CHAPTER I

THE RUSSELL-GLADSTONE MINISTRY

Government.

THE death of Lord Palmerston found neither his 1865. Sovereign nor his colleagues unprepared. Before the The new event had actually occurred the Queen, writing from Balmoral, "told Lord Russell that she should ask him to carry on the Government." 1 As soon as the news reached Mr. Gladstone, he at wrote to his senior colleague anticipating the choice of the Crown, and offered to retain the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, with or without the leadership in the House of Commons. On this point, however, there could not be a doubt. No sooner had Lord Russell kissed hands as First Lord of the Treasury and surrendered the Foreign Office to Lord Clarendon than he requested the Chancellor of the Exchequer to represent the Government in the other House. It was in some respects a perilous choice. For Mr. Gladstone had neither the tact, the social popularity, nor the easy-going temper of Lord Palmerston. But it was the sort of choice which ever since the days of Milton has been associated with the name of Hobson. Mr. Gladstone was so clearly the first man on the Treasury Bench that neither Sir George Grey nor any other Minister would have cared to undertake the task of leading him. Lord Russell, now Prime 1 1 Walpole's Life of Lord John Russell, ii. 407. VOL. III

B

1865.

Minister for the second time, was in his seventy-
fifth year.
Although he looked both older and
frailer than he really was, neither his age nor his
constitution fitted him for the task which he under-
took, and he would have done better to decline it.
It is true that his hands were free. The death of a
Premier dissolves his administration, and the new
broom may sweep as clean as it likes. Lord
Russell's mind was always active, and he was alive
to the necessity of enlisting recruits. Yet he
shrank from the invidiousness of personal changes.
Sir Robert Peel was, however, removed from the
Irish Office, to which he had been appointed by a
mere freak of Lord Palmerston's, and for which, as
for any other office, he was quite unfit. The new
Chief Secretary was Mr. Chichester Fortescue, a
Whig, and a prominent figure in the fashionable
society of London, but an Irishman who thoroughly
understood the history, the institutions, and the
people of his native land. His former place as
Under-Secretary for the Colonies was taken by
a sturdy Radical, William Edward Forster,
Member for Bradford. So far, all was plain
sailing, for the sacred fabric of the Cabinet had
not by the new Minister been touched. Many
changes had been made by death or resignation
since Palmerston formed it, and Lord Russell
naturally desired to strengthen it from without.
An arrangement by which in a Liberal Adminis-
tration the Prime Minister and both the Heads of
the spending departments were Peers was hard
to defend. Like Lord Palmerston ten years before,
Lord Russell approached Lord Stanley, with whom
he was on the most friendly and cordial terms.
But Lord Stanley refused, as before, to desert his
father. Whig arrogance excluded Mr. Bright, and
his own speech against reform stood in the way
1 The Duke of Somerset and Lord de Grey.

of Mr. Lowe.1 After long delay Mr. Goschen, 1865. then only thirty-four, but already famous for his treatise on the theory of foreign exchange, was at the beginning of 1866 admitted to the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy in the room of Lord Clarendon and as a recognition of the Radicals. Sir Charles Wood was compelled by a serious fall in the hunting-field to retire from the India Office, where he was succeeded by Lord de Grey. The new Secretary for War was a Member of the House of Commons, Lord Hartington, and thus the Cabinet stood at the meeting of the new Parliament.

It illustrates the lax and easy temper of the times that the House of Commons, which had been elected in July 1865, did not meet till February 1866. Before that date, however, the Cabinet of Lord Russell had to contend with serious difficulties both within and without the limits of the

in Jamaica.

United Kingdom. Lord Palmerston had only The Rising just been buried when a despatch arrived at the Colonial Office from Mr. Eyre, the Governor of Jamaica, which required the immediate attention of the Queen's Ministers. Governor Eyre, writing on the 20th of October 1865 to Mr. Secretary Cardwell, described "a most serious and alarming insurrection of the negro population." Although the negroes of Jamaica, by far the largest part of the inhabitants, had been legally free for more than thirty years, they distrusted their planter magistrates and resented their own exclusion from the soil. The Governor's language, however, was exaggerated and misleading. There was no general insurrection in Jamaica, though there was a dangerous local outbreak at Morant Bay. On the 7th of October the magis

1 This was unfortunate for the Government; Mr. Lowe being not merely a powerful debater, but also a brilliant writer in the Times.

1865.

trates then and there sitting to try an agrarian case ordered into custody a man named Geoghegan for interrupting the business of the Court. Geoghegan was protected by the bystanders, and the police were unable to arrest him. This was on a Saturday. On the following Monday warrants were issued to apprehend Paul Bogle, an influential negro, and others of less note, for riot and interference with justice. The police who attempted to execute the warrants were overpowered by a mob of armed negroes, and some of them were severely beaten. This was the signal for a general rising throughout the district of St. Thomas-in-the-East,

where

Morant Bay is situated. Paul Bogle sent out an inflammatory proclamation, and on Wednesday, the 11th of October, the volunteers, after the Riot Act had been read, fired on a crowd of blacks who were marching on the Court House. The blacks, however, were not dismayed by this timely display of vigour. They routed the volunteers, burned the Court House, and murdered about twenty white. men. There can be no doubt that these acts of violence were premeditated and part of a scheme for getting possession of land at Stony Gut, near the Bay, which the negroes alleged to be theirs by right. They objected to pay rent for land which they said was free and the property of the Queen. It is a maxim of English law that a tenant cannot dispute his landlord's title, which the very fact of his tenancy admits. But in Jamaica there was a want of impartial tribunals for determining such questions, and the magistrates were not trusted by the natives. The rising had, of course, to be put down whether the grievances were well founded or not, and in the work of suppression the Governor acted with creditable promptitude. General O'Connor, who commanded the British troops in the island, sent a hundred soldiers to Morant Bay,

and a man-of-war was also despatched from Port 1865.
Royal. By these and other measures the rebellion
was confined to the bay and prevented from
spreading through the island. On the morning of
the 13th, martial law was proclaimed by the
Governor, after consulting the Chief Justice at a
Council of War, under authority of a local statute.
Before Sunday, the 15th of October, the rising had
been entirely quelled, and then the work of ven-
geance began. Upward of four hundred persons were
put to death by martial law, and about six hundred,
including women, were flogged. At a place called
Bath men were flogged by a horrible instrument of
torture composed of wires twisted round cords. No
fewer than one thousand houses were burned.
infliction of these penalties was continued long
after resistance to authority had ceased. On the
30th of October the Governor stated that "the
wicked rebellion lately existing," not throughout
the island of Jamaica, but "in certain parts of the
county of Surrey," had been subdued, while in his
despatch to the Secretary of State he said that his
"first night of quiet and rest was the night of
the 15th. The Courts-Martial went on sitting for
weeks after peace had been restored, and much
indignation was excited at home by the discovery
that women had been flogged.

The

Gordon.

But the case which attracted most public interest The case of was the execution of George William Gordon on a charge of high treason. Gordon was a coloured man, by religious profession a Baptist, a landed proprietor, though in embarrassed circumstances, and a Member of the House of Assembly. He was disaffected to the Government, disliked the Governor, and encouraged the negroes in their agrarian demands. His vanity was more obvious than his capacity, and he flattered himself that while using incendiary language he could keep