It is probably as annoying to an expectant Minister to be offered what he regards as an inferior post as to be entirely ignored. Sir Robert Peel, in December 1834, offered Lord Ashley (subsequently the Earl of Shaftesbury) a seat on the Board of Admiralty, which Lord Ashley, thinking it altogether beneath him, promptly refused. “Had I not,” he writes in hisDiary, “by God’s grace and the study of religion subdued the passion of my youth, I should now have been heart-broken. Canning, eight years ago, offered me, as a neophyte, a seat at one of the Boards, the first step in a young statesman’s life. If I am not now worthy of more, it is surely better to cease to be a candidate for public honours. Yet Peel’s letter, so full of flummery, would lead anyone to believe that I was a host of excellency. The thing is a contradiction.” Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that he accepted the post subsequently. He satisfied himself that it was of more importance than he at first supposed.
No politician had such curious adventures as an aspirant to office, and certainly no one has confessed so freely the bitterness of his disappointments, as Shaftesbury, whose name is so honourably associated with legislation for the protection of women and children employed in factories. In 1839 Peel was again engaged in making a Government. Queen Victoria had hardly been two years on the Throne, and was only twenty years of age. Peel invited Lord Ashley to accept a post in the Royal Household, urging thathe desired to have around “this young woman, on whose moral and religious character depends the welfare of millions of human beings,” persons whose conversation would tend to her moral improvement. Lord Ashley acknowledges that he was “thunderstruck” when he received Peel’s letter, as he expected a far higher position than what he describes as “a mere Court puppet.” But in his reply he said, somewhat sarcastically, that if Peel desired it, he was willing to take “the office of chief scullion to the Court.” However, this Administration was not constituted. It was wrecked on what is known as “the Bedchamber question.” As one of the ladies of the Bedchamber, the Mistress of the Robes, who was most closely in attendance upon Queen Victoria, was related to some of the outgoing Whig Ministers, by whom she had been appointed—the office being at the time political, and its occupant bound to go out on a change of Government—Peel insisted upon her resignation. The Queen refused to consent to such a course, as one repugnant to her feelings, and Peel, thereupon refusing to form an Administration, the Melbourne Ministry were recalled to office. Two years later Peel was engaged once more in making a Government—this time Queen Victoria raised no objection to the Mistress of the Robes being changed—and again he offered Lord Ashley a place in the Royal Household, as a man who was deeply religious and moral. Lord Ashley now believed that Peel simply wanted to muzzle him, the leader of the growing humanitarian movement for the State regulation of factories. He refused the office. “I told Peel,” he wrote, “the case was altered; the Court was no longer the same; the Queen was two years older, had a child, and a husband to take care of her.” So he declined to devote himself to ordering dinners and carrying a white wand. He discovered subsequently, to his deep mortification, that Peel had already offered the post of Vice-Chamberlain of the Household to Lord —— (“the hero of Madame Grisi,” as Ashley describes him); and that Lord —— exclaimed: “Thank God, my character is too bad for a Household place!” Lord Ashley argued that “morality, therefore, was not the reason for putting me at Court.”
On January 27, 1855, the Coalition Government of Lord Aberdeen and Lord John Russell resigned, being defeated on a vote of censure charging them with mismanagement of the Crimean War. Lord Palmerston received the commands of Queen Victoria to form an Administration. He, too, desired to have a Ministry of both Liberals and Conservatives. On February 7th he wrote to Ashley—now the Earl of Shaftesbury and a Conservative—offering him the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster with a seat in the Cabinet. That was in the morning. In the afternoon Shaftesbury received a brief note from Palmerston requesting him to “consider the offer as suspended,” in consequence of unforeseen difficulties, which, it subsequently transpired, were the claims of the Liberals for a greater share of place and power in the new Government. This explanation came to Shaftesbury from Lady Palmerston. “Palmerston is distracted with all the worry he has to go through,” she wrote. In a P.S. she added: “It is no pleasure to form a Government when there are so many unreasonable people to please, and so many interested people pressing for their own gratification and vanity, without any regard to the public good or the interests of the Government and country.” Shaftesbury thus poured out his virtuously indignant soul on the subject to his son: “The selfishness, the meanness, the love of place and salary, the oblivion of the country, of man’s welfare and God’s honour, have never been more striking and terrible than in this crisis. These, added to the singular conceit of all the candidates for office (and all have aspired to the highest), have thrown stumbling-blocks in Palmerston’s path at every step. The greediness and vanity of our place-hunters have combined to make each one of them a union of the vulture and the peacock.”
