Theakston K. After Number 10. Former Prime Ministers in British Politics

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would privately refer to her, demanding and even on occasion ‘very mad’,

but had grown genuinely fond of her. After his departure from ofﬁce he

stayed at Windsor three times in the remaining eight months of 1880.

They kept up a private correspondence, mostly but not entirely gossipy.

Disraeli was a master at providing the mix of sympathy, affection and ﬂat-

tery she needed. But there was some political content to their secret exchanges,

with the Queen telling him about audiences with Liberal politicians and

asking for his advice and for his views on foreign policy. This behaviour

might have become constitutionally more problematic had Disraeli not

been prudent and discreet, and if the situation had lasted longer than it

did. In the end, as Blake says, it probably did no great harm: ‘nothing that

Disraeli could say was likely to make the Queen detest Gladstone any more

than she already did’.

After ﬁnally quitting Downing Street, Disraeli no longer had a house in

London. One of the Rothschilds made available a suite of rooms in his

house for Disraeli’s use on his occasional visits to London for House of

Lords business, but he spent most of his time at Hughenden, his country

house. At the end of the year he took out a seven-year lease on a house in

Mayfair – a sign he was intending to remain politically active. He enjoyed

the ﬁne summer and autumn in the Buckinghamshire countryside, saying

he wanted ‘a dose of solitude’ and describing himself as a ‘hermit’ and ‘in a

state of coma’.

His wife had died in 1872 and afterwards he had proposed

marriage to the widowed Lady Chesterﬁeld largely – as they both under-

stood – to be nearer to her younger and happily-married sister, Lady

Bradford, with whom he was in love. Lady Chesterﬁeld had turned him

down, but for many years – and continuing after his loss of ofﬁce – the two

women were a vital source of female comfort and sympathy for him, and

he saw much of them and corresponded constantly.

When he had lost the premiership for the ﬁrst time Disraeli had caused a

sensation by publishing a best-seller, Lothair, in 1870, the ﬁrst novel ever

written by a British ex-prime minister. According to Monypenny and

Buckle this book ‘deepened doubts of statesmen about Disraeli’s serious-

ness. Politicians out of ofﬁce, it was thought then, should write classical,

historical, or constitutional studies.’ In 1880 he pulled off a similar success

with Endymion, a novel he had started in opposition before 1874 and

ﬁnished soon after his ﬁnal election defeat (it appeared in November 1880).

He received for it the-then record publisher’s advance of £10,000. ‘My

books’, Disraeli once said, ‘are the history of my life’. Though he never

wrote his memoirs, his novels (he wrote 12 over his lifetime) all have

strong autobiographical aspects. Endymion is a light and entertaining social

and political fairy tale, with some good one-liners and characters loosely

modelled on some of the great politicians and statesmen from Disraeli’s

past. The Archbishop of Canterbury ﬁnished the novel ‘with a painful feel-

ing that the author considers all political life as mere play and gambling’.

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But Lord Derby thought it was ‘a remarkable production for a man of 75,

after six years of a kind of labour which does not stimulate the imaginative

faculty’. Disraeli then promptly sat down to start another novel, complet-

ing nine chapters before his death. Gladstone had thought an earlier novel

of Disraeli’s to be ‘trash’ and he would have been even less amused had

he seen the devastating caricature portrait of him, in the guise of the char-

acter called Falconet, in this new work: a humourless, arrogant, devout,

self-righteous, hypocritical, prig.

Disraeli had become obsessed with the real-life Gladstone – one of the

things still keeping him in politics was the sight of the ‘Arch Villain’, as he

now called him, back in Number 10, ‘an irresponsible demagogue’ leading

a government of ‘Radicals and Jacobins’. There was no question of Disraeli

giving up the party leadership, though the next election could be six years

off, and on age and health grounds he seemed hardly up to another pre-

miership. His position remained, as Blake put it, ‘impregnable’ until his

death. There was no single obvious successor and Disraeli mischievously

encouraged the two rivals, stroking Sir Stafford Northcote with talk about

‘when you come to form a ministry’ and telling Lord Salisbury, whom he

probably preferred, how he dreamt of him ‘leading H.M.’s Opposition’.

