to the
animosities he had excited; much to the alarm of a Cabinet at so
impulsive and imperious a colleague; something to Lord Salisbury’s
desire that the leadership of the House of Commons and all that might
follow therefrom should be secured to Mr. Balfour. Perhaps, too, they
felt less compunction in dealing with him than with an older man, and
thought with Smith that all this was ‘only an incident in the life of a
young politician’; that ten years later, or twenty years even, he might
serve with his own contemporaries or lead a younger generation. Time
would cool the blood of the Reformer, and the experience of adversity
might temper an impatience born of extraordinary success. Little did
they know how short was the span, or at what a cost in life and strength
the immense exertions of the struggle had been made. That frail body,
driven forward by its nervous energies, had all these last five years
been at the utmost strain. Good fortune had sustained it; but disaster,
obloquy and inaction now suddenly descended with crushing force, and the
hurt was mortal.
CHAPTER XVIII
ECONOMY
When I consider life, ’tis all a cheat;
Yet, fool’d with hope, men favour the deceit;
Trust on and think to-morrow will repay.
To-morrow’s falser than the former day;
Lies worse; and while it says we shall be blessed
With some new joys, cuts off what we possest.
Strange cozenage! none would live past years again;
Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain;
And from the dregs of life think to receive
What the first sprightly running could not give.
DRYDEN, _Aurung-Zebe_.
The position of a Minister who has withdrawn from a Cabinet is always
difficult and peculiar. If for the sake of some principle which he
considers vital he is prepared openly to attempt to wreck the Government
and inflict upon the party a defeat at the polls, and if the issue is
one which must soon be decided, the course, however painful, is plain.
He has only to drive steadfastly on through the storm, like Lord
Salisbury in 1867 or Lord Hartington in 1886, careless of consequences
so long as he does his duty, disdainful of the anger of friends, if he
holds them mistaken, and looking for vindication to the calm, just
judgments of the after-time. But if the question on which he has
separated from his colleagues is not paramount or urgent, and if, while
differing strongly from the Government, he is yet determined not to
injure the party from which that Government is drawn, his position
becomes impossible. The more powerful he has been, the more powerless he
becomes; the higher his office, the greater his fall.
From his place in Parliament he is bound, in common-sense and
consistency, to uphold and justify his immediate contention. It may be
economy; it may be Free Trade. Whenever that subject is raised he must
be in his place, alike for his own defence and for the sake of his
cause, to show that there was good reason for his action and that the
public interest was at stake. If he feels strongly, he will speak
strongly. Convictions harden and grow, and differences magnify and
ossify as the controversy progresses. His party and his former
colleagues are embarrassed by his proceedings, however legitimate or
honest they may admit them to be. The more effective his advocacy, and
weighty his charges, the more they are resented. The Opposition are
naturally pleased. They take from the ex-Minister’s statements whatever
they may consider useful to themselves and they employ his phrases and
arguments to belabour in the House and in the country the party and the
Government they are seeking to overthrow. Thus assailed, the Ministerial
press and the party machine--with all its scribes, agents, orators and
small fry--retaliate after their kind. In a hundred newspapers, from a
hundred platforms, hitherto voluble in his praise, the ex-Minister
becomes the object of depreciation and censure, expressed in varying
degrees of vulgar and untruthful imputation. And all the while, since he
will not declare general war upon his party, he is prevented from
defeating calumny by vigorous action or answering malice by attack.
When Lord Randolph Churchill pressed his charges of extravagance and
inefficiency against the public departments, the party which happened to
be responsible at the time were themselves offended. When the
ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer urged the need of economy and spoke his
mind, in all courteous moderation, upon the financial policy of his
successor, the Government Whips whispered that it was only his jealousy
and spite. If, on the other hand, he had remained silent, the judgment
of the nation on the great question for which he had sacrificed so much
would have gone by default. To do nothing was to abandon his cause; to
move was to quarrel with his party.
These embarrassments are only aggravated when the resigning Minister has
been exercising in the Cabinet a general authority over the whole field
of policy. As Leader of the House of Commons Lord Randolph had become
acquainted with almost every question which was likely at that time to
come before Parliament. On many of these he had formed strong views of
his own. He knew exactly how he had intended to handle them when they
became subjects of debate. When therefore he heard them mishandled, or
a course adopted at variance with Cabinet decisions he had previously
obtained, it was natural that he should wish to criticise or demur. Such
conditions pointed inevitably, if the tension were prolonged, to a total
rupture between the most patient ex-Minister and the most generous
Government; and Lord Randolph was not the most patient of men, nor the
Government the most generous of Governments.
Looking back on the circumstances and events of those years in the light
of after-knowledge, there may be some who will find it easy to say what
Lord Randolph should have done after his resignation. He should have
stated the whole grounds of his difference with the Tory Cabinet,
minimising nothing, keeping nothing back. In two or three speeches in
Parliament and in the country he should broadly have outlined his
general political conception of the course the Conservative party should
follow, and then, unless he was prepared to wage relentless war upon the
Government for the purpose of compelling them to adopt that course, he
should forthwith have withdrawn himself entirely from public life.
Leaving his party in the place of power to which he had raised them,
with all the glamour of three years of cumulative and unexampled success
still untarnished, he might well have been content to stand for a season
apart from the floundering progress of the Administration, leaving to
others to muddle away the majority he had made. And he could have
counted, not without reason, upon the continued affection of the
Conservative working classes. The party press would have been silent or
even conciliatory. The relentless irritation of the machine would have
been prevented. As the years passed by and the discredit of the
Government increased, the Tory Democracy would have turned again to the
lost leader by whom the victories of the past had been won.
Lord Randolph Churchill chose otherwise. He did not lay deep or long
plans. His nature prompted him to speak as he felt, and to deal with the
incident of the hour as it occurred. He was solemnly in earnest about
economy and departmental mismanagement. He wanted to curb expenditure;
and, while at that business, he was not at all concerned with his
‘prestige’ or his ‘career.’ Deeply injurious to himself and to his
influence with the Conservative party as his course ultimately proved,
it was at any rate perfectly simple and straightforward. He returned to
England at the end of March, and plunged at once into the vortex of
politics. In three speeches which he delivered during the month of April
to public audiences at Paddington (where he defended particularly his
resignation), at Birmingham, and at Nottingham, he made clear what his
attitude towards Lord Salisbury’s Government would be. He was entirely
independent of that Government. He had resigned from it on important
grounds of difference. He desired a liberal and progressive policy in
domestic affairs, and he was determined to wage war on extravagance and
expenditure. But in the main lines of their policy he was a supporter of
the Government; and to the cause of the Union, as to the large and
permanent interests of the Conservative party, he remained perfectly
loyal. From these intentions he never in any degree varied or departed
in the years that followed. ‘You are quite right,’ he wrote to
FitzGibbon (November 5, 1887), ‘in supposing that mere returning to
office has never been in my mind. I fight for a policy and not for
place; and when I go back to office (if ever) I shall have secured my
policy.’ A Tory Democratic policy could only be furthered from within
the Conservative party, and to that party he faithfully adhered. Besides
Mr. Jennings, Lord Randolph had two good friends among the younger men
in the House of Commons--his brother-in-law, Lord Curzon, and Mr. Ernest
Beckett, the member for Whitby. These gentlemen stood by him, worked
with him, and rendered him many political services in the years that
followed his resignation, for which they were not extravagantly beloved
in the high places of their party.
With these three exceptions the late Leader of the House of Commons was
entirely alone. To do him justice he made no effort to increase his
following and discouraged several who would have willingly worked with
him. Profoundly as he disagreed with much that the Government did, and
disliked the temper that inspired it, fiercely as he resented the Lobby
slanders and the steady detraction of the party press, never in the five
years that followed--the last five years, as they were fated to be, of
his physical strength--did he contemplate alliance of any sort with the
Liberal party or seek to cause cave, clique or faction in the
Conservative ranks.
The introduction of the Budget on April 21 afforded Lord Randolph his
first opportunity of opening his ‘economy’ campaign. Mr. Goschen’s
ingenious Budget differed widely from the ambitious proposals of his
predecessor. The reductions in the Estimates for which Lord Randolph had
fought were, indeed, maintained--and even increased. The result was a
surplus of 776,000_l._ This Mr. Goschen now increased by an addition to
the stamp duties, yielding 100,000_l._, and by a reduction of the
Sinking Fund and Debt Charge from 28 millions to 26 millions. The total
sum, amounting in the balance to a surplus of 2,779,000_l._, was to be
expended in taking a penny off the income-tax, at a cost of
1,560,000_l._; in reducing the duties on tobacco by 600,000_l._; and by
granting 330,000_l._ in aid of the local rates, leaving a final
estimated surplus of 289,000_l._
The Budget was, on the whole, applauded. The Conservative party, whose
consciences were a little uneasy on financial questions, were delighted.
The very questionable resort to the Sinking Fund--not for any special
emergency nor general scheme of fiscal revision, but simply for the
purpose of courting popularity by inconsiderable reductions of
taxation--was sustained by Mr. Goschen’s financial record. ‘Great,’
exclaimed Lord Randolph Churchill, ‘is the worldly worth of a
reputation!’ In complete good-humour, albeit with a sharp edge, he
rallied the Chancellor of the Exchequer--‘the canonised saint of the
financial purists’--on his lapse from the austere principles he had
formerly professed; and both on the night of the Budget’s introduction
and four days later when he spoke next after Mr. Gladstone, he addressed
to the Government and to the Conservative party earnest counsels of
retrenchment and departmental reform. He added:--
It is not necessary to touch the Sinking Fund. The Chancellor of
the Exchequer has ample resources at his disposal. If he leaves the
Sinking Fund alone, and remits a penny of the income-tax, he will
still have a balance of 400,000_l._ If he does not reduce the
income-tax, and prefers to take off the tobacco duty, he will have
a balance of 800,000_l._ If he touches neither of these, and
relieves the rates, he will have a balance of 300,000_l._ He can do
any of these things if he will only leave the Sinking Fund alone;
and he is touching it for a purpose so paltry and frivolous that I
fail to understand why it entered his mind. I pray the Chancellor
of the Exchequer to believe that I only make these remarks because
of my intense and earnest desire that the present Government--whose
career, I hope, is going to be a long one--may enter upon the paths
of financial stability.
On this Mr. Gladstone enters in his diary: ‘R. Churchill excellent.’
The Parliamentary Committee on Army and Navy Estimates, for which Lord
Randolph had asked at the beginning of the year, had been promised by
the Government in reply to a question, put during his absence, by Lord
Curzon. But weeks and even months were allowed to slip by without the
necessary motion being made. When at length it was put on the paper it
was immediately blocked; and thus it would have probably remained. But
one day, when the first business happened to be the vote for the
decoration of Westminster Abbey, Lord Randolph asked abruptly if the
Government really meant to say that they considered the decoration of
Westminster Abbey more important than a Parliamentary inquiry into the
naval and military expenditure. After this the motion was put down at a
reasonable hour, and it passed by general consent. On May 14 Mr. Smith
wrote:--
10 Downing Street, Whitehall: May 14, 1887.
My dear R. C.,--Before we proceed to nominate the Committee on Army
and Navy Estimates I should be glad to know if you would take a
leading place upon it.
I cannot, of course, nominate the Chairman; but, so far as I am
concerned, I should be very glad indeed if you would take the
Chair, and I should say so to my friends, as I have complete
confidence that your influence would be exercised with absolute
impartiality and for the good of the public service.
Believe me
Yours very sincerely,
W. H. SMITH.
Lord Randolph replied at once in the affirmative; but the delay in
nominating the members continued, and his patience broke again:--
2 Connaught Place, W.: May 24, 1887.
My dear Smith,--I must ask you to excuse me from having the honour
of dining with you to-night. The dinner is, of course, an official
one, and the names of the guests will be in the papers, and it will
be assumed by the public that those who dine with the Leader of
the House are thoroughly satisfied with the policy and conduct of
the Government.
As far as I am concerned such an assumption would be entirely
unfounded. I have watched a great deal in the action of the
Government which I deplore more than I can say; but I cannot pass
over without notice your neglect to nominate the Army and Navy
Estimates Committee last night, or rather this morning, and your
postponing of that most important matter till after Whitsuntide.
The delay in appointing that Committee is scandalous and
inexcusable. It might long ago have commenced its work had the
Government been in earnest about the matter; but last night you
gave me a positive promise that you would nominate it without
further delay, and, relying on that, I spent the evening till 12.30
in examination of the Estimates with two other gentlemen, and,
being then very tired, did not return to the House. I dare say you
are all right in thinking that you can afford to indulge in this
kind of treatment of one of your supporters, but you cannot expect
me to show publicly pleasure or satisfaction. _Hodie tibi, cras
mihi._
Yours very truly,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
Smith replied softly:--
3 Grosvenor Place, London, S.W.: May 24, 1887.
My Dear R. C.,--I am very sorry you do not dine with me this
evening, and still more for the cause.
At half-past five this morning I moved that the Committee be
nominated, but I was met by cries from the other side of the House
that it was opposed, and by murmurs from our own benches, and I
felt it was impossible to proceed further at that hour with a jaded
and heated house.
I am sure you would have done as I did if you had been in my place.
Yours very sincerely,
W. H. SMITH.
But the Committee was appointed without further delay.
Meanwhile Lord Randolph had been industriously preparing his general
indictment of War Office and Admiralty maladministration. To the
intricate and detailed information which he had acquired at the
Treasury, he added a mass of material accumulated with the greatest care
and trouble by Mr. Jennings and amplified and checked by various expert
authorities, with whom he was in communication. Basing himself on this
and on the papers presented to Parliament he formulated his charges at
Wolverhampton on June 3. He seems to have believed sincerely that it
would be possible for him to effect a large reduction in the cost of
government. He recalled to his mind the fact that the Government of 1860
was determined on a retrenchment policy, and the Army and Navy Estimates
were in five years reduced from 27½ millions to 22½ millions; and
that whereas in 1868 the estimates were 25 millions, by 1871 they had
been reduced to 21 millions. Such examples may prove the possibility of
retrenchment, but they were the achievements of a giant Minister working
year by year from inside the Cabinet, and using the whole leverage of
the great department over which he presided; and we have since learned
from Mr. Morley’s pages that even in Liberal Cabinets elected on the
famous watchwords of ‘Peace, Retrenchment and Reform’ Mr. Gladstone had
to fight for his economies at the constant peril of his official life.
It is instructive to study the course of an agitation for naval and
military economy directed by anyone outside the circle of the Government
of the day and without the aid of the machinery of State. It may begin
in all undivided earnestness in a simple demand for a reduction of
expenditure. The Government and its official advisers will reply that
they, too, are the zealous advocates of such a policy, if only they can
be shown how to effect it; and they invite suggestions of a specific
character. That is the first stage. Thus challenged, the economist
leaves for the moment the enunciation of great principles of finance and
national policy and descends to grapple with masses of technical
details. He discovers a quantity of muddles and jobs, and arrays
imposing instances of waste and inefficiency. His statements are, of
course, contradicted, and his charges are wrangled over _seriatim_.
Expert is set against expert, and assertion against assertion. The
reformer is accused--not, generally, without some justice--of
exaggeration; and he is in part and in detail inevitably betrayed into
inaccuracy. But in the issue enough is proved to awaken public anxiety
and even indignation. Certain main facts of discreditable and
disquieting character are clearly established. Many weaknesses,
neglects, incompetencies are revealed. There are guns without
ammunition. There are fortresses without provisions. There are regiments
without reserves. There are ships imperfectly constructed. There are
weapons which are obsolete or bad. But in the process of the controversy
the movement has been insensibly and irresistibly deflected from its
original object. It began in a cry for economy; it has become a cry for
efficiency. That is the second stage. The Government and their official
advisers at the proper moment now shift their ground with an adroitness
born of past experience. They admit the damaging facts which can no
longer be denied. The politicians explain that they arise from the
neglect or incapacity of their predecessors. They recognise the public
demand for more perfect instruments of war. They declare that they will
not flinch from their plain duty (whatever others may have done); they
will repair the deficiencies which clearly exist; they will correct the
abuses which have been exposed; and in due course they will send in the
bill to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. So that the third stage of an
unofficial agitation in favour of a reduction of expenditure and a more
modest establishment becomes an agitation in favour of an increase of
expenditure and a more lavish establishment.
All this happened exactly in the case of Lord Randolph Churchill. In his
earlier speeches since his resignation he had confined himself to the
need of retrenchment, and this had been the ground on which he had
fought in the Cabinet. But at Wolverhampton he sought to show that, in
spite of the great and increasing expenditure, the services were in a
wholly unsatisfactory and even dangerous condition. And in this he was
beyond all question brilliantly successful. In a fierce speech of an
hour and forty minutes he unfolded a comprehensive catalogue of
follies. His audience, consisting of about 4,000 persons--mainly
Conservative working men--at first doubtful and apathetic, were
gradually raised, as the newspaper reports testify, to a state of
indignation. With a display of feeling unusual even at a partisan
meeting, and still more remarkable when the currents of ordinary
partisanship were running against the speaker, they interrupted him
repeatedly with cries of anger, and he ended amid a perfect tumult of
assent.
It is not necessary to this account to examine the details of his
charges. Each generation has its own jobs and scandals to confront. The
administrative follies of 1887 have passed away. Some survived, to be
dwarfed by more astonishing successors; others were corrected, but not
extirpated. All have produced a prosperous progeny, nourished in richer
pastures, and attaining proportions of which their ancestors could
hardly have dreamed. The main outlines of the indictment must, however,
be placed on record. The condition of the British Army and Navy in the
year 1887 was, in sober truth, a serious public danger. Mr. Gladstone’s
Government of 1880 had had, during their tenure of office, to deal with
all kinds of military and Colonial enterprises for the effective
execution of which a Liberal Administration is not naturally fitted.
They detested their work heartily; they executed it very badly. In truth
the Cabinet, distracted by the violence of Egyptian and Irish affairs
and the gravity of the Eastern situation, torn by the increasing
demands of Radicalism, and harassed by a relentless Opposition, was
incapable of giving to naval and military matters adequate
consideration. There had followed upon all this the two years of
political revolution with which this story has been largely concerned.
It was natural, it was inevitable, that in the interval which had
elapsed since the great Army Reform Parliament of 1868 much waste and
inefficiency should have crept into the military system; and in the same
period, from considerations altogether outside the course of British
politics, an enormous extension and complexity had affected the
responsibilities and functions of the Navy.
Lord Randolph alleged in respect of the Army that not a single fortress
was properly armed; that no reserve of heavy guns existed; that the
artillery, both horse and field, was obsolete; that the rifle of the
infantry was defective; that the swords and bayonets broke and bent
under the required tests; and that, notwithstanding these deficiencies,
the cost of the land service had increased in twelve years by over four
millions a year. He charged the Admiralty with such waste as exporting
Australian tinned meat to Australia, rum and sugar to Jamaica, flour to
Hong Kong, and rice to India; with making improvident contracts for
ships, engines, and materials of various kinds; with disarming the
Spithead and Portsmouth forts in order to arm warships. He asserted that
the whole of the 43-ton guns designed by the Ordnance Department, on
which 200,000_l._ had been spent, were worthless and liable to burst
even with reduced charges; that the Ordnance officials had been told
beforehand by the principal experts of Messrs. Armstrong that this type
of gun was imperfect; that they persisted in making them; that one of
the guns had already burst; that the others had been condemned; but that
they were nevertheless to be employed on her Majesty’s ships. The most
serious count, however, dealt with various classes of ships which had in
important particulars failed to realise the expectations of the
designers and were in consequence unfit for active service.
He instanced especially the _Ajax_ and the _Agamemnon_, the battleships
of the _Admiral_ class and the _Australia_ class of cruisers. Of the
armoured cruiser _Impérieuse_ he declared that she drew four feet more
water than was expected, with the result that the armour which should
have been above water was now below water, and in consequence the ship
was actually unprotected. ‘The result of all this is that in the last
twelve or thirteen years eighteen ships have been either completed or
designed by the Admiralty to fulfil certain purposes, and on the
strength of the Admiralty statements Parliament has faithfully voted ...
about ten millions, and it is now discovered and officially acknowledged
that in respect of the purposes for which these ships were designed, the
whole of the money has been absolutely misapplied, utterly wasted and
thrown away.’ The foundation for this somewhat sweeping statement was
supplied by the explanatory memorandum to the Navy Estimates, 1887. ‘In
one important particular,’ so this document affirmed, ‘there is a
discrepancy between ... the original design and its result which, in the
case of the _Impérieuse_ and her sister ship the _Warspite_, attracted
some attention, and which is likely to recur in the case of the belted
cruisers, seven in number, the _Warspite_ and the armoured vessels of
the _Admiral_ class.... If the whole of the 900 tons [of coal] ... be
placed on board [the _Impérieuse_] the top of the belt will, on the
ship’s first going to sea, be six inches below the water.’
The Wolverhampton speech made a considerable stir. In spite of the
pressure of Irish affairs and the general instability of the political
situation, it was for some days the principal topic of public
discussion. The powerful interests assailed, retorted at once, and the
newspapers were filled with censure and contradiction. Even those which,
like the _Times_, were forced to acknowledge Lord Randolph Churchill
‘right in his main contention,’ rebuked him ponderously for extravagance
of statement and violence of language. His strictures on naval
construction brought Sir Nathaniel Barnaby, the late chief constructor
to the Admiralty--to whom Lord Randolph had personally alluded--into
voluminous protest in the columns of the _Times_, and an acrimonious
correspondence ensued. Sir Nathaniel denied that he had been ‘dismissed’
from his post and pointed in disproof to his having been made a Knight
Commander of the Bath. Lord Randolph replied acidly ‘that K.C.B.’s and
official testimonials were the usual manner in which the country
requited long service when the intentions had been honest, no matter how
deplorably defective might have been the capacity’; and expressed
himself willing to substitute the phrase ‘allowed to retire’ for the
word ‘dismissed.’ On the main question Sir Nathaniel appealed to Lord
George Hamilton; and Lord Randolph brought up Sir Edward Reed, a rival
constructor of great repute, who confirmed and even aggravated most of
his statements. Both parties fell back upon official records, memoranda
and Blue Books; and a battle royal developed, around the outskirts of
which naval authorities of every rank and description cruised, seeking
to intervene, on the one side or the other, with masses of highly
technical information couched in highly controversial terms.
Lord Randolph’s contention that the _Ajax_ and the _Agamemnon_ were
failures was not seriously disputed, Sir Nathaniel Barnaby himself
admitting (_Times_, June 7) that he was ‘thankful they were the only
approximately circular and shallow sea-going ships we built.’ The
fiercest strife raged around the cruiser _Impérieuse_. Sir Nathaniel
Barnaby met the assertion that the money spent upon her was ‘absolutely
misapplied, utterly wasted and thrown away,’ by quoting a later
Admiralty memorandum which declared her to be, ‘if not actually the most
powerful, one of the most powerful ironclad cruisers afloat of her
tonnage.’ But Sir Edward Reed was able to show that this was not
extravagant eulogy, for that there was only one other ‘ironclad cruiser
_of her tonnage_’ in existence. He also showed that, to lighten her,
she had already been deprived of her masts and consequently of her
intended sailing powers; and that even so, to bring her to her intended
draught, it was necessary to take out the whole of her coal. When the
smoke had at length a little lifted, it was generally held that,
although Lord Randolph Churchill’s charges were sustained on almost
every substantial point, he had injured his case by over-stating it.
Full marks were also awarded to the ‘distinguished ex-public servant
cruelly assailed in his professional character.’
Lord Randolph Churchill was duly elected Chairman of the Army and Navy
Committee. Mr. Jennings, who was also a member, laboured indefatigably
to collect, sift and arrange material. The Committee met without delay,
and collected much valuable and startling evidence. They discovered, for
instance, that one branch of the War Office cost 5,000_l._ a year in
supervising an expenditure of 250_l._ a year. ‘Would it have been
possible,’ the Accountant-General was asked, ‘for any private member to
have ascertained from the Estimates laid before Parliament from 1870 to
the present year that the total increase of net ordinary Army
expenditure amounted to almost nine millions of money?--A. ‘It would
have been extremely difficult.’ Q. ’ ...or that since 1875 there had
been an increase of about five millions?’--A. ‘I do not think it would.’
‘Up to now,’ Lord Randolph suggested, ‘Parliament has never had the
smallest idea of what was the total cost of the services?’--‘Taking the
whole of the services,’ replied Mr. Knox, ‘it has not.’ It would be easy
to multiply these specimens of the evidence collected by the Select
Committee. Day by day, as it was published, it was commented on by the
press, and public and Parliamentary scrutiny was increasingly directed
towards the Estimates of the two services.
Here is a note which it is pleasant to transcribe:--
One odd effect of your Committee: [wrote Jennings July 27].
Bradlaugh came to me this afternoon--said he had been reading the
evidence--was immensely struck with it--thought you had done
enormous service already. I told him a little more about it. He
said: ‘He has done so much good that I really think I must close up
my account against him.’ ‘Well, surely,’ I said, ‘there is no use
in keeping it open any longer. It only looks like vindictiveness.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think I will close the ledger.’
It will be convenient to follow Lord Randolph’s economy campaign to its
conclusion. As it gradually became directed to efficiency rather than
simple economy it enlisted an increasing measure of professional
support. By May 1888, public opinion had become so vigilant that,
following upon some outspoken and not very temperate statements by Lord
Wolseley, then Adjutant-General, the Government determined--momentous
resolve!--to appoint a Royal Commission with Lord Hartington at its
head. Mr. Smith invited Lord Randolph Churchill to join it:--
10 Downing Street, Whitehall: May 18, 1888.
My dear R. C.,--You will render great service to the administrative
reform of the two great departments if you will join the Royal
Commission over which Lord Hartington will preside.
Mr. Gladstone has asked Mr. Campbell-Bannerman to represent the
Opposition; I am to go on, on behalf of the Government; and you
would represent those who believe that efficiency and economy may
result from a change of system. General Brackenbury will join as a
soldier, and Sir F. Richards, who has just returned from sea, as
the sailor. Two civilians with extensive knowledge of large
business transactions are to be added, and Sir Richard Temple will
also be asked as a capable and successful Indian Administrator.
These are the people with whom you would be associated in the
effort to improve our system, and I hope most sincerely that you
will not refuse your help.
Believe me
Yours very truly,
W. H. SMITH.
I enclose a copy of the reference.
‘To inquire into the civil and professional administration of the
Naval and Military Departments and the relation of those
Departments to each other and to the Treasury; and to report what
changes in their existing system would tend to the efficiency and
the economy of the Public Service.’
Lord Randolph, however, knowing a good deal of the ways of such bodies,
declined. He was persuaded by Lord Hartington, who wrote:--
Hôtel du Rhin, 4 Place Vendôme: May 26, 1888.
My dear Churchill,--Smith has sent me your letter declining to
serve on the Army and Navy Commission. I hope very much that if you
have not absolutely made up your mind you may be induced to
reconsider your decision, as we are both very anxious to have your
assistance.
I think that your Committee has taken some very valuable evidence
which shows the inefficiency and defects of the present system. But
I should doubt whether you will effect much more by the examination
of minor officials or by investigating the details of the separate
votes; and I should think it might be possible for you to leave the
inquiry to be finished by some one else. My own opinion is that we
shall never get either efficiency or economy until we can find some
way of giving the professional men more power and at the same time
more responsibility; but how this can be done in combination with
our Parliamentary system is a very difficult problem which requires
bold and original treatment.
If we cannot suggest a more efficient and intelligent system of
superior administration, I think that we shall do very little good
by exposing details of maladministration in minor matters; and as
the subject-matter of our inquiry is to be the real centre of the
whole question of administrative reform, I cannot help thinking
that you would find our inquiry more interesting and important than
any which you can take up or continue on other branches of the same
question.
I remain
Yours sincerely,
HARTINGTON.
The Commission appointed on June 17, 1888, did not report till March,
1890. Lord Randolph’s separate memorandum, which will be found in the
Appendix, is well known. Its sweeping proposals were not adopted by the
majority of the Commissioners; but it has been so often quoted, and
bears so closely upon modern controversies, that the reader who is
interested in these subjects should not neglect to study it. The
indirect results of his agitation were, perhaps, more fruitful. Lord
George Hamilton, with whom he so often engaged in sharp argument when
Navy Estimates recurred, bears a generous tribute to the unseen
influence which severe public criticism exerts upon the workings of a
great department. It would seem that Lord Randolph Churchill’s belief
that considerable economies were possible on the establishments of 1886
was not without foundation.
Lord George Hamilton writes, October 4, 1904:--
During my tenure of office at the Admiralty great changes were
made, and in the foremost rank of these reforms was the
reorganisation and renovation of the Royal dockyards. These
establishments had been allowed to grow and develop without a
sufficient regard to the revolution in shipbuilding which the
substitution of iron and steel for wood had caused. Laxity in
supervision, connivance at practices neither economical nor
efficient, dawdling over work, obsolete machinery and ill-adjusted
establishments, associated with Estimates framed for political
exigence rather than naval needs, all combined to bring these great
national building yards into disrepute. The _personnel_ was
first-rate both in ability and integrity and the material used as
good as money could obtain. All that was required was a thorough
readjustment of the establishments to the work they were called
upon to do, by the reduction of the redundant and superfluous
workmen, by the dismissal of the incompetent, and an increase to
the numbers working in steel and iron. Changes such as these, if
associated with the introduction of the methods and checks in force
in the best private yards, were quite sufficient to put our
dockyards in the first rank of building establishments. But whoever
undertook the task would be subject to much obloquy, both local and
Parliamentary. The stern suppression of long-standing malpractices,
the dismissal of a large number of unnecessary and indifferent
workmen, if enforced on a large scale, required a strong current of
public opinion behind it for its consummation. This assistance I
obtained from Lord Randolph Churchill’s crusade on economy. He and
I differed on many questions of naval administration, but we were
at one as to the necessity of dockyard reform. Many economists who,
though agreeing in the abstract with Lord Randolph’s views,
hesitated to cut down the effective fighting forces of the Army and
Navy, were delighted to co-operate with him in so non-contentious
an improvement. The Labour party was not then as well organised or
represented in Parliament as they have since become, and their
opposition to dockyard dismissals was less strenuous than it would
be now.
I was thus enabled, after two years of continuous labour and
trouble, to organise the dockyards from top to bottom, to put down
establishments that were not required, to dismiss the loiterers,
and to establish, modelled on the practice of the best private
yards, a completely new system of supervision, check, and control.
The effect was electrical. The dockyards at once became the
cheapest and most economical builders of warships in the world. The
largest ironclad ever designed, up to 1889, was built, completed
and commissioned ready for sea in two years and eight months from
the date of the laying down of its keel. No large ironclad had been
previously completed within five years. Up to 1886 the average cost
of the big ships building in these yards was 40 per cent. above
their original estimate; since then the estimates have rarely been
exceeded. In the first year of the new system there was an
instantaneous saving of 400,000_l._ The continuous and satisfactory
progress of our vast and annually increasing building programme is
mainly due to those changes, and Lord Randolph could, I think,
fairly claim that, though his name was not publicly associated with
the great national gain thus achieved, it was the public opinion
which he aroused, which largely contributed to the consummation of
dockyard reform.
Lord Randolph Churchill addressed five meetings in the autumn and winter
of 1887--two at Whitby and Stockport respectively for his two friends,
Mr. Beckett and Mr. Jennings; and three in the North. The Whitby meeting
in September afforded an opportunity for a display of the hostility with
which he was regarded by the dominant section of the Conservative party,
for several prominent local worthies publicly refused to attend--a
proceeding which even the _Times_ was compelled to censure. The 7,000
persons who gathered upon the sands and around the slopes of a kind of
natural amphitheatre under the west cliff gave him a very different
welcome, and listened with delighted attention during that beautiful
afternoon to a spirited and ingenious defence of the miserable session
through which the Government had shuffled. In Yorkshire and Lancashire,
as in the earlier meetings of the year, and later in the North, his
popularity with the Conservative masses was still undimmed. He was
greeted everywhere by immense crowds. The largest halls were much too
small. Paddington was loyal and contented. His Birmingham supporters
asked no better than to fight for him at once. At Nottingham, long
before his arrival, the streets were thronged; and all the way from the
station to the Albert Hall he passed through continuous lines of
cheering people.[64] Similar scenes took place at Wolverhampton, and the
Conservative Association of that borough passed a formal resolution
supporting his policy of economy. In the North he made a regular
progress. He visited three important centres in a single week and made a
‘trilogy of speeches’--no light task for a speaker whose every word is
reported and examined. He spoke on the afternoon of October 20 at
Sunderland, at great length, in reply to a previous speech of Mr.
Gladstone, covering the whole field of domestic policy and defining the
immediate limits of the Tory Democratic programme. These proved
sufficiently comprehensive to include Free Education, Local Option in
the sale of drink, a compulsory Employer’s Liability Act, the abolition
of the power of entailing land upon unborn lives, ‘One man, one vote,’
and Parliamentary registration at the cost of local bodies. At
Newcastle, two days later, he spoke in defence of the Union, justified
the Government policy in Ireland, and vehemently attacked Mr. Gladstone
for the countenance which he showed towards lawlessness and disorder.
On the Monday he spoke at Stockton, and here he turned aside to deal
with another subject which had been thrust much upon him of late. Mr.
Jennings, like Lord Dunraven, was, as the reader is aware, a Fair
Trader, and throughout the year--from the very beginning of their
association--he had laboured tactfully, but persistently, to win Lord
Randolph to his views. He knew that although the cry of ‘Less waste and
no jobbery’ might appeal to many, ‘Economy’ was not in itself a popular
cause to submit to a Democratic electorate, and was, moreover, foreign
to the instincts and traditions of Toryism. ‘Fair Trade,’ on the
contrary, touched a very tender spot in a Conservative breast; and,
quite apart from this consideration, Mr. Jennings was an enthusiast. He
had examined the question both from an American and a British point of
view. He possessed a large and well-stored arsenal of fact and argument.
On such subjects as ‘One-sided Free Trade,’ ‘Our Ruined Industries,’
‘The Dumping of Sweated Goods,’ ‘The Commercial Union of the Empire’ or
‘Our Dwindling Exports’ he could write, as his frequent letters show,
with force and feeling. Scarcely since St. Anthony had there been such a
temptation on the one hand or such austerity on the other.
‘The main reason,’ Lord Randolph had said at Sunderland, ‘why I do not
join myself with the Protectionists is that I believe that low prices in
the necessaries of life and political stability in a democratic
Constitution are practically inseparable, and that high prices in the
necessaries of life and political instability in a democratic
Constitution are also practically inseparable.’ And this having drawn
upon him the wrath of Mr. Chaplin, he proceeded at Stockport to make his
case good. He used no economic arguments. He pointed to the supremacy of
the Conservative party as a proof of political stability under low
food-prices. He pointed to the conversion of Sir Robert Peel as a proof
of political instability, under high food-prices. To make wheat-farming
profitable a duty was required which would raise the price of corn from
28_s_. a quarter to something between 40_s_. and 45_s_. a quarter. Would
anyone propose a sufficient tax on imported corn to make it worth while
for the rural voter to pay the higher prices which Fair Trade would
secure for the manufactures of the urban voter? How did the Fair Traders
propose to deal with India? How did they propose to deal with Ireland?
Could they prove that France, Austria and Germany were more prosperous
than Great Britain? ‘It is no use saying to me, “Go to America or New
South Wales.” I will not go to America, and I will not go to New South
Wales. There is not the smallest analogy between those countries and
England. America is a self-contained country and almost everything she
requires for her people she can produce in abundance. We cannot. We have
more people than we can feed; and not only for food, but for our
manufactures, we depend upon raw material imported from abroad.
Therefore I decline to go to America or New South Wales; but I would go
to European countries--to France, Austria and Germany--and I want to
know whether the Fair Traders can prove that the people of those
countries are more prosperous than ours.’
This Stockton speech was naturally a great disappointment to Jennings.
‘I cannot deny,’ he wrote, ‘that you gave many of your followers a
bitter pill to swallow. I think I could give you satisfactory grounds
for admitting that your objections to “Fair Trade” will not stand much
investigation; but, of course, the real difficulty is that in many of
our constituencies the question is popular. We have been partly elected
on the strength of it; and when you attack it, you fire a broadside
into your own supporters and give the Radicals in our boroughs a stick
to beat us with. It is hard for us to fight against your authority,
especially when we have been drilling into the minds of the people that
yours are the views they should adopt. If you ever had half an hour to
spare, I wish you would allow me to put the facts before you. You would
soon see, for example,....’ And then follow pages of tersely stated
arguments of a kind with which most people are now only too familiar.
They produced no effect upon Lord Randolph. ‘The policy which you
advocate,’ he replied (October 30), ‘of duties on foreign imports for
revenue purposes, much attracted me at one time; but I came to the
conclusion that, although such a policy would gain the adhesion of the
manufacturing towns, it is open to such fearful attack from the Radicals
among the country population that we should lose more than we should
gain. I cannot see how you can persuade yourself that the country
population would accept a method of raising revenue which would directly
benefit the manufacturing population at their expense. The election of
‘85 made a great impression upon me. Then the defection of the rural
vote completely neutralised our great successes in the English
boroughs.’ And again on November 3, after the discussions at the
conference of Conservative Associations: ‘Do you see how the Fair
Traders have been wrangling and disputing with each other--everyone
going in a different direction--confirming all that I said at Stockton
about their not knowing their own minds?’ Late in November came an
invitation from the ‘British Union,’ a Protectionist Association having
its headquarters in Manchester--of all places--to which Lord Randolph
replied as follows:--
2 Connaught Place, W.: November 26, 1887.
I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 25th inst. I
understand that your Committee are good enough to do me the honour
of asking me to preside at a meeting to be held on January 24 in
the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, in favour of Fair Trade.
You allude to the recent vote of the Conservative National Union
bearing upon this subject, and inquire as to what effect that vote
has had upon my mind. I may reply: ‘None whatever, except to
confirm me in the opinions I expressed at Stockton in the course of
last month.’ Both at the Fair Trade Conference recently held, as
well as at the conference of the delegates of the National Union, I
observed that the sentence which would best characterise those
discussions was _quot homines tot sententiæ_. There is not among
those who desire extensive fiscal reform the slightest approach to
real agreement either as to objects or to methods. I must also
point out that the delegates of the National Union do not appear to
have had any instructions from those whom they were supposed to
represent to debate and to decide on the question of Fair Trade,
neither did they in any way specially represent trade interests.
Their decision in favour of Fair Trade, therefore, is not more
weighty than their decision in favour of ‘Women’s Suffrage,’ which
latter would certainly not be accepted by the Tory party as a
whole.
Under these circumstances you will see that it is not possible for
me to depart in any way from the views I have recently expressed on
Fair Trade; nor could I, as you kindly invite me to do, ‘take the
helm of a movement’ which up to the present remains altogether
vague and undefined.
So far as I have been able to discover, this was, with one exception,
his last public word on the subject.[65] His objections to Fair Trade
were not based on principle. They were entirely practical. He cared
little for theory. He hated what he used to call ‘chopping logic.’ He
was not at all concerned to vindicate Mr. Cobden, and he mocked at
‘professors’ of all kinds. But he thought that as a financial expedient
a complicated tariff would not work, and he was sure that as a party
manœuvre it would not pay. He saw no way by which the conflicting
interests of the counties and the boroughs could be reconciled and he
believed that without such reconciliation the movement would prove
disastrous to the Conservative cause. He was, no doubt, strengthened in
his views by his desire so far as possible to work in harmony with Mr.
