Alistair Lexden
No Work of Family Piety
Lansdowne: The Last Great Whig, Simon Kerry, Unicorn, £25.00, 448 pp. (Hardcover)
Some reputations seem to be irretrievably lost. No one ever has a good word for the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, whose sole interest is almost universally believed to have been the ruthless exploitation of their tenants. It is a brave person who attempts to argue that the British Empire had virtues as well as defects. A little-known American academic had the temerity to make such a claim recently in an obscure journal. A torrent of well-publicised abuse descended upon him, much of it from fellow academics more interested in fashionable posturing than in freedom of speech. A distinguished Oxford professor weighed in, calling for recognition of the good the Empire had done as well as the harm; he too incurred fierce academic ire.
The 5th Marquess of Lansdowne (1845-1927), truly the last great Whig politician, dwelt in both these highly controversial worlds. He was one of the largest Anglo-Irish landowners (with substantial estates in Scotland and England too) and a prominent imperial proconsul. His unjustly neglected career does not reinforce well-worn popular assumptions. In Ireland he strove hard to avoid reproach. As this fine, thoroughly researched biography shows, trouble-makers who came to scrutinise the management of his vast estates with malign intent went away disappointed.
Suddenly, however, he found that much more was expected of him. In the late 1870s, good stewardship and a deep concern for the welfare of tenants ceased to be enough to satisfy the critics. A new test was introduced: a willingness to accept that tenants should be given powerful statutory rights which imposed severe constraints on landlords. Lansdowne rightly saw that estates could not be run successfully in such conditions. When Gladstone started to confer those rights in 1880, he abandoned a promising career as
a junior minister in protest. The last great Whig, heir to a long tradition of carefully reasoned politics, took his first great stand against a popular political folly.
Wholly opposed to state regulation of Irish estates, he adopted a radical alternative: state purchase of them, followed by dismemberment and sale to tenants. It was through Lansdowne’s policy, not Gladstone’s, that centuries of conflict in rural Ireland were brought to an end. The Tories implemented it in a series of stages culminating in 1903, hoping not only to solve the land problem (which they did), but also to undermine Irish nationalism which had been furnished with mass political support for the first time by a nationwide campaign of organised rural protest that extracted the disastrous land reforms from Gladstone.
Lansdowne, whose overriding concern was to preserve Ireland as part of the United Kingdom, naturally became a staunch Tory ally. The last great Whig ended up working in close collaboration with his party’s historic foes, displaying a political dexterity of which Anglo-Irish landowners have generally been seen as incapable. Today, it is customary to express deep regret that Home Rule was withheld from Ireland in this period and to praise Gladstone for his far-sighted wisdom in proposing it; Lansdowne and his Tory allies were wholly unpersuaded that a stable, friendly regime could be established in Dublin, capable of ruling all of Ireland well in the face of determined Unionist opposition, particularly in Ulster.
Imperial affairs were Lansdowne’s second major preoccupation. He was ideally suited to dutiful, demanding service within the Empire, which brought him to public prominence for the first time when he was in his forties. He did not have even a touch of proconsular swagger or bravado about him. As governor-general of Canada, he assisted patiently with the development of a recently established federal system, confident that it would serve the country well as a self-governing state within the Empire.
He swiftly mastered the bizarre intricacies of government in India, summarised with impressive clarity by Simon Kerry, becoming one of
the most successful of all viceroys. Whigs stood for carefully considered, moderate reform, and that is exactly what Lansdowne gave India. His Indian Councils Bill increased Indian participation in local government, much to the satisfaction of Queen Victoria, a fierce guardian of the interests of her Indian subjects. She wanted to make Lansdowne a duke when he returned to England at the end of 1893, having drawn heavily on his own resources to supplement an inadequate salary. India did not enrich its principal public servants. Unable to live in lavish style, he declined the dukedom. Those who condemn the Empire in lurid, sweeping terms do grave injustice to a career like his.
His two great causes – Ireland and Empire – came to dominate British politics. They kept him at the very forefront of public life for the rest of his long career. After 1895 the Tories (known in this period as Unionists) would not have dreamed of forming a Cabinet without him. He was not a great success at the War Office as the army struggled to show itself superior to the Boers, though Kerry argues persuasively that bone-headed generals began to see that that they must modernise their outdated ways as a result of his reforming initiatives, advanced with calm Whig deliberation. What Kerry does most convincingly of all, however, is to establish Lansdowne’s claim to be regarded as a great Foreign Secretary, the post he held for the first five years of the twentieth century. The author does this by drawing more fully than anyone before him on the rich archives of these crucial years to reassess foreign policy, basing formidable revisionist chapters upon them.
It fell to Lansdowne to end the Unionists’ long-cherished policy of so-called splendid isolation. With its international pre-eminence under increasing challenge from ambitious rivals, Britain needed allies in order to defend its interests effectually not just in Europe, with which some historians have been unduly preoccupied, but across the globe. Lansdowne weighed up the possibilities that a complicated international diplomatic chequerboard presented in 1900 with the open-mindedness that Whigs traditionally brought to the business of statecraft. Controversially, but correctly, he saw an alliance with Japan as the best means of securing British interests
in the Far East. He encouraged the United States to exert itself more strenuously in the cause of world peace. In Europe he showed much skill in presenting to Germany the benefits of British friendship, moving prudently towards France as the Kaiser’s sabre-rattling increased. As Kerry writes, ‘Lansdowne altered British foreign policy for ever’.
Simon (Earl of) Kerry is a direct descendant of Lansdowne and the current heir to his title, but this book is no work of filial piety. Kerry is strongly critical of his forebear’s conduct as Unionist Leader of the Lords in precipitating one of the greatest of all constitutional crises by throwing out Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ in 1909. Lansdowne claimed that the Lords knew best about such matters. ‘The House of Commons’, he asserted, ‘was notoriously out of touch with the British people, and the House of Lords was fighting for popular liberties.’ But the people in the then predominant Liberal party mocked the Lords’ pretensions, and their powers were reduced. It was a serious breach of the hallowed Whig practice of avoiding political battles that could not be won.
How could such an interesting and important career have come to be so completely forgotten? The answer lies in a fateful letter. Having recently retired from office, Lansdowne wrote to The Daily Telegraph in November 1917, arguing that the time had come to consider peace terms with Germany. Passchendaele’s appalling carnage had just ended. ‘We are not going to lose this war’, he wrote, ‘but its prolongation will spell ruin to the civilised world.’ He foresaw that harsh terns of the kind ultimately inflicted on Germany at Versailles would produce no lasting peace. The letter unleashed a furore that made Lansdowne a political pariah. Kerry writes: ‘the appalling criticism he received…unjustly ruined his reputation and threw him into obscurity’.
The last great Whig would not have wanted a biography written passionately in his defence. Simon Kerry lays out the facts of a remarkable life fully and with calm authority. That is what this forgotten statesman would have regarded as the proper course, and it makes this book a major contribution to modern political history.