This, however, was but the first act of the coming tragedy. On the 7th Lord Frederick Cavendish, a brother of Lord Hartington and an intimate friend of Gladstone's, who had been appointed Chief Secretary in Forster's place to carry out the new policy of conciliation, was assassinated at Dublin with Mr. Burke, the chief permanent official, by members of an Irish secret society, known as the "Invincibles." These were in reality quite unconnected with Parnell's Parliamentary party, but the public did not discriminate between the two, and the result was a universal cry for strong measures against all forms of rebellion. For a moment Gladstone battled against this, and it was proposed to Dilke, who, as an advanced Radical, was with Chamberlain at that time friendly to the Parnellites, that he should take the post of danger at Dublin and continue, as Cavendish's successor, the task of conciliating Ireland. But Dilke did not like the look of things, and refused the post. It was found difficult to get any one to accept it. What, however, decided the abandonment of the policy of conciliation was the attitude of Hartington. He took the matter of his brother's death, which he felt deeply, as a personal wrong to be avenged, and from that moment became the most determined enemy of Irish Nationalism. Gladstone had to choose between resignation and the abandonment of his policy, and, seeing a majority of his Cabinet against him, he chose the latter. Trevelyan was sent to Dublin and new coercive measures were resolved on. And so, too, as to Egypt. Up to this point, in spite of the unconciliatory views of the Foreign Office, Gladstone, supreme in the Cabinet, had been able to put a veto on any active form of armed intervention. But now he found himself out-voted, and Egypt, too, was thrown to the wolves. "Look," his colleagues seem to have said to him, "where your policy of conciliation has led us in Ireland." If I have been rightly informed, a policy of coercion in Ireland and of intervention in
Egypt was decided on at one and the same Cabinet in the second week of May. I quote some extracts from my Diary in illustration of the double situation.1