Formally these two shared the leadership after Disraeli’s death, with

Salisbury eventually coming out on top and becoming the next Tory PM in

1885. Northcote’s rather lacklustre leadership of the Tory MPs in the

Commons was not helped by the ‘Fourth Party’, Lord Randolph Churchill’s

small awkward squad of rebels and gadﬂies. Disraeli wanted it both ways,

seeing them as a ‘safety valve’ and encouraging them – ‘I wholly sym-

pathize with you because I was never respectable myself’ – but also stressing

the need for unity and support for the leadership.

In this phase of his career Disraeli was gloomy, even at times alarmist,

about the political outlook but believed the Conservatives needed to act

cautiously. The Gladstonian bandwagon, he believed, threatened the

landed interest, the constitution, the empire, the union with Ireland: ‘Old

England seems to be tumbling to pieces’. There was not much the oppos-

ition could do when a new government was fresh in ofﬁce. Taking advan-

tage of the support of dissident Whigs, he had the Compensation for

Disturbance Bill, which would have hit Irish landlords, thrown out by the

House of Lords in August 1880. He felt it was prudent, however, to restrain

the ultras on his own side and let through a Game Bill and an Employers

Liability Bill – both popular in the country though detested by the Tories

– rather than provoke an all-out war between the Commons and the Tory-

dominated Lords. For the longer-term he hoped for and predicted some

sort of internal ‘disruption’ breaking up the Liberal majority. But he was

not the man to work out a more positive strategy for his party to reﬂect the

rising new middle-class urban and suburban Conservatism that he neither

understood nor identiﬁed with.

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Disraeli’s health had been poor for many years. He suffered from gout,

asthma, bronchitis and probably Bright’s disease. The warm weather towards

the end of 1880 had done him good but the atrocious wintery conditions

from January 1881 onwards brought about a rapid and sharp deterioration

in his condition. He was still politically busy, but needed the help of drugs

before speaking in the House of Lords in March 1881. He remained active

on the social scene, at some times managing to seem his old self, but at

other times sitting ‘silent and deathlike, a mummy at the feast’. He caught

a bad chill in March and his powers of resistance failed. Bedridden and

conscious this was the end, he corrected Hansard proofs of his last speech

– ‘I will not go down to posterity talking bad grammar’ – and declined

a proposed visit by the Queen – ‘No, she would only ask me to take a

message to Albert.’

He died, aged 76, on 19 April 1881. Gladstone offered

a public funeral but his instructions were that he be buried alongside his

wife at Hughenden.

‘There is some mystery’, says John Vincent, ‘as to how he died a

rich man.’ His will was ﬁnally proved at £84,000 (equivalent to around

£5 million today). For long periods of his life he had been heavily debt-

ridden. He had married his wife for her money and had been helped to buy

Hughenden with the sort of shady ‘loan’ from political ‘friends’ that would

have put him into hot water in the modern world. Later a benefactor bought

up his debts and then charged him a low rate of interest, declining the

offer of a peerage in return. After being Chancellor of the Exchequer in

the 1850s, he secured a ministerial pension of £2,000 a year whenever he

was out of ofﬁce. He received a large legacy from a rich old lady he had

been cultivating. He made serious money from his books as an ex-prime

minister. There were rumours the Rothschilds may have been secret bene-

factors.

But, as with so much else about Disraeli, there remains a shadowi-

ness and an elusiveness.

William Gladstone (resigned 2 March 1894)

Gladstone was Liberal prime minister four times for a total of over 12 years

(1868–74, 1880–85, February–July 1886, 1892–94). He was an octogenarian

during his last premiership: the oldest man ever to be appointed prime

minister at 82 (fully 37 of our prime ministers had died before reaching the

age he then was in August 1892); and 84 years old when he ﬁnally stood

down on 2 March 1894. He always felt Wellington and Palmerston had

made the mistake of clinging to ofﬁce for too long, and he ultimately did

so as well. Most of his colleagues in the end were glad to see the back

of him.

