With both eyesight and hearing fading, Gladstone couldn’t last long after his defeat on Home Rule. Though he lasted as long as he could. Even after almost the entire cabinet prevented him from blocking an increase in naval expenditure, demanded by the admirals, and which he feared would merely add fuel to the fire of an arms race, he still clung on for a while longer. Finally though, in February 1898 he went.

But who would replace him? Would it be Spencer, his favoured candidate despite having opposed Gladstone over the naval expenditure? Well, Victoria didn’t even do him the courtesy of consulting him about his successor, so what he favoured didn’t matter.

Might it be Harcourt, the Chancellor and ‘little Englander’ whose cautious view of imperialism was in line with thinking across the mainstream of the Liberal Party?

Or would it be the Liberal Imperialist Rosebery, who’d keep the party firmly anchored to its right wing?

Well, Victoria was quite an imperialist herself. Rosebery was picked. He head a short-lived, inglorious government, torn by internal dissension – Harcourt couldn’t forgive him for depriving him of a position to which he thought he was entitled – which fifteen months later simply imploded and meekly resigned, letting Salisbury form his third administration.

That was the opening of a Tory decade. It was that long before the Liberals got another chance to form a government.

Illustration: Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, by Henry T. Greenhead, published 23 October 1894, when Gladstone’s successor was a fading Prime Minister. National Portrait Gallery D39875

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The 1892 election had given Gladstone his chance to form yet another government and establish two new records: the only man to have been Prime Minister on four different occasions, and the oldest man ever to have held the post.

He formed a government which gave the young Asquith his chance to shine in a senior position, which he certainly did. It also gave the Earl of Rosebery, dithering about it until the end, playing hard to get, blowing hot and cold, the position of Foreign Secretary and a platform, as we shall see, to go still further before long. Finally, it was a government which had some valuable achievements in its short existence.

But one achievement that eluded it was the aim on which Gladstone had set his heart. He got Irish Home Rule through the House of Commons, only to see it thrown out by the House of Lords. What might have turned into a posthumous victory for Parnell, turned instead into his final failure. This episode asks to what extent that was a missed opportunity but leaves the answer to you to choose.

On the other hand, the bloodshed in the 130 years since Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill was defeated, is easy to judge. Simply, unequivocally, it is the stuff of tragedy. By no means the first in the long sad history of Anglo-Irish relations, but it would be a relief if it turned out to be the last.

Illustration: William Ewart Gladstone as a senior statesman, by Harry Furniss. National Portrait Gallery 3381

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The pendulum had been swinging fairly steadily over the twenty years up to the early 1890s, with any party that won an election generally losing the next. That happened again in 1892, although the win was nothing like as decisive as Gladstone had hoped, leaving him instead dependent on Irish MPs to have the votes to challenge for office again.

It also produced a crop of interesting new characters for the politics of the future. The first Labour MP independent of the Liberal Party, Keir Hardie. Edward Carson, the Unionist lawyer from Dublin who’d already won a reputation as a tough prosecutor in Ireland. Herbert Henry Asquith, first elected six years earlier, now on the brink of an important career. David Lloyd George whose future would be closely bound up with Asquith and had been elected two years earlier.

As well as these figures, this episode also talks about Charles Bradlaugh, who had died the year before the election, but whose campaign to allow the non-religious to sit in parliament would have repercussions long after his life and involved many of the people we’ve come to know, though not necessarily love, such as Asquith, Labouchère and Randolph Churchill.

Indeed, after his death – at his funeral indeed – it even involved a figure of huge importance later, one of the towering giants of the twentieth century, Mohandas K. Ghandi.

Yes, that’s right. The Mahatma.

Illustration: Keir Hardie, Labour’s first MP, as he was in 1892, by Arthur Clegg Weston. National Portrait Gallery x13173

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Just two weeks after the end of the divorce proceedings between Katharine and William O’Shea, the Irish Parliamentary Party assembled in Committee Room 15 of the Palace of Westminster, for the most fateful meeting in Charles Stewart Parnell’s career.

The backlash from the divorce and the revelations that emerged about Parnell’s behaviour, left Gladstone feeling that continuing his association with Parnell would fatally undermine the chances of his Liberal Party winning re-election. Paradoxically, that meant that the hopes for Irish Home Rule, which required the formation of a Liberal government, depended on his distancing himself from its most powerful champion. So in Committee Room 15, the Irish Parliamentary Party had to decide whether, to achieve its aim, it had to remove from its leadership the very man who’d brought that aim so close to realisation.

The explosive effect of this destructive paradox would be devastating for the Irish Parliamentary Party and for Parnell himself.

Illustration: Parnell addressing a crowd during the Kilkenny North by-election, from The Illustrated London News, 27 December 1890.

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We break away in this episode from our account of events in Britain’s ever-troubled relationship with Ireland, to look instead at Africa, where things were about to get a lot worse even than they were for the Irish.

From 10% of the landmass being controlled by European colonial powers in 1870, by 1914 the figure had grown to nearly 90%. Some of the drive to extend European possessions had been driven by individuals, such as Cecil Rhodes in British South Africa, or the even more extraordinary character, Leopold II, not a private individual, since he was king of the Belgians, but acting in a private capacity in Africa. He eventually controlled as his own personal domain the whole of what he called the ‘Congo Free State’ (there’s an unintended irony in the word ‘free’), a territory 75 times larger than Belgium where he was king.

We follow the exciting events that led to his incorporating the still-troubled region of Katanga into his holdings, as a telling example of how the Europeans behaved in that unfortunate Congo.