Shaftesbury declares that he had then no desire for place; and it is impossible to doubt the genuineness of the thanksgiving on his “escape from office” in which he indulges. A month later some of the Members of the Administration resigned, and Palmerston again offered Shaftesburythe Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster. But Shaftesbury was still reluctant. “I could not satisfy myself,” he says, “that to accept office was a Divine call. I was satisfied that God had called me to labour among the poor.” However, one morning he received this note from Lady Palmerston: “Palmerston is very anxious now that you should put on your undress uniform and be at the Palace a quarter before three to be sworn in. Pray do this, and I am sure you will not repent it.” Shaftesbury gave way to these pleading entreaties. The result was certainly curious. “I went and dressed,” he writes in hisDiary, “and then, while I was waiting for the carriage, I went down on my knees and prayed for counsel, wisdom and understanding. Then there was someone at the door, as I thought to say that the carriage was ready. But instead of that a note, hurriedly written in pencil, was put into my hand. It was from Palmerston—‘Don’t go to the Palace.’” Many would have groaned in the anguish of their souls over this crowning disappointment. Shaftesbury declares he danced with joy. “It was to my mind,” he says, “as distinctly an act of special Providence as when the hand of Abraham was stayed and Isaac escaped.” Palmerston’s sudden change of mind is no doubt accounted for in a passage which I find in theAutobiographyof the eighth Duke of Argyll, who was a member of Palmerston’s Cabinet. He states that one day Palmerston astonished all his colleagues by proposing that Lord Shaftesbury should be one of their number. “I was far too fond of Shaftesbury, and had much too great a respect for him to say one word in opposition,” Argyll writes; “but I saw that it rather took away the breath from a good many of my colleagues. His fervid nature, his uncompromising temperament, and his somewhat individual opinions were evidently not considered as promising well for united councils. My opinion, which, however, I kept to myself, was that he was a far more valuable man out of office than in it.” Argyll adds: “Palmerston evidently saw that the proposal was not very well received, and we heard nothing more of it.”
In July 1886 Henry Cecil Raikes, a distinguished Conservative M.P., awaited, with hope and misgiving alternating in his breast, a letter from Lord Salisbury—then engaged in forming his first Unionist Administration—inviting him to join the Cabinet. As the list of Ministerial appointments announced in the Press grew towards completion, and nothing was heard from the Prime Minister, the fear grew upon him that he was about to be shelved. But he had staunch friends at the Carlton Club, and they took the unusual course of addressing a “round-robin” to Salisbury, earnestly requesting him not to forget “the long and arduous services to the Party” of Henry Cecil Raikes. A day or two later Raikes received the following letter from the Prime Minister:
20 Arlington Street, S.W.,July 28, 1886.My Dear Raikes,Areyou disposed to join us as Postmaster-General? I am very anxious to meet your views. I wish I was in a position to do so more fully. But that is a species of regret which clogs me at every step of the arduous task in which I am engaged. I shall be very glad if we are able to persuade you to associate yourself with us—for the present in this office.Believe me, yours very truly,Salisbury.
20 Arlington Street, S.W.,July 28, 1886.
My Dear Raikes,
Areyou disposed to join us as Postmaster-General? I am very anxious to meet your views. I wish I was in a position to do so more fully. But that is a species of regret which clogs me at every step of the arduous task in which I am engaged. I shall be very glad if we are able to persuade you to associate yourself with us—for the present in this office.
Believe me, yours very truly,Salisbury.