Gladstone’s political career stretched back to 1832, when he had ﬁrst

become an MP. On many occasions – and even before he became prime

minister – he had talked of resignation and quitting politics, longing, so he

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said, ‘for an interval of quiet between Parliament and the grave’ and to

devote the remainder of his life to religious study and the defence of the

church. Temperamentally, however, he could never give up politics and

public life for long. After his 1874 defeat, careless of the consequences

for his party, he had withdrawn from the leadership and for a while dis-

engaged from politics, writing pamphlets and engaging in religious con-

troversies, before bouncing back into the frontline with furious attacks on

Turkish massacres of Christians in the Balkans and on the evils of Disraeli

and his government. In his 1880–85 government, now in his seventies, his

health was poor (only Campbell-Bannerman, Bonar Law and Churchill in

the 1950s, among subsequent PMs, having worse health, suggests Jenkins)

and sometimes looked like forcing his retirement, but he kept going.

the last decade of his political life he was spurred on by his crusade to solve

the Irish problem. Defeat in that quest in 1893 heralded the end of his

active career.

Exceptional physical and mental strength and stamina, ambition and

drive had powered Gladstone to the top and kept him there. He could dis-

play an ‘almost manic energy’ and remained tough, vigorous and resilient

into old age, still wielding his axe and chopping down trees until he

was nearly 82, and he stayed intellectually active, writing proliﬁcally and

reading voraciously. Where Disraeli wrote light ﬁction, Gladstone churned

out theology and classical scholarship. His voluminous writings trying to

link the stories of Homer to Christianity and the Bible were dismissed by

Jowett as ‘crazy’; ‘everything Gladstone had written on Homer was wrong’,

Disraeli liked to gloat. Asquith’s verdict on Gladstone’s output was ‘he is

difﬁcult to read, and still more difﬁcult to remember’.

By 1892 serious questions were being asked about Gladstone’s capacity

for governing. Some senior Liberals wondered if the premiership could be

handed to someone else, such as Earl Spencer, with Gladstone taking ofﬁce

without portfolio to introduce an Irish Home Rule bill – an arrangement

that was never on the cards. ‘He had made the party unleadable during his

active lifetime save by himself’, argues Matthews. Even his frustrated col-

leagues would not have dreamed up as a solution to their problem the

bizarre incident in which the Grand Old Man, just after he had become

prime minister again, was knocked down by a mad cow but luckily escaped

serious injury or worse. Increasing deafness and eye problems affected his

ability to function: he saw the world ‘through a fog’, reading was difﬁcult

and he found over half of what was said in the Commons inaudible. Glad-

stone himself wondered if he was ‘no longer ﬁt for public life’, but his

doctor believed he was ‘constitutionally unﬁt to stand aside’. Gladstone’s

wife, Catherine, never wanted him to quit, Rosebery complaining that ‘the

“petticoats” around him won’t allow him to give up power’. Although his

physical powers were failing he could still rise to the big occasion, and his

old mastery was seen in his leadership in devising and presenting the

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Home Rule legislation. But he was no longer up to what Jenkins calls

‘the normal conduct of a prime minister’s business’.

The House of Lords destroyed Home Rule and Gladstone’s reason for

staying in politics in September 1893 but he did not go easily or quietly:

‘he would go when he wanted to, not when his colleagues wanted him to’,

and he was unhappy about retiring ‘on a low note of failure and defeat’.

