Sons, Servants and Statesmen (14 page)

His plans to disestablish the Irish Church were not the end of it. He had two additional schemes involving Ireland, both of which would have linked the royal family more closely in the country. The first was the acquisition of a royal residence in Ireland, which he felt the Queen would do well to visit from time to time, thus going less to Balmoral. The second was the abolition of the post of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and the appointment of the Prince of Wales as a viceroy with a responsible secretary of state to assist him. Soon after becoming prime minister, Gladstone had been offered the use of a royal residence by John La Touche, a Dublin banker, and he asked the Queen to give the subject her earnest attention. Disraeli had had a similar plan but soon found that the Queen was so hostile to the idea that he decided to say no more about it.

Though she thought the offer was ‘very liberal, and indeed noble’,
³⁹
Balmoral was necessary to her health, and nothing could take its place in her affections. She had had a grievance against Ireland since the royal visit in August 1861, when the Prince Consort had been the object of hostile demonstrations on account of an incautious comparison he had made between Irish and Polish discontent. To her, it was an insult never to be forgotten or forgiven.

The viceroy plan would have involved the Prince of Wales living in Ireland for several months each year. She thoroughly disliked the idea, saying it was a waste of time trying to connect the royal family with Ireland, as Scotland and England deserved it far more. The climate of Ireland was uncongenial to her, and it would also be bad for the Prince of Wales. Gladstone could not have disagreed more with this last opinion. He believed that the Prince of Wales was exercising a disastrous influence on society with his pleasure-loving way of life and told Ponsonby that he wanted to see the Court ‘as pure as King Arthur’s Round Table’. While Ponsonby was just as keen to see a solution to the problem on similar lines, he felt duty-bound to warn Gladstone that he had learnt from Tennyson’s poem that the Round Table had also fallen short of perfection.

Lord Granville begged Gladstone to let the matter drop, but he would not accept such advice. While he had ‘no wish to irritate’, he thought that Queen and country had suffered in the past ‘from want of plain speaking’. Returning to his argument, he wrote to the Queen pointing out that it was necessary to provide some means of ‘remodelling’ the life of the Prince of Wales ‘by finding His Royal Highness that adequate employment from which, without any fault, he has hitherto been debarred’.
⁴⁰
She retorted that he was putting forward this idea merely as an experiment, and ‘she does not think Ireland is in a fit state at the present moment to be experimented upon’.
⁴¹

Over-earnest and zealous, Gladstone was wise and far-seeing, but he lacked charm and the ability to persuade people. The more he tried to insist on the validity of his cause, the less the Queen was inclined to cooperate, or indeed listen to him. To Henry Ponsonby, she was ready to make comparisons between her Prime Minister and the relationship between the German Chancellor and his notoriously docile sovereign, Emperor William I, observing that ‘
she
has felt that Mr Gladstone would have liked to
govern
her as Bismarck governs the Emperor. Of course not to the same extent, or in the same manner; but she always felt in his manner an overbearing obstinacy and imperiousness (without being actually wanting in respect as to form) which she never experienced from
anyone
else, and which she found most disagreeable.’
⁴²

Anxious that credit should be given where it was due, Ponsonby insisted respectfully that Gladstone, unlike Bismarck, was ‘honest and true’, and she should believe that his loyalty and devotion to her as his sovereign was beyond question. To this she replied that he was indeed loyal, but he was, as Lord Palmerston had once said, ‘a very dangerous man’.

I
n January 1874, after a series of by-election defeats, Gladstone declared that his government had been ‘reduced to impotence’, and dissolved parliament two and a half weeks later. A general election gave the Conservatives 350 seats to the Liberals’ 245 and the Home Rulers’ 57. Declaring that he intended to put ‘an interval between Parliament and the grave’, he announced his impending retirement. When he went to Windsor to resign, he found the Queen ‘very kind’, but he declined her offer of a peerage.