Only the minor post of Postmaster-General, when he had expected the Home Office, which carries a seat in the Cabinet! But to refuse an offer of office because it does not come up to one’s expectations often means the exclusion from office for ever. Raikes accordingly decided to take the post of Postmaster-General. “He fully recognized the difficulties of his chief’s position,” writes his son and biographer, “and, of course, was not blind to the fact that if he were to refuse this office he would probably be throwing away the substance for the shadow, and would cut himself off from any but a remote chance of future advancement.” It is not every politician who has had an offer of an office which was less than he expected that can followthe example of Henry Brougham, who contemptuously tore up the letter of Earl Grey offering him the post of Attorney-General in the first Reform Administration. Brougham wanted the Lord Chancellorship, and would not be put off with anything else; and though Grey was reluctant to trust Brougham in so exalted a post, Brougham had his way, for he was in the strong position of being indispensable to the new Government, not only in his own estimation, which did not so much matter, but also in the estimation of many leading Whigs, which did. But Raikes knew that he could be done without, and, sensible man, he accepted what was offered. Naturally he was mortified that the Secretaryship of State for the Home Department was carried off by an entirely outside and unsuspected rival, Henry Matthews (afterwards Lord Llandaff), who was discovered in the Law Courts as a powerful advocate and pleader by Lord Randolph Churchill.
Is there anything more poignant in the history of the making of Governments than the entreaty addressed by Benjamin Disraeli to Sir Robert Peel, in 1841, that he should not be forgotten in the distribution of the offices in the Tory Administration which was then being formed? Writing from Grosvenor Gate on September 5, 1841, and addressing “Dear Sir Robert,” Disraeli said he should not dwell upon his services to the Tory Party, though since 1834 he had fought four contests, expended large sums of money, and exerted his intelligence to the utmost for the propagation of Peel’s policy. He adds: “But there is one peculiarity in my case on which I cannot be silent. I have had to struggle against a storm of political hate and malice, which few men ever experienced, from the moment—at the instigation of a member of your Cabinet—I enrolled myself under your banner, and I have only been sustained under these trials by the conviction that the day would come when the foremost man of this country would publicly testify that he had some respect for my ability and my character.” Then, throwing all reserve aside, he ends his letter with the following outburst of genuine feeling:“I confess to be unrecognized at this moment by you appears to me to be overwhelming, and I appeal to your own heart—to that justice and magnanimity which I feel are your characteristics—to save me from an intolerable humiliation.”
The same post brought the Prime Minister a most appealing letter signed, “Mary Anne Disraeli,” addressed “Dear Sir Robert Peel,” and marked “Confidential.” She begins: “I beg you not to be angry with me for my intrusion, but I am overwhelmed with anxiety. My husband’s political career is for ever crushed if you do not appreciate him. Mr. Disraeli’s exertions are not unknown to you; but there is much he has done that you cannot be aware of, though they have no other aim but to do you honour, no wish for recompense, but your approbation.” Her husband had made Peel’s opponents his personal enemies, she goes on; he had stood four expensive elections since 1834. “Literature,” she concludes, “he has abandoned for politics. Do not destroy all his hopes, and make him feel his life has been a mistake.”
Peel’s reply was cold and formal. He disliked Disraeli, regarding him as a political adventurer, and disliked him personally. “My dear sir,” he addresses him, and, fastening on the statement that Disraeli had joined the Tory Party at the instigation of a member of Peel’s former Cabinet, he declares that no one had ever got from him the slightest authority to make such a communication. Then Peel gives a remarkable account of the difficulties which beset him in constituting the new Government:
But, quite independently of this consideration, I should have been very happy, had it been in my power, to avail myself of your offer of service; and your letter is one of the many I receive which too forcibly impress upon me how painful and invidious is the duty which I have been compelled to undertake. I am only supported in it by the consciousness that my desire has been to do justice.I trust, also, that when candidates for parliamentary office calmly reflect on my position, and the appointments I have made—when they review the names of those previously connected with me in public life whom I have been absolutely compelled to exclude, the claims founded on acceptance in 1834 with the almost hopeless prospects of that day, the claims, too, founded on new Party combinations—Itrust they will then understand how perfectly insufficient are the means at my disposal to meet the wishes that are conveyed to me by men whose co-operation I should be proud to have and whose qualifications and pretensions for office I do not contest.