Leopold’s rule over the Congo was particularly appalling, but the other colonial powers (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain), though less awful than he was, had little enough to be proud of either.

Illustration: Cartoon by François Maréchal in Le Frondeur, (Liège, Belgium), 20 December 1884, showing Leopold II carving up the Congo with Bismarck to the right and a crowned bear for Russia on the left.

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This episode picks up Ireland’s story again, just as the English establishment turned its guns on Charles Stewart Parnell.

Round 1 of its attack was launched through the Times newspaper, in a series of articles entitled ‘Parnellism and Crime’. It set out to show that, despite his public commitment to the parliamentary road to achieving Ireland’s aspirations, in reality and in the background he was prepared to collaborate with men of violence. Indeed, in the second article of the series, the Times published a letter apparently from Parnell to a leading Fenian, in which he seemed to condone one at least of the Phoenix Park murders of 1882.

That attack failed when it emerged that the letter was simply a forgery.

Even so, damage had been done to the Irish movement by the sheer extent of the investigations carried out by the Commission set up to examine the allegations against Parnell. It cleared him but found other mud to throw at different parts of the Irish movement.

Round 2 of the attack came when William O’Shea, husband of Katharine, the great love of Parnell’s life, sued for divorce. The revelations at the trial were immensely damaging to him. In this episode, we follow events up to the point where the Irish Parliamentary Party, having rallied to him at one meeting, have called another to review that decision and Parnell has weakened his position by publishing a manifesto that could hardly have been better calculated to offend people on whose support he needed to count.

Illustration: The Times attack on Parnell, accusing him of association with criminality.

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This episode looks at the strange behaviour of Captain William O’Shea, the husband of Katharine. She was in one of the great love relationships of their time, with Charles Stewart Parnell. O’Shea wanted to get back into parliament and Parnell, to indulge Katharine, perhaps even to deflect O’Shea’s hostility if not blackmail, went to great lengths to make sure he did. And yet, once he had, O’Shea stood down again within just four months.

Next the episode turns to Salisbury, then heading his second government. He decided to fill the recently vacated post of Chief Secretary of Ireland by appointing his nephew Arthur Balfour to it. This is strictly nepotism, since the Latin word nepos means nephew, but to everyone’s surprise, the appointment worked well for Salisbury. Balfour revealed a steeliness no one suspected in him and found the way to impose on Ireland just what Salisbury had called ‘resolute government’. That’s a euphemism for something pretty repressive.

At the same time, he set out to address Irish grievances over landholding and over agricultural incomes, pursuing a strategy he called ‘killing Home Rule with kindness’.

Together with the repression, that worked, and broke the latest wave of unrest. Still, it’s pretty clear that it wasn’t his kindness that Irishmen focused on most. No, it was the stick, not the carrot, that won him his new nickname: Bloody Balfour.

Illustration: Arthur Balfour by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant), circa 1890. National Portrait Gallery P144

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Before we return to the sorry tale of British rule in Ireland, this episode looks at some of the many other issues that Lord Salisbury addressed during his second ministry. What emerges is the portrait of a man of his class, moulded by the outlook of the aristocratic landowner, convinced that his peers were the men best positioned to lead without being ‘defiled by the taint of greed’ and therefore able to ensure that England, and by extension Britain, avoided change that was altogether too radical. That’s too radical not just for him but, indeed, for most Brits.

He was a man for whom all change was necessarily change for the worse. And yet, he could read circumstances well enough to know when certain changes were necessary, and ensure, heavy-hearted or not, they were made. One type of change he particularly disliked was modification of principles to suit electoral considerations, but he could make those too.

Indeed, that willingness of his contributed to driving forward the process that would make of the Conservative Party the most effective election-winning machine Britain has ever seen.

Illustration: Lord Salisbury during his second ministry, Harry Furniss, 1891. National Portrait Gallery 3411

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It was a bad time for Gladstone, defeated in an election held just a few months after the previous poll which he’d won.

It was a bad time for Charles Stewart Parnell and his Irish Parliamentary Party who’d felt Home Rule for Ireland was within their grasp only to see themselves cheated of the prize.

But it wasn’t an easy time for Salisbury either who had to approach building his second government with a lot of care, watching out who he offended and who he couldn’t afford to offend.

But Salisbury’s biggest problem was the most outspoken and best-known parliamentarian his Conservative Party had in the House of Commons, Lord Randolph Churchill, father of the Winston who would ultimately become far better known than he ever was. Randolph Churchill was a problem for Salisbury until the latter showed his skill by turning the tables on the former.

And making it a bad time for Churchill too.

Illustration: Photo of the original performance of Shaw’s Arms and the Man, 1894.

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It was heartbreak time for Parnell. He’d spent eleven years in parliament, leading to the emergence of a powerful Irish Parliamentary Party that eventual won the balance of power. That put Home Rule, the restoration of a Dublin parliament, apparently within his grasp. Yet all that culminated in defeat and disappointment when Gladstone’s bill was thrown out.

The loss led to the fall of Gladstone’s third government and the formation of Salisbury’s second. In turn, that was the start of a long period of Conservative dominance over British politics, lasting for nineteen years. Or, in my view, more like 137 years right up to the present day.

But to get that well launched, Salisbury had to deal with one great thorn in his side. That was Randolph Churchill. And he sorted that problem with his customary skill.

Illustration: Gladstone, Hartington and Chamberlain: political allies but not for much longer. Caricature by Théobald Chartran for 'Vanity Fair', 1880. Public Domain.

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