In 1880 Lord Randolph Churchill was regarded as a trifler; in 1885 he was definitely numbered among the three or four men who counted in British politics; in 1890 he was, politically speaking, a ghost; and in 1895 he died. His whole political career—or at least that part of it which could distinguish him from the ordinary representative of a family borough—scarcely extended to fifteen years; the significant part of it was compressed within five. Yet those five years sufficed to give him an ascendancy in the Tory Party far more marked than that which Disraeli had established after decades of laborious application. The moment before his fall it seemed certain that he, and no other, would shape Tory policy; that he would, sooner or later, oust the Cecils; that he would get rid of the Birmingham influence; and that, within some quite measurable period, he would, with undisputed authority, reign over a Cabinet of young Tories committed to the task of making actual part at least of the Young England dream of the great Jew who, with his usual generous appreciation of youthful talent, had marked Lord Randolph early as one who must, with any reasonable prudence and industry, play a great part in affairs.

The fall came, and within a few weeks Lord Randolph was in the position of the unfortunate deer “much marked of the melancholy Jacques.” He was bankrupt, and shunned by every “fat and greasy citizen” on the look out for rich pasturage. The men who had trembled before him had begun to wonder why they could have been so foolishly submissive. Lord Salisbury congratulated himself on having got rid of a troublesome “carbuncle,” and inwardly resolved not to run a second risk. Mr. Balfour, who could not forget the comradeship of the Fourth Party days, was like a good-natured man who sees an old schoolfellow carrying a sandwich-board in the Strand; unable to give any real help, he was only too glad to bestow some of the small change of courtesy, especially when no one in particular was looking. The ordinary crowd of place-holders and place-seekers passed by on the other side. In the inner councils of the party there reigned for a moment a queer kind of glee. It was like the breakfast after a very disturbed night in a country house. The memory of the fire, or the burglars, or the Zeppelins, or the ghost which made Lady Polly scream so dreadfully (and which turned out to be only the under-footman somnambulating in his pyjamas) gives a peculiar zest to the devilled kidneys and the grilled sole, and the best appetites belong to those who were most alarmed. Now, Lord Randolph Churchill was, to the ordinary Conservative, not one but all of these terrors. He was a fire which had actually burned many dry sticks, and threatened many more. He had broken into the Cabinet with a most ingeniously contrived set of house-breaking implements. He was much in the air, and nobody knew when he was going to drop things of explosive quality. And he was, in a certain political sense, a sham ghost and a real under-footman. That “Tory Democracy,” as old as Bolingbroke and perhaps older, was never much more than a wraith, and nobody really knew how much substance there was behind the cunning magnesium glares with which Lord Randolph sought to hypnotise the masses. But everybody did know that, with all his vigour and ability and success, there was something, so to speak, unestablished about him. He was the master of his masters, as a servant may become in certain circumstances rare in real life but common in fiction; and he used his power while it remained with him without stint or scruple. But he never quite consolidated that power; he remained always like the schemer in the novel, apparently omnipotent but really always fearful of a reverse, and compelled to go on more and more boldly because to stay still is the most dangerous thing of all. The first false step was irretrievable, because there was, after all, nothing to retrieve. Lord Randolph was not a political investor. He was a margin gambler, constantly putting his winnings to a new hazard. The game is an exciting one, and while he continues to win much is heard in praise of the punter’s genius. But one break will ruin him.