Chamberlain and so to combine and fuse together all the Democratic
forces which supported the Union. Yet Fair Trade had much to offer to a
Conservative statesman. To him, above all other Tory leaders, the
prospect was alluring. That section of Tory Democracy which had received
the gospel of Mr. Farrer Ecroyd--and it was already important--would
have followed a Fair Trade champion through thick and thin. In every
town he would have secured faithful and active supporters. His earlier
speeches had prepared the way. His own immediate allies in Parliament,
his best friends in the press, were ardent Fair Traders. Hardly a day
passed, as he said at Stockton, without his receiving letters from all
classes of people imploring him to come forward as a Fair Trader. He had
only to raise the standard to obtain a following of his own strong
enough to defy the party machine. The National Union might still afford
the necessary organisation. And had he been, as it was the fashion to
say, willing to advance his personal position regardless of the
interests of the Conservative party, there lay ready to his hand a
weapon with which he might have torn the heart out of Lord Salisbury’s
Government.
CHAPTER XIX
THE NATIONAL PARTY
‘Love as if you should hereafter hate; and hate as if you should
hereafter love.’--BIAS (quoted by Aristotle).
‘All the politics of the moment,’ said Lord Salisbury on March 5, 1887,
to the members of the National Conservative Club, ‘are summarised in the
word “Ireland.”’ The fierce struggle in the English constituencies was
over. The Home Rulers had been totally defeated. Mr. Gladstone had been
driven from office. A Conservative Government, strong in its own
resources of discipline and class, strengthened by most of the forces of
wealth and authority which had hitherto been at the service of the
Liberal party, and supported by the energetic multitudes of Tory
Democracy, sat in the place of power. Among the ranks of the Opposition,
fortified in their midst, with leaders of their own upon their Front
Bench, was a solid band of seventy gentlemen of unusual ability actively
engaged in preventing the return of their neighbours to office. Such was
the grim aspect of the field upon the morrow of the great battle. Such
was the change of fortune which a year of Irish policy had brought to
the Liberal party. But, although the relative forces of the combatants
in the political arena had been so surprisingly altered, the question in
dispute remained utterly unsettled and ‘Ireland’ was still the vital and
dominant factor in the political situation.
So long as the Liberal Unionists adhered to Lord Salisbury’s Government
it was, of course, unshakable; for it enjoyed the double advantage of
their support and of the cleavage which they caused in the Opposition.
But the conditions under which Liberal-Unionist support would be
continued could not be definitely known; and its withdrawal meant the
immediate fall of the Administration. Forced thus to live from day to
day upon the goodwill of its allies, with few means of knowing and not
always a right to inquire when that goodwill might be impaired, the
Government was apparently deficient in real stability or power. Nor
could it be said to make up in talent what it lacked in strength. The
retirement of Sir Michael Hicks-Beach deprived the Treasury Bench of its
sole remaining Conservative Parliamentarian; Mr. Goschen’s position was,
at any rate for the first year, difficult and peculiar; Mr. Balfour had
yet his name to make; and the choice of Mr. Smith for the leadership of
the House of Commons, however justified by his courage and his
character, so far as the distinction of debate was concerned, only
revealed the nakedness of the land.
In all these circumstances it was with no little anxiety that the
Conservative party watched the progress of the negotiations which
attended the Round Table Conference and endeavoured to estimate the
effect upon those negotiations and upon the general attitude of the
Liberal-Unionist party of the growing tension of Irish affairs. Mr.
Chamberlain’s intentions were especially uncertain. His effective
co-operation with the Conservatives had been largely facilitated by his
good relations with Lord Randolph Churchill and the very considerable
agreement in political matters which existed between them. But Lord
Randolph Churchill had now left the Government; and how could a Radical
support a policy from which a progressive Tory had been forced to
separate? Moreover, Mr. Chamberlain was closely associated with Sir
George Trevelyan. They had resigned together from the Home Rule Cabinet.
They fought side by side in the election which followed. They were the
joint representatives of Liberal Unionism at the Round Table Conference.
On January 22, 1886, while the issue of that conference was still
undetermined, Mr. Chamberlain was the chief speaker at a demonstration
at Hawick in Sir George Trevelyan’s honour; and Sir George Trevelyan was
all the time known to be earnestly and eagerly labouring for the reunion
of the Liberal party. ‘It is because I believe,’ said Mr. Chamberlain on
this occasion, ‘that at all events a great approximation to peace, if
not a complete agreement, may be attained without a betrayal of the
trust which has been reposed in us that I ask you to await with hope and
confidence the result of our further deliberations.’ Lord Hartington
took, indeed, no part in these negotiations. ‘Some one,’ he said,
characteristically, ‘must stay at home to look after the camp;’ but he
proceeded to wish the Conference ‘every measure of success,’ and he was
careful not to destroy by any words of his the prospects of
reconciliation.
The whole situation--already delicate, uncertain and seemingly
critical--could not fail to be profoundly influenced by the course of
events in Ireland. The winter of 1886 was accompanied by a widespread,
though by no means general, refusal or inability to pay rents. Sir
Michael Hicks-Beach had never been too enthusiastic in his sympathy with
the Irish landowner, and during the winter he had endeavoured to
mitigate the severities of the time by the exercise of a kind of
‘dispensing power.’ Landlords were given to understand that the whole
machinery of the Executive would not necessarily be at their disposal
for the purpose of enforcing against their tenants claims which, in the
opinion of the Chief Secretary, were harsh or unjust. This
rough-and-ready method was heartily supported by Sir Redvers Buller, and
to its adoption the comparative crimelessness of the winter was largely
due. But, however satisfactory its results in practice might be, it was
easily and justly assailable in principle; and after the Lord Chief
Baron Palles had authoritatively declared that the attempt to withdraw
the police from supporting the legal claims of private persons was
altogether unjustifiable, the ‘dispensing power’ had to be abandoned,
and the law took its regular course. The consequence of the numerous
and, in some cases, ruthless evictions which followed was a formidable
agrarian conspiracy. The tenants on different estates joined themselves
together to offer to the landlord whatever rent they considered just,
and where it was refused as insufficient they deposited the whole sum
with a managing committee to be used for the purposes of resistance.
This movement, known to history as the ‘Plan of Campaign,’ was the
immediate result. The secondary, though not less direct, result was the
advent in the House of Commons of a Land Bill and a Coercion Bill, both
of which must expose to uncalculated strains the composite forces on
which the Government depended.
But now and in the years that were to come the far-seeing statecraft
with which the Conservative leaders had stimulated and sustained the
schism in the Liberal party and had dealt with the crisis of the General
Election was to be vindicated. They had built far stronger than they
knew. Underneath the smooth words of the Liberal-Unionist leaders
towards their former friends, and behind all the generous emotions of
the Round Table Conference, stubborn brute forces were at work which,
though they did not necessarily conduce to the stability of the
Conservative Government, were inevitably fatal to Liberal reunion. The
Liberal-Unionist members who had come back safely to Westminster, having
broken with their party organisations and defied the Grand Old Man, were
very particular to call themselves Liberals and to deny that they had
severed themselves in any degree from the principles and traditions of
Liberalism. They banned Tory colours and Tory clubs. When they attended
public meetings they took care that the complexion of the platform
should be Liberal Unionist. Even Mr. Goschen, after taking office in a
Conservative Government, thought it necessary to assert in his election
address his unaltered and unalterable character as a Liberal, and to
apologise to the Conservative electors for the strain put upon their
natural partisanship by his candidature. And there is no doubt that they
were perfectly honest in their belief. They were not conscious of any
abandonment of principle. They declared that they agreed with the
Liberal party on every other question except the Irish Question, and
even in regard to Ireland there was agreement on three points out of
four. The Conservatives had exacted no pledges from them. They did not
feel themselves divorced from one body of doctrine and engaged to
another. They remained in political opinion on all the great contested
questions of the day exactly where they had been when Parliament met in
January 1885, and they sat in the same places and among the same party.
But, in fact, one change had taken place in their character of more
practical importance than all the symbols and nomenclature of party, and
counting more in political warfare than any change of principles,
however sudden or sweeping: they had changed sides. Abstract principles
and party labels might be the same, but whereas in January 1886 they
wished and worked for a Liberal victory and a Conservative defeat, in
January 1887 they wanted to see the Conservatives win and the Liberals
beaten. Otherwise no change! No disagreement, outside Ireland, with the
Liberal party--except that they sought its overthrow; no difference
except the one difference which swallows up all others--the difference
between alliance and war. And this difference, be it noted, was not
founded on any passing mood of anger or caprice which smooth words and
fair offers might dispel. It was fundamental and innate. It was the
basis of the election of these seventy members. They had stood as
opponents of Mr. Gladstone and all the forces he directed. They were
elected for the very purpose of preventing his return to power by
electors nine-tenths of whom at least were Conservatives. While they
opposed Mr. Gladstone, they responded to the constituent bodies by whom
they were returned. If they made friends with him--no matter upon what
terms--they ceased to represent nine-tenths at least of their
electorates.
Moreover, few men go through the experience of an internecine quarrel,
with its taunts and charges of treachery and ingratitude exchanged
between old comrades who know each other well, and with all the
wrenching and tearing asunder of friendships and associations, without
contracting a deep and abiding antagonism for those from whom they have
broken. Sir George Trevelyan--unembarrassed by a constituency--indeed
went back; but he went back alone. The rest remained to justify, by
their consistent action, the wisdom of Conservative tactics; to prove,
as the years went by, the most trustworthy supporters of the
Conservative party, and in the end to secure the main control of its
policy. From that strange pilgrimage--‘that bitter pilgrimage,’ as Mr.
Chamberlain calls it (was it so very bitter, after all?), there could be
no turning back after the first decisive steps were taken.
All this was, however, either unknown or imperfectly appreciated in
1887; and even if the Liberal-Unionists’ mind had been thoroughly
understood, the uncertainty of the political situation would not have
been by any means concluded. For, although there never was any real
chance of Liberal reunion, there were repeated possibilities of a
Conservative collapse. The Liberal Unionists were resolved to do nothing
that would bring Mr. Gladstone back to power. Apart from imperilling the
cause of the Union, that process would probably involve the political
extinction of most of their party. But, subject to that dominant
proviso, they could not feel any particular affection for Lord
Salisbury’s Government. They disliked much of its action, they did not
agree with its general views, and they could not be impressed by the
Parliamentary exposition with which they were favoured. Their leaders
were not desirous of office for its own sake; but they were gravely
disquieted by the policy adopted towards Ireland, and more than once
drawn to the conclusion that a wide reconstruction of the Cabinet would
be necessary to maintain the reputation of the Unionist party in
Parliament and the country. In view of their evident power to change
the Government at any moment by a vote, the passage of the Irish Bills
through the House of Commons was attended with extreme danger to the
Ministry. On more than one occasion its life depended upon a single
hand, and once it was decided that that hand should be withdrawn.
About Ireland and all that concerned her Lord Randolph cared intensely.
He felt responsible in no small degree for the denial of Home Rule. As
to that he had no doubts; but he had always intended, and had been
allowed, with the full sanction of the Cabinet, to declare that the
counterpart of the assertion of the Union was a generous, sympathetic,
and liberal policy towards the Irish people in regard to religion,
self-government, and land. Intimately acquainted as he was with many
shades of Irish opinion, he was both grieved and angered at the temper
displayed by the conquerors in the years that followed their victory. To
Coercion, indeed, so far as it should be necessary to maintain the law,
he had made up his mind before he left the Cabinet, and he had no
thoughts of going back on that; but the Bill and its enforcement stirred
all the latent Liberalism in his character. He discovered, as time went
on, that special legislation was not regarded by the Government as a
hateful necessity; but as something good in itself, producing a salutary
effect upon the Irish people and raising the temper of the Ministerial
party. He was offended by the calm assumption of social and racial
superiority displayed, as a matter of course, by Ministers towards
their Irish opponents, and the studied disregard of Nationalist
sentiments and feelings which, even when no public object was to be
gained, marked these dark years of Unionist policy; and with all his
determination never in any degree weakened to maintain the Union, it was
in the conduct of Irish affairs from 1887 to 1890 that he realised most
acutely his differences with the Government, and out of which his open
quarrel with the Conservative party ultimately sprang.
The retirement of Sir Michael Hicks-Beach from the Irish office on
account of his eyesight was the first blow.
‘I waited till I got home,’ Lord Randolph wrote on March 30, ‘before
writing to you, as I did not know where a letter might find you: but I
feel sure no letter from me was needed for you to be convinced how
profoundly grieved I was at your having to give up official work, and at
the cause. I knew you had trouble before you, but was in great hopes
that it might have been for long delayed. I saw Roose yesterday, and it
was very pleasant to hear him assert with confidence that you would be
as strong and well as ever before the close of the year. Indeed, you are
a great loss to Ireland and to the party and to me. Now that you are
gone, there is no one in the Government I care a rap about.... I should
so much like to see you and have a long talk. I have as yet seen none of
my late colleagues, nor do I want to. Don’t trouble to answer this; but
believe that there is no one who more truly and earnestly wishes for
your renewed health and strength.’
The Land Bill opened various difficulties. Many of the Liberal Unionists
thought it inadequate, and both Mr. Chamberlain and Lord Randolph had
decided opinions of their own upon several of its most important
clauses. All through the summer of 1887 these two disinherited chiefs of
democracy drew closely together. They were both, as Mr. Chamberlain
describes it, ‘adrift from the regular party organisations.’ Yet each
possessed great influence in Parliament and the country. It was natural
that the idea of some Central party should present itself to their minds
in a favourable light. And, indeed, the increasing weakness of the
Government in the House of Commons and the apparently uncertain
character of its majority made such speculations very reasonable. On at
least two occasions a defeat in Committee on the Land Bill appeared
certain; and in that emergency only a coalition headed by Lord
Hartington and strengthened by both Mr. Chamberlain and Lord Randolph
Churchill could have prevented the return of the Home Rulers to power,
with a disastrous election to follow. In many letters and in several
speeches the idea of a ‘National party’ recurs. In July the situation
appeared so critical and the prospects of a collapse so imminent that
Lord Hartington himself seems to have regarded the reconstruction of the
Government as inevitable. In that event it was known that the two
democratic leaders stood together and that neither would enter any
Cabinet without the other.
The crisis passed, and with it the agreement. With the best will in the
world Mr. Chamberlain and Lord Randolph Churchill found it very
difficult to work in close accord. Their opinions were nearly alike, but
their political positions were different. They had similar aims, but
divergent antagonisms. The disputes within a party are always fiercer
than those between regular political opponents and their rage burns long
in the breast. Mr. Chamberlain had resigned from Mr. Gladstone’s
Cabinet, and his attitude tended to become mainly one of opposition to
him. All other political leaders, of whatever complexion, stood more or
less in shadow. Lord Randolph, on the other hand, had resigned from Lord
Salisbury’s Cabinet and the differences which most concerned him were
those which separated him from the ‘old gang.’ Hence that strenuous
alliance which was the necessary foundation of the National party was,
from the very outset, subjected to perilous strains. Further
difficulties arose from the topography of the House of Commons. The two
friends sat on opposite sides of the House. No intercourse in the
Chamber was possible without exciting notice and perhaps remark. On the
other hand, the shifting course of the debates made constant consultings
indispensable to harmonious action. Without them misunderstandings and
disagreements were bound to arise. Both men formed strong and immediate
opinions on every small point that arose. Both spoke with dangerous
facility. Both had sharp tongues and some readiness to use them when
provoked. During the long-drawn session of 1887 several petty
disagreements, taking the form of public expression, arose.
One of these incidents occurred during the consideration of the
bankruptcy clauses of the Irish Land Bill, August 1, 1887. The subject
was technical, and the issue mixed. Lord Randolph Churchill had made a
short argumentative speech upon an amendment which had been moved from
the Liberal-Unionist benches. Mr. Chamberlain followed, and took a
totally different line. ‘The noble lord,’ he said, ‘has not told the
Committee how he intends to vote on this amendment.’ Lord Randolph said
he would vote with the Government. ‘I confess,’ said Mr. Chamberlain, ‘I
did not come to that conclusion from his speech. I thought the noble
lord intended to support the amendment, and upon that I was going to
point out to him that the greater part of his speech was against it.’ He
then proceeded to indicate considerable differences with Lord Randolph
on the merits of the question. The House was in Committee, and both men
could therefore speak again. Lord Randolph referred to Mr. Chamberlain’s
opening remarks as ‘a characteristic sneer.’ ‘The right honourable
gentleman evidently does not understand the process of differing from
one’s party and yet supporting it. On this question of the Irish land I
hold certain opinions which I have ventured--I hope, with moderation--to
press very rarely--I think, only three times--on Her Majesty’s
Government. And then, if the Government have not altogether agreed with
these opinions, I do not think it necessary to assume that the
Government are entirely wrong or that I am infallibly right. Well, on
the whole, I adhere to my view of the case. I see nothing inconsistent
in supporting them after the remarks I have made--not in a dictatorial,
but in a pleading manner.’ Mr. Chamberlain’s retort was prompt and
sharp. He denied that he had intended a sneer of any kind. He was
sincerely in doubt as to how Lord Randolph would have voted. ‘I am
rather glad,’ he said, ‘that this incident has occurred, inasmuch as it
has enabled the noble lord to pay me a compliment; and I can assure him
that, coming from him, I very much value it. The noble lord said that I,
at any rate, am not one of those who differ from their party and yet
support it; neither am I one who speaks one way and votes another.’
There the matter dropped so far as the House of Commons was concerned.
Mr. Chamberlain wrote the next day to put matters right. ‘I hope,’ he
said, ‘that in this case it is _ira amantium redintegratio amoris_.’
Lord Randolph was not, however, easily placated. ‘I freely confess,’ he
replied, ‘that I had viewed your action last night with the greatest
possible surprise and some vexation, which I thought proper to express.
When on Clause IV. you took similar action, hostile to my views, I
refrained from any public comment. I am quite at a loss to understand
why you have thought it necessary on two occasions within a week to
express in a most marked manner your entire disagreement with me; but I
am sure you have excellent reasons for all you do.’
This ill-humour lasted only a few days. Within the week the two men were
dining and consulting with each other on personal terms as friendly as
before. Yet some scars seem to have smarted, for there are signs in Lord
Randolph’s correspondence that from this date he began to draw more
closely in matters political towards Lord Hartington, and less freely to
confide in his former ally. One morning soon after this Lord Randolph
and Mr. Chamberlain went for a walk together in Hyde Park. They
discussed the whole position in the frankest way and decided by mutual
consent to work independently and to pursue the objects they sought in
common by separate paths. Thus ended that intimate political
understanding which had united these fiery spirits during the period of
storm in a comradeship which had not been without its effects upon
public affairs. They parted, with many expressions of goodwill, to
follow after a time different roads and to face in the end contrasted
fortunes. Their alliance had been brief. Even in the few years with
which this account is concerned, they will be seen in sharp antagonism.
Yet both were accustomed to preserve, amid the inexhaustible
vicissitudes of politics, pleasant memories of those exciting and
eventful days.
With this separation the prospects of a National party fade again into
that dreamland whence so many have wished to recall them. Few, indeed,
are the politicians who have not cherished these visions at times when
ordinary party machinery is not at their disposal. To build from the
rock a great new party--free alike from vested interests and from holy
formulas, able to deal with national problems on their merits, patient
to respect the precious bequests of the past, strong to drive forward
the wheels of progress--is without doubt a worthy ideal. Alas, that the
degeneracy of man should exclude it for ever from this wicked world!
Late in August Ministers determined to put their powers under the Crimes
Act into force. All the independent men who kept them in office, seem to
have been pained and dismayed by this decision. They feared its effects
upon the majority, and doubted its necessity in Ireland.
‘I am desperately puzzled,’ wrote Lord Randolph to Lord Hartington
(August 20), ‘to know what line to take about this last action of the
Government. I disapprove of it profoundly, but distrust my own
opinion--all the more that I do not know what special information
Ministers have to support their action. There is unquestionably a smack
of vindictiveness about the proclamation, _prima facie_, which the
country will be quick to feel. This, coupled with their singular
treatment of the Land Act, cannot produce a good effect. I am anxious to
know whether, before their final decision, they secured your
concurrence, as in that case I should keep my opinions to myself and
give a silent vote in their support.
‘I have a letter from Chamberlain showing considerable irritation and
impatience at your last communication to him, and great alarm for the
future and his future; but he says he has decided to postpone any action
tending to emphasise any difference of opinion between yourself and him.
This, however, was written apparently before he was aware of the
proclamation of the League and I do not know what effect that may
produce on him.’
Lord Hartington’s measured reply makes plain the debt which the
Conservative Government owed to this grave, calm, slow-moving man:--
_Private._
Bolton Abbey, Skipton: August 21, 1887.
My dear Churchill,--The Government did not obtain or ask for my
concurrence before deciding on the proclamation of the League. They
have throughout on this question seemed disposed to take their own
course and have not consulted me, as they have done on other
subjects. The first I heard of it was from A. Balfour, who told me
some weeks ago that they would probably proclaim before the end of
the Session.
I have had several conversations with Smith, Goschen, and Balfour,
in which I have expressed my serious doubts as to the policy of the
measure, although I could not tell what information they might have
from Ireland. They seem to have felt, and I cannot complain of it,
that this was a measure rather of Executive responsibility than of
policy, and to have rather carefully abstained from asking me to
share their responsibility with them. I also have felt that, not
being able to share it with them, I could not press them very
strongly on a matter in which they had knowledge which I did not
possess.
I sent Balfour a very strong letter of remonstrance from
Chamberlain, telling him at the same time from myself that the
proclamation appeared to be open to every sort of Parliamentary
and political objection, but that I could not tell what information
they might have as to its necessity.
I shall come up on Wednesday night or Thursday, if it is settled to
take the debate on Thursday.
Yours sincerely,
HARTINGTON.
Lord Randolph, though reluctant and disquieted, was willing to acquiesce
in this sober opinion. From FitzGibbon, who wrote to him distressfully,
he did not hide his dissatisfaction:--
‘I am against this proclamation business--as, I imagine, are most people
of common sense and possessing knowledge of Ireland. But I must keep my
opinion to myself and give a silent vote for the Government. It is no
use finding fault with H.M.G. They are stupid, and there is no more to
be said. I think there is nothing extravagant or improbable in the
supposition that the G.O.M. will be Prime Minister before next Easter.’
And he added, with more shrewdness, ‘The Land Bill has been sadly
mismanaged. I fear nothing will kill Home Rule except a second trial by
Gladstone and a second failure.’
But Chamberlain was the gloomiest of all. Nothing can exceed the
despondency of his letters at this time. He refrained, at the earnest
requests of Lord Hartington and Lord Randolph Churchill, from publishing
his alternative plan of Irish Local Government which he believed the
political situation required. He never wavered for an hour as to his own
course. The darker the Unionist horizon, the more uncompromising was his
attitude towards the Gladstonians. But he evidently expected the speedy
downfall of the Government and perhaps the triumph of Repeal. Throughout
the autumn he faced the public with deep anxiety at his heart. ‘Every
day of Coercion,’ wrote this experienced judge of electoral
possibilities (October 2), ‘adds to the Gladstonian strength, and I see
no probability that the strong measures which are disgusting our friends
in England, will effectually dispose of the League in Ireland.... I
cannot see how Mr. G. can be kept out much longer. If he comes back he
will dissolve and most of the Liberal-Unionists will go to the wall. I
do not feel absolutely certain of a single seat, though I think that I
am safe myself. Then he will propose and carry his new plan, whatever
that may be. I expect we shall not like it any better than the old one.’
From these embarrassments he was glad to depart altogether, and the
Government, not perhaps without cunning, suggested an attractive and
important mission to the United States to negotiate a fishery treaty. He
left England late in November, and did not return till March in the New
Year. This interval gave practical effect to his political separation
from Lord Randolph Churchill.
In the meanwhile the session ended and His Majesty’s Government--as
Governments do in a changeable world--ran for the time out of storms
into calmer water. Lord Randolph continued in a twilight mood. He
disliked the Ministry, but did his best so far as he truthfully could to
sustain their policy. In the winter he revolved plans for an Irish
Education Bill, and endeavoured to pick up again the threads he had
been forced to drop incontinently two years before.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Justice
FitzGibbon._
2 Connaught Place, W.: November 21, 1887.
This should be the plan of campaign. Assume that you are a
benevolent despot with unlimited power for carrying out your own
sweet will in respect of a legal solution of the Education
Question:
1. Draw your Bill as per documents forwarded to me.
2. Ascertain from Walsh how far the draft meets with his
concurrence and would secure his support; or what modifications or
extensions would be necessary to that end. And, further, whether,
if you and he are agreed, he and his party would desire that I
should submit the matter to the House of Commons.
I have a better chance, I think, of carrying a Bill than the
Government; for, although I have not the Government command of the
time of the House, I can put very considerable pressure upon them
to give me facilities, and it would be much easier for the Irish to
support a private member than to accept anything whatever at the
hands of a Coercion Government. Moreover, I feel confident of
Liberal-Unionist support and, being very friendly with John Morley,
I feel pretty sure of his benevolent neutrality--probably of his
assistance also.
I will assent to, and assume Parliamentary responsibility for, any
scheme which you and the Archbishop can agree upon. I do not think
there is any difficulty as to the position of a private member
opposing a grant of public money for certain purposes. The transfer
of the expenditure on Model Schools to other purposes is certainly
within the power of a private member.
When you have got your scheme drafted, and feel sure of your
Archbishop, then I will get hold of Beach, and approach the
Government. I cannot move until I get a draft Bill.
For strategic purposes, leave alone Erasmus Smith, Incorporated
Society, Irish Society and London Companies; so that, if I am
troubled by factious opposition from those interests, I may
threaten reprisals by moving to appropriate radically their
resources.
Would you approve of making your Bill very comprehensive and in
three parts?
1. Elementary (see your paragraph, p. 18, of your Report).
2. Intermediate (see following paragraph).
3. University (_i.e._ the creation of a Catholic University out of
the existing Royal University, endowed by the moneys now paid to
the Queen’s Colleges, and as a subsidiary measure a “Stincomalee”
at Belfast).
A large Bill often moves through the House, by its own momentum,
with greater ease than a small one, and the prospect of abolition
of the Model Schools and the godless Colleges would, I think, be a
lure which the Catholic clergy and laity would greedily swallow.
Your great organising mind could easily arrange a Bill of this
dimension, and many circumstances lead me to think that the moment
is very propitious for the launching of such a scheme.
2 Connaught Place, W.: February 6, 1888.
I think the education matter had better wait until you are able to
come over to London and we can thrash it out together in
conversation. Walsh’s absence is decisive against doing anything
yet. Perhaps H.M.G. contemplate moving on their own account. Do
not say anything to them to give them the idea that you and I
contemplate moving.
2 Connaught Place, W.: February 10, 1888.
I hope you will come over soon and arrange to remain several days.
The Session comes in like a lamb. I am reminded of the earlier
Sessions of the 1874 Parliament. I saw H.E. the Lord-Lieutenant
yesterday; he tells me he often sees you, which I am glad of. The
inconceivable apathy of the House of Lords prevented H.E. from
delivering his views on Ireland; I am very sorry he was not able to
speak. I have to give an address on the Irish Question to the
Oxford Union on the 22nd. This must be a grave and moderate
statement of our case. Do, if you have time, send me some good and
novel views and, if possible, some effective references and
quotations.
2 Connaught Place, W.: February 15, 1888.
It was very good of you writing me such a long letter and sending
me so much good information. My thoughts, however, when I was
preparing my speech for the Oxford Union led me away from the line
you suggested and I fear you will think that I gave you a lot of
trouble all for nothing. Balfourism acts like a blister on Ireland
and the Irish, and has the bad and good effects which such
treatment generally produces. A too protracted application of the
blister might do much harm.
Doncaster came in the nick of time. I think we shall probably hold
Deptford. Things look fairly well in Parliament. There are hints
and insinuations from some quarters as to my rejoining the
Government. I am, however, very happy and contented where I am, and
usually able to exert a good deal of influence if I take the
trouble, without being saddled with any inconvenient
responsibilities. I hope you will be running over soon.
[Sidenote: 1888 ÆT. 39]
2 Connaught Place, W.: July 14, 1888.
I wish very much we could meet the Archbishop’s views. It is a
great pity that Irish education should be complicated and
embarrassed by other political questions. Next year, if all is
well, we must make a great effort to get forward. I hope to be in
Ireland the end of August or beginning of September; and if so,
perhaps I may have the great advantage of personally ascertaining
the Archbishop’s opinions.
If I can only attain full agreement with him I do not anticipate
any difficulty with the Cabinet. The present moment is most
propitious for action. Later on we may become again involved in the
chaotic and whirling conflict of Home Rule, and education will be
indefinitely postponed.
From the oratory of the recess and the rumours of reconstruction Lord
Randolph hurried away upon an expedition to which he had for some months
past been looking forward. To travel abroad, particularly in Europe,
always amused him; and he found no better relaxation after a spell of
political activity than in new scenes, fresh men and another atmosphere.
He had always wanted to visit Russia; and to go there now, in
circumstances personally so convenient and when the international
situation was full of interest, was a project to him very attractive.
Like most men whose lot it is to live a part of their lives on the
world’s stage, to mingle with large crowds and to submit themselves to
public comment or applause, he was especially jealous of the privacy of
his holidays; and in order to prevent gossip of various kinds he had
allowed it to be understood that he would spend a part of the winter in
Spain. This device succeeded admirably until he was discovered about to
start for St. Petersburg. Then the newspapers awoke. The Continental
press manufactured rumours with that fertile ingenuity for which it has
always been distinguished, and on these the London newspapers dilated
with preternatural gravity. The _Times_ led the way with a solemn
warning to the Czar not to be misled, as his predecessor had been by a
certain Quaker deputation on the eve of the Crimean War, by any
assurances of British friendship which might be offered by the ‘most
versatile and volatile’ of English politicians. Lesser journals were
less restrained. All the gossip of the previous year was revived. He was
making a political journey. He was charged with a secret mission. He was
an ‘officious’ ambassador from Lord Salisbury. He was gathering
materials for a campaign against the Government. If he were neither for
nor against the Government, why should he be there at all? Why, except
for grave reasons of State, should a man not physically robust exchange
Spain for Russia in December? It was understood Lord Randolph was to
seek health and warmth in the South; but here, in midwinter, he was
‘deserting the Guadalquivir for the Neva, and the sun of Seville for the
snows of St. Petersburg.’ That he was ‘accompanied by his wife’ was
apparently a matter of additional significance. The explanation that he
was going to Russia as a tourist because he wanted to see Russia and the
Russian Court was offered by his friends. But no one was so simple as to
believe that; and at length an official _communiqué_ was published from
the Foreign Office: ‘Lord Randolph Churchill has no mission from the
Government to M. de Giers. His presence in St. Petersburg is wholly
without the knowledge of the Foreign Office and he has no official
status’; and then followed a sentence which seemed to bear the marks of
a certain sharply pointed pen--‘His lordship alone knows why he gave up
a contemplated Spanish tour for a visit to northern latitudes.’ After
this the lower Ministerial press struck a different note. The Czar would
refuse to see a vulgar globe-trotter. There was no person whom the
Russians more heartily despised than the member for Paddington--‘a
boastful, rattling, noisy egotist with no principle and, apparently,
with no conception of duty or honour.’
Meanwhile the object of this merry chatter was enjoying himself. When
the word has gone forth in Russia that a visitor is to be well received,
he need not trouble himself about details. Everything moves _sur les
roulettes_; railway officials and Custom House officers are transformed
into attentive servants--often a considerable transformation; carriages
are reserved in every train; and luggage passes untouched through every
cordon. Lord Randolph arrived expeditiously at St. Petersburg, assailed
by newspaper correspondents--‘mischievous people’ whom he refused to see
(after all, they must live, like everybody else)--and met by his friends
from the Embassy. The next day he saw M. de Giers; and the day after the
Czar, without waiting for the usual New Year’s Day reception, summoned
him to Gatschina. Lord Randolph has left a carefully written account of
his conversation with this great personage, which I have but slightly
abbreviated. After driving in bright sun and bitter cold to the Winter
Palace, and long delays, relieved by cups of tea, in interminable
corridors adorned by wonderfully dressed servants with _panaches_ of red
and orange ostrich feathers, he was conducted to the Emperor’s
apartment. The Czar was sitting at a large writing-table in a small
_cabinet d’affaires_, and told his visitor to seat himself on a low
yellow banquette on the opposite side of the table. After cigarettes had
been produced and lighted, the conversation began in French, ‘which,’
writes Lord Randolph, ‘was a great disappointment to me, for he can
speak English perfectly; and sometimes he talked rather low and in his
beard, so that I, who do not hear very well, missed some of his
remarks.’
Lord Randolph’s account proceeds:--
‘After some general observations as to the time when he was in England
last and when I was presented to him, and inquiries as to my stay in
Russia and intentions of going to Moscow, His Majesty said: “Well, I
hope you have been long enough in St. Petersburg to find out that we are
not so terribly warlike as we are made out to be.” I replied that I did
not think that anyone in England of information had the smallest doubts
of the strong desire of His Majesty for peace and of the reluctance of
the Russian Government to go to war. This had been abundantly shown by
several incidents in the course of the last two years. The Czar remarked
that the English journals were very bitter against Russia and
attributed all sorts of malignant intentions to her. He added that he
had been told that some of them were subsidised by Monsieur de Bismarck
and excited against Russia by him. I told him that I could not think
there was any foundation for the last statement, though I had heard a
story of the * * * * having been paid by Monsieur de Bismarck to insert
some months ago some startling announcement as to the relations between
Germany and France; but that it was said that one of the proprietors had
lost a large sum of money owing to the fall in securities which followed
that announcement. Speaking generally on the question of English
journals, I expressed a hope that His Majesty would not pay much
attention to the remarks of English newspapers; that no public man in
England ever cared a rap for anything they said; that they were quite
irresponsible, and on foreign affairs as a rule very ill-informed. I
particularly urged the non-importance of the London press as any guide
to English public opinion, which was far better expressed and followed
by the provincial press and the leading daily journals of our large
towns. His Majesty seemed struck by this and said that some one had told
him the same thing once before.
‘After saying that he had a great wish to go to England for the purpose
of ascertaining the drift of English policy, he asked after Mr.
Gladstone and whether there was any chance of his returning to office. I
replied that Mr. Gladstone was very old and aged, that there seemed to
be no reason why the present Parliament should not last for three or
four years, and that it was hardly conceivable that after that period
Mr. Gladstone would be physically capable of official duty, even if
other circumstances were favourable. This latter contingency was
extremely remote, as in my opinion the combination of parties against
him was too strong to be resisted, and would probably keep the
Opposition out of office for years. In a word, that no rational
politician would count on Mr. Gladstone’s return to office as a
practical factor in politics. His Majesty appearing to be under the
impression that the breach between Mr. Gladstone and the party of Lord
Hartington was not a very irreparable one, and might be made up, I told
His Majesty that at the commencement that was so, but the course of
events during this year had hopelessly embittered the quarrel; and that
Lord Hartington had taken up, with the assent of his followers, a very
strong position of opposition in general to Mr. Gladstone, mainly on
account of their conviction that Mr. Gladstone’s internal policy was
anarchical. His Majesty asked after several other public men--Lord
Granville (_un homme charmant_), Lord Derby, Mr. Goschen.
‘His Majesty then went on to say that he was anxious to have visited
England in order to have a full explanation with Lord Salisbury
”_jusqu’à présent l’ennemi acharné de la Russie_.” I reminded His
Majesty that at the time of the Conference of Constantinople Lord
Salisbury had by no means been such an enemy, but that at that time he
probably had great sympathy for Russia; that after that events had
taken an unfortunate turn, and that Lord Beaconsfield’s influence had
prevailed, and English policy been directed into an anti-Russian groove;
but I also reminded His Majesty that Lord Salisbury had in August last
made a speech at the Mansion House--which, coming from him, was of great
significance--which was marked by a tone of perfect friendship for
Russia and a strong belief in the possibility of good relations between
the two countries.
‘His Majesty did not disagree to all this, and said he hoped it was so,
as he must have an understanding (or settlement) with England _une jois
pour toutes_. These words he repeated more than once in the
conversation. I said the great difficulty between us had been the
Central Asian Question. He said it ought not to be a difficulty any
longer, that the Russians wanted no more, that they had more than they
could manage; but that the policy of the neutral zone had altogether
broken down and proved to be nonsense; that the two Powers must be
_limitrophes_, that we were making a great mistake in still pursuing the
neutral-zone policy by insisting on the independence of Afghanistan,
which we ought to take and govern ourselves. To this I replied, in the
first place, that I had never understood that Afghan territories were
included in any neutral zone; that, on the contrary, I thought it had
always been accorded that Afghanistan was outside Russian influence and
must be solely under British influence. To this His Majesty said
nothing. I went on to say that it was vital to us in India to exclude
all foreign influence from Afghanistan, and to retain its government
under our sole guidance; that we could not tolerate the smallest
departure from this principle, and I said that if His Majesty thought we
were too strong and unyielding on this matter he had only to recollect
the essential nature of the Indian Government--250,000 whites ruling 250
million _indigènes_; that a Government of that kind rested almost
entirely on its _morale_ and prestige; and that _la moindre attente_
against its prestige, if not promptly and effectively dealt with, might
become the gravest wound; that any attempt to exercise influence other
than British in Afghanistan would be such an _attente_. I went on to say
that our position was not perhaps quite logical; for that, holding such
opinions, we ought to take Afghanistan. This, I said, we could not do,
as public opinion and the Parliament would be invincibly opposed to any
such large extension of our Indian Empire, except under circumstances of
the most critical and forcible character; that that was our
position--that while we could allow no interference by others we would
not assume the responsibility of direct government by ourselves; and
that it seemed to me that a frank acceptance of that position would be
essential to any understanding between the two countries. His Majesty
having commented generally on this, and having contrasted our position
with his own as regarded Khiva and Bokhara--which, he averred, were now
most tranquil and prosperous, instead of utterly disordered as they used
to be--went on to speak of the European position as it affected the two
countries.
‘“With regard to the Black Sea and the Dardanelles, if you desire peace
and friendship with Russia, you must not mix yourselves up there against
us. We will never suffer,” His Majesty said, with some slight approach
to excitement, “any other Power to hold the Dardanelles except the Turks
or ourselves; and if the Turks ultimately go out, it is by Russians that
they will be succeeded.”
‘I replied that I had always understood that that was the Russian view
and that I would offer no criticism or comment on it, as it appeared to
me to be too speculative for practical purposes; that as regarded
present European difficulties Constantinople was in no way _en jeu_; and
that I did not think that questions concerning its ultimate fate ought
to disturb relations between England and Russia.
‘With respect to Bulgaria I expressed my own strong opinion that England
had no direct or important interests in that part of Europe and that it
could be no object to us to oppose the exercise of what I admitted was
legitimate Russian influence there; that, if we had any interests, they
were purely platonic, on behalf of liberty generally, and springing from
a general anxiety that treaties should be maintained; beyond that they
did not go. I added that in my opinion the policy of the Crimean War,
which was also adopted in ‘76-‘78 by England, had come to an end with
the election of 1880 and was not likely to be renewed or resumed; that
the English people were not likely to fight for the Turks, nor for the
Bulgarians; and that they were not likely to associate themselves with
Austria; that the policy which the English people would prefer about
that part of Europe was complete neutrality and non-intervention. I said
more than once that I knew nothing whatever of the Government policy;
that I had no connection with the Government, direct or indirect; that I
only spoke as one who had had much opportunity of learning the
disposition of Parliament and the tendency of opinion among the people.
