The storm that had been building for years over Ireland broke just as soon as Gladstone, with Irish support, finally brought down the Salisbury minority administration. His problem was that quite a few of his own Liberal MPs were unenthusiastic about Irish Home Rule, a policy to which he was now firmly committed, especially as he was dependent on the votes of Irish MPs.

Both the Whig tendency within Liberalism, whose leader was Hartington, and quite a few of the Radicals, following Chamberlain, were beginning to separate from Gladstone’s brand of Liberalism. When, therefore, he went into the campaign for his Home Rule Bill, he faced attacks from two wings of his own party, as well as from the Tories, now openly against restoring the Irish parliament since they were no longer hunting for Irish votes.

He might have handled some of the opposition more tactfully, especially Chamberlain’s. But it may have been a hopeless task anyway, given the depth of feeling against Home Rule among so many in both parties. Either way, the vote on the measure went just the way one might imagine, as Liberal rebels voting with the Conservatives made sure it was defeated.

The first squall of the storm had struck. It had left Gladstone’s attempt at Home Rule in pieces on the floor. And his government was in just as bad a way.

Illustration Joe Chamberlain by Harry Furniss. National Portrait Gallery 3349

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Salisbury, who’d secured his position in the Conservative Party by his clever political work over Gladstone’s 1884 Reform Act, was now Prime Minister. But only at the head of a minority government. That wasn’t something he could live with for long, since it meant that the Liberals had a Commons majority hanging over his head, ready to kick him out whenever they decided it was time to use their strength against him.

The election, when it came, would have nearly three million more voters on the registers than previous time around. Many of them would be Irish, including quite a few Irishmen living in England. So issues to do with the government of Ireland, and in particular Irish Home Rule, would be a key factor in the outcome. Both main parties had contacts with Parnell and his Irish Parliamentary Party. Gladstone, though he had come around to supporting Home Rule himself, encouraged Parnell’s conversations with the Conservatives, rather hoping to have them introduce Home Rule rather than having to do so himself, if he came back to office heading a new Liberal government.

Salisbury was having none of that since he was opposed to the whole idea of Home Rule. On the other hand, with Irish votes at stake, he didn’t mind people thinking he might be considering the possibility. So Parnell spoke to both sides.

Then, when the election results were announced, it turned out Gladstone had won but without a majority, with the Conservatives second. Parnell’s Irish party had taken 86 seats, the 86 of 86 as they were called, since the parliament only met in 1886.

He held the balance of power.

In the meantime, a bold action by Gladstone’s son with the British press, the so-called Hawarden Kite, had seen the Liberal leader identified as the champion of Home Rule. Parnell could put him back into office. Maybe it was time for him to stop flirting with both sides and commit himself to the Liberals who seemed committed to the goal he was pursuing.

Or were they?

Illustration: Herbert John Gladstone, First Viscount Gladstone, by Sir Leslie Ward, published in Vanity Fair, 6 May 1882. This is Herbert, Gladstone's son and a Liberal MP, who was responsible for flying the 'Hawarden Kite'.National Portrait Gallery 3288

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After nearly five years in power, the strains inside the second Gladstone government were beginning to show. Indeed, both main parties were having trouble, above all with their respective awkward squads. The Radicals in the Liberal Party were always demanding more and greater reform. Meanwhile, the ‘Fourth Party’ launched inside the Conservatives by Lord Randolph Churchill (father of the more famous Winston) demanded more ‘Tory democracy’, though it’s not clear what that meant, except that it always seemed to lead to the political progress of Churchill himself.

With the Reform Act of 1884 as its only major accomplishment, Gladstone’s government staggered on towards its end. Both main parties realised that the Irish MPs would be crucial to the formation of a new government after the next election, the first to be held on the basis of the extended electorate brought in by the Reform Act, and both were therefore courting Parnell. He, indeed, worked with the Tories to bring down Gladstone in a Commons vote on a financial question.

Then, with Salisbury leading a minority government to cover the time until the new electoral register was complete and an election could be held, Parnell took part in negotiations with both sides, in the hope of advancing his cause of Irish Home Rule. That led to a lot of secret negotiations hidden behind a veil of universal dishonesty.

