He was at his sharpest when he took the offensive. At Blackpool, early in 1884, he turned one of Gladstone’s endearing little traits into a sharp jab at the Grand Old Man. The GOM and his son enjoyed felling trees together. Randolph told his audience how a delegation of workingmen arrived at Gladstone’s home and were led out into the grounds, where “all around them” lay “the rotting trunks of once umbrageous trees; all around them, tossed by the winds, were boughs and bark and withered shoots. They came suddenly on the Prime Minister and Master Herbert, in scanty attire and profuse perspiration, engaged in the destruction of a gigantic oak, just giving its last dying groan.” The workmen were “permitted to gaze and worship and adore”; then each was “presented with a few chips as a memorial of that memorable scene.” Randolph swiftly developed his theme, which was that the GOM had given the delegation exactly what he had given the Empire: “Chips to the faithful allies in Afghanistan, chips to the trusting native races of South Africa, chips to the Egyptian fellah, chips to the manufacturer and the artisan, chips to the agricultural laborer, chips to the House of Commons itself. To all who leaned on Mr. Gladstone, who trusted him, and who hoped for something from him—chips, nothing but chips—hard, dry, unnourishing, indigestible chips.”49
The self-righteous GOM was particularly vulnerable to satirical oratory, and it was Randolph’s great good fortune that the Liberals should have been in power when he returned from Dublin to make his way in the House as a Tory MP. Gadflies like him flourish in opposition. It was Winston’s boyhood impression, he later wrote, that “Dizzy had been thoroughly beaten by Mr. Gladstone, so we were all flung out into Opposition and the country began to be ruined very rapidly. Everyone said it was ‘going to the dogs.’ ” Afterward, looking back, he wrote that the position of the Conservatives, as a result of that beating, had “become weak and miserable in the extreme…. Outmatched in debate, outnumbered in division, the party was pervaded by a feeling of gloom.” Dispirited, many stopped attending Parliament altogether. But for Randolph, the moment and his own mood were matched. His resentment of the men who had cut him after his row with HRH had infused him with a Jacobin spirit. The membership of the House was divided into Liberals, Conservatives, and Irish Nationalists; Randolph, without relinquishing his Tory label, founded what he called “the Fourth Party.” There were four members: himself, Sir Henry Wolff, Sir John Gorst, and Arthur Balfour. Salisbury picked up the torch of Conservative leadership after Disraeli’s death, but in his grasp it flickered low. The four free lances concentrated their fire on Gladstone and his ministers, but they did not spare the Tories’ shadow government. They dubbed Tory insiders “the Old Gang”; Salisbury’s weaker colleagues were “the Goats.” Nothing was sacred to the four, not even Disraeli’s spirit. Dizzy’s policy had been Imperium abroad and Libertas at home. Randolph challenged both. He attacked Gladstone’s occupation of Egypt and embarrassed both Gladstone and Salisbury by squaring off against Charles Bradlaugh, a professed atheist who, when elected to Parliament by Northampton, refused to take the religious oath of allegiance. There was a fiery scene in the House on February 21, 1882, when Bradlaugh appeared, produced a book, identified it as “a Testament,” and swore himself in. Randolph bounded up from his corner seat below the gangway and called the oath a farce. The book could have been anything, he said; “it might have been Fruits of Philosophy”—an appeal for birth control of which Bradlaugh was coauthor. After a series of complicated parliamentary maneuvers, Randolph persuaded the House to expel the member from Northampton. It was a brilliant coup, but it left a bad taste. Disraeli, wiser men knew, would never have permitted it. Then they remembered that Randolph, unlike his father, had never deferred to Disraeli—had, in fact, scarred him with the same rapier he was brandishing now.50
