Sons, Servants and Statesmen (20 page)

Evidently Ponsonby, or someone else, communicated the royal displeasure, for Rosebery was soon back in favour. In August 1893, at an audience with him, Victoria told him she wished he was prime minister, and when he had told her that he might be accepting the vacant viceroyalty of India, she suggested that he was indispensable as regards her government at home, as he was the only one of the ministry with whom she could talk freely.

Seven months later, her wish had come true. Ponsonby, who brought to Rosebery the Queen’s letter asking him to form a government, passed on the news from her that she was ‘immensely delighted’. Whether her delight was at having the Foreign Secretary as prime minister or at being assured that ‘the G.O.M.’ (the Grand Old Man, as she sometimes referred to Gladstone) would not hold high office again, one must wonder. At the same time she wrote to Lord Rowton, asking him to tell Salisbury that ‘her wish to see him again at the head of affairs is as great as ever’, but she could not act differently than she had done, as the Liberal government still had a majority in the House of Commons.
³⁶
On 5 March Rosebery kissed hands on his appointment as prime minister. The task she had entrusted to him, he told her, ‘was very difficult, and not what he would have wished to undertake, but I repeated that he was the only person in the Government I considered suited to the post, and in whom I had absolute confidence’.
³⁷

As prime minister, Rosebery found his relations with the Queen were not untroubled. He recognised that she was personally sympathetic to him, though hostile to his ministry. ‘She does not object to Liberal measures which are not revolutionary,’ she assured him, ‘& she does not think it possible that Lord Rosebery will destroy well tried, valued & necessary institutions for the sole purpose of flattering useless Radicals or pandering to the pride of those whose only desire is their own self gratification.’
³⁸

Nevertheless, his was a thorny premiership. Within a week of taking office, he was finding it impossible to please everyone – or indeed almost anyone. During a House of Lords debate on the Queen’s Speech, he dismayed his followers, as well as the Nationalists, by as good as agreeing with an address by Lord Salisbury assuring him of a hearty welcome and saying that Home Rule was now in suspense: ‘England as the predominant member of the partnership of the Three Kingdoms will have to be convinced of its justice and equity.’
³⁹
The Times
asserted that Rosebery had at one blow shattered the fabric of Liberal policy.
⁴⁰
When the radical Henry Labouchere proposed an amendment to the address which virtually abolished the power of the House of Lords, the Queen delivered a furious rebuke to Rosebery, accusing him of being negligent towards the Whips. It prompted him and his Cabinet colleague Sir William Harcourt to comment that the spirit of George III survived in his granddaughter.
⁴¹

He needed to tread carefully, retaining his position by virtue of a slender majority in the Commons while never losing sight of the fact that he was distrusted by the Liberal Party rank and file. He once lamented being pledged to Gladstonian policies, ‘shut up in a House almost unanimously opposed to his ministry’.
⁴²
In an address at Bradford he referred to the House of Lords as a ‘permanent barrier against the Liberal Party’, promptly bringing forth the Queen’s disapproval. ‘She fully realises the extreme difficulty of his position,’ she wrote to him, ‘having inherited some such (as she must call them) dangerous & almost destructive measures from his Predecessor, which she deeply regrets. But she still hopes that he will act as a check & drag upon his Cabinet. What she would however wish to say, speaking
very
openly to him, is that in his Speeches out of Parliament he should take a more serious tone, & be, if she may say so, less jocular, which is hardly befitting a Prime Minister.’
⁴³

Yet he would not be deflected from his theme. At another address in Bradford, on 27 October, he said that the next election would be fought not on disestablishment of the Church, home rule or the liquor question, but the House of Lords, which was ‘a great national danger’. It was intolerable, he went on, that the Liberal Party should have to go cap in hand to the House of Lords to ask it to enact further legislation. ‘We fling down the gauntlet; it is for you to back us up.’
⁴⁴
Horrified, the Queen appealed to Lord Salisbury for advice, asking whether the Conservative and Unionist Party was ‘fit for a dissolution
now
?’
⁴⁵
Rosebery, she wrote, had committed a grave impropriety by not consulting her, ‘not to speak of not obtaining her sanction’, before advocating such far-reaching changes in the British constitution. Earlier in the year, she had stressed to him that the House of Lords ‘might possibly be improved, but it is
part and parcel
of the
much vaunted
and
admired
British Constitution, and
cannot
be
abolished
’.
⁴⁶
Rosebery denied this, pointing out that he had made the speech to a partisan audience of over 5,000, and he could hardly be expected to argue points under such circumstances ‘in the style appropriate to a drawing room or a library’. On 3 November Ponsonby was requested to inform Rosebery that the Queen would never consent to such a resolution being tabled without an appeal to the country.

Four days later, at another audience with the Queen, Rosebery deliberately turned the conversation to the matter of the House of Lords but said that if a resolution on the subject of diminishing their powers was tabled, it would only be in a very mild form. Though mollified, the Queen was still extremely irritated with him. ‘He never really seemed to know his own mind,’ she remarked to another senior Liberal, Sir Henry James, a couple of years later. She said that when she scolded him for taking up so strong a position against the House of Lords, he said that she need not be troubled, as his views had fallen so flat in the country. This, she considered, was not ‘a right position’ for her Prime Minister to adopt, ‘and I was not sorry when he was turned out’.
⁴⁷

In the following month she wrote to him at some length on the issue. He was mistaken, she said, ‘in thinking that ‘
any dealing with the H. of L
.’ is distasteful to her’. She fully recognised the necessity for reform and would be interested to know the broad outlines of his plan of reconstruction. It was not ‘a mere question of policy’ but, as he appreciated, ‘
a question of enormous importance
’, a ‘
question of the revision of the entire constitution
’, and she believed that her sanction for its public declaration should have been obtained. Fifty-seven years ago, she reminded him, ‘the Constitution was delivered into her keeping and that right or wrong she has her views as to the fulfillment of that trust. She cannot but think Lord Rosebery will feel that
his
position is not the only difficult one in these democratic days.’
⁴⁸