The consequence was that Home Rule was now firmly back on the political agenda. It would be the great issue of the next couple of years. Which, in turn, would make it the determining factor in convulsions about to rock the British political system.

Illustration: Lord Randolph Churchill by Harry Furniss.
National Portrait Gallery 3559
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As the second Gladstone government approached its end, it had little enough to point to as major successes. Some measures had been passed to try to pacify Ireland, but that sad country was still far from reconciled to British rule. There’d been colonial disasters in South Africa and Sudan. There’d been the Labouchère amendment, not perhaps seen as all that significant at the time, but something that would open the doors for eighty years of shameful treatment of gays, leading to Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment and Alan Turing’s suicide.

Then, at last, the government came up with one really major achievement. That was the 1884 Reform Act, which added nearly three million new voters to the electorate. They were all men and still only 60% of them, but it was still a significant advance.

Lord Salisbury, who’d got his fingers burned in the painful and ultimately failed campaign to block the Arrears Act for Ireland, this time adopted a cannier approach and worked hard to stiffen up his support. He took the line of refusing to let Reform through the House of Lords, where the Conservatives had a built-in majority, unless it was accompanied by Commons seat redistribution, to mitigate the damaging effect on his party’s electoral chances. This time he was successful, reversing the damage to his standing caused by the earlier failure, and putting him in a strong position to become sole leader of the Conservatives when the existing dual leadership with Stafford Northcote ended.

Reform had proved successful for both main party leaders.

Illustration: Cover of the Reform Act 1884. © ParliamentaryArchive
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After the Phoenix Park murders, there was a bit of a hiatus in Parnell’s campaign for Irish Home Rule, while he consolidated his grip on the movement, guiding it firmly into the path of constitutionalism and away from violence. Meanwhile, Gladstone brought in an act to relieve tenant arrears in Ireland, the counterpart to Parnell’s work for pacification within the context of the tacit agreement that got him out of prison and came to be known as the ‘Kilmainham Treaty’.

Salisbury, for the Conservatives, decided to make a stand against the Arrears Bill. At first, he seemed to be strongly placed, with firm support within the party. But as it became clear that there’d be government money for landlords with tenants in arrears, his backing began to drop away until, leaving him isolated and forced to let the bill through. That weakened him in his competition with Stafford Northcote for the Conservative leadership.

Away from Ireland, Britain plunged into some tricky and unfortunate adventures abroad. The First Boer War in South Africa led to humiliating defeat. Then, following a successful campaign to take control in Egypt, General Gordon’s mission into Sudan left him beaten and dead. Gladstone’s failure to rescue him led to his nickname of GOM (Grand Old Man) giving way to MOG (Murderer of Gordon). Not a good look for a politician soon to campaign for re-election.

Illustration: General Gordon’s Last Stand. Public Domain.
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The passage of the Land Act for Ireland provided many tenant farmers with a wonderful way of getting their rents reduced. Sadly, that benefit had a downside, as it undermined the enthusiasm for continuing the campaign Parnell wanted to guide into increased pressure for Home Rule. It was by no means the only unintended consequence of measures taken at this time and which made the relations between Britain and Ireland increasingly tense.

Those tensions culminated in the arrest and imprisonment, without trial and merely to prevent a crime that hadn’t been committed, of several leaders of the Irish Land League, including Parnell. That was so contrary to human rights that it rather underlines the colonial nature of British rule in Ireland.

Imprisonment was particularly hard for Parnell because this was also the time when his overwhelming love for Katharine O’Shea was increasingly dominating his life. She was, indeed, pregnant by him.

But, to ensure that every aspect of the human comedy, and tragedy, is present in this episode, we end with a tale of death, the killings that have come to be known as the Phoenix Park murders.  

Illustration: Detail from the miniature of Katharine O’Shea that Parnell

Disraeli didn’t last long after losing power for the last time, dying within a year. That ended a remarkable era, of the long battle between him and Gladstone.

Next, the survivor, Gladstone, had to build a second government, made up of both Whigs and Radicals, the two great wings of his Liberal Party. The relations between them were becoming tense, with friction, between the more conservative views of the Whigs and the more liberal aspirations of the Radicals, beginning to grow. As we’ll discover later.