The ﬁnal straw came when he was isolated and at odds with his Cabinet in

heated and bitter arguments in early 1894 about increased naval expend-

iture. Gladstone raved on about the ‘mad or drunk’ proposals, while his

horriﬁed colleagues vetoed his idea of a snap election fought on the House

of Lords issue – an ‘insane’ idea, said one minister, ‘the act of a selﬁsh

lunatic’; Rosebery recalled Palmerston’s prophecy that Gladstone would

one day ‘ruin the Liberal Party and die in a madhouse’. Gladstone warned

his colleagues in January that he intended to resign and – when they did

not blink – ﬁnally carried out his threat on 2 March 1894. Some ministers

broke down at his last Cabinet meeting on 1 March – which he afterwards

contemptuously called the ‘blubbering Cabinet’ – and later that day he

made his last appearance and interventions in the House of Commons,

never again setting foot in parliament after a membership going back over

60 years, though he kept his seat until the 1895 general election, which he

did not contest.

Gladstone wanted to go down to history as plain ‘Mr Gladstone’. He had

refused a knighthood in 1859 and offers of a peerage in 1874 and 1885. He

was not an egalitarian and had great respect for rank and the social hier-

archy but always saw himself as a commoner. The Lords, says Jenkins, was

not a forum that would have suited him. In 1894 the Queen curtly said she

did not offer her retiring PM a peerage only because she knew he would

refuse it. He encouraged his wife to decline the offer of a separate peerage

in her own right.

Queen Victoria could hardly conceal her delight at Gladstone’s depar-

ture; the only problem was it had not come soon enough. Both had con-

tributed to their relationship deteriorating from bad to appalling over the

years. Both were relieved it had come to an end. She had described him

as ‘half mad’ and as a ‘dictator’; he felt ‘the Queen alone is enough to kill

any man’. Praise from her came only when he did something like make a

speech supporting the erection of a monument of Disraeli. The thought of

having to make this speech had made him ill for two days beforehand. He

was careful to insist he was ‘loyal to the Throne’. He gave instructions to

his family to ‘keep in the background’, after his death, details from his side

of the personal relations between him and the Queen. The Queen’s han-

dling of his resignation deeply offended and wounded him, and he would

brood over her personal discourtesy – virtually dismissing him as if ‘settling

a tradesman’s bill’ – for the rest of his life. Gladstone expected and wanted

to be formally asked about his successor – and would have nominated Lord

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Spencer, the top Liberal in the Cabinet most committed to Home Rule. But

the Queen did not consult him and sent instead for Lord Rosebery – a

choice that dismayed him; he would have preferred even Harcourt over

Rosebery. When they brieﬂy met by chance a few years later in Biarritz in

1897 the Queen was polite enough (and shook hands with him for the ﬁrst

time he could remember) but Gladstone thought she had become more

feeble and would soon abdicate. She was pleased to see that he was ‘much

aged’.

After Gladstone’s resignation Rosebery’s Liberal government lasted only

15 months. The G.O.M. did not think much of its performance or the new

leadership. He disliked the way in which Rosebery more or less binned

Home Rule. He regretted having brought the ‘difﬁcult’ Rosebery to the

front and making him Foreign Secretary, where they had had policy clashes.

‘I cannot understand him – he remains a closed book to me’, Gladstone

complained in July 1894. ‘He never consults me.’ His successor, he noted,

‘has been under no obligation to give me his conﬁdence, and he has

entirely withheld it as to inner matters, while retaining unimpaired all his

personal friendliness. He does not owe his present position in any way to

me, and has no sort of debt to pay.’ Later in 1896 Gladstone was quoted as

saying that ‘he gave Rosebery up altogether as a competent man for Liberal

leadership – for lack of judgment and even sense’.

Nor did the successor regime please him in other ways. He disliked

Harcourt’s budget and the new graduated death duties on land. He had

reservations about aspects of the Welsh Church Disestablishment legis-

lation and ministers feared he might intervene to speak out against it at the

committee stage – it fell with the government. He recorded a damning

general all-going-to-the-dogs impression of the political scene, with ‘an

anarchical Cabinet, abundant pledges, obstructive opposition, compulsory

acquiescence in small achievement, and an apathy and languor in the

general mind curiously combined with a decided appetite for novelties and

for promises apart from the prospect of performance’.