With this, the matter was left in abeyance, but it was not the end of Rosebery’s differences with the Queen. In a speech he gave in Glasgow in late November, he proclaimed Scottish disestablishment as a permanent part of the Liberal programme. While the manses may or may not be Tory agencies, he went on, the Established Church was unrepresentative of Scotland as a whole. The Queen regarded any moves to meddle with the Church, as she saw it, just as provocative as some of Rosebery’s pronouncements on the House of Lords. Once again, she drew his attention to her oath on accession to the throne, and warned him that she would do everything within her power to be true to her promise.

Within a few weeks, Rosebery’s health was on the verge of breaking down. The strain of high office during the previous months, acute insomnia and an attack of influenza all left him greatly weakened. In addition, he had been deeply affected by the suicide of Lord Drumlanrig, his assistant private secretary, a son of the Marquess of Queensberry (one of the architects of Oscar Wilde’s downfall in 1895), and fears that any scandal might implicate him and result in questions as to his private life, even hinting at a homosexual liaison between himself and Drumlanrig. Various crises and defeats in parliament plagued the government throughout spring and early summer, and after only fifteen months as prime minister he resigned on 23 June 1895.

Five days later, he had his final audience with the Queen, at which she invested him with the Order of the Thistle. Afterwards she noted that he was ‘much attached’ to her personally, and in certain respects she preferred him as a person, if not his politics, to Salisbury.
⁴⁹
Rosebery’s overwhelming feeling was one of relief. A comment on resignation from his biography of Sir Robert Peel, which he published four years later, will suffice. He believed that there were two supreme pleasures in life, one ideal, the other real: ‘The ideal is when a man receives the seals of office from his Sovereign. The real pleasure comes when he hands them back.’
⁵⁰

At the subsequent elections, a Liberal majority of 43 was overturned with a Unionist majority of 152. Lord Salisbury became Prime Minister again, and he remained in office until after Queen Victoria’s death five and a half years later. ‘It is easy to see that she [the Queen] is very fond of him,’ his daughter-in-law, Violet, noted at one of their tea parties in the south of France, ‘indeed I never saw two people get on better, their polished manners and deference to and esteem for each other were a delightful sight and one not readily to be forgotten.’
⁵¹
On holidays there they attended church together, and sometimes at home the Queen would arrive at Beaulieu for lunch with very little notice. Though Salisbury lacked the courtliness and vividly witty conversation of Melbourne or Disraeli, he shared their non-interventionist, rather laid-back attitude to governance of the kingdom which appealed to the Queen.

William Boyd Carpenter, Chaplain to the Queen in her last years and Bishop of Ripon from 1884 to 1911, realised that she held Salisbury in high esteem. She often spoke with admiration of him, the Chaplain noticed, ‘as of one in whom she had great confidence’. The impression he had ‘was that she gave him, if not the highest, an equal place with the highest among her ministers’. The two prime ministers of her reign whom she praised most were Salisbury and Peel. Of the latter she ‘spoke with very warm and grateful affection’, particularly on account of the kindness he had personally shown her, and the trouble he took in helping her to purchase Osborne as a royal residence. She and Prince Albert, she said, ‘owed it to him that we got this place’.
⁵²

Curiously, the spell of Disraeli had faded to some extent by this time. When Boyd Carpenter asked her whether she regarded his novel
Coningsby
as a book which gave a fairly correct picture of the English at its time, she looked blankly at him, as if not knowing how to reply. Then she pursed her lips, remarking in a quizzical manner, ‘I didn’t care for his novels.’
⁵³
It was as if she had come to revise her opinions with hindsight, and as if Albert’s scepticism about the rising young politician of the 1840s whom he had regarded with such distaste had come to influence her judgements once more.

In their last years, Salisbury and the Queen were both increasingly deaf. Once, when he came to Balmoral – with great reluctance, and only after his secretary had contacted Arthur Bigge (assistant secretary to Sir Henry Ponsonby) to request that his room should be kept at a minimum temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit – the household were amused to come across sovereign and Prime Minister sitting in different rooms on opposite sides of the corridor, shouting at each other so that every word could be overheard.

The Queen and her old adversary Gladstone were destined to come face to face once more, at Cannes, in March 1897. She and her daughter Louise were both spending a few days on the Riviera that spring, and Louise took the opportunity to invite the former prime minister and his wife to tea with her. They then joined the Queen for a few minutes. At eighty-eight, he was extremely frail, and the sight of the old man moved Victoria to pity. She gave him her hand, which he noted she had never done before in her life. He too was struck by the change in her and thought that her ‘peculiar faculty and habit of conversation had disappeared’.
⁵⁴

Although Gladstone was now the senior surviving privy councillor, he was not invited to take part in any of the diamond jubilee celebrations. While some might have regarded this as an unwarranted slight, by this time his health was too poor to allow him to venture far without considerable physical discomfort. Moreover, the general tone of the proceedings was thought to be too imperialist in tone for a statesman who hardly held the empire in thrall to enjoy. The Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, a Liberal and republican firebrand some twenty years earlier, had now become one of the most loyal members of Her Majesty’s government, and it was partly on his initiative that the diamond jubilee became ‘a festival of empire’, with prime ministers from the larger colonies invited to take part, in preference to foreign monarchs from Europe, who were not invited. Gladstone would no doubt have felt ill at ease with such an arrangement.