But, quite independently of this consideration, I should have been very happy, had it been in my power, to avail myself of your offer of service; and your letter is one of the many I receive which too forcibly impress upon me how painful and invidious is the duty which I have been compelled to undertake. I am only supported in it by the consciousness that my desire has been to do justice.
I trust, also, that when candidates for parliamentary office calmly reflect on my position, and the appointments I have made—when they review the names of those previously connected with me in public life whom I have been absolutely compelled to exclude, the claims founded on acceptance in 1834 with the almost hopeless prospects of that day, the claims, too, founded on new Party combinations—Itrust they will then understand how perfectly insufficient are the means at my disposal to meet the wishes that are conveyed to me by men whose co-operation I should be proud to have and whose qualifications and pretensions for office I do not contest.
Disraeli, writing from Grosvenor Gate, September 8, 1841, hastens to explain that he never intended to even suggest, much less to say, that a promise of official promotion had ever been made to him at any time by any member of Peel’s Cabinet. “Parliamentary office,” he says, “should be the recognition of Party services and parliamentary ability, and as such only was it to me an object of ambition.” He ends with a dignified touch of pathos: “If such a pledge had been given me by yourself, and not redeemed, I should have taken refuge in silence. Not to be appreciated may be mortification; to be baulked of a promised reward is only a vulgar accident of life, to be borne without a murmur.”
Five years passed, and in the debate on the third reading of the Bill for the repeal of the Corn Duties, Disraeli, from the back Ministerial benches, made a scathing attack upon Peel and what he called his betrayal of the Tory Party in bringing in such a Bill to establish Free Trade. The Prime Minister, in reply, disclosed to the country the curious incidents of 1841. “It is still more surprising,” said he, “that if such were the hon. gentleman’s views of my character he should have been ready, as I think he was, to unite his fortunes with mine in office, thereby implying the strongest proof which a public man can give of confidence in the honour and integrity of a Minister of the Crown.” Disraeli rose at once to make a personal explanation. He denied that his opposition to the Free Trade policy of the Prime Minister was inspired by his disappointment of office. He was not an applicant for office in 1841. “I never shall—it is totally foreign to my nature—make an application for any place,” he cried. “Whatever occurred in 1841 between the right hon. gentleman and myself,” said he, “was entirely attributable to the intervention of another gentleman, whom I supposed to be in the confidence of the right hon. baronet, and I daresay it may have arisenfrom a misconception.” The correspondence which I have quoted was not published until long afterwards. The abrupt ending of the incident in the House of Commons is strange in the light thrown upon it by the correspondence. According to the report inHansard, Peel made no reply to Disraeli. Peel held the correspondence in his hands, and resisted the temptation to read it and crush Disraeli, because he was advised by one of his colleagues that the disclosure of a private application for office would be contrary to the high and honourable traditions of statesmanship.
Gladstone agreed with Peel that it was not advisable to put a man into the Cabinet without a previous official training. It was also Gladstone’s custom, once he had invited a man to office, to hold on to him to the last possible moment. “The next most serious thing to admitting a man into the Cabinet,” said he, mentioning one of the principles which guided him in the making of a Government, “is to leave a man out who has once been in.” Still, there were occasions when he was compelled to pass over an old comrade-in-arms on the ground of age. He was himself seventy-one years of age when, in 1880, he was called upon to form his second Government. To one old member of his former Administration he wrote: “I do not feel able to ask you to resume the toils of office.” He admitted that he himself was “the oldest man of his political generation,” and that, therefore, he should be a solecism in the Government which he was engaged in constructing. “I have been brought,” he added, “by the seeming force of exceptional circumstances to undertake a task requiring less of years and more of vigour than my accumulating store of the one and waning residue of the other.” Here we have the answer to the question of age and office. The exclusion of a veteran politician from office is not a matter of the number of years he has counted. Is he an extinct political volcano as well as an old man? May he safely be set aside? On the answer which the Prime Minister gives to these questions in his own mind depends the fate of the office-seekerof advanced years. Gladstone was eighty-four in 1893, but he was still inevitable as Prime Minister. If the strong young man of achievement, and still greater promise, cannot be ignored, neither can the old man, who, having built up a commanding reputation, takes care that it is duly and fittingly recognized.