The problem was Gladstone had become out-of-date and out of touch

with the party and the new ideas coming into it. Had he stood aside earlier,

the Liberals may have been better able to make the transition to a new and

effective leadership and to adapt themselves to new social forces and polit-

ical challenges. ‘I am a survival’, was how Gladstone put it, ‘a survival from

the time of Sir Robert Peel’. His colleagues ‘felt this’ – they were decades

younger than him and thought his retirement overdue. ‘I cannot sym-

pathise with much of the talk of the present day and they knew it.’ He

said to Lionel Tollemache he was ‘Conservative in a certain sense’. It would

have been more accurate to say ‘Peelite’, for he admitted he yearned for

‘the impossible revival of the men and the ideas of my ﬁrst 20 years which

immediately followed the ﬁrst Reform Act.’ In 1896 he looked back nos-

talgically to the statesmen of old and the days of Melbourne, Russell,

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Wellington and Peel – ‘we have fallen miles since then’. ‘Rather than be

under any government now’, he told Lord Rendel, ‘in such matters, he

would like to have back the Tories of old days’.

‘The future is to me a blank’, he confessed in 1896. ‘I cannot at all guess

what is coming.’ He was, he said, ‘not so much afraid either of Democracy

or of Science as of the love of money. This seems to me to be a growing

evil. Also, there is a danger from the growth of the dreadful military spirit.’

At other times he denounced ‘the mad race and rivalry of armament’ and

fulminated ‘militarism is a reversion towards barbarism’. He spoke critically

of imperialism and ‘Jingoism’. In the last months of his life in 1898, he

was concerned about ‘the gloom and anxiety of the general outlook … the

prospect in Europe was more and more overclouded’. On a cruise of the Baltic

in 1895 he had seen the Kaiser reviewing the German ﬂeet at the opening

of the Kiel Canal and predicted: ‘This means war!’

Gladstone liked to refer to his ‘political death’ in 1894. But, as Feucht-

wanger noted, his ‘authority was … still so great that any move on his

part caused more than a ripple in the muddied waters of Liberal politics.

Nobody could be certain he might not sweep back into the arena as he had

done before.’ In July 1894 he had been asked about Home Rule and said,

‘if I could still do anything for that, I would – but as to all the rest, I have

done with it’. However, echoing events of 20 years earlier, his controversial

intervention on the issue of the Armenian massacres brought him back

brieﬂy onto the political stage, meeting deputations, writing to the press

and making his last great public speeches. He called for strong action and

argued the Turkish empire should be wiped off the map. The more direct

impact was on the inﬁghting within his own unhappy party. Shortly after

Gladstone’s September 1896 speech in Liverpool, Rosebery – ill at ease and

miserable under his great predecessor’s shadow and looking for a way out

of the leadership – resigned, saying Gladstone had dealt him the coup de

grace ‘by enabling discontented Liberals to pelt me with your authority’.

Gladstone lived for a little over four years after retiring as prime minister.

Colleagues and visitors reported that though an old man, he still seemed

well, cheerful and in good spirits, and relatively vigorous for the ﬁrst three

years or so, into late 1897. A cataract operation in May 1894 was not

wholly successful, leaving him virtually half-blind, so that reading and

writing became more difﬁcult. But his ‘table talk’ was still sharp and opin-

ionated, and he remained intellectually active in retirement, still spending

many hours at his desk in the ‘Temple of Peace’, his library at Hawarden

Castle, his home in Flintshire. He published in these years his translation of

Horace’s Odes, some long journal articles on theology, and two substantial

volumes on the works of Bishop Butler. His theological scholarship was

‘spirited’ but ‘not very subtle’ according to Jenkins; ‘old-fashioned … and

out-of-date’ according to Matthew. He had received various offers for his

autobiography – £5,000 from one publisher in 1887, £25,000 from another

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in 1891, and Andrew Carnegie had offered in 1887 the huge sum of £100,000

(£5 million today). The latter would have dwarfed Disraeli’s post-Number

10 literary earnings but Gladstone signed no contract. He wrote some auto-

biographical fragments and left papers on some particular episodes but

never planned or worked on a proper volume of memoirs. Invited to make

a United States tour in the autumn of 1894, Gladstone instead sent an axe

that was exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair.