‘His Majesty asked me if the views I had expressed were shared by Lord
Hartington. I replied that it was almost impossible to say accurately
what Lord Hartington’s views were, as he was a man of remarkable
reserve, but His Majesty would recollect that from 1880 to 1885, when
the English Government pursued in Europe a policy which was certainly
one of friendship and loyalty to Russia and of undisguised indifference
as to the fate of the Turk, Lord Hartington was, after Mr. Gladstone,
the leading man in that Government, and that I had no reason to suppose
that he had in any way receded from the foreign policy he then
contributed to give effect to. His Majesty, speaking about Egypt, said
that Russia had no desire to interfere with us there in any way. On the
contrary, they had no interests in that country. He added that he did
not see why England and France should not be perfectly good friends on
all Egyptian matters. To this I replied that understandings with France
appeared to be impossible; that not only did Governments succeed each
other there with hopeless rapidity, but that the very form of Government
in France was ephemeral. To this His Majesty quite assented, and said:
“Well, if you like, you have a great task before you on your return to
England--to improve the relations between Russia and England.” I replied
that for some time past I had worked in that direction and should
continue to do so, although in certain quarters, Parliamentary and
otherwise, my views had not hitherto been regarded with favour; but that
I had formed a strong opinion that a thorough understanding between
England and Russia was possible and would be of the greatest advantage
to both. I added that I had said nothing, either to His Majesty or to M.
de Giers, which I had not very often said to Lord Salisbury while I was
his colleague.
‘His Majesty, who throughout the interview had been wonderfully kind,
quiet and simple, talking evidently with unreserve and allowing me to do
the same without displeasure, then brought to a close a conversation
which had lasted for about forty-five minutes.’
The next day Lord and Lady Randolph had intended to go to Moscow; but an
invitation, equal to a command, to a party at Gatschina, delayed them.
‘It was,’ wrote Lord Randolph, ‘certainly a very pretty and interesting
sight. The Emperor and the Empress were very kind to us, and I sat at
supper, at the Empress’s table, between the Grand Duchess Elizabeth
(daughter of the Duke of Hesse and very beautiful) and the Grand Duchess
Catharine. I made the acquaintance of some interesting people, _entre
autres_ of General Ignatieff. M. de Giers sat by me during most of the
play. There was first a French play, then a quartette from _Rigoletto_,
then the duo from _The Huguenots_, then a Russian play (quite
unintelligible), and then another French play. The programme was too
long. Between the pieces the Emperor and Empress walked about and spoke
to people, and there was a large buffet where everyone went and lapped.
The whole thing was splendidly done.’
The marked consideration shown to the English visitor increased the
gossip--good-humoured and spiteful alike--at home; and in the Russian
capital, where everyone takes his cue from the Czar, Lord and Lady
Randolph for some days almost engrossed the attention of Society and the
press. Reporters and telegram agents hovered gloomily round the hotel
from morn till dusk. Skating parties, in which Lady Randolph much
distinguished herself, and visits to important people occupied the days,
and banquets and receptions the nights. Long tours through peerless
galleries and museums, where Lord Randolph recognised with regret not a
few alienated Blenheim treasures; a flying visit to Moscow; the
‘Blessing of the Waters’ on the feast of the Epiphany, ‘when the Emperor
had to stand bareheaded in the cold for a good long time’; a rout of 800
persons given in his honour by Lady Morier at the British Embassy, were
among the incidents of a brilliant fortnight. ‘I am sure in England,’
Lord Randolph wrote to his mother, ‘it would bore me dreadfully to go
to all these dinners and parties and things, but here it amuses me. I
wonder why it is.... You must not believe a word the newspapers say. I
was most careful and guarded in all my communications and confined
myself to general beaming upon everyone. Lord S. may or may not be
angry, but I am certain that my going to Russia has had a good effect
and can at any rate do no harm.’
He lingered a little on the homeward journey both in Berlin and Paris.
_To his Mother._
British Embassy, Berlin.
Here we are very comfortable. I never travelled with so much
circumstance before. The Malets are most kind and anxious to make
everything very pleasant. On Monday night the opera, where was
represented all Berlin Society _en grande tenue_; the old Emperor
looking very brisk. Yesterday the picture gallery, in which I
observed three Blenheim pictures--the Fornarina by Raphael (now
called a Sebastian del Piombo), the Andromeda of Rubens and the
great Bacchanalia picture by Rubens.... To-night Malet has an
immense feast--thirty-six persons. I went this morning to Potsdam
to write my name on Prince William, who called on us yesterday and
saw Jennie while I was out. Then luncheon with Herbert
Bismarck--very pleasant--no one else but Herr von Pothenberg,
Prince Bismarck’s _chef de cabinet_. We talked very freely for a
long time, and drank a great deal of beer, champagne, claret,
sherry and brandy! H.B. is delightful, so frank and honest.... I
have not a doubt that the Chancellor kept away purposely. He is a
_grincheux_ old creature, and knows quite well that I will use all
my influence, as I have done, to prevent Lord S. from being towed
in his wake.... Some correspondents have been to see me, but I have
been very snubby to them.
And so back to England, pursued by rumours with which the _Times_
thought it worth while to fill three columns of its foreign telegrams.
CHAPTER XX
CROSS CURRENTS
‘Surely there is no better way to stop the rising of sects and
schisms than to reform abuses; to compound the smaller differences;
to proceed mildly, and not with sanguinary persecutions; and rather
to take off the principal authors, by winning and advancing them,
than to enrage by violence and bitterness.’--BACON.
Sixteen months had passed, after Lord Randolph Churchill resigned,
before he became involved in a serious and open difference with the
Conservative Government. That he was separated from them by sentiment
and conviction, not only upon various considerable questions of method,
but upon the general character and temper of their policy, has been
abundantly explained. But his misgivings were concealed from the public
by his consistent defence of the Union, by an unaffected partisanship
and by the lively attacks which he made upon the Opposition. It is true
that the criticisms upon naval and military administration which had
been a necessary feature of his crusade of economy had naturally won him
little favour in Ministerial circles, and his open independence of the
official leaders could not be welcomed by his party. But the details of
departmental administration, though of immense practical importance, do
not usually raise, and ought scarcely ever to raise, questions of
confidence and loyalty. The efficient conduct of the services and the
doctrines of public thrift are--formally, at least--included in the
principles of both great political organisations. Except at rare
intervals, they lie apart from the ordinary scope of Parliamentary
conflict; and their discussion should never seriously divide political
associates. But Ireland opened chasms of a very different kind.
When Sir Michael Hicks-Beach recovered his eyesight, Lord Salisbury was
anxious for him to rejoin the Government and offered him--no other post
being vacant--the Presidency of the Board of Trade. Beach, for whom
office had few attractions, who was on many questions in full sympathy
with Lord Randolph, and who was always bound to him by firm friendship,
was in no hurry to accept. He proposed to Lord Randolph, as they walked
down one day to the House together, that he should decline Lord
Salisbury’s offer and that they should both sit together and work
together for the rest of the Parliament. Lord Randolph would not,
however, countenance this generous attempt to relieve the isolation of
his position. He urged Sir Michael to join the Government. ‘They need
you,’ he said, ‘and besides, I shall like to feel I have one friend
there’ (February 1888).
During the whole of 1887 Lord Randolph had regularly supported his late
colleagues. Any opinions he had expressed on the Budget and the Land
Bill had been of a friendly nature and in the interests of those
measures. He had joined in the debates of the House with the same tone
and intention as he would have spoken in the Cabinet. No divergence of
principle on a dominant issue had yet occurred. The Government had
acted--however uninspiringly--in conformity with the main lines of the
policy declared at the General Election. It was not until the year 1888
that the question of Irish Local Government and the Suakin operations
provoked a definite and notorious disagreement. On both these matters
Lord Randolph Churchill had made public declarations of the plainest
character in Opposition or as Leader of the House of Commons, and to
those pledges he adhered with a truly Quixotic disregard of his personal
interests.
‘On this question of Local Government,’ Lord Randolph had stated in
August 1886, speaking in the House of Commons in the name of the
Conservative party, and with the full authority of the Cabinet as a
whole, of the Prime Minister, of the Chief Secretary of the day, and of
the leaders of the Liberal Unionists--‘the great sign-posts of our
policy are equality, similarity and, if I may use such a word,
simultaneity, as far as is practicable, in the development of a
genuinely popular system of Local Government in the four countries which
form the United Kingdom.’ The months had slipped away. A year and a half
were gone. When Lord Randolph left the Government their good resolutions
in respect of Ireland faded. Their pledges were long to remain
unredeemed. The arguments appropriate to such occasions were employed:
the circumstances had changed; the disaffection of the people was
patent; the Irish were unfitted by character and history for popular
institutions.
It was a Wednesday afternoon (April 25), and under the old rules of
procedure the House rose at half-past five. A Nationalist member had
moved the second reading of an Irish County Government Bill, roughly
designed to merge boards of guardians, lunatic asylum boards and town
commissioners in smaller towns into county councils. To this a reasoned
amendment was moved, with the concurrence of the Government, by a
private member from the Unionist benches, setting forth the inexpediency
at that time of introducing any large constitutional change in Ireland.
Mr. Gladstone spoke in support of the Bill, and Mr. Balfour made an airy
reply, instancing the improper conduct of Irish local bodies and
declaring that that country was not fit for any extension of Local
Government. Something in his easy manner, thus dismissing
unceremoniously--almost, as it seemed, unconsciously--solemn pledges
elaborately given to the electorate at a time of choice, and renewed in
Parliament after the decision, seems to have stirred Lord Randolph’s
blood. He got up immediately the Chief Secretary finished. Speaking with
much restraint, but with sufficient sharpness of manner to prevent him
referring to his old comrade as a ‘right honourable friend,’ he reminded
the Government and the swiftly-offended party of the declarations by
which they were bound, and the authority upon which those declarations
had been made.
‘All the circumstances,’ he said, ‘upon which the Chief Secretary has
enlarged this afternoon, showing the defects which exist in the working
of popular institutions in Ireland and the dangers that might be
anticipated from their extension, were before the Government of Lord
Salisbury at the time when they had to take a decision--a most momentous
decision--upon this question.... The idea of the Government at that time
was that a certain just extension, within reasonable limits, of Local
Government in Ireland was to be looked upon as a remedy for the great
evils which have been dwelt upon by the Chief Secretary.... I recollect
that the pledges given by the Unionist party were large and liberal,
were distinct and full, and that there was no reservation in those
pledges with respect to all the defects pointed out this afternoon in
the Irish character and in respect of Irish unfitness for Local
Government--nothing of the kind. We pledged ourselves that we would at
the very earliest opportunity extend to Ireland the same amount of Local
Government which we might give to England and Scotland. I venture to
say--and I do not care how much I am contradicted, or what the
consequences may be--that that was the foundation of the Unionist party;
and, more, that that is the only platform on which you can resist
Repeal. If you are going to the English people, relying merely on the
strength of your Executive power--if you are going to preach that the
Irish must for an indefinite time be looked upon as an inferior
community--unfit for the privileges which the English people
enjoy--then I tell you that you may retain that position for a time,
but only for a time, and that the time will probably be a short one....
The words I used in representing the Government at that table were that
in approaching this momentous question of Local Government we should do
so with similarity, equality and simultaneity. The time has gone by
altogether for me to bear, and I will be content no longer to bear,
solely the responsibility of those words; and I do not think that there
would be a _bonâ fide_ carrying-out of the policy I then announced if
Ireland is not to have a measure of Local Government, until the state of
order in that country is satisfactory to the Executive Government.’
Only a short time remained before the sitting must end. Chamberlain rose
at once from the Front Opposition Bench and in a speech of four minutes
said that he should vote with the Government on the understanding that
measures of local reform for Ireland were simply delayed by pressure of
business. Before the Leader of the House could add anything to the
debate Mr. Parnell moved the Closure--the Irish desiring to obtain the
division usual on such private members’ Bills--and the incident ended.
But it left an estrangement behind.
The second quarrel did not arise till eight months later. In November
1888 the chronic skirmishing and raiding around Suakin developed into a
regular blockade of that place, and the squalid, worthless, pestilential
Red Sea port became again a bone of strife between brave men in the
desert and wise men in the Senate. I do not need to remind the reader
of the vehement attacks which Lord Randolph Churchill had made upon Mr.
Gladstone’s Egyptian policy, or of the support and approval which those
attacks had received from the Conservative party and the Conservative
press. No part of those strictures had been more effective or more
violent than that which referred to the operations around Suakin. They
had not, as many people on both sides of politics had believed and
freely stated, been impelled mainly by a factious desire to discredit
and embarrass Mr. Gladstone’s Administration. That was, no doubt, an
obvious contributory motive; but behind it lay a profound detestation of
the purposeless bloodshed with which Soudan history, and especially
Suakin history, had since 1883 been stained. ‘I do not hesitate to say,’
he declared in 1888, ‘that I hate the Soudan. The idea to me of risking
the life of a single British soldier in that part of the world is
inexpressibly repugnant.’ Whatever he might have thought at another
time, when the finances of Egypt were restored and the Dervish fires had
burnt low, of a methodical and scientific reconquest of the country, he
was sincerely opposed in 1888, as in Mr. Gladstone’s day, to the policy
known as ‘kill and retire.’ It seemed to him the highest unwisdom,
whether from a political or military point of view, to despatch a single
British battalion, swamped among four thousand Egyptian soldiers, with
no other object, even if successful, than to fight a battle, decimate
the hostile tribesmen and return. He recalled the small beginnings and
the insufficient forces out of which great and far-reaching events in
Zululand and in the Transvaal had sprung. And he did not lack, as was
afterwards proved, the support of high authorities for his opinion. ‘I
can assure you,’ telegraphed Lord Cromer (then Sir Evelyn Baring) to
Lord Salisbury on December 6, ‘that, unless great care is taken, the
Government may be dragged into another big Soudan business almost before
they are aware of it’; and, again, ‘all sorts of arguments will probably
be put forward about tranquillising the Soudan once and for all. I
believe that these arguments are of very little value and that for the
present the Soudan cannot be tranquillised without the re-occupation of
Khartoum, which would require a large force.’[66]
On these subjects and in this tenor Lord Randolph delivered three
speeches in the House of Commons, which were, as may be easily imagined,
met with unstinted resentment by his party. He spoke first on December
1, a general debate on the vote for embassies and foreign missions
having been raised by Mr. Morley; and three days later he moved the
adjournment of the House. This step created extravagant surprise and
anger. He rose, as the newspapers took care to point out, to make his
motion absolutely alone on the Government side of the House. He was
supported by the whole Opposition. He spoke--as, indeed, throughout the
Parliament of 1886--with gravity and moderation, and made a quiet,
earnest appeal to the House to prevent the renewal of the Soudan
warfare. His motion for the adjournment was unexpected, and the
Government were for some time, during the debate that followed, in a
minority. At a quarter-past six, however, when the division was taken,
they secured a majority of forty-two, although a half-dozen
Conservatives--among whom Mr. Hanbury was probably the best-known--voted
against them.
Loud and long was the expression of Ministerial wrath. ‘In order to
discredit his views,’ wrote Jennings, in his preface to Lord Randolph
Churchill’s speeches, ‘it was necessary to bring into play those
formidable weapons of misrepresentation which can never be used with
greater effect than when they are directed by persons who have the
entire machinery of a great party at their command.’ He was accused
forthwith of having laid a plot with the Opposition to destroy the
Government on a snap division; and the ‘treachery’ and ‘ingratitude’ of
such conduct were for some days a popular and fertile theme. He was even
forced to defend himself in public from such imputations. His reply was
explicit: ‘(1) If I had desired,’ he wrote to an inquiring person, ‘to
snatch a surprise division on the motion for the adjournment of the
House, which I made on Tuesday last with regard to Suakin, I should not
have occupied fifty minutes of the time of the House with my own speech.
(2) If I had desired by the aid of the Opposition to defeat the
Government, I should not have selected an evening when the supporters of
the Government, under the pressure of a five-line whip, were likely to
be present in great numbers in order to take part in a division on an
Irish vote which had been arranged to come off before the dinner-hour.
(3) The fact of the matter is that the case against the Suakin
expedition is so strong, and the line taken with respect to similar
expeditions by the Tories when they were in Opposition was so marked,
that I felt very confident of receiving appreciable support from the
ranks of the Ministerialists. For that reason I welcomed every
circumstance which was likely to bring together a full House.’
It is not suggested that Lord Randolph Churchill was unwilling to defeat
the Government by his motion. Its object was to prevent the proposed
action in the Soudan. That object could only have been attained by an
adverse vote in the House of Commons. Whether such a vote would have
involved the resignation of Ministers is uncertain. The pretence that a
simple motion for adjournment, necessarily unaccompanied by any
substantive censure of policy, should directly involve a change of
Government is a modern abuse of Parliamentary practice. But even had the
fate of the Government turned on the division--as, of course, they
declared it would--conscientious conviction in an urgent matter of life
and death would have fully justified Lord Randolph in the course he
took. His action was reasonable, consistent and fair. Whether he was
right on the merits of the question or as to its importance in relation
to the general political situation, must be judged by others.
The Government profited both by the counsels which were offered them and
by the result of their final decision. The British force despatched to
Suakin was reinforced. The scope of the warfare was rigidly confined.
Nothing that might prove extensive or entangling was permitted and, on
the other hand, the limited operation was in itself completely
successful. On December 21 an engagement was fought outside Suakin. The
Dervishes were routed with heavy slaughter and driven away into the
desert, whence--as it luckily happened--they did not subsequently choose
to return in numbers sufficient to cause anxiety to the garrison or
seriously disturb the peace of the Red Sea Littoral.
The speeches of Lord Randolph Churchill in Parliament during the years
from 1887 to 1890 were the best in manner and command he ever made. He
stood alone, surrounded by enemies who were once his supporters, and
faced by opponents whose plaudits he did not desire; but if he had still
been Leader of the House he could not have been more at his ease and
more sure of himself. His style was serious enough to suit the dullest;
and yet point after point was made with a clearness and rhetorical force
to which the dullest could not be insensible. His voice penetrated
everywhere without apparent effort. Every tone was full of meaning. He
was sparing of gesture and cared little for oratorical ornament. He was
always heard with profound attention by the House, with obvious anxiety
by the Government, and usually in silence by the Conservative party.
The influence which he exerted upon the course of affairs outside the
ordinary divisions of party was palpable and noteworthy. With the full
consent of the Government he moved (February 16, 1888) the Address to
the Crown, which being assented to unanimously by the House, called into
being the Royal Commission upon the alleged corruption and improprieties
of the Metropolitan Board of Works. When a member of Parliament had been
guilty of a libel upon the Speaker, it was Lord Randolph Churchill who
with formidable authority of manner, and complete mastery of
Parliamentary practice, persuaded, and indeed compelled, the House to
resolve his suspension for an entire month (July 20, 1888). One hot
summer afternoon (June 27, 1888) he appeared unexpectedly in his place
and practically laughed the Channel Tunnel Bill--supported though it was
by Mr. Gladstone and many prominent Tories--out of the House of Commons.
Sir Edward Watkin, the promoter, had explained a device by which a
Minister of State by touching a button could in an instant blow up the
entrance to the tunnel. ‘Imagine,’ exclaimed Lord Randolph, drawing an
airy finger along the Treasury bench--‘Imagine a Cabinet Council sitting
in the War Office around the button. Fancy the present Cabinet gathered
together to decide who should touch the button and when it should be
touched.’ He had intended to add, ‘Fancy the right honourable member for
Westminster (Mr. W. H. Smith) rising at length in his place with the
words “I move that the button be now touched,”’ but the laughter from
all parties which this diverting picture had already excited led him to
forget the climax he had contemplated. The Bill was rejected by 307 to
165. Few private members, divorced alike from office and from the
official Opposition, have in modern times been able by their unaided
personal force so powerfully to sway the opinion of Parliament.
And now must be related an incident which, though not in itself of
historical importance, created a great hubbub at the time and involved
an open political dispute and severance between Lord Randolph Churchill
and Mr. Chamberlain. Although Lord Randolph was comfortably settled in
Paddington and enjoyed the luxury of a safe seat, he always hankered
after Birmingham. Contact with a democratic electorate in a centre of
active political thought was always personally very alluring to him; and
it is singular that he never achieved his ambition of representing a
popular constituency. But if these were general predilections,
Birmingham offered attractions of its own. His association with the
Birmingham Tories during the fighting days of 1884 and 1885 had formed
ties of mutual regard and comradeship which proved strong enough--in the
case of those who had come into personal touch with him, at any rate--to
stand all the strains of the lean and melancholy years that followed. No
amount of party disapprobation, of pressure from headquarters, of
newspaper abuse, affected the faithfulness of those with whom he had
fought side by side. They scorned every suggestion that he was
‘disloyal’ to the party. They held by him through thick and thin. In
spite of the frowns of party leaders, and sometimes of real divergences
of opinion, the controlling forces in the Midland Conservative Club were
always unswerving in his support; and the last time he ever appeared on
a public platform was in the Birmingham Town Hall.
There were, moreover, obvious reasons why, in the early part of 1889,
Lord Randolph should have wished to be sustained by the vote of a great
constituency. He was out of joint with his party. He was almost alone in
the House of Commons. All the orthodox and official forces in the
Conservative party were hostile to him. He had taken an independent
course on various important questions, and that course had twice been
directly opposed to Lord Salisbury’s Government. There was asserted to
be a definite compact between the local Conservative leaders in
Birmingham and the Liberal Unionists that, in the event of a vacancy in
the Central Division, Lord Randolph Churchill was to be invited by both
wings of the Unionist party to stand. This agreement was personal to
Lord Randolph and particular to Birmingham, and quite independent of any
general arrangement respecting Conservative and Liberal-Unionist seats;
and a clear understanding to this effect existed between Lord Randolph
and Mr. Chamberlain. There was, therefore, no doubt that if a vacancy
occurred Lord Randolph had a right to stand and to look for the support
of both sections of the party. If he did not stand himself, then only
the nomination of a candidate would rest properly with the Liberal
Unionists. It was admitted that in such a contest he would be victorious
by a majority of two or three thousand votes; and his friends believed,
almost without exception, that such a victory, involving as it did a
popular endorsement of all that he had done since he left the Cabinet,
must enormously raise his prestige in Parliament and the country.
All through the year 1888 Mr. Bright lay desperately ill. At the end of
May Mr. Chamberlain, who had just returned from his American trip, and
who was still on most friendly terms with Lord Randolph, wrote to tell
him that he feared the end was approaching, to ask what Lord Randolph
would do, and to promise him support should he decide to stand. Lord
Randolph replied (May 30, 1888): ‘I hope Mr. Bright will get better. The
news this morning is more favourable. In the event of a vacancy
occurring, I should not leave Paddington unless it was the strong and
unanimous wish of the Tories and of your party combined, and unless they
were of opinion that there was real danger of the seat being lost if I
did not stand. I do not imagine, however, that these two conditions are
likely to arise. The seat is a Liberal-Unionist seat and that party has
a clear right to put forward one of their own number, and to receive a
full measure of Tory support.’ These communications were on both sides
informal. They did not in any way affect the compact. They were merely
assurances as to what the writers would do personally under the compact
as it existed, if the issue were raised at that time. The issue was not
raised. Mr. Bright rallied and survived almost for another year. When he
died, on March 27, 1889, quite a different situation had been created.
Lord Randolph Churchill ardently desired to stand. Mr. Chamberlain was
vehement to prevent him. The dispute that followed is not in its essence
difficult to understand. A definite agreement exists between two
friends. They agree as friends to interpret it in a particular manner.
They cease to be friends as regards politics. They wish to interpret it
in another manner; and they quote one another’s friendly assurances as
if they were an integral part of the agreement itself. Neither is
legally bound; both are morally embarrassed. In the present case the
complexity of the dispute was aggravated by all sorts of conflicting
statements and promises made at different times by the local leaders.
Into these it is not necessary to enter.
[Sidenote: 1889 ÆT. 40]
Lord Randolph Churchill’s right to stand was, of course, incontestable.
Compact or no compact, his claim upon the Liberal-Unionist vote was
strong. He had polled 4,216 Conservative votes against Mr. Bright
himself in that very constituency. He had only been defeated by 773. The
Conservative organisation was unanimous in his favour. He was ‘idolised’
(this is the word that is used most frequently in contemporary accounts)
by the rank and file. They outnumbered by three or four to one the
Liberal Unionists in the division. Their votes had contributed
four-fifths of the poll of all the Liberal-Unionist members in the city.
Lord Randolph had himself been the principal agent by which the return
of these gentlemen had been secured. On the day after the vacancy was
declared the _Birmingham Daily Post_, the official Liberal-Unionist
organ, published an article supporting his candidature and giving the
Conservatives reason to believe that it would be accepted by both
parties; nor did Mr. Chamberlain himself deny that if Lord Randolph came
forward it would be his duty to support him. The only question was:
Should he come forward?
No sooner was Mr. Bright dead than the Birmingham Conservatives appealed
to Lord Randolph. All his friends and well-wishers pressed him to stand.
Mr. Jennings was insistent. FitzGibbon urged him to ‘chuck another big
town’ at the ‘old gang.’ ‘It would be like the Paris elections to
Boulanger,’ said others. Colonel North, with the blunt decision of a
business man, telegraphed to him from Santiago: ‘Be sure contest
Birmingham.’ Faithful supporters offered to place their seats at his
disposal in case of accidents. Lord Randolph does not seem to have
anticipated any opposition from Mr. Chamberlain; yet it should have been
sufficiently evident that Mr. Chamberlain’s interests and inclinations
were not likely to be served by the establishment of ‘Two kings in
Brentford.’ So long as they were allies working in concert, it might
be--perhaps it must be--endured. Now that they were separated and
pursuing independent, and even divergent, courses the idea was
intolerable. No difficulty or dispute was, however, apprehended. On
April 2, when the writ was moved, Lord Randolph Churchill had every
reason to suppose that complete unanimity prevailed. A deputation of
Birmingham Tories waited on him at the House of Commons on that day with
a hearty invitation. It seemed that his election was secured, and that a
giant majority was certain.
And here I leave the account to Mr. Jennings:--
_Mr. Jennings’s Account of the Birmingham Affair._
Tuesday, April 2, 1889.
On my going to the House I met R. C. in the lobby. He drew me
aside, and whispered that the deputation would be here presently.
Would I meet them in the outer lobby, bring them inside, and talk
to them till he came back? He was just going to see Hicks-Beach a
few moments. He was turning away, but came back and said: ‘May I
ask you to do me another favour? Go and draw up a draft farewell
address to the electors of South Paddington and an address to the
electors of Birmingham.’ ‘When do you want them?’ ‘This afternoon.’
he said. After a few more words he went away.
I made arrangements with Mr. Mattinson (M.P. for a Liverpool
division) to meet the deputation while I went into the library to
write out the addresses. I had finished the one for South
Paddington and was half-way through the other when Mattinson came
to me and told me the deputation were outside. I went to them, and
had a little chat. They were radiant, having no reason whatever to
anticipate a refusal. Mr. Rowlands told me R. C. was sure of a
majority of between 2,000 and 3,000. After a talk I went back to
finish the address, but met E. Beckett in one of the corridors. He
said; ‘Have you heard what he has done?’ ‘No.’ ‘He has left it to
Hartington and Chamberlain to decide what he will do.’ I was
completely bewildered, and went into the smoking-room to look for
R. C. Directly he saw me he came up and led me out into the
corridor. There we walked up and down a long time, talking about
it. He said he had been with Hicks-Beach, who was dead against his
going to Birmingham. While they two were talking a knock came at
the door and someone said Lord Hartington particularly wished to
see Lord R. C. R. C. said: ‘Let him come in here.’ H. did so, and
said Chamberlain was ‘furious’ at the idea of R. C. going to
Birmingham--that he was ‘in a state of extreme irritability.’ Would
they (Beach and Churchill) mind having Chamberlain in to hear what
he had to say? Churchill said no, but he would go away for half an
hour and leave them to discuss the matter. He would abide by their
decision.
When he told me this I said: ‘Surely you must know what their
decision will be? Why, they would not want half a minute to decide
that you shall not go. Chamberlain is “Boss” in Birmingham, and he
means to remain so. He does not want you there, dividing his
popularity with him or, most likely, taking the lion’s share of
it.’ And so on.
R. C. did not seem to think it so certain that they would decide
against him and said, moreover, that he could not take the
responsibility of dividing the Unionist party. After a time he said
he would go back and hear their decision. In the meanwhile
Akers-Douglas had carried off the Birmingham deputation to his own
room.
I should think about a quarter of an hour elapsed, when R. C.
reappeared in the lobby, from the House, and made for the outer
door. He saw me and said: ‘Where are the deputation--in the
Conference Room?’ I told him where they were. ‘It is all over,’ he
said. ‘I cannot stand for the seat. I’ll tell you all about it
by-and-by.’
I would not go into the room, because I am not on terms with
Akers-Douglas; but when a division-bell rang, and Akers-Douglas
came out, I went in. The deputation were very incensed and loudly
declared they had been cheated, and would go back and vote for the
Gladstonian candidate. R. C. tried to smooth them down, but it was
quite useless....
The deputation were not alone in their disgust. Mr. Jennings was so
vexed by what he conceived to be the weak and capricious abandonment of
a cherished plan that for several days he could hardly bring himself to
discuss it with Lord Randolph. His other friends were puzzled and
discouraged. They ridiculed the impartiality of the committee of three.
Chamberlain was an interested party, with a perfectly open and declared
wish to prevent Lord Randolph standing. Hartington as leader of the
Liberal Unionists could not act against the interests of his own
followers. Beach, though a staunch friend, was a member of the
Government. No wonder they had been able to come so promptly to a
decision. To Lord Randolph himself the result was a cruel
disappointment. He was isolated. He had few loyal followers and many
powerful enemies. He could ill afford to surrender such advantages as he
possessed. The others were armed with all the resources of a vast
confederacy. Of his little he gave freely. In their prosperity and power
they accepted the sacrifice as a matter of course. Mr. Chamberlain, it
is true, was careful to say publicly[67] that Lord Randolph’s action was
‘in loyal accord with the arrangements made with the Conservative
leaders, including himself, in 1886,’ and to emphasise his ‘honourable
determination not to break the national compact of which he was a chief
party in 1886.’ But the _Times_, then in the closest agreement with the
governing forces of the Conservative party, though admitting that Lord
Randolph had acted ‘with thorough loyalty to the great cause that unites
us all,’ permitted itself (April 6) to observe that ‘if the Birmingham
Conservatives had any right to be aggrieved at the loss of their pet
candidate it was to him, and to no one else, that they ought to address
their complaints.’
The dispute was continued passionately at Birmingham. Mr. John Albert
Bright was duly brought forward as the Liberal-Unionist candidate for
the Central Division. The Conservative leaders there--Rowlands, Sawyer,
Satchell-Hopkins, Moore Bayley--utterly refused to support him. They
were local men, and against them were arrayed the whole authority of
their party chiefs and the force and influence of a great national
politician. But they had fought hard battles before, and although they
thought themselves deserted by Lord Randolph Churchill they faced the
situation with obstinacy. They declared that the Liberal Unionists had
broken faith with them and that Mr. Chamberlain had intrigued and used
unfair pressure to prevent Lord Randolph from standing. Their
determination not to support Mr. J. A. Bright was endorsed by their
followers. For several days it seemed as if the Gladstonian candidate,
Mr. Phipson Beale, would carry the seat.
So critical was the position that Mr. Balfour was hurried down to
restore peace. A crowded meeting was held, at which Mr. Rowlands was
bold enough to say that the Birmingham Conservatives were not prepared
to bow down to anything that might be settled in London, and the more
vigorous members of the Midland Conservative Club shouted ‘No
surrender!’ Mr. Balfour was at his best. He dwelt upon Lord Randolph’s
refusal to stand--‘he had absolutely declined to do so.’ There was
almost a suggestion that the speaker doubted the wisdom of that
decision--but there it was! He then asserted the unimpeachable right of
the local Conservatives to choose their own candidate. He deprecated
strongly the interference of London politicians in local matters. But he
urged them, in the free exercise of their discretion, utterly
uninfluenced by such interference, to oppose the return of a
Gladstonian. He carried the meeting with him. The local leaders were
divided. Some acquiesced; some stood aside for a time. The part Mr.
Rowlands had played had been too bold and prominent for retreat or
pardon. Birmingham politics are bitter. Notwithstanding that every
Conservative organisation in the city passed resolutions urging him to
retain his leadership, he resigned his offices and withdrew altogether
from public life. He should be remembered for having carried out the
arrangement of 1886, whereby the Conservatives gave their full support
to the Radical Unionists, ‘asking for no return, making no boast or
taunt,’ on which arrangement Mr. Chamberlain’s second empire in
Birmingham was ultimately established; and also for his firmness and
courage amid peculiar and uncertain circumstances. Mr. John Albert
Bright was elected by a large majority, practically the whole
Conservative party having voted in his support.
Mr. Chamberlain and his friends, like practical people, said nothing
until the election was over and their candidate was returned. Then he
addressed a letter to the Birmingham papers challenging the local
Conservatives to make good their charges of bad faith and intrigue. ‘I
am perfectly ready,’ he wrote, ‘to accept full responsibility for the
advice which, in common with Sir Michael Hicks-Beach and Lord
Hartington, was tendered to Lord Randolph Churchill when he asked our
opinions. I had no right and no wish to conceal my view that Lord
Randolph Churchill’s candidature might possibly be unsuccessful, and
would certainly be regarded with disfavour by Liberal Unionists in all
parts of the country, as taking from the party one of the comparatively
few seats held by them in 1886. While, however, I maintained this
opinion, I expressed my readiness to do all in my power to promote his
return if he should finally decide to come forward.’ To the challenge to
produce proofs of a broken compact the Conservatives replied with vigour
and volubility. A whole page of the _Birmingham Gazette_ was occupied
with their statements, which appear to have been both explicit and
complete. But as the dispute turned largely on the exact terms of the
‘understanding,’ whether those terms constituted a ‘compact,’ and how
far this compact, if it existed, was modified by a general compact
relating to Liberal-Unionist seats throughout the country, and as both
parties relied mainly on their recollection of conversations which had
taken place at intervals during the preceding year, no definite issue
could be reached. But the Birmingham Conservatives were provoked anew by
the triumphant resolution passed by the Liberal Unionists affirming that
the recent election had proved their ‘preponderance of power’ in the
Central Division, and the quarrel was protracted with the rancour of
civil war and the amenities of political discussion in Birmingham.
These proceedings, which were reported very fully throughout the
country, forced Lord Randolph Churchill to publish on April 23 a
detailed statement in the form of a letter to Mr. Chamberlain. After
dealing at length with the questions of the compact he continued:--
My going to Birmingham as candidate or not going always practically
rested with you, as you perfectly well know, and you decided, no
doubt on public grounds alone, that I was not to go. Now you have
had your way, you have seated your nominee. I may claim to have
assisted you materially, not only by yielding to your desire that I
should refuse the request of the Birmingham Conservatives, but also
by counsel, oral and written, as Mr. Rowlands and others can
testify, to my friends in Birmingham to support Mr. John Albert
Bright. If ever a man was compelled by duty to be magnanimous, or
could afford to be magnanimous, it was yourself after such a
conspicuous success. Your position demanded that you should neglect
to notice any words which legitimate disappointment may have
prompted, that you should do your best to soothe irritated but just
susceptibilities, that you should suggest arrangements by which, in
future electoral contests, the two sections of the Unionist party
might work together cordially for their mutual advantage.
How widely different, however, has been your action! How curious
the return you make to the Conservatives who voted in such large
numbers for Mr. Bright, and to me, who thought I was your friend,
and who certainly--to put the matter in the most negative and
colourless manner--did nothing to interfere with Mr. Bright’s
return.
As far as I am concerned, you endeavour to embroil me and my
friends in Birmingham by representing, and by seeking to make it
appear, that I have played fast and loose with them, although in
dealing with the incident I have regarded your interests a great
deal more than my own; and in respect of the Conservative party in
Birmingham they are rewarded by an acrimonious attack from you and
their leaders, by contumely and denunciation being poured upon men
to whom they owe much and whose services they highly value; and,
finally, in order that insult may be heaped upon injury, you allow
the Liberal-Unionist Association, which is completely under your
control, at a meeting over which you presided, to set forth in a
formal and written resolution an assertion so questionable as to be
almost ridiculous, to the effect that the recent election has shown
‘that the preponderance of political power in Central Birmingham is
with the Liberal-Unionist party.’
I have entered into this controversy with you with much reluctance
and have in no way sought it; but I owe too much to the
Conservatives in Birmingham not to take up pen in their behalf
when, as it appears to me, they are treated with unqualified
injustice.
There the matter ends so far as this account is concerned; for it is not
necessary to follow the long and vexatious discussions by which, after
years had passed, the representation of the Edgbaston Division in lieu
of the Central Division was ultimately conceded to the Conservative
party. Lord Randolph’s decision has been exposed to various criticisms,
but the explanation is not obscure. He looked back with pride to the
great compact of 1886. He could not bear to take action which would be
misrepresented as hostile to the fundamental basis of the Unionist
alliance; and he knew well that the forces for influencing public
opinion against him were strong enough, whatever the actual rights and
wrongs of the Birmingham dispute, to create that impression. This
reasoning may have been sufficient; but it does not cover the fact of
his submitting his claims to the arbitrament of such a committee.
Whatever the circumstances, he himself should have decided. The
responsibility was his alone; and although it might be prudent to
receive the counsels of Lord Hartington and of Sir Michael Hicks-Beach
and to hear Mr. Chamberlain’s opinion, he should have informed them, and
not they him, of the decision that was finally taken.
It should be said that Lord Randolph Churchill never considered that Mr.
Chamberlain had treated him with any want of candour in this affair. He
did not think he had been generous in action or in victory. But he
recognised that a natural divergence had opened between them and, this,
although acute, was confined to political and public limits and did not
extend to personal relations. To the end of his life he was accustomed
to say that their only quarrel was over the Aston Riots; and they met,
though less frequently, on courteous terms. The blow was a bitter one to
Lord Randolph. His enforced desertion of his Birmingham friends cut him
to the quick. As he came out of the Whips’ room, where he had given his
answer to the deputation, a friend noticed upon his face the shadow of
that drawn and ghastly look with which it was in a few years to be
stamped.
So considerable an interval elapsed after the Suakin debates before Lord
Randolph Churchill again addressed the House of Commons that he provoked
a laugh by drolly asking ‘the indulgence usually accorded to a new
member.’ The session of 1889 had almost reached its close without the
question of making the necessary provision by Parliamentary grant for
the children of the Prince of Wales having been debated. When he rose
(July 26), in succession to Mr. Bradlaugh, from his accustomed seat
immediately behind the Treasury Bench, the Conservative members seemed
in some doubt as to his intention, and he was greeted by only a very
faint cheer. But his first words made his position manifest: ‘I have
always held an opinion, amounting to absolute conviction, as to the
indisputable right of the Crown to apply to Parliament to make provision
for the Royal Family and to rely upon the liberality of Parliament in
respect of such applications.’ Then followed one of the most happy
speeches he ever achieved. The argument, which was elaborate and
precise, was concerned largely with figures and precedents showing the
small cost of the British Monarchy compared with other forms of
Government, and the conduct of the reigning Sovereign with respect to
claims upon Parliament in comparison with some of her later
predecessors. The constitutional doctrine involved and the mode of
presenting such a case to a popular assembly are worthy of the attention
of politicians; but the whole was enlivened and adorned by a sustained
sparkle of what in those days had come to be called ‘Randolphian
humour,’ which kept the rapidly assembled House in continued laughter
and applause. When, for instance, he referred to Mr. Mundella as having
‘addressed his constituents in Paradise--Square,’ with just the
slightest pause after ‘Paradise,’ the whole House collapsed; and Mr.
Gladstone, whose sense of humour was somewhat uneven, is said to have
laughed more than at any other jest he had ever heard in Parliament.
The effect of this speech, which occupied more than an hour, was to
produce for the moment a complete reconciliation between Lord Randolph
and his party. All about him as he sat down was a stir of enthusiasm.
The Treasury Bench turned a row of delighted faces towards him. Among
his papers I find a bundle of letters, full of gratitude and praise,
written from the House by Conservative members while the impression was
strong in their minds. But Lord Randolph Churchill knew he had that to
say two days later in the Midlands which would speedily dissipate such
transient and uncourted approbation.
On successive evenings at Walsall and Birmingham he outlined an
extensive, yet not unpractical, programme of domestic legislation,
dealing especially with land and housing, and with temperance. A single
extract will show how far his mind had travelled from those serene
pastures where the Government lambs were nourished:--
...The great obstacle to temperance reform undoubtedly is the
wholesale manufacturers of alcoholic drink. Those manufacturers are
small in number, but they are very wealthy. They exercise enormous
influence. Every publican in the country almost, certainly
nine-tenths of the publicans in the country, are their abject and
tied slaves. Public-houses in nine cases out of ten are tied
houses. There is absolutely no free-will, and these wholesale
manufacturers of alcoholic drink have an enormously powerful
political organisation, so powerful and so highly prepared that it
is almost like a Prussian army: it can be mobilised at any moment
and brought to bear on the point which is threatened. Up to now
this great class has successfully intimidated a Government and
successfully intimidated members of Parliament; in fact, they have
directly overthrown two Governments, and I do not wonder, I do not
blame Governments for being a little timid of meddling with them.
But, in view of the awful misery which does arise from the
practically unlimited and uncontrolled sale of alcoholic drinks in
this country, I tell you my frank opinion--the time has already
arrived when we must try our strength with that party.... Do
imagine what a prodigious social reform, what a bound in advance we
should have made if we could curb and control this destructive and
devilish liquor traffic, if we could manage to remove from amongst
us what I have called on former occasions the fatal facility of
recourse to the beerhouse which besets every man and woman, and
really one may almost say every child, of the working classes in
England.
The next day he spoke at Birmingham. Ireland was his principal theme.
For the first time on this subject since he resigned he unburdened his
mind without restraint. He showed how much he hated the harsh and
ill-tempered opinions then so powerful. He advocated two great measures
by which the Conservative party might with wisdom and propriety assuage
the bitter discontent of the Irish people--Local Government and land
purchase. He even named the sum of money for which the credit of the
United Kingdom might be pledged to create a peasant proprietary.
‘Something like one hundred millions,’ he said; and the audience gasped
suspiciously. What folly to think the Conservative party would touch
such measures! And yet they have passed them into law!
Surely the reader will linger on the wit and wisdom of this concluding
passage, remembering always how great a price in influence and personal
fortunes the speaker willingly paid for the privilege of telling the
truth:--
I dare say many of us have read, and a great many of you remember,
a charming novel of Mr. Dickens, ‘Our Mutual Friend’; and it may be
in your recollection that there was a certain character in that
novel of great interest, the delineation of which, by Mr. Dickens,
is a subject of great amusement to the reader. His name was Mr.
Podsnap; and, if you recollect, Mr. Podsnap was a person in easy
circumstances, who was very content with himself and was extremely
surprised that all the world was not equally contented like him;
and if anyone suggested to Mr. Podsnap that there were possible
causes of discontent among the people Mr. Podsnap was very much
annoyed. He declared that the person making such a suggestion was
flying in the face of Providence. He declared that the subject was
an unpleasant one; he would go so far as to say it was an odious
one; and he refused to consider it, he refused to admit it, and
with a wave of his arm, you recollect, he used to sweep it away and
to remove it off the face of the earth.
It would be a great mistake to suppose that Mr. Podsnap is a
character of fiction. I know him well. I often meet Mr. Podsnap in
London society. Mr. Podsnap hates me; he looks upon me as a person
of most immoral and most evil tendency; but, with that morbid love
of contemplating and prying into things essentially evil which is
possessed, I think, by a great many good men, Mr. Podsnap cannot
restrain himself sometimes from conversing with me, and this is the
sort of remark Mr. Podsnap makes when he accosts me. He says,
‘Young man’--he always begins in that way, though I believe he is
not very much older than myself--he says, ‘Are you not more and
more impressed day by day with the constant proof and illustration
of the hopeless and hereditary wickedness of the Irish people?’ I
say ‘No;’ that I have had some experience of the Irish people, and
I have lived amongst them for some years, and that I have always
found them a very pleasant people and a very amiable people, and
very easy to get on with if you take them the right way. And then
Mr. Podsnap is painfully annoyed; he shows his indignation, he
declares that the subject is an unpleasant one, and he will go so
far as to say an odious one. He refuses to admit it, he refuses to
consider it, and he removes it and sweeps it away from off the face
of the earth. Well, sometimes I like, when I have nothing better to
do, to try and draw Mr. Podsnap, and I go up to him and I ask him
whether he does not think on the whole it might be a good thing
after balancing everything--if we could find some dodge which might
keep the Irish members out of prison. And then Mr. Podsnap is
startled, and he is much annoyed, and he says, ‘Do you mean
seriously to argue that the Irish members, if they had their
deserts, ought not to be hanged, drawn and quartered in front of
Westminster Hall?’ Then I reply that no doubt that is one way of
dealing with the Irish members and one way of governing Ireland,
but that it appears to me a somewhat singular way of maintaining
the Parliamentary union between two countries; and then Mr. Podsnap
is very wroth, and he sweeps me away and he removes me and the
Irish members and Ireland from off the face of the earth. But Mr.
Podsnap is not a bad fellow on the whole, so long as you do not pay
the smallest attention to him. But undoubtedly, at the present
moment, what Mr. Dickens calls Podsnappery is rampant and rife in
London, and I think this Podsnappery we ought to make a great
effort to put down.
I am certain that intolerance and contempt of Irish opinion and
prejudice, hopeless prejudice against Irish ideas, produce a
corresponding rancour and hatred among the Irish people against us,
and terribly envenom the feelings and the relations between the two
countries. No, let us rather have recourse, and confident recourse,
to justice, to liberality, to generosity and, above all, to
sympathy in our Irish policy. You may be certain of this, that a
free manifestation of those qualities in your Irish policy would
work such a miracle in Ireland as you have no conception of. I hope
most earnestly that I shall never live to see the day when there
may be established in Ireland a separate Parliament and a separate
Government; but I hope equally earnestly and equally strongly, that
I may live to see the day, and that possibly it may be in my power
somewhat to contribute to the advent of that time, and that that
time may not be at any very distant or remote date, when the Irish
shall not only be prosperous, but free--free in the full and proper
sense of the word--free as the English, as the Scotch, and as the
Welsh are free; and when a strong conviction of the benefits and a
strong affection for the ties of union with Great Britain shall
pervade and fill Irish hearts and minds, when the recollections of
the former strife of nations shall be all forgotten, and when our
children shall wonderingly inquire of us how it was that through so
many weary years Ireland was a source of danger and of distress to
the British Empire.
These two speeches in the Midlands, especially the first, at Walsall,
were a terrible rock of offence. The landlords, the brewers and the
opponents of land purchase were incensed and alarmed. ‘They are all up
in arms against you,’ wrote Jennings sadly from the House of Commons.
‘The speech on the Royal Grants did you so much good with the party, and
now ... the Conservatives say you are nothing better than a Socialist,
and the Radicals are, for a wonder, equally hostile. They are all agreed
in denouncing you. The wind is due east, I must admit, and very keen and
biting.’
‘I am sorry to have to tell you,’ wrote a Conservative member who had
been pressing Lord Randolph to visit his constituency, ‘that the local
Fathers in * * * think that in the interests of the party it would be
undesirable to hold a meeting there, and that you would not meet with a
good reception from our own people. All of them expressed the opinion
that they could not afford to offend the brewers and publicans, who have
done so much for us in the past, and that any scheme proposing a loan of
money to Ireland to buy out Irish landlords was most unpopular and
regarded as Gladstonianism pure and simple.’
In Birmingham especially a bad impression was created, and Lord
Randolph’s influence, already terribly injured by his refusal to stand,
was further weakened. It need scarcely be said that Mr. Chamberlain was
much shocked by the open profession of doctrines so advanced in
constituencies which bordered on his own, and on the first convenient
occasion he felt it his duty to administer a suitable rebuke:--
I observed the other day [he said] that a most distinguished
nobleman, Lord Randolph Churchill, addressed various speeches to
audiences in Birmingham and the neighbourhood, and that he declared
himself to be a Tory. I can only say his programme is a programme
which, I am perfectly certain, will be absolutely repudiated by
Lord Salisbury and Mr. Balfour. I dare say you have often seen at a
bazaar or elsewhere a patchwork quilt brought out for sale, which
is made up of scraps from old dresses and from left-off garments
which the maker has been able to borrow for the purpose. I am told
that in America they call a thing of this kind a ‘crazy quilt.’ I
think that the fancy programme which Lord Randolph Churchill put
before you the other day may well be described as a ‘crazy quilt.’
He borrowed from the cast-off policy of all the extreme men of all
the different sections. He took his Socialism from Mr. Burns and
Mr. Hyndman; he took his Local Option from Sir Wilfrid Lawson; he
took his Egyptian policy from Mr. Illingworth; he took his
metropolitan reform from Mr. Stuart; and he took his Irish policy
from Mr. John Morley. Is this Toryism?
All this was especially edifying, pronounced as it was within four years
of the ‘Unauthorised Programme.’ But Lord Randolph was not, as some who
wrote to him seemed to suppose, trying to ingratiate himself with the
House of Commons Tories, or seeking to win re-entry to the Cabinet. ‘I
decline,’ he said sardonically, ‘to enter into competition with Mr.
Chamberlain for the smiles of Hatfield.’ He understood perfectly what
reception the ruling class in the Conservative party would accord to his
democratic ideas. The worthy Conservative gentlemen who had pressed
their congratulations upon him after his speech on the Royal Grants
could hardly restrain their indignation now. Finding themselves at one
time in complete agreement with him, and at another in vehement dissent,
they assumed, not unnaturally, that he was unbalanced and insincere. Yet
these speeches, variously greeted as they were, arose from the same
logical and coherent system of political thought to which, rightly or
wrongly, he had always adhered through good and evil fortune. The
principal speeches which he made in 1889 almost covered, and were
designed to cover, the whole field of ‘Tory Democracy.’ In justifying
the Royal Grants he had affirmed that loyalty to the Crown which every
true Tory Democrat must be prepared to practise and sustain. At Walsall
and Birmingham he urged that energetic sympathy with practical social
reform and indifference to selfish class instincts which alone can
convince democracy that time-honoured institutions are not merely
safeguards, but may be made effective instruments of progress. In Wales
during the autumn he championed the Established Church. In Scotland
later in the year he defended the Union. Something was, however, still
wanting to complete his political faith. It remained to assert the
sanctity of those constitutional barriers by which liberty and justice
are secured. That omission the near future was to repair.
CHAPTER XXI
THE PARNELL COMMISSION
“Iam non ad culmina rerum
Injustos crevisse queror: tolluntur in altum
Ut lapsu graviore ruant.”
CLAUDIAN.
It is no part of my task to examine the proceedings of the Special
Commission, nor to supply a narrative of that long-drawn and embittered
controversy known as ‘Parnellism and Crime.’ Those are matters of
history, and even such allusion to their course and character as might
have been required for the coherency of this story seems unnecessary in
view of an account recently given to the world by Mr. Morley,[68]
combining the vivid and picturesque character which only an eye-witness
can command, with that brevity in regard to general questions
indispensable to biography. I am concerned only to pick out Lord
Randolph Churchill’s part and to trace the steps which led him to an
utter breach with the Government and quarrel with the Conservative
party; and this can be done mainly in his own words.
The letter involving Mr. Parnell in complicity with the Phoenix Park
murders was printed in facsimile in the _Times_ of April 18, 1887, and
was doubtless intended to be a spur to the Unionist party on the day of
the introduction of the Coercion Bill. That same night Mr. Parnell
declared it to be a forgery. His denial was received with incredulity by
the Ministerialists and he was at once asked why he did not take action
for libel. His reasons for not doing so were apparently that he and his
advisers had no confidence that their case would be considered without
prejudice by a Middlesex jury, and that if a favourable verdict were
obtained in Ireland similar English suspicions would deprive it of moral
effect. No action being taken by Mr. Parnell, a motion was made by a
private member for a Select Committee of Inquiry. This was debated on
May 5, and the Select Committee was refused by the Government. Lord
Randolph, who on this occasion, as on various other questions of
privilege, was consulted by Mr. Smith, supported the Government
decision, and warmly defended the Leader of the House from attacks which
were made upon him. Although the murder charges against Mr. Parnell were
repeated in various forms at partisan meetings, and even received
countenance from several of the Conservative Ministers, the whole matter
lapsed so far as Parliament was concerned, and would never have been
resuscitated but for the perversity of chance.
An action for libel against the _Times_ was instituted in November 1887
by an Irishman who had sat in the late Parliament as a follower of Mr.
Parnell and who felt himself damaged by the various allegations
contained in the series of letters headed ‘Parnellism and Crime.’ This
suit was tried before Lord Coleridge in July 1888. The _Times_ happened
to be defended by Sir Richard Webster, the principal law officer of the
Crown--acting, however, as he explained, to his own satisfaction, purely
professionally and not as a member of the Government. In the course of
the trial the Attorney-General repeated during three days the general
charges and allegations of the _Times_ articles, and produced a further
batch of incriminating letters alleged to be signed by the Irish leader.
On this the Parliamentary case was reopened, and Parnell himself
demanded a Select Committee of Inquiry. The Government, as before,
refused the Committee, but--to general astonishment--they now proceeded
to offer, and finally to insist upon, a Commission of three judges with
statutory power to inquire not merely into the specific matter of the
letters, but rovingly into the whole of the charges and allegations of
the _Times_, whether against members of Parliament or ‘other persons.’
The necessary Bill was introduced on July 16.
Lord Randolph Churchill was dismayed by this unexpected departure. He
felt it his duty to protest from the very beginning against such
procedure. Yet he did not wish to embarrass the Government or to hamper
them in their Irish policy. Instead of speaking in the debates upon the
Bill, he drew up on the day of its introduction a memorandum which he
sent to Mr. Smith, and which is at once a convenient narrative of the
case and perhaps the most powerful statement he ever penned. If it were
necessary to base his reputation for political wisdom upon a single
document, I should select this.
_Memorandum._
It may be assumed that the Tory party are under an imperative
obligation to avoid seeking escape from political difficulties by
extra-constitutional methods. The above is a general rule. The
exception to it can scarcely be conceived.
The case of ‘Parnellism and Crime’ is essentially a political and
Parliamentary difficulty of a minor kind. A newspaper has made
against a group of members of the House of Commons accusations of
complicity in assassination, crime and outrage. In the commencement
the parties accused do not feel themselves specially aggrieved.
They take no action; the Government responsible for the guidance of
the House of Commons does not feel called upon to act in the
matter. A member of Parliament, acting on his own responsibility,
brings the matter before the House of Commons as a matter of
privilege and a Select Committee is moved for to inquire into the
allegations.
The Government take up an unexceptionable and perfectly
constitutional position. They refuse the Select Committee on the
ground marked out by Sir Erskine May, that matters which may or
ought to come within the cognisance of the Courts of Law are not
fit for inquiry by Select Committee.
The Government press upon the accused parties their duty, should
they feel themselves aggrieved, to proceed against the newspaper
legally and, with a generosity hardly open to condemnation, offer
to make the prosecution of the newspaper, so far as expense is
concerned, a Government prosecution. The offer is not accepted, the
view of duty is disagreed from by the accused persons, the motion
for a Select Committee is negatived and the matter drops, the
balance of disadvantage remaining with the accused persons.
Owing to an abortive and obscurely originated action for libel, the
whole matter revives. The original charges are reiterated in a
court of law by the Attorney-General, but owing to the course of
the suit no evidence is called to sustain the allegations. A fresh
demand is made by the accused persons for a Select Committee and is
refused by the Government on the same grounds as before and, as
before, with a preponderating assent of public opinion. So far all
is satisfactory, except to the accused parties and their
sympathisers.
For reasons not known, the Government take a new departure of a
most serious kind. They offer to constitute by statute a tribunal
with exceptional powers, to be composed mainly of judges of the
Supreme Court, to inquire into the truth of the allegations. To
this course the following objections are obvious and unanswerable:
1. The offer, to a large extent, recognises the wisdom and justice
of the conduct of the accused persons in avoiding recurrence to the
ordinary tribunals.
2. It is absolutely without precedent. The Sheffield case, the
Metropolitan Board of Works case, are by no means analogous. Into
those two cases not a spark of political feeling entered. The case
of ‘Parnellism and Crime’ in so far as it is not criminal is
entirely political. In any event the political character of the
case would predominate over the criminal.
3. It is submitted that it is in the highest degree unwise and,
indeed, unlawful to take the judges of the land out of their proper
sphere of duty, and to mix them up in political conflict. In this
ease, whichever way they decide, they will be the object of
political criticism and animadversion. Whatever their decision,
speaking roughly, half the country will applaud, the other half
condemn, their action; their conduct during the trial in its
minutest particulars, every ruling as to evidence, every chance
expression, every question put by them, will be keenly watched,
canvassed, criticised, censured or praised. Were judges in England
ever placed in such a position before? Will any judge emerge from
this inquiry the same for all judicial purposes, moral weight and
influence as he went into it? Have you a right to expose your
judges, and in all probability your best judges, to such an ordeal?
4. The tribunal will conduct its proceedings by methods different
to a court of law. The examination will mainly be conducted by the
tribunal itself; a witness cannot refuse to reply on the ground
that the answer would criminate himself. Evidence in this way will
be extracted which might be made the basis of a criminal
prosecution against other persons. Indemnities might be given to
persons actually guilty of very grave crime, and persons much less
guilty of direct participation in grave crime might, under such
protected evidence, be made liable to a prosecution.
The whole course of proceeding, if the character of the allegations
is remembered, will, when carefully considered, be found to be
utterly repugnant to our English ideas of legal justice, and wholly
unconstitutional. It is hardly exaggerating to describe the
Commission contemplated as ‘a revolutionary tribunal’ for the trial
of political offenders, If there is any truth in the above or
colour for such a statement, can a Tory Government safely or
honourably suggest and carry through such a proposal?
I would suggest that the constitutional legality of this proposed
tribunal be submitted to the judges for their opinion.
It is not for the Government, in matters of this kind, to initiate
extra-constitutional proceedings and methods. One can imagine an
excited Parliament or inflamed public opinion forcing such
proceedings on a Government. In this case there is no such
pressure. The first duty of a Government would be to resist being
driven outside the lines of the Constitution. In no case, except
when public safety is involved, can they be justified in taking the
lead. They are the chief guardians of the Constitution. The
Constitution is violated or strained in this country when action
is taken for which there is no reasonably analogous precedent.
Considerations of this kind ought to influence powerfully the
present Government.
It is said that the honour of the House of Commons is concerned.
This is an empty phrase. The tribunal, whatever its decision, will
not prevent the Irish constituencies from returning as
representatives the parties implicated. In such an event the honour
of the House of Commons could only be vindicated by repeated
expulsion, followed by disfranchisement. Does any reasonable person
contemplate such a course?
The proceedings of the tribunal cannot be final. In the event of a
decision to the effect that the charges are not established,
proceedings for libel against the newspaper might be resorted to,
the newspaper being placed under a most grossly unjust
disadvantage. In the event of a decision to the contrary effect, a
criminal prosecution would seem to be imperative. Regarded from the
high ground of State policy in Ireland such a prosecution would
probably be replete with danger and disaster.
These reflections have been sketched out concisely. If submitted to
a statesman, or to anyone of great legal learning and attainments,
many more and much graver reflections would probably be suggested.
I do not examine the party aspects of the matter; I only remark
that the fate of the Union may be determined by the abnormal
proceedings of an abnormal tribunal. Prudent politicians would
hesitate to go out of their way to play such high stakes as
these.--R. H. S. C.
July 17, 1888.
[Sidenote: 1890 ÆT. 41]
Nearly two years had passed since these words were written. During all
that time Lord Randolph Churchill kept silence. The Government
persevered in their courses. The Bill for the Special Commission was
driven swiftly through the House of Commons by guillotine closure. The
Judges slowly unravelled the vast tangle of evidence and ethics which
had been thrust upon them. Not until the fiftieth sitting of the court
was the letter reached which was the reason for the whole proceeding.
Then there was an acceleration. In two days a wretched man was proved a
forger. In five days he was dead. The only charge that gave birth to the
Commission perished by the pistol-shot that destroyed Pigott. The other
allegations, melancholy and voluminous as they were, useful as they may
have been for political controversy, revealed only the bitterness of the
national and racial struggle; and expressed in the language of the
victorious party a condemnation of methods of political warfare, more or
less lawless, certainly deplorable, but essentially characteristic of
revolutionary movements, open or veiled.
The report of the Commission came before the House of Commons on March
3, 1890. In spite of every effort to broaden the issue and to escape
from narrow and definite charges of murder, which had been disproved, to
general charges of lawlessness and disloyalty which required no proof,
the impression produced in the country was adverse to the Government.
The party orator dilated on the heinous conduct of the Irish members.
The plain man stopped short at Pigott. Ministers had stained the cause
of the Union by unconstitutional action and had allowed others to stain
it by felony. Lord Randolph’s private letters reveal from time to time
the abhorrence with which he regarded the whole transaction. The
by-elections attested the opinion of the public. There was too much
truth in Parnell’s savage accusation:[69] ‘You wanted to use this
question of the forged letters as a political engine. You did not care
whether they were forged or not. You saw that it was impossible for us
under the circumstances, or for anybody under the circumstances, to
prove that they were forgeries. It was a very good question for you to
win elections with.... It was also a suitable engine to enable you to
obtain an inquiry into a much wider field and very different matters, an
inquiry which you never would have got apart from these infamous
productions.’
The feeling that some reparation was due to men against whom a charge of
complicity in murder had been falsely preferred and who had been pursued
by such unwonted means, was by no means confined to the Opposition. But
the Government were resolved to brazen it out; and the party machine,
local and national, held firm. The speech of the Conservative leader was
grudging and unsympathetic; and Mr. Gladstone’s condemnation and appeal
rang through a responsive House. The debate on his amendment ebbed and
flowed through four Parliamentary days, and from the division by which
it was terminated fourteen Unionists, including Lord Randolph,
abstained. Meanwhile, on March 7, Mr. Jennings--with the concurrence, as
was generally known, of Lord Randolph Churchill--had given notice of the
following amendment: ‘And, further, this House deems it to be its duty
to record its condemnation of the conduct of those who are responsible
for the accusations of complicity in murder brought against members of
this House, discovered to be based mainly on forged letters, and
declared by the Special Commission to be false.’ Such a notice, coming
from the Unionist benches and believed to have the support of Lord
Randolph Churchill, of course attracted general attention. He himself
was, however, in the greatest perplexity. Party feeling ran high. It is
when the attack is grave and damaging, when there is fullest
justification for censure, when manifestly Ministers are wrong, that
those who adhere to them through thick and thin, are most impatient of
reproach. He knew well that by speaking he would greatly injure himself
in the eyes of his party. And yet could he honourably keep silent? He
regretted that he had encouraged Jennings to put his amendment down. He
asked him to withdraw it. But Mr. Jennings refused. It was not until Mr.
Gladstone’s amendment had been disposed of on the fourth day of the
discussion that he made up his mind to speak, when the House should meet
at the next sitting (March 11). By custom, though not by rule, the
Speaker would have called upon the movers of other amendments, once that
stage of debate has begun. But Lord Randolph, after much consideration,
decided that he had better say what he had to say upon the main
question, neither interfering with, nor being limited by, Mr. Jennings’s
amendment or others that stood before it; and technically he was within
his right, if the Speaker should call on him.
He was heard by the House in a strained unusual silence, which seemed to
react upon him; for he spoke with strange slowness, deliberation and
absence of passion--like a judge deciding on a point of law, and without
any of the lightness and humour of old Opposition days. He examined the
question frigidly and with severity--how the Government had discarded
the ordinary tribunals of the land; how they had instituted a special
tribunal wherein the functions of judge and jury were cumulated upon
three individuals; how the persons implicated had had no voice in the
constitution of that tribunal; how they were in part the political
opponents of the Government of the day; and how one result had been to
levy upon both parties to the action a heavy pecuniary fine. All these
things were described in the same even, passionless voice, and heard by
the House with undiminished attention and by the Ministerial supporters
with growing resentment. Presently came a pause. He asked those about
him for a glass of water. Not a man moved. Fancying he had not been
heard, he asked again: and so bitter was party passion that even this
small courtesy was refused. At length, seeing how the matter stood, Mr.
Baumann, a young Conservative member from below the Gangway, went out
for some. As he returned, the Irish--always so quick to perceive a small
personal incident--greeted him with a half-sympathetic, half-ironical
cheer, and Lord Randolph, taking the glass from his hand, said solemnly
and elaborately in a penetrating undertone: ‘I hope this will not
compromise you with your party.’
At length he began to speak louder. ‘The procedure which we are called
upon to stamp with our approval to-night is a procedure which would
undoubtedly have been gladly resorted to by the Tudors and their judges.
It is procedure of an arbitrary and tyrannical character, used against
individuals who are political opponents of the Government of the
day--procedure such as Parliament has for generations and centuries
struggled against and resisted--procedure such as we had hoped, in these
happy days, Parliament had triumphantly overcome. It is procedure such
as would have startled even Lord Eldon; it is procedure such as Lords
Lyndhurst and Brougham would have protested against; it is procedure
which, if that great lawyer Earl Cairns had been alive, the Tory party
would never have carried. But a Nemesis awaits a Government that adopts
unconstitutional methods. What,’ he asked, ‘has been the result of this
uprootal of constitutional practice? What has been the one result?’ Then
in a fierce whisper, hissing through the House, ‘Pigott!’--then in an
outburst of uncontrollable passion and disgust--‘a man, a thing, a
reptile, a monster--Pigott!’--and then again, with a phrase at which the
House shuddered,[70] ‘Pigott! Pigott! Pigott!’
Let us return to Hansard. ‘Why do I bring these things before the House?
[_An honourable member laughed derisively._] Ah! yes; I know there are
lots of high-minded and generous members, who not long ago were my
friends, who are ready to impute--and much more likely to impute than
openly assert--that I am animated by every evil motive. I bring these
matters before the House of Commons because I apprehend the time--which
I trust may be remote, but which I sometimes fear may be nigh--when the
party which vaunts itself as the constitutional party may, by the
vicissitudes of fortune, find itself in a position of inferiority
similar to that which it occupied in 1832--when the rights of the
minority may be trampled upon and overridden, when the views of the
minority may be stifled, and when individual political opponents may be
proceeded against as you have proceeded against your political
opponents.’
He then explained how that these were no new views of his, that they had
not been formed in consequence of the results of the trial--‘as those
who are always ready to form a most unfavourable opinion of me have
said’--but that two years before, when the Bill for the Special
Commission was before Parliament, he had embodied them in a document
which he had ‘respectfully laid before the First Lord of the Treasury.’
‘There was a time,’ he said at the end, ‘not very long ago, when my
words had some weight with honourable gentlemen on this side of the
House; and in recalling that time I will add--I cannot refrain from the
remark--that the prospects of the party were brighter than they are
now. When I had the honour, the memorable honour, of counselling them,
the Unionist majority was more than a hundred. It has now fallen to
about seventy. If there are any lingering memories on these benches of
those days--when, I think, our fortunes were better--it is by those
memories I would appeal to the Conservative party to give a fair and
impartial and unprejudiced consideration to the counsels which I now lay
before them. But if my words are to fall on deaf ears--if the counsels I
most honestly submit are to be spurned and scorned, then I declare that
I look forward to the day when a future Parliament shall expunge from
the Journals of this House the record of this melancholy proceeding; and
in taking such action--inspired, I trust, not by party passion, party
vindictiveness or party rancour, but acting on constitutional grounds,
and on those alone--it will administer to its predecessor a deserved and
wholesome rebuke for having outraged and violated constitutional liberty
and will establish a signpost full of warning and guidance to
Parliaments yet unborn.’
He sat down very much exhausted--for his health was already
weakening--by the strain to which he had been put. He had never spoken
with more consciousness of right, never with less regard to his own
interests and scarcely ever with greater effect. Deep down in the heart
of the old-fashioned Tory, however unreflecting, there lurks a wholesome
respect for the ancient forms and safeguards of the English Constitution
and a recognition of the fact that some day they may be found of great
consequence and use. Moreover, the case was black and overwhelming. But
a formidable champion was at hand to succour and shield the Ministry;
and it was Chamberlain who rose from the Front Opposition Bench to reply
on behalf of the Government. His speech was couched in a friendly and
respectful tone--not unmindful, perhaps, of an old compact as to the
asperities of political warfare--but in every part it made clear the
breach which now existed between these former allies, and the bonds
which were steadily strengthening between this Radical leader and his
Conservative friends.
To all this Mr. Jennings had listened with impatience and resentment.
His amendment had not, it seemed, been merely deserted by Lord Randolph
Churchill; it had been compromised. The opportunity for moving it was
irretrievably spoiled. The consequence that had attached to it, was
gone. The crowded house was melting. No man about to address a critical
assembly on a matter which he considers important, resolved to do his
very best by his argument and braced against the expected disapprobation
of his own friends, can be free from nervous tension; and the better the
speaker, the greater the strain. At such a moment small things do not
always appear small and grave decisions are not always taken on serious
grounds. Mr. Jennings had been several times disappointed in Lord
Randolph. He had failed to carry him forward into a Fair Trade campaign.
He had been bitterly discouraged by the Birmingham surrender. He had
watched with mortification the decline of Lord Randolph’s popularity. He
had disapproved of the Radicalism of the later speeches. And now, on the
top of all the rest, came this sharp collision. He took it as an act of
mortal treachery and insult. In that flood of anger the comradeship of
four stormy years was swept away as if it had been a feather. While Mr.
Chamberlain was replying he leaned over the bench and told Lord Randolph
shortly that after such a speech he would not move his amendment, and
would tell the House why. Lord Randolph, who had been absorbed by his
own struggle, was amazed at his fierce manner, and realised for the
first time that he had caused deep offence. He wished at once to put it
right. But Jennings would not answer. He had made up his mind. Two
pencil notes, written on slips torn from the order paper, were put into
his hands. He read them, folded them, put them carefully away, and they
have drifted here, like the wreckage tossed up on the shore long after a
ship has foundered. ‘I hope you will reflect before making any public
attack upon me. It would be a thousand pities to set all the malicious
tongues wagging, when later you will understand what my position was.’
And again--probably after Jennings had spoken--‘How can you so wilfully
misunderstand my action and so foolishly give way to temper in dealing
with grave political matters?’
As soon as Mr. Chamberlain had finished, Mr. Jennings rose, and struck
as hard as he could. ‘He had not been prepared for the tone and manner
of the speech of his noble friend.’ The delivery of a speech so hostile
‘to the Government’ had considerably embarrassed him. ‘It is said,’ he
proceeded in his cold, measured way, ‘that I derive my opinions from my
noble friend, but occasionally, and at intervals, I am capable of
forming opinions of my own, and such an interval has occurred now.’ ‘The
noble lord has a genius for surprises: sometimes he surprises his
opponents; sometimes he takes his best friends unawares.’ Finally, he
declined to move his amendment, as a means of dissociating himself from
any attempt ‘to stab his party in the back.’ During this speech the
occupants of the Treasury Bench took, as may be imagined, no pains to
conceal their satisfaction. In a very brief personal explanation Lord
Randolph Churchill declared that his own speech had been made without
reference to any of the amendments on the paper, solely because it was
pertinent to the main question rather than to any amendment. Mr. Caine,
who was then on the verge of returning to the Liberal party, moved the
dropped amendment without comment. Almost alone among Conservative
members, Lord Randolph supported it, as he had promised and always
intended, in the division lobby, and it was rejected by a majority of
sixty-two.
The outcry raised against Lord Randolph Churchill for his speech and
vote was immediate and astonishing. The entire Conservative press
denounced him as a traitor, and he was deluged with abuse. The
_Standard_ declared that he had no further right to be regarded as a
member of the Unionist party. ‘The utter failure of his career points a
moral of peculiar significance. Seldom has it been possible to give a
more convincing proof of the fact that the man who is ready to sacrifice
principle to personal ambition will not only lose the esteem of the
worthiest among his fellow-countrymen, but will even fail in the object
to which he is willing to surrender his convictions.’ But more important
even than such pronouncements was the feeling in the country. The
meeting which he was to have addressed at Colchester was cancelled
‘owing to the illness of Lord Brooke.’ The Chairman of his Association
in Paddington resigned; the various clubs in the borough passed strong
resolutions in condemnation of their member, and a meeting of the
Council was convened for the 17th to consider his conduct. Opinion in
Birmingham was very hostile. Even the Midland Conservative Club met
together to pass a vote of censure.
Lord Randolph Churchill met these manifestations with composure not
unmingled with scorn. To the resolution of the Paddington Council he
replied in a letter described by the much-shocked _Times_ as
‘characteristically pert and saucy,’ and dated from the Jockey Club
Rooms at Newmarket. ‘I have no reason to suppose,’ he wrote, ‘that the
Council are in error in committing themselves to the opinion that my
action is “entirely out of harmony” with the views of the Conservative
electors of the division; but I remark with satisfaction that the
Council, with a prudence which I cannot too highly or respectfully
commend, have abstained from expressing any opinion as to whether my
action was right or wrong.’ If they wished him to take the opinion of
the electors on the question they knew the steps which were necessary,
but meanwhile he reminded them that the Council was not the Association
and still less the constituency of South Paddington.
On the same morning of this meeting in Paddington Lord Randolph
published in the _Morning Post_--which almost alone among Metropolitan
newspapers remained well disposed towards him--the memorandum which he
had written nearly two years before. The memorandum, he explained, had
been intended to be ‘a strong but friendly protest against the measure.’
The speech of the previous Tuesday was intended, so far as lay in his
power, to prevent such a measure being ever proposed by a Government
again. This document had a marked and decided effect upon public
opinion. Seldom had a political prophet been so completely vindicated by
the event. It was now proved that two years before the exposure of
Pigott he had warned the Government of the discredit in which the
Special Commission would involve them and had described beforehand in
exact detail many of the evil consequences by which they were now
overtaken.
All of a sudden party indignation began to subside, and that keen sense
of justice never far removed from the English mind reasserted itself.
The journalists and the wirepullers had laboured to excess and the
inevitable reaction followed. Numbers of plain people began to write to
the newspapers to protest against the attacks made upon one who had been
so greatly concerned with famous Conservative victories. At Birmingham
the Old Guard--Rowlands, Sawyer, and Moore-Bayley--contrived to parry
the vote of censure by a simple resolution of confidence in the
Government, which the rest, when it came to the point, were content to
accept. Mr. Fardell resumed the Chairmanship of the Paddington Council,
and that body received their member’s reply without further comment or
action. So that Lord Randolph was enabled, without more hindrance, to
pursue his own path in his own way.
But while he cared little for the displeasure of political associates
and nothing at all for the party outburst, there was one breach which
caused him regret. Louis Jennings had been for the past four years an
intimate friend and a close and valuable ally. He had become a friend at
a time when others were falling away and after Lord Randolph had given
up the power to help and reward good service. He had adhered to his
leader with constancy, through much unpopularity and ridicule, and at
the cost of his own political future--such as it might have been.
Whatever cause he may have had for complaint, he had certainly repaid
the injury to the utmost of his power. Nothing could be more disparaging
to Lord Randolph Churchill personally or more prejudicial to the
opinions he had expressed than that he and they should be publicly
repudiated by the one man who of all others had stood by him until now.
The political world found it difficult to believe that the tone of a
speech apart from its tenor, a dispute about an amendment, or the
accident of debate, could in themselves be a complete explanation of a
sudden severance between such close political associates. Jennings
volunteered no further information on the subject; and Lord Randolph
Churchill to persistent inquiries merely replied: ‘I was not aware, and
could not be aware, that my speech would cause Mr. Jennings to withdraw
his amendment, and I am altogether unable to understand his reasons for
this action. I had told him that I would vote for his amendment and
speak in favour of it, and, as a matter of fact, I did so. Mr. Jennings
has acquired the reputation of being a man of reason, ability and sense,
and his actions are presumably guided by those qualities. That being so,
any further examination of his action against me last Tuesday does not
particularly attract me.’
Mr. Jennings left, however, among his private papers a statement
carefully prepared while the episode was fresh in his mind. I am content
to place this upon record exactly as it was written.[71]
The breach was never repaired. Lord Randolph Churchill would gladly have
made friends, and took pains to let the fact be known to Mr. Jennings.
But no communication, written or spoken, ever passed between them again.
Whether from an enduring sense of wrong, or from vain regrets at such a
miserable ending to four years of loyalty and labour, Mr. Jennings
continued in antagonism, and from time to time employed his dexterous
pen in sharp and sarcastic attack. There is an air of musty tragedy
about old letters. Week after week, in packet after packet, since 1886,
Jennings’s neat handwriting recurs. Suddenly his letters stop, just as
the Gorst letters had stopped five years before. He passes out of this
story--was soon, indeed, to pass out of all stories men can tell. On
that exciting night in March Lord Randolph Churchill had only five years
to live. But Mr. Jennings had less than three. He took little further
part in politics. He was returned for Stockport again at the General
Election; but almost at once he declared that he must retire from public
life. An internal malady had afflicted him, and he died somewhat
suddenly on February 9, 1893, aged fifty-six years. The circumstances of
his quarrel with Lord Randolph Churchill, no matter whether his anger
was deserved or not, or on which side the balance of misunderstanding
may have lain, cannot exclude from this account a full acknowledgment of
his loyal, industrious and fearless comradeship. He suffered the
vexations and disappointments which must always harass those who fight
for lost causes and falling men.
The strange and memorable episode of the Parnell Commission lies at the
present in a twilight. It has drifted out of the fierce and uncertain
glare of political controversy. It is not yet illumined by the calm lamp
of the historian. Those whose influence initiated or sustained the
policy seem abundantly vindicated by events. Their action was ratified
by Parliament and never seriously impugned by the nation. Whatever
injury resulted at the time to the cause of the Union--and no doubt the
injury was grave--was more than healed by the unexpected proceedings in
the Divorce Courts at the end of the year. If it be true, as some may
think, that the conduct of Irish affairs by the Conservative Cabinet of
‘86 enabled Mr. Gladstone to advance the flag of Home Rule again at the
head of a Parliamentary majority, it is also true that this second
onslaught encountered a not less stubborn resistance and ended in an
even more decisive and lasting success. Those who were responsible have
no apparent cause to regret the course they took. Those who, on the
other hand, opposed it, from whatever motive, were brushed aside, and
could never persuade the public of their case. And yet such a strange
place is England that there is scarcely anyone, from the Ministers who
bear the burden, to the _Times_ newspaper--left, through the policy of
the Government it supported, loyal and indignant, with a quarter of a
million to pay--who will not to-day confess, and even declare, that
these proceedings were a grand and cardinal blunder from beginning to
end; that an Executive has no business to thrust itself into disputes
which the parties concerned may settle in the courts, and no right to
erect special machinery for the examination of charges perfectly within
the knowledge and scope of the law. So that if these things are
affirmed while the light is dim, while even the dust of conflict has
not altogether subsided, we may be hopeful of the judgment which history
will pronounce.
* * * * *
In these later years Lord Randolph Churchill was drawn increasingly
towards a Collectivist view of domestic politics. Almost every speech
which he made from 1889 to 1891 gives evidence of the steady development
of his opinions. His interest in the problems of the labouring classes
grew warmer and keener as time passed. He spoke his mind without the
smallest regard to the susceptibilities of his party, or to his own
influence and position; and he favoured or accepted doctrines and
tendencies before which Liberals recoiled and even the most stalwart
Radicals paused embarrassed. He urged the House of Commons to examine
the demand for a general eight hours’ day ‘with a total absence of
anything like dogmatism.’ He replied with some asperity to Mr.
Bradlaugh, whose outspoken condemnation of the State regulation of the
hours of adult labour had evoked delighted cheers from the Conservative
party. He often wondered, he said, whether Mr. Bradlaugh or Mr.
Chamberlain would be the first to take a seat on the Treasury Bench. He
was sceptical, in the face of Income Tax and Revenue Returns, about ‘the
narrow margin of profit’ remaining to capital. His answer to a
deputation of miners who waited in succession on him and Mr. Gladstone
to urge the enforcement of an eight hours’ day in the coal trade was
accepted by them as far more favourable to their desires than anything
that fell from the Liberal leader. He voted for the principle of the
payment of members of Parliament. He took a leading part in the movement
to provide North-West London with a polytechnic institution--‘a
university for labour,’ as he described it. ‘An Englishman,’ he said,
‘possesses over Europeans one immeasurable and inestimable advantage.
Out of the life of every German, every Frenchman, every Italian, every
Austrian, every Russian, the respective Governments of those countries
take three years for compulsory military service. If you estimate those
three years at eight hours per day for six days a week, you will find
that out of the life of every European in those nations no fewer than
7,500 hours are taken by the Governments of those countries for
compulsory military service, during which time the individual so
deprived is, for the purposes of contributing to the wealth of the
community as a whole by his labour, as idle and useless and unprofitable
as if he had never been born. But in our free and happy country, where
the freedom of existence has practically no reasonable limits and where
only a very minute portion of the population voluntarily embraces a
military career, every man who lives to the age of twenty-three or
twenty-four, possesses as an advantage over the inhabitants of foreign
countries an extra capital of at least 7,500 hours. That immeasurable
superiority, if properly taken advantage of by the provision of adequate
educational institutions, is what should enable us to put aside alarm as
to foreign competition.’ His Licensing Bill, which he introduced on
April 29, 1890, in the last great speech he ever made to the House of
Commons, while it affirmed the justice of compensation, asserted for the
first time in Parliament the principle of popular control over the issue
of licences.
All these questions trench too closely upon current politics to be
conveniently examined here. But it is not difficult to understand why
his opinions did not win Lord Randolph Churchill the support of every
section of the Conservative party. And yet all the while, in spite of
his public declarations--obstinately repeated--there continued in the
Tory ranks a steady and at times a powerful pressure to bring him back
to the Government. Session after session had been scrambled through in
dispiriting fashion. The mismanagement of Parliamentary business, the
failure of important legislative projects, the abiding discredit of the
Pigott forgery, the lack of any life or fire or inspiration in the
conduct of affairs, sank the Conservative party and the Unionist
alliance lower and lower in public estimation.
By June 1890 Lord Salisbury’s Administration was in the utmost peril.
The Government majority upon a decisive division fell to four.[72] Their
licensing proposals were ignominiously withdrawn. Their attempt to carry
business over to an autumn session failed. And in these hard times many
Conservatives who disagreed altogether with Lord Randolph Churchill’s
views felt that his return to a commanding place was a necessary
condition, if the waning fortunes of their party were to be retrieved.
Ministers of importance approached Lord Salisbury. Sir Michael
Hicks-Beach urged him not to allow the object of excluding Lord Randolph
Churchill to prejudice the interests of the Unionist cause. Tory papers
wrote favourable articles. Tory worthies met together in the
Conservative Club under the presidency of Sir Algernon Borthwick, to
entertain the ‘prodigal son.’ ‘Randolph must return’ was everywhere the
whisper and the word. But Lord Salisbury was firm. Nothing would induce
him to divide his authority again. And having regard to all the
circumstances which have been related, he was, from his own point of
view, unquestionably right. He knew well that Lord Randolph Churchill
had altered no whit, had retracted nothing; and that, if he rejoined the
Ministry, he would labour as of old, without stint or pause, with riper
gifts of knowledge and experience and under conditions more favourable
perhaps than in 1886, to guide and to deflect the policy of a
Conservative Government into democratic and progressive paths. Better a
party or a personal defeat; better a Parliamentary collapse; better even
an Imperial disaster!
Fortune favours the brave. The courage and tenacity of the Prime
Minister received an unexpected relief. The downfall of Parnell was at
hand. Her Majesty’s Government regained in the Divorce Court the credit
they had lost before the Special Commission. The ranks of the English
Home Rule party, lately so exultant, were broken in dismay; and
Nationalist Ireland, hitherto united under one controlling hand, was
distracted by enduring and ferocious feuds. This peculiar episode may
have settled decisively the fate of the legislative union between Great
Britain and Ireland. It also terminated for ever, without hope or
expectation of renewal, the protracted conflict between the New Tories
and the Old.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 1887-1893]
Meanwhile outside the House of Commons and the forbidding circles of
politics Lord Randolph was developing during these years new interests
and amusements. Excitement in one form or another always attracted him,
and after his resignation he sought it on the Turf. In partnership with
Lord Dunraven he soon acquired a number of horses, to whose training and
running he paid the closest attention. He became a shrewd judge of
‘form.’ In handicaps especially, his forecasts were so often fulfilled
that he acquired quite a reputation among his sporting friends. On the
morning of a race meeting he would sit for hours pencilling upon the
card, by the aid of _Ruff’s Guide_, calculations which led very often to
conclusions that were right and still more often to conclusions that
were nearly right. Under his eye Sherwood’s stable became successful and
for two years at least stood high in the winning lists. His footsteps
fell upon some odd streaks of luck. While he was away fishing in Norway,
in the summer of 1889, his mare the Abbesse de Jouarre won the Oaks at
odds of twenty to one. At Doncaster, the year before, he dreamed he saw
a number hoisted. On consulting his card the next day he found that only
one horse running had so high a number. Inquiries led to the belief that
this horse had a much better chance than the odds at which it stood
suggested. Lord Randolph backed it heavily and won a considerable sum.
Against the advice of his trainer he insisted on running the Abbesse de
Jouarre for the Manchester Cup in 1889, and her victory constituted
perhaps his most fortunate speculation. Of other horses which he owned
or leased it is not necessary to speak, but during the years 1887 to
1891 Lord Randolph’s colours--‘chocolate, pink sleeves and cap’--were
often to the fore.
Standing, as he did, apart from the ordinary groupings of party, he
cultivated during these years pleasant relations with politicians of
every shade. At his sister Lady Tweedmouth’s house he met Mr. Gladstone
more frequently than he had ever done before. Lord Randolph treated the
illustrious old man with the utmost deference, and each appears to have
derived much satisfaction from the other’s society. ‘He was the most
courtly man I ever met,’ observed Mr. Gladstone in later years to Mr.
Morley. At one dinner at Brook House Mr. Gladstone had talked with great
vivacity and freedom and held everyone breathless. ‘And that,’ said Lord
Randolph to a Liberal-Unionist friend, as they walked out of the room
together, ‘that is the man you have left? How could you have done it?’
His own society was eagerly sought by his friends; for he had much
treasure to give as a companion, if only he were in the giving vein. The
gay and reckless brilliancy of his conversation fascinated all who came
within its range. He would talk and argue with entire freedom on every
subject. He loved to defend daring paradoxes; and when forced to exert
himself he would produce arguments so original and ingenious that the
listeners were delighted, even if they were unconvinced. He sometimes
amused himself by saying things on purpose to shock ponderous people,
and in painting himself extravagantly in the darkest hues, so that they
departed grieved to think there was so much wickedness left in the
world. He excelled in all kinds of chaff and conversational
sword-play--from sombre irony to schoolboy fun. When he wanted to
persuade people to do any particular thing, he took enormous pains,
seeming to touch by instinct all the feelings and reasons which moved or
disturbed them, and very often he coaxed or compelled them to his
wishes. On the other hand, he did not care how rude he was to those who
wearied or irritated him, and he would toss and gore fools with true
Johnsonian vigour and zest. In this abrupt and impulsive way he hurt the
feelings of some harmless people and disquieted a good many more; but if
he were sorry afterwards, as he very often was, he could nearly always
make amends by a word or a smile or some little courtesy, and the sun
shone out all the brighter for the storm. Although in his later years
the nervous irritability of his nature became extreme, he steadily
enlarged the circle of his private friends, and those who had known him
long were increasingly attached to him. Not without justice could they
apply to him Addison’s well-known lines:--
In all thy humours, whether grave or mellow,
Thou’rt such a touchy, testy, pleasant fellow,
Hast so much wit, and mirth, and spleen about thee,
There is no living with thee, nor without thee.[73]
Lord Randolph was wont to pass much of the autumn and winter abroad and
each year he pushed his travels further afield and remained a longer
time. In August of 1888 he had visited Tarbes--the constituency which
returned his friend the Marquis de Breteuil to the French Chamber--and
here spent some placid agreeable weeks of fine weather amid splendid
mountains, while his companion conciliated the principal electors by
intercourse and entertainment. Of the attractions of Tarbes and its
neighbourhood--better known, perhaps, to French and Spanish visitors
than to the English tourist--it would be superfluous to write, for they
were set forth by the local newspaper in a passage whose hospitable
extravagance I shall venture to quote:--
Nous apprenons l’arrivée dans notre département de lord Randolph
Churchill, qui vient y retrouver son ami M. le Marquis de Breteuil.
Nous souhaitons la bienvenue dans nos montagnes au noble Lord, au
brillant orateur de la Chambre des Communes.
Il est certain d’y recevoir un accueil cordial de la part de nos
députés et courtois de la part de nos populations qui n’ont jamais
failli aux devoirs de l’hospitalité.
Il y retrouvera, avec un climat plus doux même que celui du
Devonshire, des sites plus enchanteurs encore, des sommets plus
élevés que le Snowdon, des lacs aussi bleus que le Lomond, des
torrents plus impétueux que le Glen et le Liddel.
Si le daim, le cerf et la grouse nous font défaut, nous avons
l’izard, la caille savoureuse, la perdrix noire, la perdrix
blanche, le coq de bruyère, la bécasse, le lièvre, etc. L’ours même
s’y rencontre, mais ... difficilement.
Chose plus importante encore, si l’honorable membre de la Chambre
des Communes avait, victime de son éloquence, le larynx fatigué,
les eaux merveilleuses de Cauterets seraient là pour le guérir.
De toutes les façons, nous avons la conviction que lord Churchill
emportera de nos Pyrénées un bon souvenir.
_To his Wife._
Tarbes: August 1, 1888.
Here we are very peaceable and comfortable--beautiful weather,
splendid mountains, and nothing to bother about. This is a charming
place; house and garden both very pretty. Breteuil’s electors drop
in at odd times and some remain to breakfast and some to dinner.
They are not very amusing, but very harmless and interesting as
types of French provincial society. The worst of the electors is
that they will not go to bed; but remain very late. I suppose they
are too glad to get an evening out.
The charm of this place is the absence of any crowd. French and
Spaniards are the only people who come here and English and
Americans are conspicuous by their absence. I tried the ‘douches’
at Cauterets. They are very pleasant at the moment, but, I think,
enervating. We dined last night in company with Mons. de Gontaut,
formerly Ambassador in Berlin--a charming old man.... Yesterday we
drove to Lourdes, a very extraordinary place--a monument of ‘la
bêtise humaine.’ A great number of electors are coming to dinner in
the evening.
* * * * *
I have just seen a man 118 years old. His father lived to be 114,
and died from a fall from a horse; his mother lived to be 108. He
is a Spaniard who lives at Tarbes--quite a poor man, subsisting on
charity; looks about 70 years old, has all his teeth, lots of grey
hair, and he walked here all the way from the town--about
three-quarters of a mile. There is no doubt about his age, as his
papers are all in order. He served eight years in the French army
in Spain and was present at the siege of Saragossa. He said he
would be glad to die, as he was quite tired of living so long....
Breteuil’s colleague in the representation of this department
arrived this morning.
Now in 1890 he would go to Egypt, where with two old friends he had
leased a _dahabeah_ on the Nile. His letters to his wife, from which I
make a few extracts, describe the even progress of the journey.
Monte Carlo: November 25, 1890.
So to-day is the meeting of Parliament. How thankful I am not to be
going down to the House! In this morning’s _Galignani_ there is a
sensational announcement that a dissolution of Parliament is to
take place in the spring. I do not believe it, though perhaps, as
Parnell’s love affairs have thrown disarray among the Home Rulers,
some of the Ministers might think it a good moment. But ‘a bird in
the hand’ is what Lord S. will be guided by.
Rome: December 3, 1890.
Your nice long letter was very pleasant to receive. I should like
to get them very often. I also got your telegram about a letter
from Fardell posted to Naples, which I suppose I will receive
to-morrow. I hope he does not announce a dissolution. Parnell’s
manifesto is a masterpiece. He lifts the issue between himself and
Mr. Gladstone from the small ground of the divorce up to the large
ground of a great political question. He may hold his own; but it
must mean a complete smash-up of the Home Rule alliance.... The
Government will be fools if they do not dissolve. This crash of the
Home Rule party, this repudiation by Parnell of Mr. G.’s scheme, is
the most complete and glaring justification of the Unionist cause.
They will never get a better chance. However, I hope they won’t do
so, as it would spoil my Egyptian plans.... I fear that bad Land
Bill may now pass and make heaps of difficulty and trouble for
future Governments....
Dahabeah, Ammon Ra, near Luxor: December 28, 1890.
It was very pleasant on waking up this morning to find a bundle of
letters from you and others. They were brought down the river by
one of Cook’s steamers from Luxor, where we shall arrive in about
an hour.... We have been eight days on the journey from Assiout,
as, except for two days, the wind has not been favourable and our
steam launch is not strong enough to tow us more than about three
miles an hour. I cannot tell you how pleasant it has been; one day
more perfect than another, and yet the heat has never been
oppressive. The days slip by as if they were hours. The newspapers
came to hand at Assiout--though newspapers here seem to be
superfluities--and I was able to read up all the news to the
13th.... It certainly looks as if the Government had been
immeasurably strengthened and would require no help from anyone.
But all these things concern me very little. We are enjoying
ourselves immensely. Life on the Nile is ideal. The scenery would
be monotonous if it were not on so vast a scale; but as it is, one
never tires of it. Certainly this is the only place to pass the
winter if fine warm weather is desired.... I must say I wish you
were on board this boat--a week of this weather and rest would make
you as strong as a horse. Perhaps next winter, if we are alive and
well, we may do it together....
[Illustration: _Lady Randolph Churchill._
_From a drawing by John S. Sargent, R.A._]
[Sidenote: 1891 ÆT. 41]
Dahabeah, Ammon Ra, Denderah: January 6, 1891.
I can, I fear, ill repay you for your very interesting letter of
the 24th. All I can say is that it was thoroughly appreciated. I
have little or nothing to tell you. A life without incident and
without emotion has many advantages; but does not lend itself to
correspondence, either as regards energy or material. I have seen
Philæ and the Cataract, as also the temples of Edfoo and of this
place--most interesting. Also a long expedition from Luxor to the
tombs of the kings, some four thousand years old. Each king must
have passed his lifetime in making his tomb, and if it was not
finished when he died he had to go without. The weather has been
perfect--day after day of cloudless skies, cool breezes and
unparalleled sunsets. We read, we smoke, we lounge, we play
picquet--at which I continue to hold exceedingly indifferent
cards.... We shall dawdle out our time here as much as possible, as
we do not want to be more than a day in Cairo.
To Sir Henry James, who wrote him accounts of the strange developments
at Westminster, he framed a more elaborate reply than was usual with him
in private correspondence:--
Dahabea, ‘Ammon Ra.’ Edfu, 60 miles south of Luxor:
Jan. 3, 1891.
Your amiable and friendly letter reached me here this morning on my
return from a visit to and prolonged study of a temple erected by
the Ptolemies 250 B.C. It is ridiculously modern compared with
Karnac, but its comparatively perfect state enables one usefully to
imagine what Karnac was. In such a frame of mind, embracing a
period of 10,000 years, your home politics, your House of Commons
interests, the eloquence of Smith, the courage of Balfour, the
honesty of Hartington, the financial genius of Goschen and the
adroitness of Joe, all acted upon, stimulated and developed by the
lax morals of Parnell, present themselves to my mental optics much
in the same manner as fleas may attract the notice of an elephant.
I am living with Rameses, Thotmes and Seti, and I have despised the
Ptolemies as parvenus, and Cleopatra as ----! Imagine therefore how
infinitely little becomes the struggle of the Kilkenny factions,
the senile drivellings of Mr. Gladstone on Ravenswood which you
think worthy of mention, the remorse of the officeless Harcourt or
the doubting gloom of Morley. Here on this placid expanse of
limitless plain and river and among these Egyptian temples you
appear to me, as I say, like performing fleas. I was once a flea
like you and skipped as nimbly as any of you, but have by some
Pythagorean process emerged from that abject condition, and prefer
musings over an immense past to worryings over a little present.
In addition to the attractions of this country and of its historic
associations, we have and enjoy ideal weather, perfect peace,
absence of all noise and a floating domicile in all respects
comfortable; good food, hock, champagne, Pilsener beer, Marquis
chocolate, ripe bananas, fresh dates, and literally hundreds of
French novels, recourse to which is interrupted by games of
picquet, in which the lucky Harry T[yrrwhit] has gained of me
10,000 1_d._ points. French novels, cards and Egyptian temples
assimilate pleasantly, but English newspapers and English news are
out of tune with these surroundings. And what pleases me most in
your letter is the reflection to which it gives rise, that I still
exist in the memory of a friend.
This is the part of the world in which you must pass your next
winter. This heavenly climate will tame the most ferocious gout and
tranquillise the most irritated nerves. If all is well, I will
conduct you here next winter, introduce to you my friends Rameses &
Co., forbid you the acquaintance of the vulgar Ptolemies, and gain
from you 10,000 1_d._ points at picquet.
We have reached our Southern limit at Assouan, and are now
leisurely floating down the current back to Cairo, back to noise,
back to cold, back to tiresome women, back to _Times_ leading
articles, all inventions of the devil from which Providence has
preserved the waters of the Nile....
I do not think I have ever experienced so pleasant a time as during
the last three weeks. I have arrived at the condition of the true
philosopher; nerves calm, health good, everything to please the eye
and the mind. The past affords matter for agreeable reflection. The
future appears without vexation. I can inform myself with interest
but without emotions either of pleasure or displeasure of the good
or evil fortunes of my enemies or my friends, and I please myself
with the imagination that if I were to die to-morrow, I should have
experienced and exhausted, prudently abandoning before satiation,
every form of human excitement. This is what you can come to if you
spend your next winter in Egypt; and it is to repay you for your
letter that I thus lengthily suggest to you the prospect of
obtaining at least six weeks of happiness and peace in the year of
our Lord 1891.
[Sidenote: 1887-1890]
It is instructive to notice that Lord Randolph’s conduct during the
years that followed his resignation will bear a far more exacting
scrutiny than the years of his good fortune. Differing as he did on many
questions from the Government, separated from them by the personal
dislike or distrust with which he was regarded, he had nevertheless
given them, so far as he conscientiously could, a loyal and regular
support. He had never spoken against them except when compelled by
opinions plainly declared in former years, or moved by deep feeling; and
then he had always practised a moderation in tone and language foreign
to his disposition. He had done nothing to embarrass them or hamper
them. He had never made a personal attack on any of his late
colleagues, nor can I discover any unkind or acrimonious word used about
them. From time to time he had tried to influence their policy in
directions which he believed the public interest and their own equally
required; but these occasions had been rare and he had usually been
right. Although the object of much abuse and even hatred from his old
friends, he nourished no thoughts of permanent separation. ‘Born and
bred,’ he wrote in 1891, ‘in the Conservative party, I could never join
the ranks of their opponents.’ ‘I have always been,’ he told his
constituents (February 22, 1891), ‘more or less of an independent
member. From the year 1874, when I entered Parliament, to the year
1880--during the time of Lord Beaconsfield’s Government--I felt it my
duty on more than one occasion to vote and speak against that powerful
Government, and at times when in certain circles in London even to
whisper a doubt as to its wisdom was considered almost treasonable. From
1880 to 1885 I pursued a course in Parliament of the greatest freedom
and independence. More than once I went my own way, not caring much
whether anyone followed; but I hardly think there are those who will
assert that my action from 1880 to 1885 did injury to the Tory party. I
have been unable even of late years to divest myself of my independent
character. Lord Melbourne--or was it Lord Palmerston?--once
characterised an independent member of Parliament as a member who could
not be depended upon. Well, this much is certain. If I am called upon
to support a reactionary and antiquated policy, then I am not to be
depended upon. If I am called upon to approve illiberal or sham
legislation, then I am not to be depended upon. If I am called upon to
support an aggressive policy or a policy of large expenditure, then I am
not to be depended upon. But if I am called upon to abide by pledges I
have given on any platform or in any published letter or to support the
political principles I have advocated, since I entered Parliament, then
I can confidently point out to you my past career as a proof that I am
to be depended upon--more, perhaps, than any devoted partisan of the
present Government.’
These were the best years of his intellectual power--a short summer when
his mind was most fertile and his judgment ripe and prescient. Almost
alone and unsupported he had by sheer personal force and persuasive
speech commanded respect and procured important decisions. Grave or gay,
in attack, defence, or exposition, on all sorts of subjects and in all
sorts of humours, the House of Commons had delighted to hear him; and
what he said in Parliament or out of doors, whether about politics or
other matters, was received and examined with national attention. But
let it be observed that Lord Randolph Churchill was beaten, whatever he
did, when he played the national game; and was victorious, whatever he
did, while he played the party game. No question of ‘taste’ or
‘patriotism’ was raised when what he said, however outrageous, suited
his party. No claim of truth counted when what he said, however
incontrovertible, was awkward for his party. Yet almost fiercely he
asserted his loyalty to the Unionist cause.
‘It was not difficult for me to notice,’ he wrote in 1891, in a letter
to his constituents, never published, ‘that after power was assured to
the Tory leaders for some years by the General Election of 1886, it was
their intention to stand on the old ways of Toryism in respect to
Ireland, foreign policy and expenditure. Then I went away from them. On
three occasions since during the last long five years have I gone
against them: (1) When they threatened to recommence the policy of
military expenditure in the Soudan; (2) when in 1888 the present Leader
of the House of Commons, then Chief Secretary, ridiculed and denounced
in the House the demand of the Irish members for Local Self-government;
(3) when in 1890 I declared against the iniquitous and infamous policy
of the Parnell Commission. With these three exceptions I often supported
the Government by speech and vote in Parliament; I even spoke and voted
in favour of their Coercion Bill in 1887, though I was much startled and
disquieted afterwards by the manner of its administration; and in 1887,
1888, and 1889 I addressed large public meetings in their support. For
the rest of the time, when I disagreed and doubted--as was often the
case--I stood aloof and held my peace; and you must well remember that
on more than one occasion in past sessions this strong Government and
party managed to get themselves into the sorest straits, and that
opportunities were offered of paying off some old scores which, if
personal considerations had influenced me, I should not have neglected
and which, I expect, not many politicians would have allowed to pass by.
Bear this in mind, I pray you, in common justice when you hear me freely
accused--as I have often been, and shall be again--of disloyalty to the
Tory or the Unionist party; contrast the line of action I have followed
with action followed in former Parliaments towards former Governments by
former out-going Ministers; and I call upon you to acquit me fully of
any charge of disloyalty.’
It had been proved to utter conviction in those barren years that ‘ten
men armed can subdue one man in his shirt.’ One friend after another had
fallen away from Lord Randolph. The hostility of the Prime Minister and
the tireless machine-like detraction of the party press had not been
without effect. His Parliamentary position was one of complete isolation
and his popularity in the country had declined. Others--scarcely heard
of in the days of battle--were now bearing the burden of the Unionist
cause, and the public eye was fixed upon a stout-hearted bookseller
whose perseverance as Leader was making of his repeated failures a
curious but undoubted success, and upon an Irish Secretary whose
reputation was every day enhanced by the taunts and revilings he
provoked from his opponents. The Minister who seemed so powerful in
1886, the people’s favourite, the necessary Parliamentarian, the central
link of the Unionist alliance, certainly its most redoubtable champion,
stood outside all political combinations, actual or potential. The
Government of such a sickly infancy was grown up into a strong, if not a
healthy manhood. The sunrise of wealth and extending comfort which in
every nation lighted up the last quarter of the nineteenth century was
strengthening by an unseen yet irresistible process the forces upon
which Conservatism depends; and the millstone of Home Rule bowed and
strangled the Liberals. There was neither need nor place for a leader of
Tory Democracy.
All this was perfectly appreciated by Lord Randolph Churchill, and his
detached contented mood and habit of thought were carefully and
laboriously assumed and fortified by every trick of mental discipline he
knew. A studied disdain of the course of public events, the influence of
movement and of changing scenes, the delights of summer-lands, books,
friends and mild Egyptian cigarettes--all were to him the incidents of
an elaborate art. But the characters of valetudinarian, pleasure-seeker,
traveller, sportsman, failed to satisfy, and served scarcely to
distract. Always at hand, though forbidden his mind, lurked the hopes
and the schemes, once so real, now turned to shadows: and the
thought--never quite to be chased away--of that multitude of working
people he knew so well, who had trusted him as their champion; who were
still ready, if they knew how, to do him honour; but for whom--though
their problems were still unsolved, uncared for, or cared for only as
counters in the game of politics--it was beyond his power to do the
smallest service. And although the great river, gliding impassively
along by the sands of the desert and the temples of forsaken faiths,
might seem to smile at fretful aspirations, the reproach and
disappointment silently consumed him.
* * * * *
Further and further afield! After the session of 1890 Lord Randolph
Churchill abandoned the House of Commons. He attended seldom; he never
spoke. In the summer of 1891 he sailed for South Africa in quest of
sport and gold--and peace. A journey to Mashonaland was in those days an
enterprise of some difficulty; nor, indeed, before the overthrow of the
Matabele power, devoid of risk. Elaborate arrangements were required to
conduct even a small party in comfort through these untrodden fields.
The command of the miniature expedition was entrusted to Major Giles, a
traveller well acquainted with the country. As killing game was a
necessity as well as an amusement, one of the best hunters in South
Africa, Hans Lee, was included in the party; and Mr. Perkins, a mining
engineer of the highest eminence, was engaged to search for gold.
The interest with which Lord Randolph was regarded by the public had
survived his popularity and all these preparations excited general
curiosity and afforded fertile themes for comment and satire. He was
persuaded to write a long series of letters for the _Daily Graphic_ by
the extraordinary offer of a hundred pounds for each letter. Every
incident of his journey, even the most trivial, especially the most
personal that could be discovered, was telegraphed to England by
assiduous reporters and discussed with genial malice by the Conservative
newspapers. He was burlesqued on the Gaiety stage with a wit so pointed
that the song was stopped by the intervention of the Lord Chamberlain.
While paragraphs, lampoons and caricatures exhibited him daily to the
ridicule of his countrymen; while the delegates of the National Union
hooted his name at their annual conference; and while the chiefs of the
Tories complacently admired the fulness of their triumph, the
ex-Minister plunged into vast solitudes. Across the veldt by bush and
kloof and kopje, through the drifts of flooded rivers, by mining camps
and frontier posts into magnificent wildernesses toiled the tiny
caravan. A gust of bracing air and rough exertion breaks in upon the
artificial ventilation of the House of Commons. The crowded benches,
with the yellow light streaming down upon them from the ceiling, recede
into the distance. Waggons creak and jolt along stony tracks, camp-fires
twinkle in the waste, antelope gallop over spacious pastures, lions roar
beneath the stars----
All this has been described by Lord Randolph Churchill himself in the
book in which his published letters were finally compiled.[74] I will
not tell a twice-told tale. It was not perhaps surprising that a
relentless criticism should have denied to these productions all title
to literary merit. Their commercial value consisted mainly in the
personality of the writer; and that personality was the object of
powerful and widespread prejudice. The extravagant price paid for them
was an incitement to every sharp pen less generously rewarded. The
letters themselves make no pretence to elegance. Here and there a touch
of quaint humour, a caustic or jingling phrase, or a rhetorical
passage--but for the most part they tell a plain story of sport and
travel, as such stories have often been told before.
One extract shall suffice:--
We were riding along through a small open glade covered with high
grass, Lee a few yards ahead of me, when I suddenly saw him turn
round, cry out something to me, and point with his finger ahead. I
looked, and saw lolloping along through and over the grass, about
forty yards off, a yellow animal about as big as a small bullock.
It flashed across me that it was a lion--the last thing in the
world that I was thinking of. I was going to dismount and take aim,
for I was not frightened at the idea of firing at a retreating
lion; but Lee called out in succession five or six times, ‘Look,
look!’ at the same time pointing with his finger in different
directions in front. I saw to my astonishment, and rather to my
dismay, that the glade appeared to be alive with lions. There they
were, trooping and trotting along ahead of us like a lot of
enormous dogs, great yellow objects, offering such a sight as I had
never dreamed of. Lee turned to me and said, ‘What will you do?’ I
said, ‘I suppose we must go after them,’ thinking all the time that
I was making a very foolish answer. This I am the more convinced of
now, for Lee told me afterwards that many old hunters in South
Africa will turn away from such a troupe of lions as we had before
us. We trotted on after them a short distance to where the grass
was more open, the lions trotting along ahead of us in the most
composed and leisurely fashion, very different from the
galloping-off of a surprised and startled antelope. Lee now
dismounted and fired at a lion about fifty yards off. I saw the
brute fall forward on his head, twist round and round and stagger
into a patch of high grass slightly to the left of where I was
riding.
I did not venture to dismount with such a lot of these brutes all
around ahead of me, not feeling at all sure that I should be able
to remount quickly enough and gallop away after shooting. My horse,
untrained to the gun, would not allow me to fire from his back and
would probably have thrown me off had I done so. I stuck close to
Lee, determined to leave the shooting to him unless things became
critical, as his aim was true. His nerves were steady, which was
more than mine were, though I do not admit that I was at all
frightened. I counted seven lions; Lee says there were more. I saw,
and cried out to Lee, pointing to a great big fellow with a heavy
black mane trotting along slightly ahead of the rest. He was just
crossing a small spruit about one hundred yards ahead and as he
climbed the opposite bank offered his hind quarters as a fair
target. Lee fired at him, at which he quickened his pace and
disappeared in front. We approached the spruit and, almost
literally under my nose, I saw three lions tumble up out of it,
climb the opposite side and disappear. Now I own I longed for my
shooting pony Charlie, for they offered me splendid shots, quite
close, such as I could hardly have missed. I raised my rifle to
take aim at the last; but, perhaps fortunately for me, he
disappeared, before I could fire, in the high grass on the other
side. I saw Lee fire from his horse at one as it was climbing the
bank, which he wounded badly. It retreated into a patch of thick
grass the other side of the spruit, uttering sounds something
between a growl, a grunt and a sob.
Mashonaland yielded no golden results to the practised eye of Mr.
Perkins; and it was not until the expedition had returned to
Johannesburg that he unfolded his novel theory of deep levels. At this
time the outcrop of the Great Banket reef was the only gold area which
was being worked. Mr. Perkins observed the slant at which the strata
emerged from the upper soil. He calculated accordingly. He advised the
purchase of farms and properties along the south side of the ridge. By
striking down directly into the earth the Great Banket reef would again
be overtaken--richer perhaps than ever before. Lord Randolph Churchill
must have stood at this time very close to an almost immeasurable
fortune. Such a vital thought could not, however, remain secret--was
already occurring to other minds. But the investments which he made were
not inconsiderable or ill-judged, and were sold at his death for upwards
of 70,000_l._
While such business and adventure occupied his mind the leadership of
the House of Commons fell vacant. Mr. Smith’s heavy task was at an end.
For two sessions he had struggled against ever-increasing physical
distresses. Hour after hour he had sat on his Bench with his rug across
his knees--a pathetic and not unheroic figure. Night after night he had
risen in his place to discharge in singularly bad speeches his duty--as
he would have phrased it--to ‘Queen and country.’ Now he was gone, and
Lord Salisbury made haste to appoint Mr. Balfour in his stead. His
selection was almost universally applauded.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to his Wife._
Mafeking, November 23, 1891.
So Arthur Balfour is really leader--and Tory Democracy, the genuine
article, at an end! Well, I have had quite enough of it all. I have
waited with great patience for the tide to turn, but it has not
turned, and will not now turn in time. In truth, I am now
altogether _déconsidéré_. I feel sure the other party will come in
at the next election. The South Molton election is another among
many indications. No power will make me lift hand or foot or voice
for the Tories, just as no power would make me join the other side.
All confirms me in my decision to have done with politics and try
to make a little money for the boys and for ourselves. I hope you
do not all intend to worry me on this matter and dispute with me
and contradict me. More than two-thirds, in all probability, of my
life is over, and I will not spend the remainder of my years in
beating my head against a stone wall. I expect I have made great
mistakes; but there has been no consideration, no indulgence, no
memory or gratitude--nothing but spite, malice and abuse. I am
quite tired and dead-sick of it all, and will not continue
political life any longer. I have not Parnell’s dogged, but at the
same time sinister, resolution; and have many things and many
friends to make me happy, without that horrid House of Commons work
and strife. After all, A. B. cannot beat my record; and it was I
who got him first into the Government, and then into the Cabinet.
This he and Lord S. know well.... It is so pleasant getting near
home again. I have had a good time (out here), but now reproach
myself for having left you all for so long, and am dying to be
again at Connaught Place.
* * * * *
CHAPTER XXII
OPPOSITION ONCE MORE
Though much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
TENNYSON: _Ulysses_.
[Sidenote: 1892 ÆT. 43]
The variations of English politics are continual, and at times so swift
that those who influence them and are in turn influenced by them are
hardly conscious of the pace they are travelling. As the general
situation alters, the relations of its principal characters insensibly
change. The doubtful or indifferent acquaintance of one year is the
trusted comrade of the next. Combinations impossible in January are
inevitable in June. Mortal offences are forgotten, if they are not
forgiven; and as the ship moves forward into newer waters only a fading
streak of froth lingers on the surface of the sea.
Lord Randolph Churchill returned from South Africa early in 1892, to
find, so far as he was concerned, a better temper and complexion in
public affairs than at any time since his resignation. The life of the
Government was ebbing away; the appeal to country could not be long
delayed; and although the Parnell disclosures had immensely strengthened
the Unionist position, there was little in the record or character of
the Administration to excite popular enthusiasm. The drag of six years
of office made its effect felt, and the Grand Old Man seemed still to
enjoy the unconquerable splendour of his powers. That feeling of closing
up the ranks, usually the prelude to a General Election, was abroad in
the party; and its chiefs, though he did not at first realise it, looked
in amity, not unmingled with anxiety, to the erstwhile leader of Tory
Democracy, who had done such great things with the electors in the past
and might, for all they knew, exert even a greater influence in the
future. His reappearance in the House of Commons in the first days of
February created a stir, which his silent and reserved demeanour did not
speedily allay. Alike in the lobbies and the newspapers the question was
debated, ‘What is he going to do?’ And it must be admitted that his
answer to the resolution in which the South Paddington Conservative
Association inquired whether he proposed to stand, and if so whether he
would support the general policy of the Conservative party, did not
altogether remove the uncertainty which existed.
‘I would be obliged to you,’ he wrote to the Secretary of the
Association (February 4, 1892), ‘if you would inform the Committee that,
as at present advised, it is my intention in the event of a dissolution
of Parliament to offer myself to the constituency for re-election and
that in taking that course I should hope that I might rely upon the
renewed support of the body which the Committee represent. It would
further be my intention, in the event of my being re-elected as member
of Parliament for the borough, to give to the Tory party the same
support which I have given to it since the year 1874, when I first
entered Parliament. Of the usefulness of that support it is not for me
to judge; it is sufficient for me to say that my action in the future in
the House of Commons would be in accordance, and consistent, with my
action in the past.’
To FitzGibbon he wrote with greater plainness.
Penn House, Amersham: January 13, 1892.
It was too pleasant to get a sight of your handwriting again. My
travel through South Africa was as nice an experience as anyone
could have, and though I am very glad to get back I really enjoyed
every hour of my journey. I think I find H. M. G. in a very weak
and tottering state; their feelings towards myself more bitter and
hostile than ever. But I imagine that, willy nilly, they will have
to shake off or subdue their prejudices, for great troubles are
before them. My information is that a large, influential and to
some extent independent section of Tories kick awfully against
Irish Local Government and do not mean to vote for it. This comes
from a very knowledgeable member of the Government outside the
Cabinet. If the Government proceed with their project they will
either split or seriously dishearten the party, and to do either on
the verge of a General Election would be suicidal. This is what
they ought to do: They ought to say this Irish Local Government is
far too large a question to be dealt with by a moribund
Parliament; they ought to confess that there is not sufficient
agreement among their supporters as to the nature and extent of
such a measure, such as would favour the chances of successful
legislation, and that they have determined to reserve the matter
for a new Parliament, when the mind of the country upon their Irish
administration has been fully ascertained. But I would not stop
there. What is the great feature of the political situation in
Ireland now? The resurrection in great force of priestly domination
in political matters. Now I would cool the ardour of these
potentates for Mr. G. by at once offering them the largest
concessions on education--primary, intermediate, and
University--which justice and generosity could admit of. I would
not give them everything before the General Election, but I would
give a good lot, and keep a good lot for the new Parliament. I do
not think they could resist the bribe; and the soothing effect of
such a policy on the Irish vote and attitude would be marked. Of
course the concession would have to be very large--almost as large
as what the Bishops have ever asked for--but preserving always
intact Trinity College. It would assume the material shape of a
money subsidy. What do you think of this? What is the frame of mind
of the Bishops? What form and scope would you give to such a
measure or measures as I suggest?
H. M. G. have no imagination or originality. The keystone of their
policy has been to play against the life of Mr. G. This (not very
noble, but still human) policy should, once taken up, be pursued
remorselessly. To carry on the policy, the life of the Parliament
should be prolonged into ‘93. How to do this? Introduce a measure
dealing largely with the registration laws.
‘One man one vote’--a trifle--could be conceded; twelve months’
residence in lieu of eighteen established; paid officials for
preparing register appointed in all constituencies. The new
register could not be ready before the early spring of next year,
and the convenient time for the election would be the summer or
autumn. Now, my dear FitzGibbon, imagine the consternation, fury
and utter paralysis of the Gladstonians if the Government were to
make this complete _volte-face_--this tremendous surprise (all so
logical and defensible as it is), the relief and joy of the Tories
at getting rid of Local Government and at getting another year of
life! Do not show this to anyone, unless it be to David Plunket, if
he is with you--the Government are too fond of appropriating my
ideas without acknowledgment--but write me all you think about it.
I could write pages in support of it, but your own wily and Ulysses
kind of mind will suggest to you all the wonderful elaboration of
which it is susceptible.
And again in April:--
Politics attract me less and less and I successfully resist all
invitations to take part in them, whether in Parliament or in the
country. I really sincerely do not think that an offer of office
would cause me the slightest emotion or drag me from my freedom and
carelessness. However, that speculation is not likely to be put to
the test. I have now a nice position--well with my constituents,
well with my party--and am inclined to let well alone. I anticipate
with amiable malice a Unionist defeat, and speculate on the nature
of their struggles to resume power after that defeat. Balfour is
doing very well, and has been much benefited by the senseless
outcry raised against him by the Opposition.... Did you see my
beautiful Latin letter to the [Trinity] College authorities,
corrected and revised by Welldon of Harrow! It ought to have been
published.
