the intense enthusiasm with which he entered into the subject and the object of the moment was apt to dim, if not obliterate, the little loves and affections which crowd the life of smaller men. The execution of his great work was the one thing in his eyes, and the instruments and tools he used were dearer to him than anything else; and the men associated with him at the moment were always greater than the men who had passed away.
A few trusted civil servants, and a few reliable members of the cabinet, superintended by Gladstone, worked in haste and silence.
When at the end of March the cabinet met to discuss his proposals, which included an Irish government with powers of taxation, Chamberlain and the Irish secretary, Sir George Trevelyan, left the room and did not come back.
On 8 April the Commons whipped itself into a fever of excitement. Every space was taken. Gladstone was greeted with cheers from his admirers, who watched him being driven to Westminster, and by many rounds of applause from his supporters in the Commons. He spoke for three and a half hours, and the ensuing debate continued for sixteen days. At the close of the debate Gladstone rose and exhorted his colleagues: ‘Ireland stands at your bar, expectant, hopeful, almost suppliant …’ He must have known that he would lose. In the event 93 Liberals voted against him and the Home Rule Bill was defeated by 343 votes against 313. There were now Liberals and Liberal Unionists, the latter taking as hard a line on the maintenance of the union as their Conservative colleagues. The Liberal Unionists and the Conservative Unionists were as one on the vital principle of the day, and it would not be long before they formed a party.
Gladstone was not in the least disheartened. He blamed vested interests for his defeat and declared not for the first time that ‘the masses have been right and the classes have been wrong’. Many Liberals, however, blamed him for hitching his party to the wandering star of Irish nationalism which, as he told Rosebery, ‘will control and put aside all other questions in England till it is settled’. He believed the chimera in his own brain to be the overwhelming question.
After Home Rule had been voted down, the queen was asked to dissolve parliament. Let the people decide. The ensuing election battle was fierce. Randolph Churchill derided the Home Rule proposals as ‘this monstrous mixture of imbecility, extravagance and political hysterics … the united and concentrated genius of Bedlam and Colney Hatch would strive in vain to produce a more striking tissue of absurdities’. This was the way many people understood the situation. The United Kingdom, not to mention the Liberal party itself, was to be torn apart in order to ‘gratify the ambition of an old man in a hurry’. Even though he looked old, bent and infinitely wearied, he was engaged once more in a national speaking tour, as if only the balm of popular acclaim could heal his wounded spirit. He noted in his diary on a speech in Liverpool at the end of June that he had spent ‘seven or eight hours of processional uproar and a speech of an hour and forty minutes to five or six thousand people … I went in bitterness, in the heat of my spirit, but the hand of the Lord was upon me.’ His biblical cadence suggests that he was beginning to adopt the role of an Old Testament prophet. The queen was dismayed. She said that it was ‘grievous’ to see a man of seventy-seven ‘behave as he does, and lower himself to an ordinary demagogue … if only he could be stopped’.
The electorate stopped him. ‘Well, Herbert, dear old boy,’ he told his son, ‘we have had a drubbing and no mistake.’ The Conservative Unionists and Liberal Unionists had a combined majority of 118 over the Gladstonians and the Irish Nationalists. At the end of the year he wrote in his diary:
it has been a year of shock and strain. I think a year of some progress; but of greater absorption in interests which, though profoundly human, are quite off the line of an old man’s direct preparation for passing the River of Death. I have not had a chance given me of creeping from this Whirlpool, for I cannot abandon a cause which is so evidently of my fellow men, and in which a particular part seems to be assigned to me.
He was, in other words, not going to give up.
To almost everyone’s amazement, Gladstone seemed ready to carry on. He said that he remained at the disposal of his party and his friends while ‘giving special heed to the calls of the Irish question’. It had become his great cause, the fruit of his moral being. He might be the justified sinner, identifying his existence with a greater good. His anger against the enemy became more pronounced. ‘Ireland is perhaps the most conspicuous country in the world,’ he said, ‘where law has been on one side and justice on the other.’ No government ‘by perpetual coercion’ could stand, when it had been erected by ‘the foulest and wickedest’ means ‘that ever were put in action’.
Salisbury had in the interim created his Conservative cabinet, which Randolph Churchill dubbed ‘Marshalls and Snelgroves’ after the solid but uninspiring department store in London. Churchill was given the offices of chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House, from which eminence it was believed that he would catapult himself into the first office. Salisbury’s duty, as he saw it, was to sit tight and ensure that Gladstone and Home Rule were no longer on the table. It was also his duty, as first minister, to keep his party whole and united. This was not necessarily an easy task, with Randolph Churchill firing off grandiose schemes, vilifying his colleagues and threatening resignation with every twist and turn of his fortunes. Eventually Salisbury decided to silence him by accepting the most recent of his letters and, much to Churchill’s amazement, allowed him to resign. The menace was gone in an instant. Salisbury was now on his own, but he had a solid Unionist majority to comfort him.
Gladstone was still in good spirits, with his devotion to the cause of Irish Home Rule giving him the ballast to survive. He and Parnell had now a ‘union of hearts’ in the Irish cause. But there is always room for the unexpected. Parnell was fatally compromised by being cited in a divorce case; the evidence was overwhelming. John Morley, a Liberal statesman, had said once that ‘Ireland would not be a difficult country to govern – were it not that all the people are intractable and all the problems insoluble.’ Gladstone privately deplored ‘the awful matter of Parnell’, but for a time kept quiet until the public reaction forced his hand. Adultery and divorce were more heinous in Ireland even than in England, and even the most popular politician could not escape the fire. Yet it was Gladstone who threw the burning branch. He wrote to Parnell urging him to resign. Parnell refused, and almost at once Gladstone made sure that his letter reached the Pall Mall Gazette. As far as Parnell was concerned, the case was concluded. Gladstone had cast him into the outer darkness. Those who still voted for him were ‘either rogues or fools’.
The Irish question was the most important for Salisbury’s administration. Salisbury told the Lords that ‘for the moment, the guardianship of the Union supersedes every other subject of political interest’. He had said that: ‘The severity must come first. They must “take a licking” before conciliation would do them any good.’ For that purpose he appointed his nephew, Arthur Balfour, as chief secretary for Ireland. Balfour had a languid and rather vague manner, in the style of the 1880s; with his wispy moustache and his juvenile good looks he could have been taken from the cast of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. But appearances can be deceptive. In Ireland he was known soon enough as ‘Bloody Balfour’. He believed in the Tory policy of coercion, which he proceeded to apply without much remorse or doubt. ‘There are those who talk as if Irishmen were justified in disobeying the law because the law comes to them in foreign garb,’ he said. ‘I see no reason why any local colour should be given to the Ten Commandments.’ Balfour introduced his Crimes Act in the spring of 1887, making boycotting, intimidation and resistance to eviction a criminal offence with a minimum sentence of six months’ hard labour. It was not considered to be a provisional or temporary measure; it was written in stone until such time as any future government might repeal it.