Gladstone: A Biography Read online

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  PART ONE

  A TALENTED AND TORTURED YOUNG MAN

  1809–1852

  1. A Liverpool Gentleman?

  2. A Grand Tour Ending at Newark

  3. A Clumsy Suitor

  4. Peel’s Apprentice

  5. Orator, Zealot and Debtor

  6. Mid-Century Frenzy

  7. Ladies of the Night

  8. The Tremendous Projectile

  PART TWO

  A MIDDLE-AGED MID-VICTORIAN STATESMAN

  1852–1868

  9. The Chancellor Who Made the Job

  10. The Decline and Fall of the Aberdeen Coalition

  11. Health and Wealth

  12. A Short Odyssey for a British Ulysses

  13. The Hostile Partnership with Palmerston

  14. God’s Vicar in the Treasury

  15. The People’s William

  16. Disraeli’s Foil

  PART THREE

  THE FIRST PREMIERSHIP AND THE FIRST RETIREMENT

  1868–1876

  17. ‘My Mission is to Pacify Ireland’

  18. A Commanding Prime Minister

  19. Irish Land and European War

  20. Sovereign and Prime Minister

  21. ‘Ever and Anon the Dark Rumbling of the Sea’

  22. Defeat and Retirement

  23. The Temporary Withdrawal

  PART FOUR

  THE REBOUND INTO THE SECOND PREMIERSHIP

  1876–1885

  24. ‘Of All the Bulgarian Horrors Perhaps the Greatest’

  25. Midlothian Beckons

  26. Victory, Where Are Thy Fruits?

  27. Gladstone Becomes the Grand Old Man

  28. The Cloud in the West Darkens

  29. The Third Reform Bill

  30. Murderer of Gordon?

  PART FIVE

  IRELAND DOMINATES AND AGE WITHERS

  1885–1898

  31. Slow Road to Damascus

  32. Schism and Failure

  33. ‘The Union – and Disunion – of Hearts’

  34. The Leaden Victory

  35. Last Exit to Hawarden

  36. The Closing of the Doors of the Senses

  References

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Section One

  Gladstone’s birthplace, Rodney Street, Liverpool (Topham)

  Seaforth House

  George Canning (National Portrait Gallery)

  Arthur Hallam (National Portrait Gallery)

  Christ Church, Oxford

  Fasque, Kincardineshire

  Hawarden, Flintshire

  Catherine Gladstone (formerly Glynne) by F. R. Say (John Mills Photography)

  Gladstone as the new MP for Newark with his brother, Thomas

  Gladstone as a young man by William Bradley (Sir William Gladstone)

  Sir John Gladstone by William Bradley

  Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington by Winterhalter (The House of Lords)

  Section Two

  John Keble (By permission of the Wardens and Fellows of Keble College, Oxford)

  John Henry Newman, later Cardinal, by Sir William Ross (By permission of the Wardens and Fellows of Keble College, Oxford)

  James Hope-Scott (National Galleries of Scotland)

  Bishop Samuel Wilberforce of Oxford and later Winchester (National Portrait Gallery)

  Henry Manning, Anglican Archdeacon of Chichester, later Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminister, and then Cardinal (National Portrait Gallery)

  Gladstone in 1858 (National Portrait Gallery)

  The fourth Earl of Aberdeen (National Portrait Gallery)

  Lord John Russell (National Portait Gallery)

  Sidney Herbert by G. R. Ward

  Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, by Winterhalter (In a private Scottish collection)

  Lady with the Coronet of Jasmine, the portrait of Marion Summerhayes by William Dyce (Aberdeen Art Gallery)

  Laura Thistlethwayte

  Palmerston (National Portrait Gallery)

  Disraeli (National Portrait Gallery)

  Section Three

  Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort towards the end of Albert’s life taken by Mayall at Windsor Castle

  Queen Victoria in the 1890s

  Gladstone family photograph taken at Hawarden Castle circa 1868 (Topham)

  Tree-felling scene at Hawarden, probably in a mid-1880s autumn (National Portrait Gallery)

  Arthur James Balfour by Richmond in 1876

  The eighth Duke of Argyll (National Portrait Gallery)

  The Cabinet in 1883 (The House of Lords)

  The Prince of Wales circa 1875

  The second Earl Granville by G. Barnett Smith

  The Edinbugh of the Midlothian Campaign (National Monuments Record of Scotland)

  Lord Hartington, later eighth Duke of Devonshire (National Portrait Gallery)

  The fifth Earl Spencer (National Portrait Gallery)

  Joseph Chamberlain (National Portrait Gallery)

  Sir Charles Dilke (British Library)

  A Gladstone family group at Hawarden in the mid-1880s (Clwyd Record Office)

  Belabouring an Egyptian: an 1882 Punch cartoon

  Gladstone flanked by his official family of private secretaries, circa 1883

  Section Four

  General Charles Gordon (National Portrait Gallery)

  Dinner at Haddo House in 1884 by A. E. Emslie (National Portrait Gallery)