The week after his “chips” speech, Randolph stunned England by announcing that in the next election he would contest John Bright’s Birmingham seat. This was carrying the battle into the very stronghold of liberalism, the home ground of the mighty Joe Chamberlain.* He had no chance of winning, but his audacity invigorated his party and brought it recruits in workmen’s pubs, where spirit was admired. Winston, of course, was too young to appreciate this strategy. He wrote Jennie from Ascot: “Mrs Kynnersley went to Birmingham this week. And she heard they were betting two to one that Papa would get in for Birmingham.” In fact, he polled 4,216 votes to Bright’s 4,989. It was an impressive moral victory, and the next day an admirer stepped down in South Paddington, giving Randolph his seat. Randolph, by now, was the fighting heart of his party. As he moved from triumph to triumph, the House came to realize that eventually he would challenge Salisbury’s role as Conservative leader. He was still in his thirties, his following in the country was growing, and he had a rallying cry: “Tory democracy.” The party, he argued, needed new blood and wider popular appeal. Democracy was less than a charmed word among entrenched Tory diehards. The mere mention of it made Salisbury shudder, and he rejected Randolph’s proposal to bring more rank-and-file members into the party’s inner councils. The two split in 1884 in a struggle for control of the National Union of Conservative Associations. Winston, aged nine, wrote to Jennie, “Has Papa got in I hope he has. You must let me no if he does.” Papa did get in; he and Salisbury then staged a public reconciliation, each giving a little. Salisbury was still the leader, but the challenger was inching closer. “Trust the people, and the people will trust you!” Randolph told an enthusiastic crowd in Birmingham that same year. It sounded selfless. It wasn’t. Randolph had become a shrewd campaigner. The Liberals were winning elections, he concluded, because the workmen felt closer to them than to the aristocratic Conservatives. “But,” he said, “my feeling is that this earl or that marquis is much more in sympathy with the working man than the greedy nonconformist butcher or baker or candlestick maker. I want you to seize my point because it explains what I have always meant when I speak of myself as a Tory-democrat. The best class and the lowest class in England come together naturally. They like and esteem each other. They are not greasy hypocrites talking of morality and frequenting the Sunday school while sanding the sugar. They are united in England in the bonds of a frank immorality.”51
If this was devious, it wasn’t a patch on his Irish policy, which had ripened slowly during the early 1880s and was held in abeyance, to be revealed at the right moment. As Randolph’s gibes wore Gladstone down, Home Rule became the key issue in Parliament. In a close election between the two major parties, the Irish Nationalists would hold the balance of power. It says much for England’s ignorance of Ireland that Randolph’s three years in Dublin made him an expert on the country in the eyes of Parliament, even though his knowledge of the people was largely confined to glimpses from the saddle while foxhunting. Thus his exile there, which had been looked upon as punishment, turned out to be a political asset. Gladstone, whose whole career would eventually hinge on this one question, had spent only three weeks in Ireland. Yet he was on good terms with Parnell, the Nationalists’ militant leader, and he regarded that as his trump card when, on June 8, 1885, his government fell over a minor budget bill. Salisbury formed a caretaker government, but both sides knew that was of small consequence. The main event was the imminent general election.
Gladstone had miscalculated. Unable to pry an acceptable Home Rule pledge from him, Parnell issued a “Vote Tory” manifesto. Salisbury, meanwhile, had appointed Randolph to his first office. Denying him a post was impractical; his strength had been evident for a year. He had been told in camera that he would become secretary of state for India—hence his trip there, to get ready—but a problem now arose, and it was revealing. Randolph was sulking. He refused to be sworn in until he had been assured that a rival, Sir Stafford Northcote, would be denied the office of leader of the House in the caretaker government. The Queen was shocked. She wired Salisbury: “With due consideration to Lord R., do not think he should be allowed to dictate entirely his own terms, especially as he has never held office before.”52 Sali
sbury sought a meeting. Randolph refused; he had taken his stand, and that was that. Yielding, the new prime minister sent the rival to the House of Lords as the Earl of Iddesleigh, and Randolph received his seals of office from the Queen. Then, to the astonishment of all London, the man who had denounced imperialism in Egypt launched the Third Burmese War and annexed the country. Aristocratic disdain for consequences was common, but this went beyond that. The first rumors about Randolph’s unreliability and bad judgment spread through Parliament and beyond.