The Gladstones had sold their London house during his second premier-

ship. Rosebery did not harry them out of Number 10. Most of the retire-

ment years were spent at Hawarden, interspersed with a number of trips in

the winter months to Cannes in the South of France, wealthy friends

picking up the bills and providing accommodation. Gladstone was a rich

man. The family’s Hawarden estate (which was not formally owned by the

G.O.M. himself) was 7,000 acres and produced an income of £10–12,000

a year. He effectively gave away most of his own money in the 1890s,

settling large capital sums on his children and giving £40,000 and 20,000

of his own books (which he moved himself to the new building in a

wheel barrow) to set up the St Deiniol’s Library (a centre for theological

study) at Hawarden. When he died his will was proved at £57,000 (around

£3 million today).

Gladstone fell ill in late 1897 and as his condition worsened and his

pain grew, cancer was diagnosed. He died, aged 88, at Hawarden on 19 May

1898. He was given a state funeral at Westminster Abbey after his cofﬁn

had lain in state in Westminster Hall. There was more pomp and ceremony

than with most prime-ministerial funerals of the last 150 years (save for

Wellington and Churchill) but it marked the passing of someone ‘iconic

for the century’, as Shannon says, a man who – like Queen Victoria herself,

who died a couple of years later – had epitomised, symbolised and provided

a background to an entire age.

Lord Rosebery (resigned 22 June 1895)

When Lord Rosebery left ofﬁce in June 1895, he had been prime minister for

just one year and 109 days. He was only 48 years old – the youngest former

prime minister there had been for 67 years, and there has not been a younger

former prime minister since then. He lived nearly another 34 years before he

died in 1929. No one since Rosebery has had so long a postpremiership. For

the ﬁrst decade of that period there was a widespread expectation Rosebery

would soon be back, heading another government or in a high national

ofﬁce. He remained a celebrity ﬁgure and a major presence on the political

stage. But his star then faded, he dropped out of public life and became a sad,

isolated and reclusive ﬁgure many years before he died.

Rosebery’s premiership was a failure. Probably anyone taking over

after Gladstone in 1894 would have struggled to chart a course, hold the

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government together, and overcome divisions in the Liberal Cabinet and

the party. Leading from the Lords made Rosebery’s task even more difﬁcult.

He was personally not up to the challenge, being too temperamental, thin-

skinned and brittle a character to be an effective prime minister. He suf-

fered in 1895 a complete nervous and physical breakdown, with serious

inﬂuenza, depression and a recurrence of his chronic and disabling insom-

nia. Heavy doses of morphine and tranquillisers were needed to pull him

through. Some commentators have speculated that in addition to the polit-

ical and personal stresses and strains of ofﬁce, Rosebery’s collapse was

brought about by fear of being exposed in a homosexual scandal, linked

to the Oscar Wilde trial, though his latest biographer, Leo McKinstry, has

comprehensively demolished this conspiracy theory.

The disintegration of Rosebery’s government was like a slow-motion rail

crash, the end coming when ministers jumped at the opportunity to resign

after losing a snap vote in the Commons on army supplies of cordite.

Rosebery rushed off to see Queen Victoria at Windsor and as a parting

honour she invested him with the Order of the Thistle (in 1892 he had

become a Knight of the Garter). ‘There are two supreme pleasures in life’,

he later wrote. ‘One is 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.’ On his last night in Downing Street he dined with

Gladstone and the two statesmen were described as being as ‘merry as boys

out of school’. Lord Salisbury immediately called an election, the Conserv-

atives winning a landslide majority. Rosebery felt the Liberals’ heavy defeat

was ‘inevitable’ and a ‘great blessing’, forcing the party ﬁnally to confront

pressing questions of policy, identity and strategy. Yet at the same time, it

had all been a shattering experience, and Rosebery was, as McKinstry says,

haunted by a sense of failure, for the rest of his life brooding on the

traumas of 1894–95 and often declaring he wished he had never accepted

ofﬁce. Rosebery, after his ordeal in Number 10, was once described as like ‘a

burnt child dreading the ﬁre’. When chances of a return occurred in the

years ahead, part of him always recoiled. For the rest of his life he held a

celebratory dinner each year on the anniversary of the fatal cordite vote.