It is a singular thing that, among the twelve hundred men or so who constitute the two Houses of Parliament, there has never been any reluctance to take office. Probably the only instance of a public man who had a positive repugnance of office was Lord Althorp, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons in the Grey and Melbourne Administrations from November 1830 to December 1834. Office destroyed all his happiness, he declared, and so affected his mind that he had to remove his pistols from his bedroom lest he should be tempted to shoot himself. He remained in office because he felt that one in his rank and position—born, as it were, to the purple, a member of one of the great territorial families, who boast of long lines of ancestors in the public service—could no more set aside the responsibility of office than the earldom and broad acres of which he was also the heir. The one consolation he derived from the death of his brother, Earl Spencer, was that his own accession to the House of Lords compelled him to lay down the burden of Chancellor of the Exchequer. SirGeorge CornewallLewis seems to have been animated by somewhat the same uncommonly high sense of duty. When Palmerston, in the forming of his Administration in 1855, offered him the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer which Gladstone had vacated, he says he entertained the strongest disinclination to accept the office. “I felt, however,” he writes, “that in the peculiar position of the Government”—they were in difficulties over the Crimean War—“refusal was scarcely honourable, and would be attributable to cowardice, and I therefore, most reluctantly, made up my mind to accept it.”
But these cases of objection to office on the part of public men, however wealthy or however old, are exceedingly rare. The hunt for posts when a new Government is being formed after a dissolution is eager and untiring. The oldmen, who will not admit that their weight of years unfits them for the cares of office, haunt the political clubs and Downing Street, so as to keep themselves conspicuous in the eyes of the new Prime Minister. But they cannot all get “jobs,” to use a word commonly employed while a Government is being made. Some of them must be sacrificed; there are so many able and pushful young men to be provided for. The same cry is heard in politics as in other walks of life: “Why should these old fellows lag superfluous on the stage?” But “the old gang”—as they are called by the young—will not retire from public life voluntarily and gracefully. It is not alone that they instinctively revolt against the assumption that their capacity for work is at an end, but they also dislike change of habits and pursuits, and, above all, they desire for a little longer to play a leading part on the prominent stage of Parliament. Public life, therefore, retires from them. It is only the few who have made a great reputation and acquired a great authority that cannot lightly be set aside. For most politicians, no matter how fine their services in the past, a time comes when they are designated “old fogeys,” and, while still anxious to be once more Ministers of the Crown, they experience the humiliation, as they look upon it, of being shunted for ever. It is idle to talk of acquiescing patiently in the inevitable. Political history affords many a sad instance of such a fate being regarded as one of the sorest of the injustices of life.
The young and pushful have their disappointments and vexations also. Disraeli—according to Buckle, his biographer—having completed his Administration in 1874, wrote to a lady friend: “I have contrived in the minor and working places to include every representative man, that is to say, everyone who might be troublesome—all those sort of men who would have made a Tory cave.” He adds: “There are some terrible disappointments, but I have written soothing letters, which, on the whole, have not been without success.” But not altogether. For in another letter, written in 1876, Disraeli says that at a dinner party he met Lord Randolph Churchill—“he glaring like one possessed of a devil, and quite uncivil when I addressed himrather cordially.” “Why?” he asks, and answering, he says it was perhaps that “I gave the lordship of the Treasury to Crichton instead of himself.”
The making of a Government may be completed in a week if all goes well. Should there be difficulties in reconciling the claims of influential rivals for particular offices, it may extend over a fortnight. And what does it all signify to the people or nation? Charles Dickens was disposed to take an ironic view of the matter, if we judge from some passages inBleak House. “The limited choice of the Crown,” he writes, “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 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 because you can’t provide for Noodle!” That, however, does not quite settle the matter. May it not be said, rather—Happy country which has so many able and honest men striving for the opportunity of toiling in its service!