In Vivian Grey Disraeli had prophetically drawn the main lines of the character and method of his admirer and imitator. Vivian, like Lord Randolph, went in for politics for the excitement of the thing, and, also like Lord Randolph, proceeded on the assumption that every man who seems dull is a dolt. We all know how Vivian fooled and bent to his purpose the stupid Marquess of Carabas. But when the house of cards went to pieces it was the clever Vivian who looked chiefly the fool. The Marquess could go back to his park, his coverts, his stables, and his cellar; the other hardly knew where to hide. Lord Randolph’s case was not dissimilar. He used and abused men in many ways more important than himself, but up to a point he showed great dexterity; his victims were generally those whom other great people were not unwilling to wound, though delicate of striking. At last he tried his strength against equals, or perhaps superiors; he failed, and all dullness extant revelled in its revenge. It is often stated that his one mistake was that he “forgot Goschen.” It would be truer to say that he forgot the prudence which had so far underlain his apparent recklessness. We can hardly believe that a man of Lord Randolph’s intelligence seriously thought there would be any difficulty in providing a stop-gap Chancellor of the Exchequer. Goschen did as well as another, but practically anybody would do. A turn of history seldom depends on the Goschens, whether in units, or tens, or hundreds. The decided and important turn that came late in 1886 was due to quite another personality. It had become a question between the survival of the Cecils and the Cecil idea and the survival of Lord Randolph and Tory Democracy. Lord Randolph had sneered at Mr. Gladstone as “an old man in a hurry.” He himself was still a young man, by all recent political standards a very young man. He was only in his late thirties. But he was in an even greater hurry than Mr. Gladstone in his middle seventies. It is said that after the defeat of the Salisbury Government in 1885 a friend asked him the course of events. “I shall lead the Opposition for five years,” he replied. “Then I shall be Prime Minister for five years. Then I shall die.” Only one-third of this prediction was fulfilled, but that was fulfilled to the letter, or rather the figure; the estimate of his span of life was almost exact. This sense, which oppressed him from an early age, that he had not long to live, was doubtless the explanation of much. He could not wait; unless the things he wanted came quickly they were useless. Hence, probably, his break with the Cecils on a detail of finance. It was a matter in itself capable of easy accommodation. But the real reasons for the rupture were real indeed. A very little experience in office had shown Lord Randolph that, while the substantial men of Conservatism had been tolerant of, if not actually enraptured with, “Tory Democracy” as a bait for the voter, the last thing they intended to suffer was Tory Democracy in terms of legislation. His great Budget at first affected the solid Tories of the Cabinet much as the glare of the boa-constrictor does the rabbit. They listened in helpless and fascinated silence to the grandiose plan, involving much of that “spoliation” so often denounced since in “revolutionary” Chancellors of the Exchequer, and for a moment it seemed as if the audacious young Minister had won by the sheer momentum of his attack. But this dazed half-acquiescence did not long endure. Was it for this, the country gentlemen asked, that they had beaten the Radicals? And they shudderingly recalled the recent Dartford speech, in which Lord Randolph had outlined a programme of reform which The Times described as “recalling the palmy days of Mr. Gladstone.” So the Dartford programme was conscientiously emasculated. “I see it crumbling into pieces every day,” wrote Lord Randolph to Lord Salisbury in November, 1886. “I am afraid it is an idle schoolboy’s dream to suppose that Tories can legislate, as I did stupidly. They can govern and make war and increase taxation and expenditure À merveille, but legislation is not their province in a democratic constitution.”

The great question, of course, was how Lord Salisbury would act. He was not, on some points, a quite typical Conservative, though his main object, like that later of Mr. Balfour, was to avoid change as much as possible. He had been heartily with Lord Randolph in Opposition. He had approved the Churchillian programme. He was not insensible to the fact that many of the younger elements in the Conservative Party were sympathetic to it. But temperamentally Lord Salisbury was averse to the whole scheme of Tory Democracy, except perhaps as a piece of protective make-believe. If the “classes and dependents of class” could be persuaded to accept something that would cover Lord Randolph’s election pledges, well and good. But if it were a choice between the support of those classes on the one hand and on the other “trusting to public meetings and the democratic forces generally to carry you through,” then his verdict was for “work at less speed and at a lower temperature than our opponents.” When the Prime Minister had arrived at this decision there were only two courses open to Lord Randolph. In fact, there was really only one. For it was not possible for him, as for so many men, to accept the rebuff with feigned cheerfulness, to eat his own words, to defend a policy not his own, and adroitly explain away the absence of a policy that was his. His audacity (so far brilliantly successful), his hot temper, his proud and intractable spirit, and perhaps, above all, his slight expectation of long life, forbade his waiting with the patience of Disraeli for the chances time might bring. It is not surprising that he decided to leave the Cabinet with the notion of being recalled on his own terms; the astonishing thing is that a man of so strong a sense of tactics should on this occasion have played so completely into the hands of his opponents. The man of strategy placed himself in a position to receive every kind of fire without the possibility of effective return. The man of drama contrived to reserve for Christmastime, when no political explosion can vie in interest with the domestic cracker, the announcement of his resignation. If he had pondered deeply on the means of sinking himself deeper than e’er plummet sounded, he could hardly have chosen, in gross and in detail, a better method. Not Goschen, but his own rashness, made his fall like Lucifer’s.