In effect, the election was a dead heat. The voters returned 335 Liberals, 249 Conservatives, and 86 Irish Nationalists. Salisbury and Parnell could lock the GOM in stalemate. But after the results were in, Gladstone’s youngest son revealed that his father did in fact favor Home Rule. The Irish then swung behind him, and he was again prime minister. Randolph now played a deep game. He courted the support of Irishmen on both sides of the Home Rule issue. His fight against Bradlaugh had won him the admiration of Catholics; that was one reason he had fought it. Privately, he assured Parnell that he favored Irish self-government on the local level and would oppose the coercion bill, which permitted the arrest and detention of Irish suspects without trial. Publicly, however, he became the most eloquent of Unionists; that is, opponents of Home Rule. Speaking in Belfast’s Ulster Hall, he told Irish Unionists—Protestants—that he would stick with them to the end. By now he had had a great deal of experience in demagoguery and had got into the way of it. He compared Gladstone to Macbeth before the murder of Duncan and predicted that if politicians “should be so utterly lost to every feeling and dictate of honour and courage as to hand over coldly… the lives and liberties of the Loyalists of Ireland to their hereditary and most bitter foes, make no doubt on this point: Ulster at the proper moment will resort to the supreme arbitrament of force; Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right.”53 This mischievous slogan was to be his chief contribution to history. It outlived him and his son. People are still dying for it in Northern Ireland.
Parliament rejected Gladstone’s Home Rule bill in June 1886—a quarter of his Liberals defected—and the country went to the polls again. This time the result was a Conservative landslide. The Tories held a clear majority of 118 seats over the Liberals, Irish Nationalists, and Unionists combined. Salisbury was now prime minister with a clear mandate, but as Randolph’s grandson wrote, “It had been Lord Randolph’s victory. He had pioneered it, engineered it and executed it. His exceptional services to the Party had to be recognised. He was indispensable to it.” Harris observed, “When the House met again Lord Randolph’s power had grown: he had deposed Gladstone, had won a greater position in the House than Gladstone himself.” Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, offered the post of party leader of the House by Salisbury, insisted on stepping aside for the Tories’ most brilliant campaigner. He wrote: “I felt that Lord Randolph Churchill was superior in eloquence, ability and influence to myself; that the position of Leader in name, but not in fact, would be intolerable; and that it was better for the party and the country that the Leader in fact should also be Leader in name.” Randolph was good in the job. He was always in his seat, always informed, always an able tactician. And he could be charming when he chose. Margot Asquith boldly invited both him and Gladstone to her Grosvenor Square home. Randolph, she recalled afterward, “had made himself famous by attacking and abusing the Grand Old Man with such virulence that everyone thought it impossible that they could ever meet in intimacy…. I was not awed by this but asked them to a luncheon-party; and they both accepted. I need hardly say that when they met they talked with fluency and interest, for it was as impossible for Mr Gladstone to be gauche or rude as it was for anyone to be ill at ease with Lord Randolph Churchill. The news of their lunching with us spread all over London; and the West End buzzed round me with questions: all the political ladies, including the Duchess of Manchester, were torn with curiosity to know whether Randolph was going to join the Liberal Party.”54
And yet…
Everyone who had worked closely with Randolph knew that he had a dark underside. Certainly Salisbury was aware of it. He would have disputed Mrs. Asquith; he was always ill at ease with Churchill. He had found him rude, peevish, temperamental, and, much of the time, unapproachable. The four crosses he bore, he said, were “the Prime Ministership, the Foreign Office, the Queen, and Randolph Churchill—and the burden of them increases in that order.” Randolph had been an exasperating colleague in the India Office the year before. Salisbury’s friends were appalled, therefore, when he appointed him chancellor of the Exchequer, the second most powerful position in the government. Even Randolph’s friends were apprehensive. Lord Rosebery wrote that the new chancellor had displayed “certain defects of brain and character which are inconsistent with the highest statesmanship.” And the Exchequer was the last place where he might succeed. Commenting on the columns of decimals in his budget, he growled, “I could never make out what those damned dots meant.” But Salisbury knew what he was doing. He owed his landslide to Randolph. No one could say he was ungrateful now. At the same time, he was alert to the fact that Randolph was after his job. So he had put him into an impossible position and then sat back, waiting for him to destroy himself.55
It took six months. “Very soon,” Harris heard, “there were rumors of disputes in the Cabinet.”56 Churchill was restive in harness; being a critic had been more fun. Tiring of the damned dots, he took a subversive interest in the affairs of other ministers. On October 3, without consulting Salisbury, he delivered a sensational speech before fourteen thousand people at Oakfield Park, Dartford, demanding more sovereignty for local governments in England, close ties with Germany and Austria-Hungary, and stiff protests against Russian influence in the Balkans—all at odds with the prime minister’s programs. Next he submitted a startling budget to the cabinet. He proposed to reduce taxes and military spending: a plank right out of Gladstone’s platform. Salisbury calmly rejected it. Churchill then decided to force his hand. He did it in the worst possible way.
