251. Unlucky Jim

Salisbury was back for his third term in office, but for now without a majority in the House of Commons. He had to form a government, and for the first time it would include Liberal Unionists as ministers. One of them, Joseph Chamberlain, surprised Salisbury by choosing to be named Secretary of State for the Colonies in preference to either of the great posts he’d been offered. It seemed that imperialism mattered more to him. With a government in place, Salisbury took the country to a general election. He won with a landslide. In this episode, however, we take a break from all that to look at some of the great breakthroughs, other than his electoral triumph, taking place at that time, specifically in the sciences. Physics was surging. So were the life sciences. So indeed was medicine, but we’ll come back to that next week, when we look at women in that male-dominated field. In particular, one man proposed a disturbingly new scientific viewpoint. That was Charles Darwin, with his highly contentious theory of evolution. One of his admirers, it turned out, was none other than the Prime Minister himself. And, even more surprisingly, when Salisbury did differ from Darwin, his argument was well-founded in science. Not something one would expect from most British Prime Ministers. Illustration: Charles Darwin, pen and ink portrait by Harry Furniis, National Portrait Gallery 6251(16) Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

13 Aug 202314min

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 Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

6 Aug 202314min

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 Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

30 Juli 202314min

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 Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

23 Juli 202314min

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. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

16 Juli 202314min

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. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

9 Juli 202314min

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. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

2 Juli 202314min

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 Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

25 Juni 202314min