As the dissolution approached, overtures were made to him to contest
several constituencies and he was pressed on all sides for his
assistance. He declined everything. ‘It is not my intention,’ he wrote
to one ardent Tory Democrat,[75] ‘to make any political speeches at the
present time. Formerly I made many; but the labour was thankless and
fruitless. Besides, I have not the smallest idea what the programme of
our party now is.... From 1880 to 1886 I advocated on my own account a
generally liberal and progressive policy, with the result that when I
came into office I found that none of my colleagues were prepared to
give to this policy the smallest genuine support; and that, office
having been reached, promises to the people were to be forgotten or
evaded. This experience I will never recommence; and it is for this
reason that I decline, and must continue to decline, all invitations to
take part in the platform exercises which precede the General Election.’
In Parliament he remained silent. He admired Mr. Balfour’s early essays
in leading the House. ‘At last,’ he said, ‘the Tory party have got a
leader whom they like.’ To one who told him that if he sat below the
gangway he could soon overthrow the Government, he answered, ‘No, no;
Arthur Balfour is too often nearly right.’
The only interventions in outside politics which he allowed himself were
a speech on Metropolitan affairs during the London County Council
election and a letter to Mr. Arnold White, the Liberal-Unionist
candidate for Tyneside. This letter, however, outlines so boldly the
scope and direction of his views that it deserves to be quoted.
He wrote:--
The Labour community is carrying on at the present day a very
significant and instructive struggle. It has emancipated itself
very largely from the mere mechanism of party politics; it realises
that it now possesses political power to such an extent as to make
it independent of either party in the State; and the struggle which
it is now carrying on is less against Capital, less one of wages or
division of profits, but rather one for the practical utilisation
in its own interest of the great political power which it has
acquired. The Labour interest is now seeking to do itself what the
landed interest and the manufacturing capitalist interest did for
themselves when each in turn commanded the disposition of State
policy. Our land laws were framed by the landed interest for the
advantage of the landed interest, and foreign policy was directed
by that interest to the same end. Political power passed very
considerably from the landed interest to the manufacturing
capitalist interest, and our whole fiscal system was shaped by this
latter power to its own advantage, foreign policy being also made
to coincide. We are now come, or are coming fast, to a time when
Labour laws will be made by the Labour interest for the advantage
of Labour. The regulation of all the conditions of labour by the
State, controlled and guided by the Labour vote, appears to be the
ideal aimed at; and I think it extremely probable that a foreign
policy which sought to extend by tariff over our Colonies and even
over other friendly States, the area of profitable barter of
produce will strongly commend itself to the mind of the Labour
interest. Personally I can discern no cause for alarm in this
prospect and I believe that on this point you and I are in perfect
agreement. Labour in this modern movement has against it the
prejudices of property, the resources of capital, and all the
numerous forces--social, professional, and journalist--which those
prejudices and resources can influence. It is our business as Tory
politicians to uphold the Constitution. If under the Constitution
as it now exists, and as we wish to see it preserved, the Labour
interest finds that it can obtain its objects and secure its own
advantage, then that interest will be reconciled to the
Constitution, will find faith in it and will maintain it. But if
it should unfortunately occur that the Constitutional party, to
which you and I belong, are deaf to hear and slow to meet the
demands of Labour, are stubborn in opposition to those demands and
are persistent in the habit of ranging themselves in unreasoning
and short-sighted support of all the present rights of property and
capital, the result may be that the Labour interest may identify
what it will take to be defects in the Constitutional party with
the Constitution itself, and in a moment of indiscriminate impulse
may use its power to sweep both away. This view of affairs, I
submit, is worthy of attention at a time when it is a matter of
life or death to the Constitutional party to enlist in the support
of the Parliamentary Union of the United Kingdom a majority of the
votes of the masses of Labour.
You tell me that you find the designation ‘Tory’ a great difficulty
to you. I cannot see any good reason for this. After all, since the
Revolution the designation ‘Tory’ has always possessed an
essentially popular flavour, in contradistinction to the
designation ‘Whig.’ It has not only a popular but a grand
historical origin; it denotes great historical struggles, in many
of which the Tory party have been found on the popular side. Lord
Beaconsfield--who, if he was anything, was a man of the people and
understood the popular significance of names and words--invariably
made use of the word ‘Tory’ to characterise his party; and whatever
the Tory party may be deemed to be at particular moments, I have
always held, from the commencement of my political life, that,
rightly understood and explained, it ought to be, and was intended
to be, the party of broad ideas and of a truly liberal policy.
His interest in Labour questions was, indeed, growing steadily. When the
Eight Hours Bill for Miners was discussed that year in the Commons, he
addressed a long private letter to Mr. Balfour praying for its
considerate treatment. ‘I humbly advise, but pressingly; in the debate
let Gorst have a little Labour fling. Keep your hand tight over Matthews
and, if you can see your way to it, make one of those interesting and
amicable speeches which you can do so well, not exactly saying that your
mind is open, but, to use a Gladstonianism, that it is not altogether
absolutely closed. You can realise,’ he added quaintly, ‘how much
importance I attach to the question when I tell you that I am actually
coming up from Lincoln and missing three important races in which our
horses run, to vote for the Bill. I do not think I would do this for the
Monarchy, the Church, the House of Lords or the Union.’
The General Election came at that period, July, dear to the hearts of
Tory organisers, when democracy is supposed to be under the soothing
influence of summer weather, and before villadom has departed on its
holidays. Lord Randolph took little part in it. He stood for South
Paddington as a Conservative and an opponent of Home Rule. He let it be
understood that if he was not interfered with by the Liberal party he
would not speak outside the limits of his own constituency. This bargain
seeming sufficiently good, in view of the fact that the seat was
impregnable, no opposition was offered him. The only speech he found it
necessary to make, and his election address, dealt almost entirely with
the maintenance of the Union, though the latter also contained the
following paragraph:--
‘My views as to the reforms in the public service which public safety
and economy alike urgently call for, are, I think, well known to you;
they have undergone no change, save that I hold them more strongly than
ever. You are also, I imagine, not unaware of my desire to meet with all
legitimate sympathy and good-will the newly-formed but very articulate
and well-defined demands of the labouring classes.’
To FitzGibbon he wrote:--
I cannot manage to get over for the Trinity College festivities. I
have a great and increasing horror of anything in the nature of
speeches and functions. We are all over here awaiting in suspense
the result of the elections.... I have refused many invitations to
speak. I do not think the time at all propitious for anything in
the shape of a manifesto such as you suggest. Besides which, I have
no contest in this constituency; and as the Radicals are not
annoying me I do not want to provoke them. Nor do I feel called
upon to take any action which may be of the slightest use to a
Government and a party which for five years has boycotted and
slandered me....
The Paddington election proceeded smoothly to an unopposed return.
Parliament met only to change an Administration and separate for the
holidays.
[Sidenote: 1893 ÆT. 44]
I am living [Lord Randolph wrote to FitzGibbon in November] a very
quiet life in London, mainly occupied in reading books of one kind
and another. I have two discourses to deliver, one at Macclesfield
on the 30th inst. and one at Perth in December. Then _tacebo_. I
hope John Morley will make a final adjustment of the grievances of
those poor Christian Brothers. If I can usefully make any
representations to him, instruct me. We have always been very good
friends. Such Ministers as I have seen declare that they will soon
be turned out; but I cannot see why this should be so. At any rate,
beyond opposing their Home Rule Bill, I shall do nothing to bother
them, as I very greatly prefer them to their predecessors.
This feeling of detachment was soon to be removed. The accession of Mr.
Gladstone to power and the imminence of a Home Rule Bill was bound to
unite in the most effective manner all sections of the Unionist party.
Lord Randolph had, since his return from South Africa, accepted, though
not without embarrassment, an invitation to dine with Lord Salisbury.
‘C’est le premier plat qui coûte,’ wrote Wolff, who highly approved of
the proceeding. Now Chamberlain sent a very friendly letter, and this
was soon followed by a long and agreeable conference. The meetings which
Lord Randolph had consented to address at Perth and Macclesfield in the
autumn must have made his antagonism to the new Government plain; and
only the sudden death of his brother the Duke of Marlborough, in
November, which was a great shock to him, caused those arrangements to
fall through; so that Parliament met in January, 1893, without his
having formally joined himself to the official leaders of the
Opposition.
With the opening of the Session and the beginning of the fight came full
and complete reconciliation. He was urged to take his place again upon
the Front Bench. ‘If it had ever occurred to me,’ wrote Mr. Balfour
(January 30, 1893), ‘that you could sit anywhere but on our bench, I
would have spoken about it to you last night. _Everyone_ desires you
should do so, and _most of all_ yours ever, A. J. B.’ At the meeting of
the Conservative party in the Carlton Club to consider the resistance to
the Home Rule Bill, he kept himself in the background at some distance
from Lord Salisbury. But after all the worthies had spoken, the assembly
still found the proceedings incomplete and loud cries were raised from
all parts of the room for ‘Churchill.’ At first there was no response,
but so continuous and insistent was the demand that Lord Randolph
eventually came forward and in a few simple words, which evoked
remarkable enthusiasm, declared his willingness to serve, to the best of
his ability, in the House of Commons under his friend and political
chief, Mr. Balfour. He was henceforward invited to attend the private
meetings of the Unionist leaders which were held at Devonshire House
during the passage of the Irish Bill, and he took his share in framing
the amendments and deciding upon the policy of the Opposition.
But now, when a new prospect was opening to his view, when he had been
welcomed by the mass of the party, when he had returned to its inmost
councils and ranged himself once again with his old friends and
colleagues in whole-hearted support of a cause which he had long
defended, a dark hand intervened. The great strain to which he had
subjected himself during the struggle against Mr. Gladstone, the
vexations and disappointments of later years and finally the severe
physical exertions and exposure of South Africa had produced in a
neurotic temperament and delicate constitution a very rare and ghastly
disease. During the winter of ‘92 symptoms of vertigo, palpitation, and
numbness of the hands made themselves felt, and his condition was
already a cause of the deepest anxiety to his friends. But it was not
till he rose on the occasion of the introduction of the Home Rule Bill
that the political world realised how great was the change. It happened
that the debate was unexpectedly delayed by a question of privilege. The
suspense proved a strain greater than he could bear with composure and
when he rose his nervousness was extreme, and more to be looked for in
some novice presuming for the first time than in a Parliamentarian of
near twenty years’ standing. He no longer dared to trust his memory:
while the notes of his speech on the first Home Rule Bill had been
written on a single sheet of paper, he now required eighteen. The House,
crowded in every part to hear him, was shocked by his strangely altered
appearance. It seemed incredible that this bald and bearded man with
shaking hands and a white face drawn with pain and deeply marked with
the lines of care and illness, and with a voice whose tremulous tones
already betrayed the fatal difficulty of articulation, could be that
same brilliant audacious leader who in the flush of exultant youth had
marched irresistibly to power through the stormy days of 1886.
Yet the quality of his speech showed no signs of intellectual failing.
Avoiding the network of details in which so many speakers had stumbled,
he presented a broad intelligible picture. Lucid and original
expression, close and careful reasoning, wealth of knowledge, quaint
Randolphian witticisms--all were there. Although much of the charm and
force of his manner was gone, his statement was considered by good and
impartial judges to have been, with the exception of Mr. Chamberlain’s,
the best speech delivered against the Bill.
And he was destined to have one last flicker of success. Once again was
he to encounter, not unequally, his majestic antagonist; once again
those he had been so proud to lead, were to sustain him with triumphant
acclamation. Exactly a week after his reappearance he was entrusted with
the conclusion of the debate on the Welsh Church Suspensory Bill. The
trying circumstances of his first effort were no longer present and the
feeling that he had broken the ice comforted him. His whole condition
varied sensibly from day to day. This was his good day. The House seemed
friendly to him; his spirits responded to its mood, and for the moment
he seemed to recover all, or nearly all, of his former power. Anyone who
will take the trouble to read in Hansard the intricate and sustained
argument and the ready rejoinders of the speech will see that the vigour
of his mind was unimpaired. Triumph came at the end. Putting aside his
notes, he began a fierce and sparkling attack on Mr. Gladstone. It is
the last quotation I shall make:--
‘What motive has influenced the right honourable gentleman and his
colleagues to propose this measure to the House? It is not, as the
member for Hertford said, “plunder.” That is the local motive. The
political motive is widely different. It is undoubtedly to secure votes
for their Irish policy. On behalf of that Irish policy nothing must be
spared--not even the Established Church in Wales. Votes! Votes! Votes!
That is the cry of the right honourable gentleman, and that is the
political morality which he preaches.
‘Hæc Janus summus ab imo
Prodocet. Hæc recinunt juvenes dictata senesque.
Votes at any cost, votes at any price. Refrain from nothing that can get
you votes; adhere to nothing that can prevent your getting votes--the
votes which alone can accomplish the political salvation of the Liberal
party. I see before me,’ he continued, backed by the clamorous growing
support of the great party from whom he had been so long estranged,
‘many distinguished gentlemen, as able as any that this country can
produce, in the administration of public departments. But do you call
that a Government? Whom do you govern? One day the Government is at the
mercy of the Irish party; another day it is at the mercy of the Welsh
party; and on a third day yet to come it will be in the power of the
Scotch party. The Government is absolutely in the power of any of the
three sections of its majority. It must concede when any section makes a
demand. An English Government has never yet been conducted on such
principles--better suited to a Whitechapel auction than to the conduct
of our State.’
This characteristic attack produced an electrical effect upon Mr.
Gladstone, and the years seemed to fall from his shoulders as he rose at
once to reply. ‘I accept,’ he cried, ‘the monosyllabic invocation of the
noble lord and I say “Vote, Vote, Vote” for both Welsh Disestablishment
and Home Rule.’ And in the course of a rejoinder which, though brief,
was inferior to few, if any, of his later speeches, he cast back the
reproaches of the Opposition and roused and rallied the enthusiasm of
his followers amid a storm of cheers and counter-cheers. The First
Reading passed by a majority of 56 in an angry and excited House, and
the members hurried home, saying that the days of the ‘eighties’ were
come back and that Randolph was himself again.
FitzGibbon, who was increasingly his correspondent, kept him supplied
with an inexhaustible stream of fact and fancy upon the Irish Bill, and
Lord Randolph’s replies to his old friend constitute a sufficient
account of his Parliamentary doings and domestic affairs:--
Branksome Dene, Bournemouth: January 15, 1893.
Many thanks for your letter. I am happy to say Winston is going on
well and making a good and on the whole rapid recovery. He had a
miraculous escape from being smashed to pieces, as he fell thirty
feet off a bridge over a chine, from which he tried to leap to the
bough of a tree. What dreadfully foolhardy and reckless things boys
do! We have a sharp return of the cold, and snow is all about. I
keep thinking of my good time in Ireland, which was the best I have
had for a long time.
50 Grosvenor Square, W.: February 18, 1893.
Just a line to thank you for your letter. I imagine the speech
produced not unsatisfactory effects. I was awfully ‘jumpy.’ The
damned Bill is out, and I should greatly like from you, if you had
spare time, a _critique raisonnée_ of it. I shall have to make some
speeches--probably one to a great meeting in Scotland at Easter
time. The Second Reading is fixed for March 13, but this may be
only a nominal date. I am very anxious about the result when it
comes to a General Election. It is on England we must concentrate
our efforts.
50 Grosvenor Square, W.: March 15, 1893.
It is most good of you taking so much trouble for me in respect of
that measure, but I will try and make the best use of all you send
me, and the ‘lawyer’s notes’ may develop into orations which may
electrify the country. If one can trust the statements of the
Unionist Press, the Bill has absolutely no prospects or chances of
passing. All the heart, what little there ever was, has been taken
out of the Repealers by the postponement of the Second Reading. I
only hope the end may not come too quick. The Local Veto Bill has
infuriated the liquor interest even more than the H. R. Bill has
Ulster.
I do not think the G. O. M. has influenza, but it may be some time
before we see him again in the House of Commons.
50 Grosvenor Square, W.: March 29, 1893.
You are really too good, and I am shocked to have added so much to
your work. Your notes will be most valuable to me and I am looking
forward to their arrival. You will see that I loosed off last night
against Mr. G. and Morley. I think our party were very much
pleased. The old man is pressing us very hard with his demands for
the time of Parliament and his refusal to give decent holidays. I
have counselled that we do not enter on a futile resistance in
which we must be overborne. I am all for giving him rope; he is
sure to get into a terrible mess sooner or later.
I have a busy Easter before me. Political discourses at Liverpool
and Perth, and I shall not get back to London till April 14. I
shall keep your notes, though more for Parliamentary purposes; they
will be too good for public meetings. With many thanks and much
gratitude.
Penshurst: April 30, 1893.
Well, we have had three important meetings at Devonshire House--D.
of D., M. of S., Joe C., Arthur B., Goschen, Sir Henry J.,
Atkinson, and myself. With the general result I am much pleased. I
contended hard for the principle that none of our amendments should
be in any sense constructive, nothing that could give rise to an
idea that we were drifting into anything like an alternative
scheme. Joe C. was much for leading us in this way, but Devonshire
and Salisbury were very firm and the mischief was averted. Then
there was another great danger avoided. Joe C., A. B., and Goschen
were rather strongly in favour of an amendment excluding Ulster
from the Bill. Your powers of reflection and discernment will show
you at once what a horrid and dangerous trap that would have let us
into. However, thanks again to Salisbury and Devonshire, the idea
was dropped.
No amendments will be moved by any of us, but some have been drawn
and will be given to others. James’ amendments to the fifth clause
are very ingenious. But I shall send you a paper of amendments
marked after next Friday. We are to meet on Fridays when the H. R.
Bill is in Committee. Government will not get their Committee
Thursday: at the earliest not before Monday. I have not been very
well lately, and the last three days have had a dreadful cough,
which would quite have incapacitated me from speaking. I hope now
it is yielding to treatment, and fortunately I have had no speeches
to make. I am full of hope. There is much rumour that Mr. G. will
go to the House of Lords. Harcourt is certainly very unwell.
Belfast seems to have settled down. I have several speeches in the
country before me in May. Write to me when you have time, but not
in those horrid envelopes.
50 Grosvenor Square.
I have just delivered a twenty minutes’ speech in the House of
Commons on the case of the Christian Brothers. We had a large
majority against the Ulster Bill. You will find a passage in
Morley’s speech in which he said that he still hoped for an
arrangement, and that if he was a member of the Board [of National
Education] he should expect to be able to discover a method. The
Tories are, I expect, very cross with me.
I think you can now go to work again.
50 Grosvenor Square, W.: July 11, 1893.
I wish you had not written in so uncomplimentary a strain about
Rosebery. I would have shown it him but for that. I have the very
highest opinion of his work,[76] and always describe it as a
literary diamond. Now please write me another letter, more
complimentary. You can bring out all the views which have occurred
to you without accusing him of absolute ignorance of Ireland.
Remember, he was in a very awkward position, and Mr. Gladstone was
very cold to him after the work appeared. After all, he made one of
the most luminous expositions of the benefits of the Union and that
covers every error. Do do what I ask, for I am very fond of
Rosebery and very intimate with him, and I always look forward to
being in a Government with him. He likes you very much, and knows
on what intimate terms you and I are. Write me a review, not longer
than your letter, fair and _raisonné_. It will not take you long,
and it might do a great deal of good.
This is not the place to describe the stormy and protracted Session of
1893. The ruthless persistency of the Government; the stubborn
resistance of the Conservative party; the inch-by-inch struggle in
Committee; Chamberlain’s keen and unceasing attack from below the
gangway; the venerable figure of the Prime Minister, erect and
unflinching, at the table; the mutilated procedure of Parliament; and
the rising storm of partisanship on both sides contribute to an account
which seems to approach by sure gradations a violent climax. Lord
Randolph has left a record, in the form of a private letter to the
Speaker, of the explosion:--
_Lord Randolph Churchill to the Speaker._[77]
50 Grosvenor Square: July 29, 1893.
I am desirous of submitting to you a true account of the
disturbance and the real cause of the disorder which occurred in
the House of Commons on Thursday night.
The cry of ‘Judas’ was the retort to Mr. Chamberlain’s expression
‘Herod.’ But Mr. Chamberlain has never taken any notice of it on
previous occasions, nor did he on Thursday night, for I saw him
smiling; and I do not consider that this exclamation was, except in
a certain sense, the real cause of the turmoil. When Mr. Balfour
left the House he told me that in the event of a division we were
to vote with the Government against Mr. Clancy’s amendment, a
course in which I thoroughly concurred. I did not know the
tremendous passions which were raging behind me. The division had
begun and I was already proceeding into the Lobby, when, turning
round, I saw that scarcely a single member of the party had moved.
I returned, and told them of Mr. Balfour’s wishes, and begged them
to go into the ‘No’ Lobby. But I was met by cries that they would
not divide, and I ascertained that Mr. Vicary Gibbs had been trying
to raise a point of order on the question of the cry ‘Judas,’ and,
because that had not been settled, this very considerable section
of the Opposition would not on any account divide. I thought it
obvious that a point of order could not be decided when a division
had been called, for the reason that a number of members had left
the House for the Lobby. I urged upon them that not leaving their
seats to vote was the gravest violation of the rules of the House,
but all to no purpose. I therefore proceeded myself into the Lobby,
where there was a small muster of Liberals, three or four
Ministers, but none, so far as I could see, of the Opposition.
We waited for about two minutes, when the sound of a great noise
reached us. We returned to the House; the floor was crowded with
members, all standing; there was much scuffling; and certainly the
scene was the most appalling I ever witnessed. I made my way to the
Front Opposition Bench again, and implored the occupants of the
Opposition benches to come into the Lobby to record their votes.
There was still time to take the division, if only they would have
moved from their seats; but all my efforts were more useless than
before.
When you took the Chair, Sir, Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Balfour
(neither of whom had seen all that passed) informed you that you
had been sent for to decide a point of order as to the propriety of
the cry ‘Judas.’ With all respect nothing could have been more
inaccurate. I lay down confidently that the whole disorder arose
from the Opposition members being determined not to take part in
the division and from the Chairman seeming not to know that he
could compel them to do so under pain of very severe penalties.
I must excuse myself for wearying you, Sir, with this long
statement, but I would make two justifications: (1) I read there is
a possibility of an inquiry into the cause of the disturbance, and
I am anxious that my evidence should be before you; (2) that there
has been so much disorder and defiance of the authority of the
Chairman of Committees by individual members of all parties during
the progress of the Government of Ireland Bill that if it is not
checked by the high authority which resides in yourself, Sir, the
House of Commons will go from bad to worse, and it is impossible
to foresee to what extent it may change its character in a very
short time.
Lord Randolph’s speech on the Welsh Church was his last Parliamentary
success. Throughout the passage of the Home Rule Bill he held his place
in the front rank of the Opposition and took a regular and not
undistinguished part in the debates. In the Easter recess his speeches
to large audiences at Liverpool and Perth commanded the attention of the
country, and now, as in former years, he provided his party with an
inexhaustible supply of catchwords and homely arguments. But the fire
and force of his oratory were gone, never to return; and as the Session
drew on, his difficulties of utterance and of memory increased, and the
severe and unrelenting labour exhausted the remnants of his strength.
Several times in the hot summer months he failed to hold the attention
of the House and even sometimes to make himself understood. Once,
indeed, the members grew impatient and the House was filled with
restless murmurs. But his friends--some of them his most distinguished
opponents--rallied to him, checked the interruptions, and tried
perseveringly to make all look smooth and successful. And in these days
it was observed that Mr. Gladstone would always be in his place to pay
the greatest attention to his speeches and to reply elaborately to such
arguments as he had advanced.
Lord Randolph Churchill was acutely conscious of his failing powers and
the realisation roused him to immense exertions. A year before he had
hardly cared for political affairs. Now he plunged desperately into the
struggle. Others around him encountered the measures of a Liberal
Administration. He faced a different foe. With the whole strength of his
will he fought against the oncoming decay. He refused to accept defeat.
He redoubled his labours. If five hours no longer sufficed for the
preparation of a speech--he would take five days. If his memory played
him false, it must be exercised the more. If the House of Commons was
escaping from his grip, he would see whether the people would still hear
him.
During the months of May and June he spoke at no fewer than ten
important meetings--at Reading, Bolton, Macclesfield, Leicester,
Carlisle, Pontefract, Boston and other big towns. Everywhere he was
received by immense audiences and frequently he succeeded, as of old, in
arousing their interest and enthusiasm. The fertility of his mind and
the store of political knowledge and expression he had accumulated were
astonishing. Almost every one of these speeches was reported verbatim in
the _Times_ newspaper. All were confined to the single subject of the
Home Rule Bill and the circumstances that attended its passage. No
repetition of argument or phrase can be detected in the entire series of
speeches.
It was at this time that he looked towards Bradford. That city had even
before the General Election invited him to contest its central
division. His eye for a political country was as good as ever. To
persuade a great commercial centre to change its party allegiance, to be
returned at the election with three solid seats won for the Unionist
cause, to entrench himself in the heart of Yorkshire was a plan most
attractive to his nature; and had he lived, these objects would
certainly have been accomplished; for all divisions of Bradford returned
Unionist members to the Parliament of 1895 and that condition continues
to this day. On May 26 he addressed a large meeting in the St. George’s
Hall. His candidature was adopted with enthusiasm by the local
Conservatives. Meetings were held, the organisation was improved, the
Unionist press was strengthened and supported, and a new impulse was
imparted to the Conservative movement throughout the whole district.
For the autumn of 1893 he prepared a further extensive campaign all over
the country, and he convinced himself that it was still in his power to
raise a great wave of democratic excitement that would shake the
Government and establish his position before the world. In order to
collect all his strength for this effort he withdrew before the end of
the Session to Kissingen and Gastein and submitted himself to the
strictest discipline that the doctors could advise. The quiet peaceful
life, with its simple routine of baths, walks and long drives, when the
afternoon sun cast the shade of the forest and the hills over half the
valley, seemed for a time to restore his health: and he hastened to
write glowing accounts to his mother of the improvement. But these
appearances were illusory and, underneath, the process of dissolution
went remorselessly forward.
One incident--not unworthy of record--diversified the weeks at Kissingen
and lighted up the autumn of 1893.
_To his Mother._
_August 7._--The sensation of yesterday was the visit of Prince
Bismarck. We had left cards on him the day before, and I did not
expect he would do more than return them. However, yesterday the
weather was showery, and as Jennie was rather seedy we did not go
our usual drive. I was reading the papers when a great big Chasseur
appeared and informed me that the Fürst von Bismarck was in his
carriage at the door and was asking for me. I hurried downstairs
and met the Prince at his carriage. He came up to our rooms--which
luckily are on the first floor--and sat down, and we began to
converse. I had sent off a message to Jennie, who had gone to the
Kurhaus to see a friend. So I had about a quarter of an hour in
which to talk to the Prince. I will tell you of his appearance. He
is seventy-eight--so he told me afterwards--but he looks so much
younger than Mr. Gladstone that in fact you would hardly give him
more than seventy-three or seventy-four years. He looked in good
health, and came upstairs without the slightest difficulty. We
discussed various subjects, which I will go through _seriatim_. We
spoke in English; but whether it was for that reason, though he
spoke very correctly, he struck me as being nervous. Perhaps it was
meeting with a total stranger, because he had never seen me before.
However, he was most gracious and seemed very anxious to please.
You may imagine that I did my very best to please him, for I
thought it a great honour for this old Prince to come and see us.
The conversation began on Kissingen--the baths, the waters, &c. He
told me he had first come here in 1874, and had been here almost
every year since. He gave up drinking the waters about eight years
ago, but he continues to take baths, and thinks they do him good.
After this I asked him why he never went now to Gastein. He said,
laughing, ‘Oh, Gastein is a peculiar water to some
people--sometimes dangerous’; that he knew two of his friends who
died of apoplexy when taking the baths; and added that his doctor
had told him that Gastein was the last resource; and he remarked,
‘And I am seventy-eight,’ and seemed quite pleased about it. Then
he talked about the Emperor William on a question as to whether
Gastein had not added some years to his life. He quite admitted it,
and told me that for many years the Emperor used to go to Carlsbad,
when he used to accompany him; and this reminiscence seemed very
pleasing to him. In talking of the Emperor he always used the
expression ‘my old master.’
Then I turned the conversation on to Siam, and asked him whether he
did not think it was a satisfactory settlement. He appeared to
agree and began speaking in this connection of M. Jules Ferry. He
regretted his loss, and said that Jules Ferry was the best man that
France had had for years, and joked a little about his
appearance--long whiskers, &c. Then he went on to say that he
thought, if Jules Ferry had remained in power, a very good
arrangement and condition would have come about between the Germans
and the French. He said that he had nearly concluded an agreement
between himself and Jules Ferry that France should remain on
friendly and peaceful terms with Germany, and that he (Prince B.)
would support France in Tunis and Siam, and generally in her
Eastern colonisation. Then I remarked about Siam that Rosebery had
learned out of his book this principle--to ask for no more than he
required, but to insist on getting what he required, and to treat
with neglect what was not essential. He said that was so and he
went on to praise Rosebery, and described him as a good combination
of will and caution, and added that of all English statesmen he was
the one who was most modest and quiet in his acts and attitude.
Of course, no conversation would be complete without a reference to
Mr. Gladstone, to which I led him. He, of course, began by
admitting that Mr. Gladstone was very eloquent; but that he had
always been like an ungovernable horse whom no one could ride in
any bridle, and was not to be controlled in any way. He used a
German adjective to describe the horse, which I have forgotten; but
seeing his drift, and in reply to his question what was the English
expression for the German word, I said ‘ungovernable and
unmanageable and hard to ride’ would express it, and I remarked
that in England people often called such a horse a ‘rogue.’ On
which he turned his face to me with a smile, but said nothing,
though he clearly understood the allusion. He further in
conversation said that he should be very alarmed and anxious if
such a man as Mr. Gladstone governed ‘my country.’ Then Jennie
arrived and he talked mainly to her for a few minutes, when he
announced that his son Herbert and his recently married wife
arrived that afternoon to stay a few days with him, and that he
hoped we should see something of them.
Without doubt this Prince and statesman has a most powerful
attraction. The whole of his career, from the time when he was
First Minister of the King and fought the Parliament, to the time
of the proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles, seems to me
more intelligible now, and at the same time a work that only this
man could have carried out or even conceived the possibility of. I
never took my eyes off his face while he was talking to me and kept
trying to fix it in my memory. For all his quiet manner his
qualities would be apparent to any observer of experience; you can
trace the iron will in great emergencies which has so frequently
borne him up, all the calm courage for which the North Germans are
peculiarly distinguished, and yet with all that--in spite of the
recollection of the great things he had done--no trace of pride, no
sign of condescension, but perfectly gracious and polite, a true
_Grand Seigneur_. He carried himself at his age as erect as a
soldier, and for all his long black coat and his rather old black,
soft, low-crowned wideawake hat he looks all over what he is--the
combination, so rarely seen in this century, of statesman and
General.
This friendly conversation, proving mutually agreeable, was followed by
an invitation to dinner with the Bismarck family. ‘We dined,’ so runs
the account, ‘in the hall of an old Bishop’s palace, on the first floor,
which a friend of the Prince owns and lends him every year. It was of
large and fine proportion. At one end we assembled before dinner; at the
other end the table was laid. The dinner was a regular old-fashioned
German dinner, a little _bourgeois_ (like the Berlin Court under the old
Emperor), but everything was dignified as to the table--the food, the
wine, the old servants--and, though very different to our ideas, had
really _un air noble_. All this was greatly added to by the presence of
the Prince, his impressive appearance, and the combination of respect
and affection which all his family and those friends that were dining,
showed him. His good spirits and excellent humour and his sustained
support of the conversation--sometimes with Jennie, sometimes with me,
sometimes with Herbert and his wife--can never be forgotten by anyone
who saw it.’
Lord Randolph sat next to Prince Bismarck and was so occupied in
observing him and the scene generally that he took but little part in
the conversation. The picture was complete--the Princess, feeble and
broken in health; Count Herbert and his wife; the famous black
wolf-hounds which once upon a time frightened Gortschakoff so much;
Bismarck himself, ‘speaking English very carefully and slowly,
frequently pausing to get the right word, but always producing it, or
something like it, in the end’; drinking a mixture of very old hock
poured into a needle-glass of champagne--‘“the last bottle [of hock], a
present from ----,” a Grand Duke whose name I cannot remember’--at length
arriving at his great pipe, prepared all ready for him by a venerable
retainer, ‘stem two feet in length, curved mouthpiece, bowl long and
large in china and standing up square with the stem, lighted by broad
wooden safety-matches to prevent him burning his fingers; and all the
time running on in talk brisk and light, always courtly and genial,
never quite serious.’
‘I did not dare,’ declares Lord Randolph, ‘to drink this old hock, and
only sipped it. The Prince, who was joking, said to Jennie that he was
very sorry I had not drunk my share, as it would cause him to drink too
much and he would be “half over the seas.”’ Presently he wanted to know
about Mr. Gladstone. He would be useful in putting to rights the
disorders of German finance. Would the English people exchange him for
General Caprivi? ‘I told him,’ writes Lord Randolph shamelessly, ‘that
the English people would cheerfully give him Mr. Gladstone for nothing,
but that he would find him an expensive present!’ So with chaff and good
temper the evening passed away--pleasant, memorable, one of the last he
was to know.
[Sidenote: 1894 ÆT. 45]
Lord Randolph returned from Germany none the better for his rest and
plunged forthwith into an exhausting campaign. What experience can be
more painful than for a man who enjoys the fullest intellectual vigour,
and whose blood is quite unchilled by age, to feel the whole apparatus
of expression slipping sensibly from him? He struggled against his fate
desperately, and at first with intervals of profound depression. But, as
the malady progressed, the inscrutable workings of Nature provided a
mysterious anodyne. By a queer contradiction it is ordained that an
all-embracing optimism should be one of the symptoms of this fell
disease. The victim becomes continually less able to realise his
condition. In the midst of failure he is cheered by an artificial
consciousness of victory. While the days are swiftly ebbing, he builds
large plans for the future; and a rosy glow of sunset conceals the
approach of night. Therefore as Lord Randolph’s faculties were steadily
impaired, his determination to persevere was inversely strengthened; and
in spite of the advice and appeals of his family, by which he was deeply
wounded, he carried out in its entirety the whole programme of speeches
he had arranged. Huddersfield, Stalybridge, Bedford, Yarmouth, Dundee,
Glasgow, Bradford and Camborne followed each other in quick succession
in October and November. But the crowds who were drawn by the old
glamour of his name, departed sorrowful and shuddering at the spectacle
of a dying man, and those who loved him were consumed with
embarrassment and grief. It is needless to dwell longer upon this.
[Sidenote: 1895 ÆT. 46]
He spent Christmas at Howth. The old circle of friends were gathered
once more, and they saw with sadness that their hopes of his return to
power, cherished for so many years, would never be fulfilled. When he
came back to England for the beginning of the Session, the hounds were
hard upon his track. But it was not till June that he consented to
yield. The doctors ordered complete rest. ‘They told me,’ he wrote to
his mother, ‘that I was to give up political life for a year. I did not
agree directly, but said I would think it over. I returned next day and
explained to them my plan [of a journey round the world]. Of this they
fully approved.’ And now followed only a few dinners of farewell to good
friends--who knew they would never see him again--and busy preparations
for a long journey. He sailed, with his wife, for America on June 27
under a sentence of death, operative within twelve months; and he
realised perfectly that his time was very short. But now Nature began
mercifully to apply increasing doses of her own anæsthetics, and for the
space there was yet to travel he suffered less than those who watched
him. Indeed, in an odd way he was positively happy in these last few
months; for the changing scenes kept him from sombre reflections, and
the increasing attention which he paid to details of all kinds occupied
his mind. Nothing was too small to command his interest, and neither in
America nor in Japan was ever seen so methodical a tourist. The light
faded steadily. At intervals small blood-vessels would break in the
brain, producing temporary coma, and leaving always a little less memory
or faculty behind. His physical strength held out till he reached Burma,
‘which I annexed,’ and which he had earnestly desired to see. But when
it failed, the change was sudden and complete. The journey was
curtailed, and in the last days of 1894 he reached England as weak and
helpless in mind and body as a little child. For a month, at his
mother’s house, he lingered pitifully, until very early in the morning
of January 24 the numbing fingers of paralysis laid that weary brain to
rest.
The illness of Lord Randolph Churchill had been followed with attention
throughout the country, and the tragic termination of his career evoked
greater manifestations of sympathy than are accorded to many who have
played a longer part in the world’s affairs. Politicians of all ranks
and parties attended the service in Westminster Abbey. Large crowds
assembled in the streets through which the funeral procession passed.
The journey lay, by a strange coincidence, from Paddington to Woodstock.
The London terminus was thronged with representatives of the
Metropolitan constituency. Woodstock gathered around the churchyard at
Bladon. Thither, too, came deputations of the Birmingham Tories and
Irish friends. Over the landscape, brilliant with sunshine, snow had
spread a glittering pall. He lies close by the tower of the village
church, and the plain granite cross which marks the spot, can almost be
discerned, across a mile of lawn and meadow, from the great house which
was his childhood’s home, and whose sinister motto his varied fortunes
had not ill-sustained. A statue is erected to his memory in Blenheim
Chapel; and a bust by the same hand was set up in the House of Commons
by private subscription among the members, and unveiled with a few
simple and well-chosen words by his oldest and truest political comrade,
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach.
* * * * *
The story of Lord Randolph Churchill’s life is complete in itself and
needs no comment from the teller. That he was a great elemental force in
British politics, that he was broken irrecoverably at the moment of
maturity, should be evident from these pages. It is idle to speculate
upon what his work and fortunes might have been, had he continued to
lead the House of Commons and influence against its inclinations the
Conservative party. It is certain only that the course of domestic
policy in Finance, in Temperance and other social questions would have
been widely deflected from that which has been in fact pursued. Most of
all, perhaps, was Ireland a loser by his downfall; for more than any
other Unionist of authority he understood the Irish people--their pride,
their wants, their failings, their true inspiration. What would have
happened to him, aye, and to others had he lived the ordinary span of
men--after all, he was but forty-six--are questionings even more shadowy
and unreal. How would he have regarded a naval and military expenditure
of seventy millions in time of peace? What would he have thought of the
later developments of those Imperialistic ideas, the rise of which he
had powerfully, yet almost unconsciously, aided? What action would have
been wrung from him by the stresses of the South African war? Would he,
under the many riddles the future had reserved for such as he, have
snapped the tie of sentiment that bound him to his party, resolved at
last to ‘shake the yoke of inauspicious stars’; or would he by combining
its Protectionist appetites with the gathering forces of labour have
endeavoured to repeat as a Tory-Socialist in the new century the
triumphs of the Tory-Democrat in the old?
For all its sense of incompleteness, of tragic interruption, his life
presents a harmony and unity of purpose and view. Verbal consistency is
of small value. Yet even his verbal consistency was not especially open
to challenge. But the ‘climate of opinion’ in which he lived, the mood
and intention with which he faced the swiftly changing problems of a
stormy period, were never sensibly or erratically altered. The
principles and convictions which he developed in the Parliament of
1874, and professed during the Parliament of 1880, were those, which
guided him to the end. That the period was brief in which he swayed and
almost dominated the Conservative party is not wonderful. The marvel is
that he should ever have won to power in it at all. Only the peculiar
conditions of the Parliament of 1880, in the House of Commons and out of
doors, made his career, as I have described it, a possibility, and
enabled him to attack a Liberal Government for oppression and war and to
appeal to a Conservative party in the name of Peace, Retrenchment and
Reform. Tory Democracy was necessarily a compromise (perilously near a
paradox in the eye of a partisan) between widely different forces and
ideas: ancient permanent institutions becoming the instruments of
far-reaching social reforms: order conjoined with liberty; stability and
yet progress; the Tory party and daring legislation! Yet narrow as was
the path along which he moved, multitudes began to follow. Illogical and
unsymmetrical as the idea might seem--an idea not even novel--it grew
vital and true at his touch. At a time when Liberal formulas and Tory
inertia seemed alike chill and comfortless, he warmed the heart of
England and strangely stirred the imagination of her people.
He contained in his nature and in his policy all the elements necessary
to ruin and success. If the principles he championed from 1880 to 1885
were the cause of his rise, they were also the cause of his fall. All
his pledges he faithfully fulfilled. The Government changed. The vast
preponderance of power in the State passed from one great party to the
other. Lord Randolph Churchill remained exactly the same. He thought and
said the same sort of things about foreign and domestic policy, about
armaments and expenditure, about Ireland, about Egypt, while he was a
Minister as he had done before. He continued to repeat them after he had
left office for ever. The hopes he had raised among the people, the
promises he had made, the great support and honour he had received from
them, seemed to require of him strenuous exertions. And when all
exertions had failed, he paid cheerfully the fullest and the only
forfeit in his power.
Lord Randolph Churchill’s name will not be recorded upon the bead-roll
of either party. The Conservatives, whose forces he so greatly
strengthened, the Liberals, some of whose finest principles he notably
sustained, must equally regard his life and work with mingled feelings.
A politician’s character and position are measured in his day by party
standards. When he is dead all that he achieved in the name of party, is
at an end. The eulogies and censures of partisans are powerless to
affect his ultimate reputation. The scales wherein he was weighed are
broken. The years to come bring weights and measures of their own.
There is an England which stretches far beyond the well-drilled masses
who are assembled by party machinery to salute with appropriate
acclamation the utterances of their recognised fuglemen; an England of
wise men who gaze without self-deception at the failings and follies of
both political parties; of brave and earnest men who find in neither
faction fair scope for the effort that is in them; of ‘poor men’ who
increasingly doubt the sincerity of party philanthropy. It was to that
England that Lord Randolph Churchill appealed; it was that England he so
nearly won; it is by that England he will be justly judged.
APPENDICES
V
_TWO ELECTION ADDRESSES_
1886.
_To the Electors of South Paddington._
Gentlemen,--A ‘people’s dissolution’ has come upon us. Such is the title
given by Mr. Gladstone to the most wanton political convulsion which
has, in our time, afflicted our country. The caprice of an individual is
elevated to the dignity of an act of the people by the boundless egoism
of the Prime Minister. The United Kingdom is to be disunited for the
purpose of securing in office, if only for a little while, by the aid of
a disloyal faction subsisting on foreign gold, a Government deserted by
all who could confer upon it character or reputation.
Mr. Gladstone has reserved for his closing days a conspiracy against the
honour of Britain and the welfare of Ireland more startlingly base and
nefarious than any of those other numerous designs and plots which,
during the last quarter of a century, have occupied his imagination. Nor
are the results of the repeal of the Union, whatever they may be, a
matter of moment to him. No practical responsibility for those results
will fall upon his shoulders. He regards with the utmost unconcern, or
with inconceivable frivolity, the fact that upon those who come after
him will devolve the impossible labour of rebuilding a shattered empire,
of re-uniting a divided kingdom. Let a credulous electorate give him,
for the third time, a Parliamentary majority by the aid of which another
Irish revolution may be consummated, and this most moderate of
Ministers will be satisfied, will complacently retire to that repose for
which he tells us ‘nature cries aloud.’ Nature, to whose cries he has
for so long turned a stone-deaf ear.
This design for the separation of Ireland from Britain, this insane
recurrence to heptarchical arrangements, this trafficking with treason,
this condonation of crime, this exaltation of the disloyal, this
abasement of the loyal, this desertion of our Protestant
co-religionists, this monstrous mixture of imbecility, extravagance and
political hysterics, better known as ‘the Bill for the future Government
of Ireland,’ is furnished by its author with the most splendid
attributes and clothed in the loftiest language. (1) Under its operation
a nation of slaves paying tribute is to be filled with exuberant love
for Britain which it now hates, but with which it is now on a footing of
perfect political equality. (2) Persons who have subsisted and
flourished on the effects of crime and outrage are to be immediately
transformed into governors wise, moral and humane. (3) A peasantry which
has for years exhibited a marked disinclination to pay contract rents to
many landlords will instantly commence and for the next fifty years
continue with cheerful alacrity and fidelity to pay rent to one single
landlord; that landlord, moreover, assuming the garb of a foreign and
alien Government. (4) A people without manufactures, longing for
protection by which to create and foster manufactures, are to become in
a moment ardent converts to the blessings of free trade. (5) A
Parliament, in which any and every legislative project or deliberative
proceeding or executive act, may be vetoed for three years, is to abound
in rapid legislation, and to surpass our ancient historic Parliament in
efficiency of procedure. (6) A financial system, under which by no
possibility can revenue be adequate to expenditure, is to perform
prodigies of economy and ‘to scatter plenty o’er a smiling land.’ (7) A
pauper population is to roll in riches. (8) Law and order and rights of
property are immediately to take their place as the most sacred and
cherished institutions of a country a great portion of whose people
hitherto, from time immemorial, have regarded them only to deride them
and violate them, &c. &c.
The united and concentrated genius of Bedlam and Colney Hatch would
strive in vain to produce a more striking tissue of absurdities.
Yet this is the policy, the last specific for Ireland, which is gravely
recommended by senile vanity to the favourable consideration of a people
renowned for common sense, the possessors of an Empire erected and
preserved by the constant flow of common sense and, I doubt not, the
progenitors of a posterity equally powerful, equally courageous and
equally wise.
For the sake of this fifth message of peace to Ireland, this farrago of
superlative nonsense, the vexatious and costly machinery of a general
election is to be put in motion, all business other than what may be
connected with political agitation, is to be impeded and suspended;
trade and commercial enterprise, now suffering sadly from protracted bad
times, and which political stability can alone re-invigorate, are to be
further harassed and handicapped; all useful and desired reforms are to
be indefinitely postponed, the British Constitution is to be torn up,
the Liberal party shivered into fragments.
And why? For this reason and no other: To gratify the ambition of an old
man in a hurry.
How long, gentlemen, will you and your brother electors tolerate this
one-man power?
Since 1868, when this one-man power began to show itself in an acute
form, have you enjoyed domestic security or foreign credit?
From that time to the present day, Ireland has been a struggling victim
in Mr. Gladstone’s hands. The Irish Church, a great agency for moral,
social, and religious order, has been swept away; two special
confiscations of landed property were confidently recommended to, and
accepted by, Parliament as certain to produce peace; six coercion Acts
of the most stringent character Mr. Gladstone has obtained; and all to
no purpose. Confusion has become worse confounded; the fabric of
Government in Ireland has been shattered; lawlessness and disorder have
been triumphant and supreme; the present state of Ireland is one of
‘grave disease,’ says Mr. John Morley; and the blame is cast by Mr.
Gladstone on the system, on the Constitution, on the Union.
It would be as reasonable to cast the blame upon the Equator.
The blame for this disgrace cannot be cast upon the system or upon the
Constitution or upon the Union.
The blame must be borne by the man who has been Minister and who is
Minister now.
Under the baneful insecurity which is inseparably connected with his
name, your trade has gone from bad to worse, your Parliament has become
demoralised, your foreign credit shaken, your colonies alienated, your
Indian Empire imperilled.
Naturally enough, Ireland has suffered most of all, for Ireland, of all
the Queen’s dominions, was least able to stand a strain.
What frightful and irreparable Imperial catastrophe is necessary to tear
the British people from the influence of this fetish, this idol, this
superstition, which has brought upon them and upon the Irish unnumbered
woes?
The negotiator of the ‘Alabama’ arbitration, the hero of the Transvaal
surrender, the perpetrator of the bombardment of Alexandria, the
decimator of the struggling Soudan tribes, the betrayer of Khartoum, the
person guilty of the death of Gordon, the patentee of the Penjdeh shame,
now stands before the country all alone, rejected by a democratic House
of Commons.
No longer can he conceal his personality under the shelter of the
Liberal party. One hundred members of that party in Parliament,
representing thousands of electors, refused, in spite of all manner of
blandishments, deceits and menaces, to support his Irish measure. All
his colleagues have abandoned him. From the Duke of Argyll to Mr.
Bright, from Lord Hartington to Mr. Chamberlain, one by one he has shed
them all; none is near him of his former colleagues save certain
placemen unworthy of notice. Last, but not least, the leading lights of
Nonconformity, such as Dr. Dale and Mr. Spurgeon, hitherto the pillars
of the Liberal party, stand aloof in utter dismay.
Known to the country under various ‘aliases’--‘the People’s William,’
‘the Grand Old Man,’ ‘the old Parliamentary hand,’ now, in the part of
‘the Grand electioneering agent,’ he demands a vote of confidence from
the constituencies.
Confidence in what?
In the Liberal party? No! The Liberal party, as we knew it, exists no
longer. In his Irish project? No! It is dead; to be resuscitated or not,
either wholly or in part, just as may suit the personal convenience of
the author. In his Government? No! They are a mere collection of
‘items,’ whom he does not condescend to consult. In himself? Yes!
This is the latest and most perilous innovation into our constitutional
practices. A pure unadulterated personal _plébiscite_, that is the
demand; a political expedient borrowed from the last and worst days of
the Second Empire.
Gentlemen, it is time that some one should speak out. I have written to
you plainly, some may think strongly; but whatever the English
vocabulary may contain of plainness and strength is inadequate to
describe truly and to paint realistically the present political
situation.
At this moment, so critical, we have not got to deal with a Government,
or a party, or a policy. We have to deal with a man; with a man who
makes the most unparalleled claim for dictatorial power which can be
conceived by free men. It is for that reason that I deliberately
addressed myself to the personal aspects of the question, and that I
have drawn the character of the claimant from recent history, and from
facts well within the recollection of all.
Mr. Gladstone in his speech in Edinburgh on Friday recommended himself
to the country in the name of Almighty God.
Others cannot and will not emulate such audacious profanity; but I do
dare, in soliciting a renewal of your confidence, to recommend the
policy of the Unionist party to you in the name of our common country,
our great Empire, upon whose unity and effective maintenance so largely
depend the freedom, the happiness and the progress of mankind.
I am, Gentlemen, yours obediently,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
Committee Room, 26 London Street, Paddington, June 19, 1886.
1892.
_To the Electors of South Paddington._
Gentlemen,--A General Election is immediately before us. I desire again
to solicit the honour of representing South Paddington in the House of
Commons. It is pleasant to me to record my strong appreciation of, and
my abiding gratitude for, the kindness and indulgence which you have
consistently shown me and for the large measure of confidence which
during six years you have accorded me. I most earnestly trust that as
long as I have the good fortune to take part in public life the
connection between us may remain as close and strong as it has ever been
at any former time.
My opinions on the policy of Home Rule for Ireland are unaltered and
unalterable. The impracticability and futility of such a policy become
more apparent and glaring as discussion and argument proceed. The
insanity of a scheme to create an independent Parliament in an island
inhabited by two races controlled by two religious creeds separated from
each other by an impassable abyss; the insoluble problem raised by such
a scheme as to the representation or non-representation of Ireland in
the British Parliament; the impossibility of guaranteeing effectually,
under any such scheme, justice to the Protestant minority, mainly
residing in Ulster; the endless and bitter conflicts which must arise
again, as they arose before, between the Irish and British Parliaments,
in addition to those which must surely arise between Irish and British
Administrations; the constitutional impossibility of establishing any
tribunal to pronounce authoritatively on the validity of laws passed by
either Parliament; the certain divergence of commercial and financial
policy to be followed by Ireland and Great Britain respectively; all
this Himalayan range of obstacles appears more utterly insuperable the
closer it is looked at, the more attentively it is studied. A conclusive
proof of the truth of these propositions is afforded by the impenetrable
reserve maintained by Mr. Gladstone and by all his colleagues even as to
the general form and outline of their Home Rule legislative project. The
formula which I have more than once expressed, that it is impossible to
put Home Rule into a Bill, is more rooted than ever in my mind; and even
if the Party of Repeal were to be furnished with ever so great a
majority at the coming General Election, that party is, I am convinced,
condemned to political impotence and sterility so long as they continue
to exhaust their energies in solving the insoluble, in accomplishing the
impossible.
After six years of trial and labour the Unionist Party return to the
country with a record of work and action cleaner and less open to
serious attack than any other political party which I have known or read
of in modern times. Ireland, on which country the last General Election
turned, which was pronounced by our opponents to be ungovernable by the
Parliament of the United Kingdom, is now simply and easily governed.
Ireland was agitated in 1886; it is calm in 1892. Ireland was distressed
in 1886; it is prosperous in 1892. No real grievance now oppresses and
irritates the Irish peasant, nor can persons possessing reason and
experience doubt that the energies and sense of a new Parliament, if
this Parliament is swayed by a Unionist majority, will be employed in
constructing a scheme of Local Government for the Irish people so broad
and generous that the last vestiges of difference, inequality,
inferiority (if such there still be), between Ireland and Great Britain
will be swept away.
Facts like these, written so largely on the history of the past six
years, cannot fail to strike and to arouse the common sense of the
British people as a whole; they must serve to dissipate the factious
fury of baffled opponents, to neutralise the allurements of innumerable
reckless and irredeemable promises. British electors at the present
moment are in duty bound to draw largely on their memories and to make a
very practical use of their experience. They cannot afford to forget or
to neglect the lessons they learnt from the anxious and even terrible
times which Ireland passed through during Mr. Gladstone’s former
administration. Remembering how gloomy and hopeless was the outlook, how
frantic were the popular rage and passion which during all those years
distracted and paralysed Ireland, how impotent were the measures of Mr.
Gladstone’s Government either to pacify or control; looking at Ireland
now, tranquil, materially prosperous, crime (ordinary and extraordinary)
reduced to an unprecedented minimum, the British electors must be
compelled to realise that an invaluable period, rarely in history
brighter, more full of justified hope and confidence, has at length,
after infinite difficulty, been attained, and that even to run the risk
of recurrence to former evils and perils would be an act of national
folly difficult to characterise, ominous of Imperial ruin. I do not
doubt but that South Paddington, in common with all other constituencies
where knowledge and political study extensively prevail, will pronounce
without hesitation in favour of the wisdom of the Unionist policy, of
the continuance in power of the Unionist Party.
My views as to the reforms in the public service which public safety and
economy alike urgently call for, are, I think, well known to you; they
have undergone no change, save that I hold them more strongly than ever.
You are also, I imagine, not unaware of my desire to meet with all
legitimate sympathy and good-will the newly-formed but very articulate
and well-defined demands of the labouring classes.
Thus recording my political faith, I trust that you may be willing and
satisfied to dispose of your political confidence as you have done in
former years since South Paddington became a separate borough, and that
I may be enabled again to serve in Parliament our constituency and the
country.
I have the honour to be
Your obedient servant,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
2 Connaught Place, W.: June 21, 1892.
VI
_PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE_
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL’S LETTER TO MR. SPEAKER AND HIS CORRESPONDENCE
WITH MR. GLADSTONE IN 1886.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to the Speaker._
Treasury Chambers, Whitehall, S.W.: Nov. 30, 1886.
Dear Mr. Speaker,--I venture to submit to you for your information
and consideration, the result of the deliberations of the Committee
of the Cabinet on the question of Parliamentary Procedure.
It would be of the greatest possible advantage to me if I could
have the honour of an interview with you, in order to examine and
explain more fully than I could do by letter the effect and object
of the various rules proposed. In case you should be coming to town
before the 22nd or 23rd December and would make an appointment with
me, I would be happy to wait upon you at any time or place which
would be most convenient to you.
Two of the proposed new provisions especially concern the Chair:
1. The Closure of debate. (Rule No. 1.)
2. Motions for adjournment of the House at question time. (Rule No.
6.)
On the first these have been my views: The length of debate is
essentially a question of ‘order.’ The Chair is the only judge of
‘order.’ By the present rule an unfair responsibility is thrown
upon the Chair, in that the initiative with regard to Closure is
thrown upon it, which initiative has to undergo the ordeal of a
vote of the House. It is difficult and almost impracticable for the
Chair to possess the information with regard to the proper time for
the exercise of the initiative, without which action in the
direction of Closure would be unsafe.
The Government propose to give the initiative of any Closure motion
to the House, and a veto to the Chair with respect to receiving and
putting such a motion. The Chair, under this provision, is not only
the protector of fair and orderly debate (its chief function), but
also guards against abuse of the Closure rule from motives of
frivolity, obstruction, haste or tyranny. Nor can the decisions of
the Chair be questioned or overruled, for no question is put to the
House unless with the permission of the Chair.
Further, in the event of the House agreeing to the proposal, the
association of the Chair with the exercise of the closing power
will have been, for a second time, deliberately affirmed. This is a
far better and more durable protection for minorities than any
arrangement of numbers. An extreme and violent Government in
office, supported by a powerful majority, would very soon make
short work of any protective arrangement of proportionate
majorities which might prove embarrassing to them. It would be a
much more difficult matter to dissociate and exclude the Chair from
all connection with, or control over, the Closure after that
Parliament had on two occasions laid down a contrary principle.
Speaking generally, this Closure (as per enclosed) is aimed at
persistent, deliberate, wilful obstruction. The Speaker can at any
time permit an appeal to the House by a member, or a Minister, as
to whether such obstruction is or is not being resorted to. This
Closure is also designed to facilitate and render possible earlier
hours of session and prevent unnecessary, stupid and perverse
‘talking out.’
In respect of Rule 6 (adjournment of House at question time):
After much anxious consideration I see no alternative to total
abolition of the power of moving such adjournment, except the
method proposed in the paper--of making the Chair the judge whether
the subject to be discussed on adjournment motion is of such
cardinal importance as to justify the postponement of the regular
assigned business of the day. I imagine that the expression ‘urgent
matter of definite public importance’ would receive, under the new
arrangement, a strict and proper interpretation, and regard this
matter, as the former one, as primarily a question of ‘order.’
Please excuse this lengthy letter, and
Believe me to remain
Yours respectfully and faithfully,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
The Right Hon. the Speaker.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Mr. Gladstone._
_Confidential._
Treasury Chambers, Whitehall, S.W.: December 17, 1886.
Dear Sir,--By the desire of the First Lord of the Treasury I have
the honour to submit to you, for your information and convenience,
the draft of the alterations in the procedure of the House of
Commons which it is the intention of Her Majesty’s Government to
recommend to the consideration of the House next session.
I express the feelings of the Government when I assure you that in
the event of its being within your power, and in accordance with
your wishes, to offer any criticism or comment or suggestion on
these draft proposals prior to the meeting of Parliament, such
would be received and considered by the Government with every
respect and attention.
I may add that in the opinion of the Government the House of
Commons would do well to arrive at conclusions as to the reforms of
procedure before commencing the regular business of the session;
that it is with that object that Parliament has been summoned so
early in the year; and that the Government, as at present advised,
will press this course upon the House of Commons.
I have the honour to be
Your faithful servant,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
The Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P.
_Mr. Gladstone to Lord Randolph Churchill._
_Confidential._
Hawarden Castle, Chester: December 18, ‘86.
My dear Lord,--I have to thank you for your courtesy in apprising
me at this early date of the particulars in which the Government
propose to amend the procedure of the House of Commons and of their
intention to give precedence to the subject.
In the last stages of this important matter, that of the present
year, I had but a minor concern, and I will therefore at once
communicate with Sir W. Harcourt, who represented principally the
late Administration on the Committee. The matter will remain
strictly confidential, and will not go beyond those of my late
colleagues who were specially concerned. In the meantime I do not
trouble you with any observations, but I thank you for your
obliging readiness to consider any suggestion which I may tender to
you.
I remain
Faithfully yours,
W. E. GLADSTONE.
Right Hon. the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
VII
_POLITICAL LETTERS OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL_
1884-1893.
_Freedom of Contract._
_Mr. Moore Bayley to Lord Randolph Churchill._
57 Colmore Row, Birmingham: March 22, 1884.
My Lord,--I am a Conservative and an elector of the borough of
Birmingham, and as such hope at no distant period to render your
lordship, as a Conservative candidate for this borough, whatever
political service lies in my power.
But before committing myself further in the compact that arose when
you were accepted as such Conservative candidate I should like to
know, as would a considerable number of political friends, how much
further your lordship’s views on the rights of contract proceed in
the direction expressed in your speech in the House of Commons when
you supported the second reading of Mr. Broadhurst’s Leaseholders
(Facilities of Purchase of Fee Simple) Bill.
The enactments of the present Government have in many particulars
so violated the rights of contract between subject and subject that
I am sure your lordship will not consider my request for
information unreasonable as to the extent you are willing to commit
your supporters in the furtherance of such like principles.
I remain
Yours obediently,
J. MOORE BAYLEY.
_Lord Randolph Churchill to Mr. Moore Bayley._
2 Connaught Place, W.: March 24, 1884.
Dear Sir,--I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the
22nd inst. In answer to your question as to my views on the rights
of contract I beg to inform you that where it can be clearly shown
that genuine freedom of contract exists I am quite averse to State
interference, so long as the contract in question may be either
moral or legal. I will never, however, be a party to wrong and
injustice, however much the banner of freedom of contract may be
waved for the purpose of scaring those who may wish to bring
relief. The good of the State, in my opinion, stands far above
freedom of contract; and when these two forces clash, the latter
will have to submit. If you will study the course of legislation
during the last fifty years, you will find that the Tory party have
interfered with and restricted quite as largely freedom of contract
as the Liberals have done. With respect to the two leading
instances of interference with freedom of contract during the
present Parliament, viz. the Irish Land Act and the Agricultural
Holdings Act, the Duke of Richmond’s Agricultural Commission and
the House of Lords must divide the responsibility for this
legislation with Mr. Gladstone’s Government. The latter had it in
their power to reject this legislation, and did not do so; the
former laid down the principles on which it was founded.
In comparison with legislation of that kind the compulsory
conversion of long leaseholds into freeholds in towns, full and
ample compensation being paid to the freeholder, is, as I called it
in my speech in the House of Commons, ‘a trifling matter.’
You will find the principle of this measure advocated in the
_British Quarterly Review_ five years ago (a very orthodox organ of
Tory doctrine). You will find the principle again contained in the
65th section of the Conveyancing Law and Properties Act, passed by
Lord Cairns in 1881. I may also add that Lord Cairns dealt a very
severe blow at the rights of owners of freehold property when he
gave to the courts of law power to protect leaseholders from
forfeiture for breaches of covenant.
Under all these circumstances I am inclined to think that you will
agree with me that all this outcry against the supporters of Mr.
Broadhurst’s Bill--this gabble about Socialism, Communism, and Mr.
George, &c.--is highly inconsistent and ridiculous, and betrays a
prevalence of very deplorable and shocking ignorance as to the
extent to which the rights of property can be tolerated, and the
relation of the State thereto.
I remain
Yours faithfully,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
_Lord Randolph Churchill on Temperance._
_Private._
2 Connaught Place, W.: November 29, 1888.
My dear Sir,--I am extremely obliged to you for your interesting
letter, with a great deal of the contents of which I am disposed to
concur.
I think it would not be difficult to find a good many Conservatives
willing to make a considerable step towards a restrictive
regulation of the sale of alcoholic liquor.
The party with which you are connected ought, however, in my
opinion, to consider practically the question of compensation in
some form or other to the retail trader. I exclude compensation to
the brewers and distillers as an impracticable and impossible
demand. The retail trader stands on a very different footing, and
any glaring injustice towards him would alienate many who would
otherwise join the Temperance movement.
One good result of buying up retail liquor interests by charges on
the rates would be to give a permanence to any local decision in
favour of largely diminishing the number of or even abolishing
public-houses.
The community would be most indisposed, by any reversal of its
Temperance policy, to run the risk of having again to face fresh
compensation liabilities.
Caprice in popular decisions is a danger to be guarded against.
I shall continue from time to time to urge the importance of strong
dealing with the Licensing Question. I only trust that your party
will not take up the position of ‘everything or nothing,’ but, if
good proposals are made, will accept them--reserving to themselves,
of course, the right to continue their agitation for more.
We shall, however, not effect much against the publicans unless we
act vigorously in the direction of better houses for the poor. As
long as we allow such an immense portion of our population to live
in pigsties, the warmth and false cheerfulness of the public-house
will be largely sought after.
The two questions appear to me to be inseparable.
I shall always be very glad to talk over these matters with you
should you feel disposed for conference.
I am
Yours very faithfully,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
James Whyte, Esq.,
United Kingdom Alliance.
_Lord Randolph Churchill on Home Rule._
2 Connaught Place, W.: February 10, 1891.
Dear Sir,--I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the
4th inst.
I am not at all surprised to learn that you, in common with, I
expect, the overwhelming majority of members of the English Home
Rule party, find yourself puzzled, embarrassed and anxious in
consequence of the recent very interesting disturbance of the
harmony of the Irish Home Rule party.
I have always been of opinion that, however attractive Home Rule
for Ireland might be in theory, it was an absolute impossibility to
put Home Rule into a Bill. You might just as well try to square the
circle.
The dispute between Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Parnell as to what took
place at what you call ‘the notorious interview at Hawarden’ brings
out this fact with exceeding clearness; and if you, and those who
agree with you politically, insist upon shutting your eyes rather
than contemplate a disagreeable truth, it will, I fear, be the sad
fate of your party to waste years of time and strength in fruitless
efforts to arrive at a solution of the hopeless problem ‘How to put
Home Rule into a Bill.’
You ask me, in conclusion, for my opinion as to what would be the
best policy for Ireland.
In reply I would refer you to several speeches which I have
delivered and letters which I have written in recent years, in
which I have declared my conviction that in a large, liberal,
generous and courageous development of Local Government in Ireland
on lines similar to those which have been so successfully followed
in this country and in Scotland, will be found the best and the
only prospect of political tranquillity for the Irish people.
I am
Yours faithfully,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
John Ogilvy, Esq.
50 Grosvenor Square, W.: March 19, 1893.
My dear Sir,--In accordance with your wishes I write a few lines to
you for the County Longford Meeting which is to be held to-morrow.
It is a pleasure to me to offer my congratulations to the Unionists
of Longford on the energy and courage which they display in
publicly demonstrating, among a population apparently hostile,
their firm and tried attachment to the Parliamentary Union between
Ireland and Great Britain and their determination to resist all
efforts to sever that Union.
I used in the foregoing sentence the word ‘apparently’ for indeed I
do not believe that the bulk of the farmers and peasant farmers of
Ireland are by any means confident as to the blessings which are to
flow from Home Rule. I hear from many quarters, some of them of
great authority, that there is arising and spreading in the minds
of the Irish agricultural population an anxious doubt as to what
will be their position under an Irish Parliament and whether the
taxes which that Parliament will be forced to levy on income or on
land, will not be far more onerous and exhausting than the rents
they formerly paid to the landlords.
They will remember and reflect that under an Irish Parliament not
only will they be absolutely cut off, in times of difficulty and of
depression and of failure of crops, from all the sources of relief
which from the Imperial Parliament they can now confidently draw
upon and be assisted by; but they will be in the hands of a
Government which, from sheer financial exigencies, will be
compelled to treat the Irish taxpayer with the utmost rigour and
harshness, to lay upon him imposts heavier than he can bear, and to
exact relentlessly the payment of those imposts to the last
farthing and on the earliest day that they become due.
I think you may well impress upon the farmers and peasant farmers
the perfect security of property which they now enjoy under the
protection of the Imperial Parliament; the perfect freedom which
they possess from oppression of any kind, either from heavy
taxation or from the unjust exactions of a pauper Government and
Parliament; the great advantages in respect of their rentals
secured to them by the Imperial Parliament and the great facilities
afforded for the easy purchase of their freeholds by its
liberality, which opportunities under the Home Rule Parliament
will, from the squalid poverty of its resources, become illusory
and insecure and in time absorbed by the hopeless insolvency of the
Irish Government.
These are the great truths and facts which the loyal minority in
Irish counties can urge upon the farmers and the peasantry. The
Irish people, in respect of their material interests, have always
been bright and quick-witted; they will, with their ready
imagination, quickly discern that though it may be pleasant and
profitable to be represented in the Imperial Parliament by an
independent and numerically powerful party who can extract from the
British Exchequer and legislature no inconsiderable concessions to
Irish wants, necessities and demands, it will be a widely different
state of things when they (the Irish agricultural population) are
handed over, body and soul, tied and bound and without appeal, to
the uncontrolled domination of that ‘separate and independent’
party who--untrained in the art of just and economical government,
eager to enjoy at any cost, and even only for a brief period, the
profits of office and the delights of a reckless exercise of
patronage and power--will have given over to their insatiable
appetites the lives and properties of those who now exist and
flourish, in tolerable prosperity and in perfect safety, by the
cultivation of the Irish soil.
I have always been opposed to what is called ‘Home Rule’ more upon
the grounds that to the Irish people themselves it must bring
distress, poverty, misery and ruin, than on account of the dangers
it will entail upon the British Empire, though those dangers are
exceedingly great.
I trust that you may be able to continue with ardour and success
the patriotic and excellent work among the Irish people which you
inaugurate to-morrow; you may be sure that the full sympathy and
genuine support of a vast majority of the English people will
attend you in the struggle and you may be confident that the dark
and menacing thunder-cloud that now impends over your country,
almost turning Irish day into night, will soon be dissipated by
the brightness of a recurring dawn of a new era of peace and
prosperity for Ireland under the enlightened rule of a United
Imperial Parliament.
Believe me to be
Most faithfully yours,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL.
J. M. Wilson, Esq.
VIII
_MR. JENNINGS’ ACCOUNT OF HIS QUARREL WITH LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL_
MARCH, 1890.
_Mr. Jennings’ Memorandum._
On Friday, the 7th of March, I called upon Lord Randolph Churchill,
to tell him my opinions with regard to the Resolution proposed by
the Government on the Report of the Special Commission. I told him
I thought some express reference should be made in the Resolution
to the emphatic acquittal of Mr. Parnell and his colleagues on what
I called the ‘murder charges,’ and gave him my reasons. With these
reasons he seemed to be much impressed, and after talking the
matter over he urged me _not_ to speak upon the main question, as I
intended, but to embody my ideas in an Amendment, for then the
Speaker could call upon me and I should have a recognised place in
the debate. Otherwise I might not be called upon at all, and have
no chance of speaking. I said that if any Amendment were drawn up,
it should be in the most moderate terms, so that it might avoid the
faults and disadvantages of Mr. Gladstone’s on the same subject. He
then went to his table and drew up the Amendment, saying, when he
handed it to me, ‘I think no one can object to this--there is not a
single adjective in it.’ We considered it well, and at one o’clock
or so I left him, asking him to turn the subject well over in his
mind before we met at the House and to let me know whether he was
still in favour of the Amendment. At a little after three we met in
the lobby, and he assured me that he was confident the Amendment
was the right thing, and that he did not see how any reasonable
objection could be made to it. I then went into the House, and
after Questions gave notice of the Amendment.
On Saturday night I dined with Lord R. and a party at the Junior
Carlton Club, but we did not have much conversation on the subject
until the end of the evening, when Lord Justice FitzGibbon came up
to us and condemned the Amendment. Lord R. then asked me to go to
his house the next morning, and talk the matter over with ‘Fitz.’ I
said that it was rather too late to ‘talk it over’ on the line
taken up by FitzGibbon, for I was committed to the Amendment and
intended to move it; that I should be very busy the next day, and
would rather be excused going to his house. But Lord R. pressed me
very earnestly to go and accordingly I did so.
On entering his room (Sunday, the 9th), FitzGibbon having been with
him some time before, Lord R. said: ‘I am sorry you put that
Amendment down; it is a mistake; can’t be defended.’ I was
astounded. ‘But,’ I said, ‘it is your own Amendment.’ ‘Yes,’ he
said coolly: ‘but I have changed my mind.’ I was silent a minute or
two, and then asked him to tell me why he had changed his mind.
‘FitzGibbon has been talking it over with me,’ he said, ‘and I am
sure he is right.’ ‘Then,’ I said, ‘I am sorry Lord Justice
FitzGibbon was not here last Friday morning.’ I listened to what
FitzGibbon had to say--it had all been in the papers before--and as
soon as I could, I left. I felt, however, much disheartened at
hearing the author of the Amendment which I had been induced to
move, denounce it as ‘all a mistake.’
The next evening (Monday) Lord Randolph’s brother-in-law (Lord
Curzon) came to me as I was sitting in the House and said he had
something important to say to me about the Amendment. We went
outside into the corridor by the library, and there he told me that
‘Randolph had made up his mind to stand altogether aloof from the
Amendment; he thought it would be best not to support it; he did
not see his way clear to have anything to do with it’--with more to
the same effect. I said: ‘What will people think of him? He has
himself told one of the newspaper correspondents that he intends to
speak and vote for the Amendment.’ ‘Yes,’ replied Lord Curzon,
‘that is the nuisance of his talking to those correspondents.’ I
said: ‘I know what _I_ shall think of his behaviour--first
Birmingham, and now _this_. You cannot doubt what my opinion will
be.’
I should have mentioned that earlier in the day Lord R. C. had
called me to his side in the smoking-room and said: ‘I shall
probably say something to-day on the main question, if I get a
chance.’ I did not quite see what he meant, and when afterwards he
went away (at dinner-time) without speaking I thought he had meant
nothing. Afterwards came Lord Curzon’s message, just referred to.
On the Tuesday, when the Amendment was to be moved, just as I was
going into the House, Lord Curzon again came to me, and said,
‘Randolph will not take any part in the debate unless you are
attacked.’ He added: ‘I cannot support you.’ I said but little, and
went into the House, quite determined to go on.
The House was crowded, and just before Questions were over R. C.
leaned back to me and said: ‘I am going to speak on the main
question.’ I asked him ‘When?’ ‘Now,’ he said. ‘How can you, after
one Amendment has been voted on?’ ‘It is all right,’ he said; ‘I
have arranged it with the Speaker.’ There was no time for
explanation or remonstrance. He was evidently quite determined, and
in a few moments the Speaker called upon him.
He then delivered a violent diatribe against the Government,
accusing them, in effect, of having called the forger Pigott into
existence--‘the bloody, rotten, ghastly fœtus, Pigott, Pigott,
Pigott’--pointing with his finger at the Ministry each time he
mentioned the name. He suggested the possibility of a Pigott being
employed against himself. While he was speaking several friends who
had intended to support me came to me and whispered that they could
not be identified with so outrageous an attack upon the Ministry.
‘You will be linked with it,’ said several of them. ‘Everybody will
believe that the entire programme to-night was arranged between
you.’
Smarting under the deliberate and treacherous manner in which I had
been thrown over, and at the utter want of consideration shown by a
leader for a follower placed _by_ that leader in a very responsible
and difficult position, I determined not to move the Amendment, and
to tell the House why I adopted that course. When R. C. sat down I
informed him that I should do this, and he made several attempts to
dissuade me. I was quite resolved, however, and am glad that I was
not induced to waver, although to throw up the Amendment was the
sorest disappointment I have ever had; and--for the time, at any
rate--the whole transaction has sickened me of political life.
L. J. J.
[I think it right to add to this memorandum the following note by Lord
Justice FitzGibbon.--W. S. C.]
‘Mr. Jennings’ memorandum seems to me to give an unduly unfavourable
impression of Lord Randolph’s action. Lord Randolph told me that when
Mr. Jennings first showed him the draft of the amendment he stated
plainly that he wished to take the whole responsibility for it, and
intended to move it whether Lord Randolph supported it or not.
Afterwards, at Connaught Place, on the day before the debate, the whole
subject was fully discussed by Lord Randolph, Jennings and myself, and
the conversation ended in a distinct statement by Lord Randolph to Mr.
Jennings that, on fuller consideration, he thought the amendment a
mistake, and that although he would not vote against it, he could not
speak in favour of it, but would speak upon the main question if he
spoke at all. His speech was, in substance, an examination of the
constitutional position which he had adopted, and a vindication of his
action in warning the Unionist leaders, two years before, of the dangers
and difficulties into which the Special Commission must lead them. When
I read the report of his speech in the _Times_, it seemed to me that,
but for the sudden loss of self-control indicated in the text, which, as
much by manner as by actual words, made it appear to be a bitter attack
upon the Government, it was conceived in a moderate tone. But, after
what had happened on the previous morning, I cannot understand how
Jennings could have imagined that there was a breach of faith with
him.’
IX
_LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL’S MEMORANDUM ON ARMY AND NAVY ADMINISTRATION_
_Included in the Report of Lord Hartington’s Commission, March 21,
1890._
The Royal Commission desires, I apprehend, to recommend to her Majesty’s
Ministers a system of government and management for the Army and the
Navy which shall appear to secure the _maximum_ of efficiency which can
be reasonably expected from normal expenditure on those services. By the
consent of all, under present arrangements, this _maximum_ has not been
attained.
The present system of administration of the services may be said to
date, for the Army, from 1855, and for the Navy from some twenty-five
years earlier. A Prime Minister forming a government allots to the
different offices members of Parliament of prominence and supposed
capacity. Thus it invariably happens that gentlemen are appointed to
exercise supreme control over the Army and Navy who possess no
experience or knowledge of the military or naval service and profession.
They are expected to decide general and technical questions of naval and
military policy, they are supposed to be held responsible for the
consequences of their decisions, and after a tenure of office, sometimes
of several months, sometimes of a few years, they are succeeded by other
gentlemen who take their places, provided with a similar lack of
experience and knowledge. The duties which these two Ministers are
expected to discharge involve scientific and economical provision for
the defensive and offensive power of an Empire whose possessions are
scattered all over the world and whose subjects number over three
hundred million souls.
It can hardly be a matter for surprise that such a system has not
altogether approximated to a satisfactory standard of combined
efficiency and economy. Governments and Parliaments have been untiring
in their pursuit after reform, but have as yet only succeeded in
progressively increasing public dissatisfaction and, simultaneously,
burdens on the taxpayer. The question seems to present itself whether
the time has not arrived for considering seriously and without prejudice
the expediency of a very radical change in our system of naval and
military administration. The object aimed at is the _maximum_ of
efficiency consistent with the amount of expenditure which the taxpayer
or his representatives will tolerate. Can any practical amount of
efficiency of administration be obtained without professional training
and knowledge? Can it be obtained without direct personal
responsibility? Can direct personal responsibility be reasonably
expected without professional control? The answer to these questions, I
submit, is obviously in the negative. Professional reputation to a
soldier or a sailor is everything next to life itself and the loss of it
equals professional ruin, entailing pecuniary and social loss of a heavy
character. To the ordinary politician under our political system
administrative miscarriage brings little or no evil consequences. His
fate, if unfortunate or unskilful, is in the vast majority of cases to
be transferred to some other office--to a foreign embassy, to a colonial
governorship or, at the worst, to the House of Lords. Neither pecuniary
nor social loss necessarily or ordinarily follows the unskilful and
possibly the disastrous administration of our Ministers for the Army and
Navy. More than this, the professional persons who advise respectively
the Secretary of State for War and the first Lord of the Admiralty
escape all risk of public censure, sheltered as they are by the
fictitious responsibility of the civilian Minister. History and theory
will be found to coincide, in support of the recital set forth above.
Parliament is made the scapegoat for defective administration. The
control of Parliament, the interference of Parliament, the jealousy of
Parliament for its rights and privileges, these are the stock arguments
in favour of an adherence to the main lines of our present system of
naval and military administration.
Personally, and speaking with some experience of the House of Commons
and after several years’ close study of the House of Commons, I put
aside arguments of that kind. I have arrived at the conclusion that,
eliminating great party issues, the House of Commons, with respect to
the transaction of ordinary public affairs, is an assembly mainly
composed of businesslike and reasonable individuals who, having to find
certain funds for certain purposes, desire, in the main, that the
pecuniary demands of Government should not be obviously excessive and
that fair guarantees should be given for economical expenditure of the
funds provided.
With these views I advocate, as an improvement on present arrangements,
that the administration of the Navy and the Army should be entrusted
respectively to members of those professions. That naval training, naval
experience and naval eminence should be the qualifications of our
Minister of Marine. That military training, military experience and
military eminence should be the qualifications for our Minister for the
Army. Superficially, at any rate, this suggestion would seem to be
reasonable and not out of accord with ordinary common sense. It may,
however, be met with the objection that it is unsuited to our
constitutional arrangements and incompatible with Parliamentary control.
I doubt whether this objection will sustain vigorous examination.
Parliament has to provide annually a certain number of millions sterling
for the purposes of Imperial defence, and while Parliament is always
willing and anxious, sometimes even over-anxious, to recognise and
reward the public service of an individual, if at the same time under my
proposed reform Parliament is enabled, without much difficulty, to do
what it cannot do now and what it never has been able to do--namely, to
detect and punish the maladministration of an individual--Parliament
would probably be satisfied.
To this end I suggest that the offices actually in existence of
Secretary of State for War and of the Board of Admiralty be abolished.
In their place I propose that there should be created three new
offices--
I. A Commander-in-Chief or Lord High Admiral of the Navy, having,
subject to the Government, supreme control over and responsibility for
naval administration. Naval training, naval experience and naval
eminence being the qualification for this office.
II. A Commander-in-Chief or Captain-General of the Army, having, subject
to the Government, supreme control over and responsibility for the
administration of the Army. Military training, military experience and
military eminence being the qualification for this office.
For the purpose of securing continuity of administration, and also of
providing from time to time for fresh administrative energy, I propose
that these two offices should be appointments tenable for five years;
also for the purpose of gaining for the Cabinet military and naval
opinion at first hand, I recommend that the holders of these offices
should be created privy councillors and should be summoned to all
Cabinet Councils when military and naval questions are under
consideration, with, while those naval and military questions are under
consideration, an equal position with the other Cabinet Ministers. But
in order to keep the administration of the services free from party
politics I suggest that these two Ministers should take no part in the
discussion or decision of any questions other than those connected with
naval and military affairs.
[A close parallel with the suggestion set forth above may be found in
the position on the Council of the Indian Viceroy of the Indian
Commander-in-Chief.]
For the purpose of bringing these Ministers into immediate contact with
Parliament and at the same time of keeping them free from being
involved in daily party debates and divisions, I advocate that they
should be created members of the House of Lords.
[The feasibility of this suggestion is, I think, to a large extent
illustrated by the positions now held in the House of Lords by his Royal
Highness the Duke of Cambridge and Lord Wolseley. Possibly also in
former days similar positions were to some extent maintained, without
inconvenience, by the Duke of Wellington and Lord Hardinge.]
These two Ministers would each of them be assisted by (among other
officers) (1) a chief of the staff whose duties will be sketched below,
and (2) a financial secretary, with a seat in the House of Commons,
whose duty it would be to explain and, if necessary, to defend in that
assembly naval or military administration in detail.
III. For the purpose of (1) preserving and insuring the financial
control of Parliament and of the Government, of (2) supplying the
much-needed link between the two services, so that one great
object--viz., Imperial defence--should be more completely attained, I
propose that there should be created the office of Secretary of State
and Treasurer for the Sea and Land Forces of the Crown.
This Minister would, according to my view, settle with the responsible
heads of the services the amount of annual expenditure to be submitted
to the Cabinet; he would be charged with the duty of auditing the
accounts of the Admiralty and the War Office, with presenting to and
defending in Parliament those estimates and that expenditure. He would
be charged, further, with a third great duty--viz., with the control,
management of, and responsibility for, the Ordnance Department, and with
the making of the great contracts for the Army and the Navy. He would,
as it were, set up and carry on a great shop from which the military and
naval heads would procure most of the supplies which they needed.
The main outlines of expenditure having been agreed upon by the two
professional Ministers in conjunction with the proposed Secretary of
State, this latter would not interfere nor necessarily be held
responsible for the administration of the services, excepting in so far
as he might have undertaken to provide those services with ordnance and
other supplies and in so far as his duty lay in auditing the accounts
and in testing the stores in hand.
The Secretary of State as proposed would be assisted by (1) a Permanent
Under-Secretary of State, (2) a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State,
(3) an Accountant and Auditor-General, (4) a Controller of Ordnance and
Supplies, under whom would be (_a_) the Head of the Ordnance Factories,
(_b_) the Director of Contracts.
The control and interference now exercised by the Treasury over Army and
Navy expenditure would, under the proposed scheme, cease and determine.
So also would the audit of the Controller or Auditor-General. I suggest
that the Secretary of State, or his Accountant and Auditor-General would
personally explain to Parliament and to the Committee of Public Account,
Army and Navy Expenditure.
The relations between the proposed Ministers for the Army and Navy on
one hand, and the Government on the other, would be closely analogous to
the well-understood relations which now exist between the Home
Government and the Viceroy of India or the Ambassador at a Foreign Court
or a Colonial Governor. The Ministers for the Army and Navy might be
dismissed by a new Government coming into office, but such a dismissal
would be a grave Ministerial action requiring defence and explanation in
Parliament.
The relations between the Ministers for the Army and Navy and the
Secretary of State for the Sea and Land Forces of the Crown would be
those of perfect equality and constant communication. The heads of the
Army and Navy would bring to the Secretary of State in very
authoritative form the views of their respective professions. The
Secretary of State would bring to the heads of the Army and Navy the
views of the Government and the House of Commons on the political
circumstances of the time. The three would examine in concert the
general requirements of Imperial defence from a point of view embracing
and balancing one against another all the exigencies or supposed
exigencies of the services. Where the claims or the views of the Army
and Navy might conflict, the Secretary of State would probably be found
an authoritative and acceptable arbitrator. In the event of the
Ministers for the Army and Navy disagreeing, either singly or jointly,
with the Secretary of State, recourse would be had to the Cabinet. In
the event of the Cabinet supporting the Secretary of State against the
Ministers of the Army and Navy, either singly or jointly, those
Ministers would have to consider whether their professional
responsibility or reputation would admit of their continuing to hold
office. In the event of the resignation of either or of both,
Parliamentary discussion must ensue, and a Parliamentary decision must
be taken. In the event of the administration of the heads of the Army
and Navy being questioned by Parliament, the Secretary of State first,
and the Government as a whole next, would have to consider whether they
could or could not support in Parliament the administrative action
arraigned. In either case, Parliamentary discussion and decision follow.
Under the arrangements suggested above in almost every conceivable
circumstance, I submit that not only in a very large measure (possibly
as great as is practicable) is direct personal responsibility actually
established, but also that the control of Parliament, far from being
diminished, is considerably increased and made much more effective. The
suggestions set forth above are, while probably open to much objection
and criticism, also probably capable of much improvement and
development, and in arriving at a judgment upon them, the Commissioners
should bear in mind that the evidence before us discloses in many
particulars a state of things more seriously unsatisfactory and possibly
more pregnant with danger than Parliament or the public imagine; and the
admitted defects of the present system of administration ought to be
balanced by the Commissioners against the suggested defects of proposals
for reform.
INDEX
Abergavenny, Marquess of, i. 315, 320
Admiralty expenditure, attack on, ii. 316
Affirmation Bill Speech, i. 252;
_Punch_ cartoon, 255
Afghanistan, Policy in, ii. 362
Alcester, Lord, i. 262
Alfred Churchill, Lord, i. 19, 52
Algiers, Italy, &c., Journey to, ii. 287, 289
Althorp, Lord, ii. 125
Arabi Pasha, i. 226, 261, 289
Argyll, Duke of, i. 224
Ashbourne, Lord, i. 128, 213, 214, 220, 393, 408, 409, 445; ii. 34, 78,
290
Ashley, Mr. Evelyn, i. 232
Ashmead-Bartlett, Mr., i. 311
Aston Riots, i. 361, 365
Balfour, Mr. A. J., i. 134, 141, 149, 211, 219, 265, 304, 339, 343, 425,
433, 466, 471; ii. 29, 153, 195, 222, 301, 335, 350, 373, 391, 451, 452,
458, 460, 463, 470, 472
Barnaby, Sir N., ii. 318
Barnett, Mr. H., i. 52
Bartley, Mr., i. 318, 353
Baumann, Mr., ii. 415
Bayley, Mr. M., ii. 504, 505
Beach, Sir M. Hicks-, i. 76, 85, 307, 320, 347, 349, 350, 356, 359, 360,
368, 384, 385, 387, 398, 400, 403, 417, 418, 432, 438, 448, 515; ii. 21,
34, 39, 45, 101, 109, 110, 116, 124, 125, 128, 145, 149, 207, 219, 224,
250, 285, 335, 337, 343, 371, 387, 392, 395, 431
Beaconsfield, Earl of, i. 30, 64, 68, 84, 98, 112, 114, 120, 154, 157,
177, 197, 222, 334; ii. 300, 362, 460
Beaconsfield statue, unveiling of, i. 240
Beale, Mr. P., ii. 390
Beckett, Mr. E., ii. 307, 388
Belfast visit, ii. 59
Berlin, ii. 368
Birmingham:
contests, i. 285, 466, 532, 544; ii. 382
meeting at Aston Park, i. 361, 365
speeches, i. 287, 296, 365; ii. 399
Bismarck, Prince von, ii. 360, 368, 477
Blackpool speech, i. 290
Blandford, Marquess of, i. 3, 19, 43, 165, 267
Blenheim Harriers, i. 25, 33, 267
Blunt, Mr. Wilfrid, i. 261
Borthwick, Sir A., i. 258; ii. 431
Bradford speeches, ii. 175, 177
Bradlaugh, Mr. C., i. 122, 124, 129, 209, 276, 333, 350; ii. 321, 428
Breteuil, M. de, i. 72; ii. 435
Bright, Mr. John, i. 59, 225, 275, 285, 286, 287, 289, 292, 378; ii. 53,
94, 109, 113, 116, 300, 384
Bright, Mr. J. A., ii. 390, 392, 393
Brodrick, Mr., i. 343, 428, 440
Bryce, Mr., i. 251
Budget:
amendment (1885), i. 398, 405
draft (1887-8), ii. 187
Bulgaria, ii. 154, 155, 165, 364
Buller, Sir R., ii. 138, 142, 143, 337
Burke, Mr., i. 207, 211
Burke, Sir J. Bernard, i. 95
Burma, i. 517; ii. 43, 484
Burnaby, Col., i. 258, 285, 320, 361, 378
Butt, Mr., i. 58, 82, 175
Cadogan, Lord, i. 160
Caine, Mr., ii. 78, 421
Cairns, Earl, i. 227, 242
Cambridge University Carlton:
speech, i. 295
undergraduates’ deputation, i. 328
Cardwell, Lord, i. 65
Carnarvon, Lord, i. 251, 432, 440, 444, 460; ii. 20, 22, 28, 30, 57, 111
Cavendish, Lord F., i. 124, 144, 207, 211
Central Committee, i. 305, 308, 356
Chamberlain, Mr. J., i. 58, 62, 170, 211, 222, 281, 286, 287, 349, 365,
370, 422, 428, 452, 462, 467; ii. 48, 52, 53, 57, 58, 73, 74, 75, 80,
82, 85, 94, 96, 100, 108, 113, 118, 119, 120, 125, 133, 143, 153, 164,
195, 216, 221, 243, 250, 252, 254, 262, 267, 284, 285, 286, 288, 336,
344, 345, 348, 349, 350, 351, 375, 382, 384, 386, 388, 392, 395, 403,
419, 420, 428, 463, 470, 472
Chancellor of the Exchequer, ii. 126, 179
budget of 1887-8, ii. 187
economies and reforms effected, ii. 184
resignation, ii. 213, 234, 240, 255, 268, 270, 282
Channel Tunnel Bill, ii. 381
Chaplin, Mr., i. 108, 245, 311, 313, 323, 355, 367; ii. 126, 175, 286,
287, 328
Chenery, Mr., i. 160, 167, 241, 248, 276
Childers, Mr., ii. 205
Civil Servants’ petitioning powers--speech, i. 260
Clarke, Mr., i. 311
Closure, i. 212, 214, 219, 220; ii. 175, 176, 219
Coalition with Whigs, proposals for, ii. 6, 8
Cobden, Mr., i. 289, 292
Collings, Mr. Jesse, i. 251; ii. 45, 164, 176
Compensation for Disturbance Bill, i. 179
Connaught, Duke of, and the Bombay Command, i. 503
Conservative Party:
Irish policy--letter, ii. 3
leadership, question of dual control, i. 227, 229, 242, 246, 251, 405
Parliamentary Reform, attitude towards, i. 336
Cook, Mr., ii. 119, 133
Corrupt and Illegal Practices Suppression Bill, i. 264
Cotter, Mr., i. 320
County Government Bill, i. 106
Cowper, Lord, i. 185, 207; ii. 90
Cranborne, Lord, i. 234
Cranbrook, Lord, ii. 35, 36, 40
Creighton, Dr., i. 24, 34, 36, 37, 255
Cromer, Lord, ii. 377
Cross, Sir R., i. 342, 378
Curzon, Lady, i. 430
Curzon, Lord, i. 428; ii. 307
Curzon, Viscount, ii. 287, 290, 292, 295
Damer, Rev. L. Dawson, i. 22, 23
Darling, Sir C., i. 364
Dartford speech, ii. 163, 175, 176
D’Aunay, Count, ii. 172
Davitt, Mr. M., i. 175, 176
De Worms, Baron, i. 166
Derby, Lord, i. 105, 227; ii. 49, 361
Dilke, Sir C., i. 70, 100-104, 276, 346, 347, 417
Dillwyn, Mr., i. 126
Disraeli. _See_ Beaconsfield
Dixon Hartland, Mr., i. 258
Dodson, Mr., i. 143
Dolben, Mackworth, i. 7
Douglas, Mr. Akers-, ii. 264, 268, 388, 389
Duffield, Tom, i. 28
Dunraven, Lord, ii. 274, 432
Durham, Earl of, i. 281
Eastern Question, i. 98, 100-104; ii. 154.
_See also_ Bulgaria
Edinburgh speeches, i. 273, 278-281
Education, i. 3, 8, 21, 24, 38
Egypt and the Soudan:
Arabi Pasha, i. 226, 261, 289
condition of, i. 225, 278, 334
Gordon, Gen., i. 349, 351, 376
policy, ii. 172, 365, 375
Soudan, evacuation of, i. 380, 382, 386, 387
Suleiman Sami, case of, i. 263
Tewfik, Khedive, i. 261
Egypt, visit to, ii. 437
Egyptian Loan Bill, i. 378
Elcho, Lord, i. 339, 343
‘Elijah’s Mantle,’ i. 248
Employers’ Liability Bill, i. 136
Escott, Mr. T. H. S., i. 15
Established Church, Defence of--speech, i. 296
Eton, i. 8
Expenditure, criticisms on, i. 143, 232
Fair Trade Movement, i. 290, 472; ii. 327
Ferry, M. Jules, ii. 478
FitzGibbon, Lord Justice, i. 77, 79, 395, 434, 435, 459, 471, 525; ii.
59, 89, 96, 124, 132, 263, 307, 351, 353, 386, 455, 462, 468, 513, 515
Forster, Mr., i. 63, 100, 174, 181, 185, 199, 201, 203, 207, 224, 349;
ii. 49, 113
Fourth Party:
Beaconsfield’s approval, i. 154, 223
Budget amendment (1885), i. 398
Coercion policy, opinion as to, i. 197
correspondence, i. 162
dual control question, i. 228
final phase, i. 303, 343
Front Opposition Bench hostility, i. 260
Gladstone’s attitude, i. 152
Gorst’s article--letter, i. 548
Lords’ amendments to Redistribution Bill, i. 417
obstruction, justification of, i. 150
origin of, i. 131
policy, i. 136, 158, 230
Reform Bill, attitude towards, i. 341
rupture and reunion, i. 199, 204, 209
_Times_ statement, i. 168
_Vanity Fair_ cartoon, i. 169
work of, i. 143, 149, 230; ii. 150
France, relations with, ii. 365
Free Trade, i. 292
Freycinet, M. de, ii. 172-174
Gastein, visit to, i. 267
Gathorne-Hardy, Mr., i. 64, 66
German Emperor, i. 166; ii. 368
Gibbs, Mr. V., ii. 472
Gibson, Mr. _See_ Ashbourne
Gibson, Mr. Milner, i. 234, 289
Giers, M. de, ii. 358, 366, 367
Giffard, Sir H., i. 130, 368
Giles, Maj., ii. 447
Gladstone, Mr. H., i. 265
Gladstone, Mr. W. E., i. 58, 60, 64, 69, 145, 172, 222, 232, 234, 260,
261, 264, 271, 275, 282, 283, 284, 377, 416, 432, 441, 451, 472; ii. 1,
3, 22, 24, 27, 62, 137, 143, 157, 169, 214, 219, 220, 229, 241, 300,
309, 312, 334, 340, 341, 360, 361, 365, 373, 428, 433, 454, 456, 463,
466, 469, 470, 471, 474, 477, 502
Affirmation Bill oration, i. 252
Bismarck’s estimate of, ii. 479, 481
Bradlaugh case, i. 127, 210, 212, 350
Burmese policy, ii. 43
Disestablishment, views on, i. 454
Egyptian policy, i. 261, 279, 334, 349
Fourth Party, attitude towards, i. 152
Irish Home Rule proposals, i. 390, 409;
ii. 29, 41, 51, 62, 66, 67, 78, 92, 96, 98, 100, 104,
111, 116, 153, 327, 437, 491, 497
obstruction, opinion on, i. 150
Parnell Commission, ii. 413, 414
rebuke of the Chair, i. 347
Reform Bill (1884), i. 336, 342
resignation, i. 400, 402; ii. 122
Suleiman Sami, i. 263
Transvaal, annexation of, i. 190, 192, 205, 208
vote of 11,000,000_l._, i. 380
Glasgow, invitation to, i. 163
Godley, Sir A., i. 476, 481
Gordon, Gen., i. 349, 351, 376
Gorst, Mr., i. 124, 133, 245, 262, 304, 305, 310, 320, 342, 352, 358,
373, 417, 421, 425, 438, 440, 471; ii. 127, 461
Gorst, Sir J., i. 257
Goschen, Mr., i. 219, 220, 295, 453; ii. 46, 47, 48, 53, 87, 90, 113,
116, 132, 200, 201, 207, 208, 243, 259, 268, 272, 282, 308, 335, 339,
350, 361, 470
Grant, Mr. Corrie, i. 427, 428, 431
Grantham, Mr., i. 126
Granville, Lord, i. 102, 103, 276, 389, 432; ii. 361
Grey de Wilton, Lord, i. 60
Grosvenor, Lord R., i. 385
Hamilton, Lord Claud, i. 311, 323, 443
Hamilton, Lord George, ii. 228, 229, 231, 234, 236, 319, 323, 324
Hamilton, Sir R., i. 445
Hanbury, Mr., ii. 378
Harcourt, Sir W., i. 67, 71, 153, 170, 204, 434, 438; ii. 49, 107, 145,
195, 205, 470
Hart-Dyke, Sir W., i. 435
Hartington, Lord, i. 58, 63, 103, 149, 179, 275, 349, 441, 453, 461; ii.
2, 3, 7, 46-48, 53, 54, 58, 69, 80-82, 87, 90, 94, 98, 113, 116, 120,
122, 124, 125, 141, 147, 153, 220, 221, 250, 256, 258, 272, 302, 321,
322, 337, 344, 349, 361, 365, 388, 392, 395
Hatzfeldt, Count, ii. 158
Healy, Mr., i. 435; ii. 4
Henry, Mr. Mitchell, i. 52
Herbert, Mr. A., i. 65
Holland, Sir H., ii. 127, 273
Holmes, Mr., i. 435, 436, 460
Home Rule:
attitude towards, i. 90, 280, 453; ii. 3, 23, 117, 490, 494, 507, 508
Belfast visit, ii. 59
Bill, proposals as to, ii. 50, 55, 92, 97, 99, 115
Conservative policy, i. 448, 460; ii. 21, 23, 28, 427
Gladstone’s scheme, ii. 2, 29, 79
Queen’s Speech (1886), ii. 32
Hope, Mr. B., i. 65
House of Commons disturbance (1893), ii. 472
Hull speech, i. 163
Iddesleigh, Lord, i. 64, 161, 219, 235, 265, 267, 326, 340, 354, 377,
398, 418; ii. 40, 127, 153, 155, 156, 160, 172, 174, 203, 212, 250, 276,
277
Aston Park, i. 360, 363, 364
Beaconsfield statue, unveiling of, i. 240
Bradlaugh case, i. 124, 128, 210, 333, 334
Egyptian policy, i. 262, 334
Fourth Party, hostility to, i. 158, 260
leadership of Conservative party, i. 145, 148, 157, 227, 242, 357,
381, 382, 403, 407, 408, 418
India:
North-West Frontier delimitation, i. 379, 380, 483
visit to, i. 374, 377, 554-564
India Office administration, i. 425, 474
army reorganisation, i. 489
Bi-metallism discussion, i. 478
Bombay command, i. 503
Budget statement, i. 491
Burma, i. 517
railway construction, i. 477
Salisbury, Lord, correspondence with, i. 498
Ireland, boycotting, origin of, i. 183
Coercion policy, attitude toward, i. 177, 189, 197, 203, 391, 393,
396, 404, 409; ii. 34, 342
Conservative party, policy of--letter, ii. 3
Home Rule. _See that title_
intermediate education question, i. 94, 97
land legislation, i. 205, 434; ii. 92, 344
Maamtrasna incident, i. 436
Reform Bill (1884), i. 343, 344
residence in, i. 75, 80, 82, 110, 111
state of, i. 1, 82, 172, 183, 186, 199, 444; ii. 33
visit to, i. 460
Irish County Government Bill, ii. 373
Irish Education Bill, plans for, ii. 352
Irish Educational Endowments Bill, i. 434
J. S., excerpt from _Realm_, i. 16
James, Sir H., i. 134, 155, 255, 265, 411; ii. 47, 48, 58, 66, 113, 116,
250, 439
Jennings, Mr. L., i. 298; ii. 270, 286-288, 290, 307, 312, 320, 321,
327, 329, 378, 386, 387, 402, 413, 414, 419, 420, 424, 426, 512
Jerome, Miss, i. 39, 40, 57
Jerome, Mr., i. 43, 56
Kerans, Mr., i. 378
King-Harman, Col., ii. 137
Kissingen, ii. 476
Labouchere, Mr., i. 130, 213, 333; ii. 27, 145, 150, 253
Lansdowne, Marquess of, i. 224; ii. 273
Lanyon, Sir O., i. 193
Lawson, Sir W., i. 251
Leadership of the House. _See_ Iddesleigh _and_ Randolph Churchill
Lee, Hans, ii. 447
Leigh, Mr. A., i. 16
Licensing question, ii. 430, 506
Liverpool meeting, i. 443
Lowther, Mr., i. 97, 245
Maamtrasna incident, i. 436
McCarthy, Mr. J., ii. 28
Maclean, Mr. J. M., i. 325; ii. 137
Manchester speeches, i. 231; ii. 69
Manners, Lord J., i. 340
Marlborough, Duchess of, i. 14, 30, 109, 115, 258
fund for relief of Irish distress, i. 110
Marlborough, Duke of, i. 3, 20, 21, 32, 40, 92, 108, 114, 170, 178, 227,
266, 429; ii. 463
Marriage, i. 57
Mashonaland, visit to, ii. 447
Matthews, Mr. H., i. 369; ii. 119, 126, 133, 134, 461
Mattinson, Mr., ii. 387
May, Sir Erskine, ii. 6, 408
Melbourne, Lord, ii. 14
Middle Temple Grand Day, 1885, i. 414
Milner, Sir F., i. 428
‘Mr. Podsnap,’ ii. 399
Mr. Spencer’s travels, ii. 169
Mitford, Mr. P., i. 258
Moore, Mr. A. W., i. 481
Morley, Mr. J., i. 125, 391, 392, 404; ii. 1, 48, 78, 88, 153, 353, 377,
405, 433, 469, 471
Morris, Lord Chief Justice, ii. 23, 57
Mowbray, Sir J., i. 245
Mundella, Mr., ii. 397
National Union of Conservative Associations, i. 305, 307, 312, 315, 318,
320, 321, 324, 326, 327, 330, 352, 355, 356, 536-543
North, Col., ii. 386
Northbrook, Lord, ii. 273
Northcote, Mr. (senr.), i. 245
Northcote, Sir Stafford. _See_ Iddesleigh
Norway, visit to, ii. 123
O’Brien, Mr. B., i. 89
O’Brien, Mr. S., ii. 66, 67
Obstruction:
Closure, effect of, on, i. 220
first use of, i. 87
opinion on, i. 150
O’Connor, Mr. A., ii. 152
O’Donnell, Mr. F. H., i. 128
Oldham speech, i. 163
Opposition, functions of, i. 233, 239
Oxford, i. 31
Territorial Military Centre--speech, i. 66
Paddington, South, i. 471; ii. 454, 461
election addresses, ii. 491, 496
Palmerston, Lord, i. 234; ii. 260
Parliamentary procedure, reform of, i. 211; ii. 10, 16, 17, 25, 42, 500,
502
Parnell, Mr., i. 83, 174, 175, 176, 183, 185, 202, 205, 393-395, 397,
446, 455; ii. 1, 22, 24, 30, 51, 54, 66, 103, 109, 141, 143, 147, 149,
375, 452, 454
arrest and release, i. 206, 207, 210
Commission, ii. 405, 413, 431
Kilmainham treaty, i. 207, 210, 212
Maamtrasna, i. 438, 440
Parnellism and Crime, ii. 406, 408, 423
Peel, Mr., ii. 9, 136
Percy, Lord, i. 306, 312, 313, 317, 318, 323, 352, 355
Perkins, Mr., ii. 447, 450
Pigott case, ii. 412, 416
Plunket, Mr., ii. 67, 84
Ponsonby, Sir H., ii. 268
Preston speech, i. 185, 187
Primrose League, i. 256, 356
Prince Imperial, monument to, i. 142
Prince of Wales’s wedding, i. 9
Protection of Persons and Property Bill, i. 200
Queen Victoria:
Bombay command appointment, i. 503
Indian affairs, i. 485
letter, ii. 154
resignation of Chancellor, ii. 234, 240, 255, 268
Radical party, principles of, i. 231, 288, 293
Raikes, Mr., i. 398; ii. 126
Randolph Churchill, Lady, i. 167, 258, 429, 430, 431; ii. 366-368
Randolph Churchill, Lord:
birth, i. 3
Chancellor of Exchequer, ii. 126, 179
characteristics, i. 6, 7, 14, 15, 33, 35, 48, 415; ii. 434
chess, fondness for, i. 30
death and funeral, ii. 484
education, i. 3, 8, 21, 24, 38
hunting, delight in, i. 4, 25, 28
illness, ii. 464
India, Secretary for, i. 425, 474
leadership of House of Commons, ii. 126, 150, 154, 213
letters, style of, i. 12, 13, 162-168
maiden speech in Parliament, i. 66
marriage, i. 57
member of Parliament, i. 55
nicknames and caricatures of, i. 275
personal appearance, i. 15; ii. 465
politics, early distaste to, i. 164, 166
popularity in 1882, i. 273
prediction in 1885, i. 473
public life, disinclination for, i. 48
speeches, style of, i. 276
Turf experiences, ii. 432
Redistribution Bill, Lords’ Amendments to, i. 417
Redschid Pasha, i. 388
Reed, Sir E., ii. 319
Reform Bill (1884), i. 335, 337, 341, 343, 360, 372, 550
Richards, Mr. B., i. 15
Richmond, Duke of, i. 227
Ripon, Marquess of, i. 492
Ritchie, Mr., ii. 126
Roberts, Sir F., i. 458, 490
Roebuck, Mr., i. 58
Rosebery, Earl of, i. 29, 433; ii. 49, 471, 478
Rowlands, Mr. J., i. 258; ii. 119, 120, 387, 391
Royal Buckhounds, i. 232
Royal grants--speech, ii. 396
Russell, Lord J., i. 234
Russell, Mr. E., ii. 142
Russia:
aggression in India, i. 380, 382, 386, 387, 389
visit to, ii. 356
Rylands, Mr., i. 106; ii. 90
Salisbury, Marquess of, i. 65, 227, 233, 245, 265, 281, 303, 347, 381,
423, 433, 458, 468; ii. 6, 7, 14, 21, 26, 54, 58, 72, 75, 78, 89, 90,
116, 135, 153, 155, 187, 264, 273, 277, 278, 281, 294, 299, 361, 362,
368, 377, 431, 463
Bombay command appointment--letters, i. 504
Burma policy, i. 522, 524
Cabinet of 1885, i. 400, 401, 402, 407, 413, 416, 419; ii. 122, 124
Carnarvon and Parnell, meeting of, i. 447
correspondence of, i. 499
Disestablishment, views on, i. 455
Eastern Question, ii. 157, 158, 160, 162, 165
Irish affairs, attitude towards, ii. 29, 30, 33-35, 37, 64, 138,
334, 448, 470
National Union, i. 312, 318, 319, 324, 330, 352, 357
resignation of Lord Randolph, ii. 214, 218, 220, 223, 228, 231-234,
236, 243, 250, 255, 261, 267, 282
Woodstock speech, i. 161
Schnadhorst, Mr., i. 276, 286, 467; ii. 98, 119, 120, 134
Sclater-Booth, Mr., i. 106
Scott, Dr., i. 22
Sexton, Mr., i. 435; ii. 4, 64, 144
Siam, ii. 478
Slade, Sir A., i. 257
Smith, Mr. W. H., i. 245, 344, 408, 503; ii. 21, 36, 40, 42, 44, 90,
124, 137, 156, 171, 221, 226, 227, 229, 230, 232, 273, 281, 291, 295,
310, 311, 321, 335, 350, 381, 406, 407, 451
Soudan. _See_ Egypt and the Soudan
South Africa:
affairs in, i. 190, 195
visit to, ii. 447
Spencer, Lord, i. 390, 438, 439, 441; ii. 3, 48
Staal, M. de, ii. 157
Stanhope, Mr. E., i. 325, 330, 373; ii. 127, 273
Stanley, Col., i. 342, 372
Stockton speech, ii. 328
Stuart-Wortley, Mr., i. 323, 353
Suakin, ii. 375, 376
Suleiman Sami, i. 263
Tabor, Mr., i. 3, 426
Tarbes, visit to, ii. 435
Temperance--letter, ii. 506
Tewfik, Khedive, i. 261
Thomas, Col., i. 4, 26
Tory democracy, i. 250, 290, 293, 295, 301, 302, 336, 349, 358, 411,
463, 465; ii. 404
Transvaal, i. 190, 193-196
Trevelyan, Sir G., ii. 48, 74, 84, 336, 340
Turf experiences, ii. 432
Turkey and the Eastern Question--letters, i. 100-104
Tyrwhitt, Mr. H., ii. 287, 289, 292
United States, visit to, i. 73
Villiers, Mr. C., i. 292
Walsall speech, ii. 397
Walsh, Archbishop, ii. 4, 78, 353, 354, 356
War Office expenditure, attack on, ii. 316
Warren, Sir C., ii. 143
Watkin, Sir E., ii. 381
Webster, Sir R., ii. 407
Welby, Lord, ii. 182, 212
Welsh Church Suspensory Bill, ii. 466, 474
West, Sir A., i. 261; ii. 205
Whitby meeting, ii. 326
Whitley, Mr., i. 443
Winston Churchill, Mr., ii. 294, 468
Wolff, Sir H. D., i. 124, 126, 129, 131, 132, 163, 264, 267, 304, 305,
310, 311, 342, 358, 367, 421, 425, 428, 430, 438; ii. 236, 260, 261, 263
Wolverhampton speech, ii. 314
Woodstock:
elections, i. 52, 115, 426, 527-532
parliamentary history, i. 18
reform of borough--speech, i. 71
Salisbury’s, Lord, speech, i. 160
Zulu War, i. 142, 191
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Seven Years at Eton_, Brinsley Richards, p. 377.
[2] _Randolph Spencer-Churchill_, by T. H. S. Escott, M.A. (Hutchinson &
Co., 1895).
[3] _Fortnightly Review_, October, 1874, vol. xvi., p. 412.
[4] Byron, _Don Juan_, Canto ix. lxxxiv.
[5] B. O’Brien, _Life of Parnell_, second edition, i. 163.
[6] ‘That this House, having been informed in her Majesty’s gracious
Speech that the conditions on which her Majesty’s neutrality is founded
have not been infringed by either belligerent engaged in the war in the
East of Europe, and having since received no information sufficient to
justify a departure from the policy of neutrality and peace, sees no
reason for adding to the burdens of the people by voting unnecessary
supplies.’
[7] ‘Elijah’s Mantle,’ _Fortnightly Review_, May, 1883.
[8] I have been greatly assisted in this chapter by the excellent
accounts of the Fourth Party proceedings contributed by Mr. Harold
Gorst to the _Nineteenth Century_ from November 1902 to January 1903.
In relating some incidents, notably on pages 153 and 161, I have by his
permission used his actual words.
[9] _Life of Parnell_, R. Barry O’Brien, vol. i. 247.
[10] _Cf._ Mr. Forster’s ‘village ruffians.’
[11] _Men, Mines, and Animals in South Africa_, p. 23.
[12] Abridged.
[13] Mr. Gladstone.
[14] Mr. Chamberlain.
[15] A quotation from Mr. Gladstone’s famous pamphlet of 1876.
[16] Preface to Lord Randolph Churchill’s speeches, by L. J. Jennings,
p. xxiv.
[17] Mr. Harold Gorst’s articles, _Nineteenth Century_, November and
December, 1902.
[18] Appendix II.
[19] Appendix II.
[20] See J. M. Maclean’s _Reminiscences_, p. 68.
[21] Appendix II.
[22] Letter to Mr. Wainwright, M.P., June 9, 1884, Appendix III.
[23] Mr. W. H. Smith.
[24] See especially his letter to Mr. Harold Gorst of January 5, 1903,
published in the _Times_, included as an Appendix.
[25] _Nineteenth Century_, January 1903, by Mr. Harold E. Gorst.
[26] Now Sir Charles Darling.
[27] Appendix IV. See especially his description of the tiger hunt.
[28] January 17, 1885.
[29] A note upon this chapter by Sir Michael Hicks-Beach.
[30] August.
[31] This was public-spirited. (See page 440.)
[32] House of Lords, May 3, 1888. _Hansard_, 325, 1179.
[33] Issued November 21, 1880.
[34] See Lord Randolph’s Letters from India, Appendix.
[35] ‘Ireland’s Eye.’
[36] Lord Ashbourne.
[37] Our Very Good Lord: Ex-Chancellor Ball.
[38] _Times._
[39] Appendix I.
[40] This appears to have been an outside estimate. (See p. 490.)
[41] Sir John Gorst’s eldest son, now Sir Eldon Gorst.
[42] The italics are mine.--W. S. C.
[43] Mr. Smith to the Duke of Cambridge, October 9, 1885.
[44] Official memorandum.
[45] Colonel Burnaby was killed in action at Abu Klea, January 18, 1885.
[46] This was written ten days ago. Its contents are not much affected
by recent events.--R. H. S. C.[*]
[*] The Memorandum and Lord Randolph’s footnote are both undated, but
Lord Salisbury’s reply on the 9th shows that he had waited some days
before replying. I conclude therefore that November 26 or 27 would be
the latest date at which this document was written.
[48] Mr. Labouchere, who has checked and confirms this account of the
conversation, remarks: ‘As a matter of fact, Lord Randolph Churchill
had asked me some time before to tell Mr. Gladstone that he would urge
Ulster to resist by arms Home Rule, which I had done, and he now begged
me to repeat to him his declaration of war.’
[49] _Life of Gladstone_, vol. iii. p. 270.
[50] Lost. The passage ultimately adopted reads as follows:--
‘The social no less than the material condition of that country engages
my anxious attention. Although there has been during the last year no
marked increase of serious crime, there is in many places a concerted
resistance to the enforcement of legal obligations, and I regret that
the practice of organised intimidation continues to exist. I have caused
every exertion to be used for the detection and punishment of these
crimes, and no effort will be spared on the part of my Government to
protect my Irish subjects in the exercise of their legal rights and
the enjoyment of individual liberty. If, as my information leads me
to apprehend, the existing provisions of the law should prove to be
inadequate to cope with these growing evils, I look with confidence to
your willingness to invest my Government with all necessary powers.’
[51] This was accompanied by the promise of a Bill dealing with the Land
Question, pursuing in a more extensive sense the policy indicated by the
Land Purchase Act in 1885.
[52] At the Colonial Office, February 15, 1898 (O’Brien’s _Life of
Parnell_, chap. xix. vol. ii.).
[53] Appendix V.
[54]
Lord Randolph Churchill 2,576
Rev. J. Page Hopps 769
[55] Wrongly stated in the _Annual Register_ of 1886 as the Board of
Trade.
[56] An expression quoted from Mr. Gladstone.
[57] ‘Lord Randolph as an Official,’ _Nineteenth Century_, October 1896,
by the Right Hon. Sir Algernon West, K.C.B.
[58]
Scale of 1886, still in force:--
Where the packet, box, bottle, pot, &c.,
did not exceed the price or value of _s._ _d._
1_s._, the duty was 0 1½
Exceeded 1_s._, but did not exceed 2_s._ 6_d._ 0 3
” 2_s._ 6_d._ ” 4_s._ 0 6
” 4_s._ ” 10_s._ 1 0
” 10_s._ ” 20_s._ 2 0
” 20_s._ ” 30_s._ 3 0
” 30_s._ ” 50_s._ 10 0
” 50_s._ 20 0
Lord Randolph Churchill’s
proposed scale:--
_s._ _d._
Not exceeding 2_d._ in value 0 0½
” ” 6_d._ ” 0 1½
” ” 1_s._ ” 0 3
” ” 2_s._ ” 0 6
” ” 4_s._ ” 1 0
” ” 8_s._ ” 2 0
” ” 12_s._ ” 3 0
” ” 20_s._ ” 5 0
” ” 40_s._ ” 10 0
Exceeding 40_s._ ” 20 0
[59] The exact figure is 291,666_l._ 13_s._ 6_d._, but some reduction
would probably occur in practice.
[60] Lord Ashbourne.
[61] Viscount Curzon, M.P. for South Buckinghamshire.
[62] Viscount Curzon, February 21. _Hansard_, 311, 179.
[63] Secretary to the Treasury.
[64] _Times_, April 20, 1887.
[65] See his letter to Mr. Arnold White, p. 459.
[66] No. 119, Egypt No. 8, 1888, published January 12, 1889.
[67] Letter to _Birmingham Daily Post_, April 18.
[68] _Life of Gladstone_, Book X., chapter iii.
[69] _Hansard_, March 1890.
[70] See Appendix, Mr. Jennings’s Memorandum and Lord Justice
FitzGibbon’s note thereupon.
[71] Appendix VIII.
[72] Local Taxation Bill, June 17--228 to 224.
[73] Addison, _Spectator_, No. 68.
[74] _Men, Mines and Animals in South Africa._
[75] The Hon. Lionel Holland.
[76] _Life of Pitt._
[77] Abridged.
* * * * *
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
the form of a lettter to his=> the form of a letter to his {pg vi 95}
the Tukrish rule=> the Turkish rule {pg vi 104}
furtherance of this political opinion=> furtherance of his political
opinion {pg vii 53}
even Constantiople=> even Constantinople {pg vii 158}
I purpose=> I propose {pg vii 282}
They outnumbered by three of four to one=> They outnumbered by three or
four to one {pg vii 385}
be would not speak=> he would not speak {pg vii 461}
the greatest atention to his speeches=> the greatest attention to his
speeches {pg vii 474}
and responsibilty for=> and responsibility for {pg vii 521}
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Lord Randolph Churchill" ***
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