His relationship with the Queen had been improving steadily. Victoria admired success. And he had been courting her. She disliked the patronizing Gladstone—“He always addresses me as though I were a public meeting,” she complained—and was pleased by Randolph’s more graceful approach. He wrote to her constantly, explaining political developments without a flicker of condescension. On September 22 she had expressed her gratitude to him: “Now that the session is over, the Queen wishes to write and thank Lord Randolph Churchill for his regular and full and interesting reports of the debates in the House of Commons, which must have been most trying. Lord Randolph has shown much skill and judgement in his leadership during the exceptional session of Parliament.” She asked him to dine with her at Windsor Castle on December 20. He was immensely pleased; it was his first royal invitation since the row over her son’s love letters to Lady Aylesford. The dinner went exceptionally well. On his return he glowed. Victoria, he told Harris, had called him “a true statesman.” He in return felt that she was “a great woman, one of the wisest and best of women.” What he did not tell Harris was that he had used the Queen’s letter paper to write a letter of resignation from the cabinet. He had shown it to a fellow guest at the castle, Lord George Hamilton, the first lord of the Admiralty. Hamilton had remonstrated: “You cannot send a letter like that to Salisbury. Won’t you consult somebody?” Randolph had replied, “No, I won’t consult anybody.” Nor had he. By Tuesday, December 21, the letter was in the prime minister’s hands.57
On Wednesday evening, while Churchill was dining at the Carlton Club with Sir Henry Wolff, a messenger handed him Salisbury’s reply. His resignation had been accepted. As Winston later wrote, Salisbury was doubtless “glad to have the whole power in his hands, instead of dividing it with a restless rival, entrenched in the leadership of the House of Commons and the control of the public purse.” Randolph hadn’t expected this—he had come to think of himself as indispensable—but he wasn’t dejected. Indeed
, he seemed strangely euphoric. Taking a cab to Connaught Place, he and Sir Henry picked up Jennie, and the three of them proceeded to the Strand Theatre. The play was Sheridan’s School for Scandal, a theme of special interest to Jennie. She knew nothing of his letter. As they settled in the stalls, she mentioned the guest list for an official reception she was planning. He said enigmatically, “Oh, I shouldn’t worry about that if I were you. It probably will never take place.” Before she could ask him what he meant, the curtain rose, and when it fell on the first act, he excused himself, saying that he was returning to the club.58
Actually, he went to The Times and gave the editor copies of his correspondence with the prime minister, including a final, savage note from him to Salisbury. The editor read this last and said, “You can’t send that.” Lord Randolph said, “It has already gone.” He then said he expected, in exchange for the scoop, editorial support from The Times. Nothing doing, the editor replied; indeed, the paper would attack him. That jarred Randolph, but not much; he was under the illusion that the party would rise up, depose Salisbury, and make him Salisbury’s successor. He told a friend, “There is only one place, that is Prime Minister. I like to be boss. I like to hold the reins.” In the morning he welcomed Harris to Connaught Place with the merry cry: “What do you think of it? More than two hundred and fifty Tory members come to attest their allegiance to me. I’ve won! The Old Gang will have to give in.” But when Harris returned a few days later, Randolph said gloomily, “The rats desert the sinking ship.”59