Gladstone also faced a problem he’d set out to solve in his previous government, when he’d declared that his mission was to pacify Ireland. That nation, which I argue Britain treated as merely another colony, even though its technical status was far grander, was once more experiencing an upsurge in unrest, especially as the effects of a bad harvest struck home.

This episode tracks Gladstone’s attempts to resolve the problem up to the moment he got a Land Act through parliament. It pauses on the way to talk about the origins of the word ‘boycott’. And it concludes that the Land Act didn’t really resolve the problems of Ireland and might, indeed, have been merely a diversion from the real issue. As we'll explore in future episodes.

Illustration: Cartoon of Charles Cunningham Boycott, whose name is now used for an campaign of ostracism directed against a political opponent. Drawing by ‘Spy’ (Leslie Ward) in Vanity Fair. Public Domain

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As the end of the parliament elected in 1874 approached, Gladstone confirmed that his re-emergence from retirement hadn’t been a one-off. He was ready to launch himself once more into full-time politics. The result was the Midlothian campaign, ostensibly intended to win him a new parliamentary seat in Edinburgh, though in fact assisting the Liberal Party to a national majority and re-establishing him as its dominant figure. When the Liberals won the 1880 election, it became impossible to deny Gladstone the premiership, and he formed his second administration.

Meanwhile, across the Irish Sea, Charles Stewart Parnell was emerging as the leading figure of Irish politics. When excessive rain in 1879 damaged the harvest and raised again the spectre of famine, he emerged as the president of a Land League campaigning for tenants’ rights, despite being a landlord himself. Despite that, Home Rule with the re-creation of an Irish parliament remained his top priority. The 1880 election strengthened his hand within the Home Rule group of Irish MPs and he won their leadership too.

Gladstone as prime minister and Parnell as leader of the Irish opposition were now facing off to each other, ready for the Irish conflict that would dominate the following years.

Illustration: Charles Stewart Parnell as President addressing a public meeting of the Irish Land League. Public Domain
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It had all been going so well. The Congress of Berlin had been a huge success, allowing Disraeli (and Salisbury) to bring back peace with honour. Things should have been flowing the Conservatives’ way.

But then there were a couple of bad military adventures, launched by over-powerful and out-of-control colonial administrators. Both ended up costing a lot of money and a lot of lives, for little gain. One, the Second Anglo-Afghan War, was even launched from India while a famine that eventually cost 8 million lives was raging and relief budgets were being cut to save money, although funds were being poured into waging war.

At the same time, the British economy was doing badly, with a recession and bad harvests.

That all added up to a rather bleaker picture for the Conservatives than their successes might have implied.

This episode also introduces three people we'll be hearing more about later, and who had significant moments in the 1870s (in one case, the moment was birth, a pretty significant event, without which it’s hard for anyone to make a name for themselves).

Illustration: Graveyard at Isandlwana, site of Britain's worst defeat in a colonial war since the American War of Independence. Photo from Zulu Kingdom Travel Guide.

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We start this episode with a Russian army north of Constantinople ready to invade the city, and a British naval squadron in the waters to its south ready – or at least apparently ready – to resist it. In the end, it was the Russians who blinked. With war avoided, the Berlin Congress of all the European Great Powers met and left Russia with a much reduced list of gains from its war against Turkey, than it had try to secure in the Treaty of San Stefano.

Disraeli and Salisbury conducted preliminary negotiations to ensure that they had commitments to the outcome they wanted before even going into the Congress. That allowed Disraeli to proclaim on his return that he had won ‘Peace with Honour’. In his case, that was probably true, which can’t be said of many of the people who’ve used the expression since.

The Congress was the major and substantial foreign policy achievement of a premiership which had also contained some earlier symbolic successes, such as the purchase of Suez Canal shares and the granting to Victoria of the title ‘Empress of India’. For now, the only shadow was Disraeli’s own health, that drove him in tiredness from the stressful environment of the Commons to the calmer waters of the Lords.

Finally, the episode talks of the appointment of a bookseller as First Lord of the Admiralty, and how that fed into the glorious Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, HMS Pinafore.

Illustration: Detail from a publicity poster for Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. Public domain

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