The truth, no doubt, was that he seriously miscalculated the strength of his position. He made the clever man’s mistake of under-rating dull men, forgetting the patience of their malice and the perfection of their hypocrisy. There were people with great names and claims, but little brains, who had cried “Hosannah!” as loudly as any in public, but never ceased to mutter “Crucify him” in the Carlton Club arm-chairs. He had invaded all kinds of prescriptive rights, had smothered all sorts of peddling ambitions, had trodden heavily on the tail of Tadpole and pulled unceremoniously the nose of Taper. Success like his was bound in any case to create an imposing array of enemies; he rather unnecessarily assisted in their manufacture. With intimates, indeed, and those who came into close official relation with him, he could be charming; his manner ranged from the airiest and easiest familiarity to an old-fashioned courtesy rather strangely in contrast with his boyish face and dandyish figure. But he rarely troubled whether a chance word hurt unimportant people, and the great misery of politics is that nobody can safely be classed as unimportant. “Why will you insist on being an Ishmael—your hand against every man?” asked Mr. Chamberlain (first enemy, then friend, then enemy again) when, not content with his other troubles, Churchill went out of his way to attack a warm friend and well-wisher. There was a good deal of the Ishmaelite in Lord Randolph; his nerves seemed to demand the stimulus of combat, and in the absence of war he was given to the duel. But other men have triumphed over equal difficulties, and more is needed to explain the sudden and final failure of Lord Randolph. That the showy edifice he had erected disappeared almost as suddenly as the palace of Aladdin was due as much to the character of the material as to that of the architect. He had used the actual bricks of nineteenth-century Toryism, but the mortar he employed was no more binding than snow or butter. Something very like genius enabled him to make his house look strong and habitable—so long as it was uninhabited. But with the very day of the housewarming the mischief began.

The career of Lord Randolph, in short, was founded on a hatred and an illusion. The hatred was for the middle class. The illusion was that the Conservative Party was still the party of aristocracy, that the old quarrel between the landowner on the one side and the banker, the manufacturer and the tradesman on the other, yet persisted. He failed, not because he was before, but because he was behind his time. His dislike of the middle class was seldom hidden. Nearly every contemptuous figure he invented was suggested either by trade or by the vanities of rich tradesmen. Mr. Chamberlain, because he had made money and not inherited it, was attacked for “bandying vulgar compliments” with the young Earl of Durham. Mr. Gladstone was sneered at for living in a “castle,” not because he was a Liberal, but because he was of middle-class origin. A public man of old descent might have amused himself in chopping down one of his ancestral oaks without scornful comment from Lord Randolph. But it was intolerable, in the circumstances, that the forest should “lament, in order that Mr. Gladstone may perspire.” “Marshall and Snelgrove of debate,” “lords of suburban villas, owners of vineries and pineries”—a score of such expressions of contempt for the successful middle-class man could be culled at random from Churchill’s speeches, and they account for much of the orator’s success with working-class audiences. But though, in the revulsion against the views fashionable a little earlier, he could command much popular applause, though he could inflict great damage on the Liberal claim to represent the masses, he could, no more than Disraeli, translate his own dream of “Tory Democracy” into reality. For the Tory Party was now itself very largely middle class and only very slightly democratic. It regarded Lord Randolph’s creed much as Lord Palmerston did the Christian religion—excellent in its own place, but it must not intrude in practical affairs. The party might have forgiven him if quite convinced of his insincerity. It destroyed him on the first suspicion that he might actually be in downright earnest.

It would have been better for Lord Randolph’s fame had Fate struck once and struck no more. For him was reserved a crueller destiny. The Eighties saw his brief splendours. The Nineties witnessed only the culmination of his slow and mournful decline. He himself seems hardly to have been aware of the ravages which disease and disappointment had wrought on his fine intellect, and the latter scenes were scarcely less painful to his more generous antagonists than to the few friends who still refused to believe that he was an exhausted man and a spent political force. Nobody is more quickly forgotten than a living politician who has ceased to count, and when the end came it was with an almost ridiculous sense of remoteness that the average member of the public read the inevitable homilies on Lord Randolph’s strange and sad career. He had written his name in water and builded his house on the sands.