The Liberals’ eviction from ofﬁce caused ﬁnancial headaches for Rosebery’s

Home Secretary and a future prime minister, H.H. Asquith, who had to go

back to earning his living at the bar. Rosebery himself, who was enor-

mously wealthy, can scarcely have noticed the loss of his prime-ministerial

salary. He had inherited his titles, estates and an income of £30,000 a year

when only 21, going on to marry a Rothschild heiress, which increased his

total income to £140,000 (something like £9 million a year today). At death

he left £1.5 million (equivalent to over £50 million today), which did not

include extensive properties made over to his heir several years before. He

had grand houses at Mentmore, Berkeley Square, Dalmeny in Scotland, The

Durdans at Epsom, a villa at Naples, thousands of acres, and a yacht. But

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the death of his wife, Hannah, in 1890 had robbed him of a vital emotional

prop and support. His grief was life-long, and the tragedy accentuated

his solitariness, moodiness, introspection and dislike of the rough and tumble

of political life. He remained a widower, though there are suggestions that at

different times he contemplated remarriage to one of the daughters of the

Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) and then to a young American actress.

Horseracing and books were Rosebery’s great passions. He was successful

on the turf and his horses had won the Derby twice in his short premier-

ship, in 1894 and 1895. In 1905 he won a third Derby, his horse Cicero

setting a new record time for the course. He once joked that ‘politics and

racing were inconsistent which seemed a good reason to give up politics’.

He had one of the most magniﬁcent private libraries in the country. A vora-

cious reader, he was also a noted writer. Having published a biography of

William Pitt in 1891, he went on to write studies of Napoleon: The Last

Phase (1900), Lord Randolph Churchill (1906) and Chatham: his Early Life and

Connections (1910), together with many shorter essays and addresses. Pro-

fessional historians tended to be sniffy but the books sold well. He turned

down offers to write the biographies of Gladstone, Disraeli and Lord Kitchener,

and refused to write his own memoirs or an autobiography.

Disillusioned and disenchanted with politics, Rosebery had wanted to

quit the Liberal leadership and retire from politics immediately after the

1895 general election. He continued nominally to head the party, while

not giving it any real lead, for more than a year after the defeat. He was

adamant he would no longer work with Sir William Harcourt – the political

bruiser who had been his Chancellor of the Exchequer and led the party in

the Commons – with whom he had bitterly clashed and who held Rosebery

in contempt. He was looking for a way out from an intolerable position

and in October 1896 seized upon Gladstone’s advocacy of strong action

over the Armenian massacres, an issue on which the bulk of the party

backed the G.O.M.’s line and wanted Rosebery to speak out more, to resign

as party leader. He wanted, he told friends, to free himself from the ‘Glad-

stonian chains’ he had been bound by since he had entered politics and

was through with the thankless role of acting as ‘Mr G’s political executor’.

While there was unhappiness and discontent with Rosebery within the

party, his supporters and allies were shocked and dismayed; Asquith later

commented ‘there are many who cannot forget or forgive his timely escape,

in a life-boat constructed to hold one person, from the water-logged ship.’

Rosebery believed the Liberal Party needed to change – moving beyond

home rule and its ‘faddist’ programme, becoming something more than

a party of protest or ‘a mad mob of dervishes, each waving his own ﬂag

and howling curses on everyone else’s’, widening its electoral support, and

being alert to the danger of being displaced by the polarisation of the

‘forces of socialism and reaction’ – but he did not want to be involved in

the hand-to-hand political ﬁghting necessary to implement that change.

Peel to Rosebery 101

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10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston