Somewhere or other I remarked that my “hobbies” include reading books about dinosaurs and British prime ministers. Well, I do, and recently I read my third biography of one of the greatest, William Gladstone, a Victorian figure second only to Victoria herself, born in 1809 and entering Parliament at age 22, where he would serve for sixty years, the only person to be prime minister of four separate governments, even though it was only his first that was a real success. My most recent take on Bill, titled simply Gladstone, was written by Roy Jenkins back in 1995. Don’t ask me why I’ve been so long getting around to reading it, because I don’t know why. I just wasn’t paying attention, I guess.
Jenkins has written biographies of four British prime ministers, and I have read three of them—Herbert Henry Asquith, Gladstone, and Churchill, taking a pass, for the time being, on Sir Stanley Baldwin. Jenkins is “unusual” as biographer of great parliamentary figures, because he was one himself. Born in 1920, the son of a coal-mining union official—his father first “went down into the pits” when he was 12—Jenkins was first elected to parliament in 1948 as a member of the Labour Party, serving as one its leading members for almost 30 years, and held the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer, the most prestigious cabinet post other than prime minister, held by both William Pitts, as well as Gladstone, Asquith, and Churchill. Jenkins wrote with a sense of that heritage that I think would be foreign to any American politician. Thanks to their parliamentary system, where “big men” (and women) remain in Parliament for decades, jostling against one another for position and power, in and out of the top offices of government, there seems to be (or to have been) a continuity of political practices that doesn’t exist here, if it ever did. The great figures of our past quickly become mere names to those who did not live in their times. Nancy Pelosi, speaker of our House of Representatives, probably knows who Sam Rayburn was, because her father was a congressman when Rayburn was speaker, but does she know anything about once-famous speakers like Cannon or Longworth (both have House office buildings named after them), or “Czar Reed”? And what about Henry Clay?
Jenkins’ biography of Gladstone is an intensely “political” one—he writes about Gladstone almost as if he were a revered, retired senior colleague/mentor—and if you don’t know a lot about Victorian politics—if you don’t know what the “Midlothian Campaign”1 was, for example—you’ll probably have a hard time getting through this book. To a surprising extent (to me, at least), what counts for Jenkins is what happens within the walls of Parliament. What happened outside “the City” (of London) was largely noises off. For example, as a young man, Gladstone made a passionate speech against the “Opium War”, which he hated as much as Karl Marx did, waged by Great Britain against China in 1840 in order to force China to allow British merchants to import opium into the Middle Kingdom. Gladstone called it “a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace” than any other. Sure, says Jenkins, but what really counted was not the war, not the attempt of Great Britain to force open the Chinese “market”, whether the Chinese liked it or not, but rather the struggle for status within Parliament.
“Undoubtedly, however, another part of it [Gladstone’s objection to the war] was his growing dislike and distrust of Palmerston, whom he saw as bumptious, chauvinist, libertine without guilt, and compounding his sins by claiming to be the heir of [George] Canning.”2 “Palmerston” was Viscount Palmerston, then foreign secretary, and 30 years Gladstone’s senior, whose political potency and sheer longevity threatened to deny Gladstone any opportunity to reach 10 Downing. Palmerston became prime minister almost 20 years later, at age 80, Gladstone serving very reluctantly under him as chancellor of the exchequer at age 50. Gladstone once saw Palmerston mounting the steps to Parliament two at a time and his heart sank within him. It seemed like the old son of a bitch would never die! But eventually he did and Gladstone came in.
Jenkins doesn’t include the “two steps” anecdote in his book and it’s a bit of a mystery why, because he is generally fascinated by Gladstone’s thunderously Victorian morality, here a bit betrayed by the sudden appearance of Old Scratch, jealous of a rival’s health. Gladstone’s biography could have been entitled “The Importance of Being Entirely in Earnest,” because he always was. He took “theology” with immense seriousness all his life, his intensely idiosyncratic “thought” winding through endless changes over the decades. In his diary he repeatedly gives thanks to God for his chastisements—for example, the time he was beaten up by bullies at Oxford—a good lesson in humility, one guesses, though exactly why isn’t clear. Perhaps we can all always use a good lesson in humility. Gladstone notoriously used to seek out prostitutes—some low, some famous “courtesans”—to offer them Christian guidance. He also used to physically “chastise” himself from time to time with some sort of whip or goad—though no one knows exactly how. And, really, who cares?
Ove and over again, Jenkins marvels at Gladstone’s overwhelming simplicity, never thinking that anyone, including his wife, might ever notice, much less look askance at, the prime minister of Great Britain wandering the streets in search of fallen women or paying court—and often rather obsessive court, too—to famous “notorious” women. For Jenkins Gladstone is a sort of larger than life crazy uncle who acted out in all sorts of absurd ways that would be impossible now, at least for any “public man”, while reading hundreds of books on all manner of topics, ranging from the intensely abstruse to the intensely practical, while writing dozens of books, pamphlets, papers, and articles himself, while chopping down forests of trees, while delivering lucid, passionate, three-hour speeches in Parliament every week, and keeping the affairs of the largest empire in the history of the world tightly organized within the compass of his mind by riding herd on a dozen fussing, feuding, headstrong prima donnas, all of whom wanted his job.
But what did Gladstone think of the British Empire? Did he have any overall “strategy”? What did he think of India? Of Great Britain’s role in the Mediterranean, particularly after Disraeli, his great rival, bought the Suez Canal, officially establishing it as Britain’s lifeline to the East, and all but guaranteeing an ever-increasing involvement in Egypt to secure that lifeline?
Jenkins isn’t interested in any of what happened in the British Empire, and outside of it, except as it relates to what happened in Parliament. Jenkins identifies very strongly with Gladstone’s dislike of British militarism and compulsive expansionism, but Gladstone seemed to have no idea about how to stop it. Ambitious young men continued to seek posts in the colonies that would allow them to win their fortune through expansion, which occurred in an almost mindless fashion, and Gladstone never seemed to bother about how to bring it to a halt. Whenever a young glory-seeker might blunder his way into a bloody disaster, it was the duty of the British Lion to avenge the outrage, leading, inevitably, to another expansion. Unfortunately for Gladstone, the superiority of European firepower swept all before it in his lifetime.3
To crown it all, it was Gladstone’s second government that ended up effectively taking over Egypt in 1882 after the “Anglo-Egyptian War”, ultimately hastening the “Scramble for Africa” rather than resisting it, and ultimately leading to the absurd but deeply held conviction among many prominent Brits, including the supposedly worldly wise Lord Salisbury—the “British Bismarck"— that only an immense north-south African empire, running from “Cairo to the Cape”, could secure Britain’s world position, inconveniently conflicting with German dreams of a great east-west African empire, running horizontally across sub-Saharan Africa, from the Atlantic to the Indian.
Gladstone’s great clash with “jingoism,” as it came to be called, was his dispute with his great rival, Benjamin Disraeli, whom Jenkins does not like, explicitly because of his appetite for imperial expansion and glory. Yet when it comes to the once famous “Eastern Question”—whether Britain should support Russia in its war with the Ottoman Empire on the grounds that Russia would “free” the Balkan territories then held by the Ottomans, as Gladstone wished, or whether Britain should regard the expansion of Russian power as a threat to its hold on India and should therefore prop up the Ottomans as a counter—Jenkins doesn’t have an answer.
The Eastern Question first rose to a head thanks to an uprising in Bulgaria, then part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1876, which was harshly repressed by the Ottomans. Gladstone, supposedly in retirement, flung himself back into battle with a once-legendary pamphlet, “Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East,” which Disraeli, then prime minister, saw with some justice as directed more at him than the Turks. Gladstone followed up the pamphlet with passionate speeches (the “Midlothian Campaign”) championing the oppressed Slavs, deeply disliked by Queen Victoria because a man of Mr. Gladstone’s position should not have been stirring up the common people in such a manner, that seem to excite Jenkins, while Disraeli’s often cynical exploitation of Britain’s imperial glory clearly disgusts him. But who was, you know, “right”?4
In the short run, it’s easy to argue that Disraeli was, if it were true, as everyone believed it was true, that Britain’s prosperity, and her “greatness”, depended on her empire. It appears that when Russia seized on the Bulgarian “horrors” as an excuse to wage war against the Ottoman Empire, Disraeli was worried both by the prospect of the expansion of Russian power in the eastern Mediterranean and the thought that, if Russia’s western flanks were secure, it might threaten British India through the north, via Afghanistan, a long-running if absurd worry that kept generations of “experts” in both countries employed for almost a century.5 The Russo-Turkish War ended in 1878, thanks to British intervention, and final peace arrangements were made at the Congress of Berlin, during which Russia was forced to surrender some of its gains. It appears that Russia felt “betrayed” by both Germany and Austria, leading to the sort of tension that Disraeli hoped for. No one could have guessed that, 50 years later, all the great multi-national empires of Europe would be falling to pieces, destroyed by the nationalism that Gladstone so innocently championed. But then, 50 years is an awfully long time to wait to be “right”.
Those who know Gladstone’s story know that when he received the news that Queen Victoria was asking him to form what would be the first of his four governments, he said, after finishing chopping down a tree, “my mission is to pacify Ireland”, and it is almost the point of Jenkins’ book to chronicle the tragedy of that failure, which Jenkins, I think, regards as the great failure of Great Britain, somehow wanting to believe (again, according to me) that if Ireland could have been pacified—ultimately, by some variation of the “Home Rule” schemes that Gladstone put forth in his last two governments—that Great Britain could have avoided the Great War and the entire cataclysm of the twentieth century that reduced the leading nation of the world to one of the third rank—that there would be no sense of “loss”—no sense of an utter break in British history between “now” and “then”—when looking backwards to Gladstone’s time.
The Irish, of course, have their own view of the endless convolutions and tergiversations6 that the British establishment went through before not granting Irish independence—the need to “square” things with endless ignorant monarchs, lords, lackeys, editors, archbishops, and eminences—the time was never “right”! So unfortunate! Dickens explained the difficulty of forming a government in Bleak House:
supposing the present government to be overthrown, the limited choice of the Crown, in the formation of a new ministry, would lie between Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle—supposing it to be impossible for the Duke of Foodle to act with Goodle, which may be assumed to be the case in consequence of the breach arising out of that affair with Hoodle. Then, giving the Home Department and the leadership of the House of Commons to Joodle, the Exchequer to Koodle, the Colonies to Loodle, and the Foreign Office to Moodle, what are you to do with Noodle? You can't offer him the Presidency of the Council; that is reserved for Poodle. You can't put him in the Woods and Forests; that is hardly good enough for Quoodle. What follows? That the country is shipwrecked, lost, and gone to pieces (as is made manifest to the patriotism of Sir Leicester Dedlock) because you can't provide for Noodle!7
Jenkins sees two “disaster points”, when Gladstone, or those around him, miscalculated and sent suspicions of bad faith soaring, utterly wrecking the prospects for constructive action. The first came during the parliamentary election campaign in 1885, when Gladstone’s son Herbert “revealed” to a reporter that his father now supported “Home Rule”, for Ireland, presumably thinking that that what his father wanted, even if he may not have known that he did. Gladstone did support Home Rule, and had supported for a long time, but he was hoping, no doubt naïvely, that it could be done in a bi-partisan manner. The revelation that Gladstone did support it caused a political sensation, supposedly convincing Lord Salisbury, the leader of the Conservative Party, that he couldn’t trust Gladstone, though one wonders if Salisbury ever believed that he could, or ever wanted to.8
The second disaster occurred in 1890—a large flock of disasters, really, set in motion by revelations of a long-standing adulterous affair involving Charles Parnell, the great champion of Irish independence, and a woman named Katherine O’Shea. Gladstone infuriated Parnell first by warning him in a letter to quit the post of leader of the Irish Party and later by publishing that letter. The furor over Parnell’s adultery alienated the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland from Parnell and confirmed the worst suspicions of every Irish hater in England, of which there were many. The whole cause of Irish independence was set back for a generation, and the possibility that it might occur peaceably probably shattered completely.
The level of animosity between the two nations was so high that it appears, in retrospect, from this side of the Atlantic, that there was simply no possibility of Gladstone’s dreams ever coming true. For the British Parliament to approve a Home Rule Bill with a chance of working, everything would have to go right—would have to go perfectly for two generations—and that never had a chance of happening.
In Jenkins’ mind, it was “appropriate” (my word) that Gladstone should resign as prime minister for the fourth time, and to finally retire for good in December 1893 at the age of 84, over the issue of increased expenditures for the royal navy, an increase supported by all the other major figures in his cabinet. In what is for Jenkins the perfect Gladstone touch, he found time during his last struggle to dash off an extended piece on contemporary English church music, and how it had improved during his lifetime.
Yet the naval increase to which Gladstone objected surely had nothing to do with Germany’s decision in 1897 to create an enlarged navy that could intimidate—though not defeat—the British. Germany did not feel threatened. Rather, they wanted to threaten the British. Overseas empires were seen as infallible sources of both prestige and prosperity. In the late Victorian era the British had used their fleet under Disraeli to end the Russo-Turkish War and under Gladstone to win the Anglo-Egyptian War. Navies worked! Perhaps most important of all, by 1897, Germany could afford a navy, whereas she couldn’t before.
All biographies must end painfully, in one way or another, because the hero must die. In all three of Jenkins’ biographies that I have read, he follows his heroes earnestly through their last, sad years to the grave , but for Asquith and Churchill he pays his last respects in a few pages. For Gladstone, he gives us several chapters, as though he just can’t bear to surrender the Grand Old Man to the ages. Gladstone’s abandonment of his diary, which he had kept for over 70 years, comes a special blow to Jenkins. To lose that faithful companion that never erred, that stood ever strong against the remorseless passage of time! That special time, when everything that England touched seemed to turn to gold (it certainly seemed that way to the English), when it seemed that all things were still possible, when it was taken for granted that all things were still possible, that all battles could be won, and all heights scaled, must not be permitted to end, could not end while the People’s William still lived!9
Afterwards
Jenkins passes over some of the more unseemly spots on Gladstone’s record rather quickly. His father owned a slave plantation in the West Indies and in 1862 Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, gave a notorious speech in which he said that Jefferson Davis had “made a nation” and that North had better learn to accept it. Jenkins leaves unmentioned charges by historian Geoffrey Alderman in his book, Modern British Jewry, published in 1992, which, according to the write-up of Gladstone in Wikipedia, accused Gladstone of both ignoring atrocities against Jews in eastern Europe—Russia in particular—and of complaining about “Jewish influence” with regard to the “Eastern Question.”
Miloš Ković, in his study Disraeli & The Eastern Question, published in 2010, quotes passages from several letters by Gladstone attributing Disraeli’s policies to his “crypto-Judaism” and his hatred of “Christian liberty and reconstruction.” The text of these letters first appeared in John Morley’s authorized biography of Gladstone, which appeared in 1905. Morley does not appear perturbed by Gladstone’s attitudes, which one might call “crypto-anti-Semitic”—and which, of course, were quite typical of British attitudes at the time. Morley also includes text from a letter that Gladstone wrote—one without comment on Jews or Disraeli’s “crypto-Judaism”—to a Madame Novikoff, “a Russian lady who at this time began to exercise a marked influence on the opinions of important men with much influence on the opinions of many other people”—a bit of a charmer, one might assume. Her brother had reportedly died heroically on one occasion or another, and the combination of personal tragedy, moral uplift, and a pretty foot could have a potent effect on Gladstone, along with other “important men.”10
I’ve read that Jenkins felt that he himself lacked the perfect self-confidence, aka an utterly unreflective will for power, needed to climb to the very top of the greasy pole, and he seems a bit reluctant to comment on how greatly Gladstone did possess this hunger. Gladstone’s wife said that it was good that he was such a Christian, because otherwise he would be a horrible man. Jenkins does not fully acknowledge Gladstone’s obsession with Homer, perhaps because he had so many others. Gladstone read the Iliad 38 times—in the original Greek, of course—never tiring of the company of stout Agamemnon and stout Achilles, and all those other stout fellows who spent their days cleaving their opponents’ skulls in half with the pitiless bronze. Jenkins passes too quickly over an amazingly absurd book—absurd, even for Gladstone—in which he asserted that the Iliad and the Odyssey were literally divine works, meant by God to be put on the shelf with the Bible and to be given equal weight with it. Because, one can only assume, the Bible simply didn’t give enough time to skull-cleaving and enough praise to the fellows who did it.
Homer and the Homeric Age was published in three volumes in 1858. Jenkins does smile at the work—“It was Gladstone in his Lord Longford mood, showing indifference to mockery, vast reserves of both energy and self-confidence and more enthusiasm than scholarly fastidiousness”—but doesn’t notice how clearly Gladstone reveals his utter unawareness of his all-pervasive appetite for skull-cleaving, as long as it was done “for good”. No wonder Disraeli called him “Tartuffe”.
Jenkins also fails to include well-known quotations from Gladstone that show he was capable of worldliness—“There are times when a prime minister must be a butcher”, for example, and, speaking of a post with the admiralty, “I think for this position we require what is known as a ‘gentleman’”, that is, someone with an unassailably aristocratic pedigree and status. Most striking of all is a remarkable display of self-awareness, recorded in Morley’s biography. When Morley was interviewing him, Gladstone said “Personal ambition has played no role in my career,” a statement so astonishing that Morley literally fell out of his chair. Gladstone burst into laughter.
Jenkins was disappointed in politics several times, though he started writing his historical studies before his “troubles” began, publishing his book on Asquith in 1964. He seems to have identified a little with Asquith as a man not quite ruthless enough to hold supreme power, even though Asquith had been an effective prime minister, only failing when Lloyd George pushed him out of the top spot during the middle of World War I. It strikes me that the overwhelming cataclysm of that war was beyond the capacity of any leader to manage. Everyone who “started” the war would be blamed for the disasters that ensued, and would have to go. Only a “new face” could gain enough public support to continue the war.11
Jenkins was a classic “man in the middle.” He was much too liberal on social issues for Conservatives like Margaret Thatcher, who wanted to pretend that what was good enough for Queen Victoria was good enough for everyone. But he hated the left wing of the Labour Party, which grew increasingly strong in the 1970s. He was a strong supporter of British membership in the EEOC, “controversial” with Labour at the time. The state of British politics today would make him utterly miserable. Well, the state of American politics makes me pretty miserable too. At least there’s more Jenkins to read!
1. “Lothian” is a region in the Scottish lowlands. “Midlothian” is a parliamentary “county constituency” that includes Edinburgh.
2. Canning was regarded as pretty “bumptious” himself by many, the first “low born” man ever to rise to high office in Great Britain. His mother was an actress—close to being a whore in those days—and his father a bankrupt. He often quarreled violently with his colleagues, fighting a duel with one of them, even though he had never fired a shot while his opponent, Lord Castlereagh, was an expert, getting shot in the thigh for his bravado. He was regarded as a “liberal” Tory for his support for political rights for Catholics and the abolition of slavery, which put him one up on Gladstone.
3. “For we have got/ the Maxim gun/ And they have not,” explained Hilaire Belloc, a contemporary of both Gladstone and Jenkins. Belloc, a Catholic apologist, could be very funny when he wasn’t complaining about the Jews. The Maxim gun was an early machine gun invented by the American Hiram Maxim.
4. Whether the Ottomans murdered more Christians than the Russians murdered Moslems is a good question.
5. Whether either Russia or Great Britain were capable of waging a serious war against each other (rather than "native" proxies) in such a remote setting almost 150 years ago is another good question. Neither the old Soviet Union nor the modern-day U.S. have had much luck in the area.
6. From the Latin tergiversari, combining tergum, meaning "back," and versare, meaning “turn”. I add this note because I had to look “tergiversation” up to make sure it meant what I thought it meant, as well as to spell it, which suggests that I don’t have the “right” to use it because it’s not part of my vocabulary. But since I got the meaning right I’m going to let myself slide.
7. Jenkins, who knew a lot about intra-cabinet pushing and shoving, enjoys rehashing these ancient quarrels.
8. According to Andrew Roberts’ biography of Lord Salisbury (Salisbury Victorian Titan), when an enthusiastic young Conservative announced that the Conservatives’ new policy might result in “Ireland pacified” Salisbury snapped “Ireland pacified? What good would that do us?”
9. I have read several biographies of John F. Kennedy, and I never want those books to end. JFK was certainly not Gladstone’s equal and I doubt if American history would be that much different of Kennedy had lived—his carefully concealed illnesses might even have incapacitated him to the extent that he would have lost in 1964—but the sense of loss defies reason.
10. Ković gives the wrong page citations for these letters, which are contained in Morley’s second volume in the chapter entitled “The Eastern Question Once More”, starting on page 548. Morley compares Gladstone’s pamphlet to both Burke’s Letters on a Regicide Peace and John Milton’s poem “Avenge, O Lord, Thy Slaughtered Saints”, referring to contemporary Catholic massacres of Protestants in Italy. Ković, a Serbian, is a strong admirer of Disraeli. Morley, eventually “Lord Morley”, was one of the few who resigned from Asquith’s cabinet over Britain’s entry into World War I.
11. I don’t see anything spectacular that Lloyd George got right. He told his generals that he wanted no more bloodbaths, but also kept seeking for a “knockout blow”, not realizing that such a thing did not exist in modern war, or that a bloodless knockout blow was a double impossibility. He is credited by many historians in playing at least a large role in the implementation of the convoy system to get ships across the Atlantic, which many admirals found insufficiently aggressive, even though it worked, and “aggressiveness” did not. By keeping the pressure on the Germans, Britain and France goaded them into doing the one thing that could guarantee their defeat—resuming unrestricted submarine warfare, thus drawing America into the war. If you insist on playing for table stakes long enough, you will lose everything.