On 17 February she sent for Disraeli, and their meeting was little short of ecstatic. ‘He repeatedly said whatever I wished shd. be done – whatever his difficulties might be!’
¹
declared the Queen. When he fell to his knees before her to kiss her hand, he effusively assured her that he would plight his troth to ‘the kindest of
Mistresses
’.
²

In the following week she wrote to her eldest daughter, Alice, the Crown Princess of Prussia, that her outgoing Prime Minister was not merely ‘a very dangerous man’, as Palmerston had warned her. He was also ‘very arrogant, tyrannical and obstinate, with no knowledge of the world or human nature’.
³
Alice was a more forward-thinking young woman, who had absorbed her father’s political lessons well, had always admired Gladstone and believed that the Liberals were more in accordance with the prevailing tide of opinion. Mother and daughter were not united on the matter.

With Disraeli in power for the next six years, Queen Victoria would have a prime minister with whom she could work amicably, a minister who made her feel important and in whose company she could relax. It was almost like the early days of her reign with Melbourne, when ministerial visits became a pleasure, and business was leavened with gossip and pleasant conversations between the plump widow in her fifties and the septuagenarian eccentric who christened her ‘the Faery’. Disraeli flattered her, regarding her with a certain wry amusement, but there was affection as well as unashamed adulation in his attitude. He knew exactly how to win her over with the phrases, gestures and compliments that would delight her. As he sometimes found it necessary to remind his colleagues, it had to be remembered that she was first and foremost a woman.

While she was shrewd enough to see through the theatricality in Disraeli’s phrases, she relished it for its own sake. She was also well aware how much he enjoyed female company. When he received a box of primroses from Windsor he thanked her, saying that ‘their lustre was enhanced by the condescending hand which showered upon him all the treasures of Spring’. Shortly before his death, he told the poet Matthew Arnold that everyone liked flattery, ‘and when you come to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel’.
⁴

When compared with Gladstone, Disraeli’s attitude to his sovereign during these years could not have differed more. While Gladstone could not resist hectoring the Queen to make a greater effort, Disraeli expressed public sympathy for her condition. He made supportive, not to say sycophantic, speeches about the onerousness of her burdens; and in his novel
Lothair
, published in 1870, he gave voice to one of the Queen’s most firmly held convictions, namely that in forgetting its sense of duty, the aristocracy was degenerating into an indulgent and worthless caste.

Faced with an increasingly radical opposition party, Disraeli’s Conservatives were becoming synonymous with policies with which the Queen was more naturally in sympathy. The young sovereign of 1837, a partisan Whig, had changed within thirty years and was now becoming into a true-blue Tory. In a series of public addresses at around this time, her Prime Minister was revealing the policy of the Conservatives as one which supported the monarchy, the House of Lords and the Church, believed in consolidating Britain’s overseas possessions, recognised the importance of social reform and stood for a strong foreign policy, for the greatness of Britain as opposed to Gladstone’s ‘Little England’ theory. While the Liberals were more internationalist, the Conservatives were the more truly national party. Disraeli saw the working classes as conservatives in the best sense, proud of belonging to a great country and keen to maintain its greatness. It was a philosophy which Queen Victoria could hardly disagree with or disapprove of.

How fortunate, he noted, that he was serving a female sovereign, as he owed everything to women. In the sunset of his life, he proclaimed that he still had a young heart, thanks to the influence of his Queen. It was as well that, unlike Lord Melbourne, he was not serving an inexperienced young sovereign, but a woman of middle age. As his contemporaries observed, the Prime Minister’s many female friends were all grandmothers, and it must have been immensely rewarding for him to be dealing with the greatest grandmother of them all.

If Queen Victoria was the widow of Windsor, Disraeli was the widower of Hughenden, for Mary Anne had died at the age of eighty in December 1872. Yet the incorrigible old romantic still craved female company, and after his wife’s death he had formed a deep, if rather one-sided, attachment with Selina, Countess of Bradford, a grandmother of fifty-four. Refusing to be broken-hearted when refused by Selina, the undaunted politician proposed to her sister of seventy-one, Lady Chesterfield, on the grounds that marriage to her would bring him closer to her sister. One must doubt how serious his intentions really were. Lady Chesterfield presumably did, for she turned him down, and he had to content himself with carrying on a passionate correspondence with both women.

Even so, Disraeli had no problem in keeping his promise to do by and large whatever the Queen wanted. Admittedly, after Gladstone, almost any prime minister would have come as a blessed relief; to have one whose political outlook was so well attuned to hers was indeed a bonus. The era of the Prince Albert-influenced liberalism was over, to be replaced by Disraeli’s conservative persuasion – if indeed any persuasion was needed. During his six-year term of office, their ideas coincided more and more. She found herself accepting wholeheartedly his faith in the working together of the aristocracy and lower classes, his belief in a powerful foreign policy and his visions of imperial grandeur.

However, there were minor differences between monarch and statesman. The Queen’s opinions regarding Church affairs were more strongly held than his, and in his policies of social reform to improve conditions for the working classes, his ‘one nation’ Tory democracy, the Queen was less interested. While she was kind-hearted, even sentimental to a degree, her social conscience was never pronounced, and she was still too ready to accept Lord Melbourne’s glib assurances that dissatisfaction was generally caused by agitators; a
laissez-faire
attitude was her answer, on the grounds that social injustices would somehow rectify themselves if given time. When Queen Victoria spoke approvingly of the working classes, she had in mind the friendly Highland crofters and farm labourers whom she saw near Balmoral, not the underfed urban masses who lived in squalor in the poorer parts of London and the other industrial cities.

Even when Queen and Prime Minister were not in full accord on some political question, they could not argue for long. He had a way when they differed, she later told a future Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, of saying ‘Dear Madam’ persuasively, ‘and putting his head to one side’.
⁵
Gladstone’s assertive, hectoring demeanour had got him nowhere, but Disraeli’s intelligent approach could not fail. Sir Henry Ponsonby claimed that he had ‘got the length of her foot exactly’.
⁶
Disraeli coaxed her, he deferred to her, he paid her extravagant compliments on her political judgement and expertise. On the publication in 1868 of extracts from her diaries,
Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands
, he had congratulated her fulsomely as ‘the head of the literary profession’, and sometimes when discussing literature, he would slip in the phrase, ‘We authors, Ma’am’.

Despite all the silver-tongued flattery, he never lost sight of the fact that the Queen was a woman of great ability. Now that he was encouraging her to think for herself, instead of always thinking how Albert might have reacted to particular problems had he still been alive, the Queen now followed her intuition, trusting her own judgement for perhaps the first time in her life. No longer was there a husband to insist that political impartiality on the part of the Crown was paramount, and her particular traits, her common sense, determination and, perhaps above all, her obstinacy, became more pronounced. Human nature being as it is, it was hardly surprising that with advancing years her views became less flexible. Even without Disraeli’s encouragement, she would probably have become increasingly self-assured that she was always right. That he was her Prime Minister at the time may have done little more than to reinforce such characteristics.

In other ways, Disraeli helped to draw her out from the shadow of the Prince Consort. He showed her that she no longer needed to try constantly to improve herself, and that she did not owe it to herself and her country to be a paragon of culture, too intellectual or too serious-minded. He appreciated her for the woman she was and impressed on her the fact that she had no reason to feel inferior about any academic shortcomings. During her married life her intellectual self-confidence had been somewhat undermined by Albert’s knowledgeable spirit and in the early years of her widowhood by Gladstone’s cleverness. Though as well-informed as them, if less learned, Disraeli took care never to make her feel inferior. He even brought a sense of fun, or at least an air of gentle levity, into her life. At the same time, he introduced her to a new sense of vocation, and now she started to take a more lively interest in political affairs. Suddenly she no longer complained that she was overworked, and he took the right approach in urging her to make an effort as she began to busy herself with a renewed sense of purpose.

Other prime ministers, not least Gladstone, were used to her keeping their audiences with her short. With Disraeli they often lasted longer than an hour, and luncheon might be delayed as a result. Whereas she never thought twice about keeping Gladstone standing, she had a small gilt chair brought in for Disraeli. Once they were so engrossed in conversation that he forgot to keep an eye on the time. He had arranged to take a special train back from Windsor to London at five minutes past five. As the clock struck five he leapt to his feet, hurriedly explained why he had to go and rushed out of the room. Instead of being dismissed, he said later, he dismissed his sovereign.