  Gladstone and Dollinger photographed in 1886 by Lehnbach in Bavaria

  Charles Stewart Parnell

  Katherine O’Shea

  Gladstone reading in the Temple of Peace, his Hawarden library, circa 1888 (National Portrait Gallery)

  Gladstone writing with great difficulty circa 1895 (Topham)

  Tennyson in 1890 (National Portrait Gallery)

  The filth Earl of Rosebery (National Portrait Gallery)

  Sir William Harcourt (Hulton Picture Library)

  John Morley (National Portrait Gallery)

  H. H. Asquith as a young Home Secretary in 1894

  The third Marquess of Salisbury (National Portrait Gallery)

  The Gladstones on one of their last drives (National Portrait Gallery)

  PREFACE

  This attempt to write a full-scale but not multi-volume biography of Gladstone is by far my rashest literary enterprise. It is like suddenly deciding, at a late stage in life and after a sedate middle age, to climb the rougher face of the Matterhorn. I hesitated for some time after the idea was suggested to me. But eventually the fascination of the subject, aided maybe by an inherent liking for taking a risk, overcame my caution at the presumption of the task.

  The fascination arises from Gladstone’s own peculiar qualities and pre-eminence. He was the quintessential Victorian statesman, fitting the reign, although not latterly the prejudices of the Queen, like a hand into a glove. He first briefly held office two years before Victoria’s accession and he predeceased her by only two and a half years. Of the other great politicians of the age, Peel survived little more than a fifth of the Queen’s reign, Palmerston was always more of a throwback to the Regency than a true Victorian, Disraeli was an exotic exile from lusher civilizations cast up on the shore of England, and Salisbury, although undoubtedly English and looking like a caricature of a Victorian, practised a detached statecraft which would equally well have been pursued at the time of the early Cecils or from such another capital as Vienna.

  Gladstone, however, was uniquely matched to nineteenth-century Britain. The evolving size of the electorate suited him perfectly. During his active lifetime and keeping v
ery good step with his increasing democratic enthusiasm it moved from half to a million to a little over five million, large enough to accommodate his taste for mass audiences but restrictive enough to prevent his instinctive sense of hierarchy becoming obviously anomalous. It also suited him well that Britain was the most powerful country in the world. He hated ‘jingoism’ (a phrase coined only in his sixty-ninth year) and deeply disapproved of the showy imperialism which he saw as Disraeli’s hallmark. The Concert of Europe was his frequently reiterated lodestar. ‘Securus judicat orbis terrarum’ (the united verdict of the whole world must be accepted as conclusive), which was Newman’s ultimate reason for joining the Church of Rome, did not lead Gladstone in that particular direction. The concept nonetheless had a most powerful impact upon his later policy positions, in relation particularly to justice for Ireland. As, however, he liked pronouncing with great moral force upon international issues, it suited him well that he was able to do so from such a pulpit of power. Britain’s reduced late-twentieth-century status would have been less suited to his style.

  He was also lucky that his sixty-three years of active politics embraced no war which threatened Britain’s vital security. The Napoleonic Wars were over when he was five. The First World War was nearly a generation after his retirement. Of the two medium-grade conflicts, the South African War began in the year after his death, and the Crimean War was the only one for which he bore any responsibility. He had no natural martial spirit and his uneasy experience with the Crimean conflict underlined his good fortune in not having, like Asquith, to try to turn himself from a peacetime to a wartime leader. Unlike the two Pitts, Lloyd George and Churchill, therefore, he was not tested in a fight for survival.

  Perhaps for this reason I hesitate to claim that he was Britain’s greatest Prime Minister. He made many mistakes, failed to carry his last endeavour of Home Rule for Ireland, and left a squabbling Liberal party which was excluded from office for a short generation after his withdrawal. But I have no doubt that he was the most remarkable specimen of humanity of all the fifty who, from Walpole to Major, have so far held the office of British Prime Minister. This was partly a question of his prodigious energy. He lived for nearly eighty-nine years, a more unusual feat a hundred years ago than it is today, and although he spent a surprising amount of time on a sickbed he always bounced back with devastating vigour. He read over 20,000 books. He chopped down innumerable trees. He could walk vast distances in Snowdonia or the Scottish Highlands, but sometimes just in the ordinary course of his life, from Chester station to Hawarden, or around the less respectable parts of the West End of London, trying to redeem prostitutes, but filling himself as a result of these irresistible excursions with far more guilt than self-righteousness. He was a great classicist, although perhaps a powerful rather than a subtle scholar. Homer and Dante were his literary heroes, but he also read contemporary fiction (and in the prolific mid-Victorian period there was a lot of it) in a way that no subsequent Prime Minister has done.

  At the same time he claimed, and to some extent justified the claim, that religion was more important to him than politics. He was deeply involved in all the theological and liturgical battles of the nineteenth century. He was a compelling orator who, despite his addiction to endless sentences, convoluted constructions, and classical allusion and quotation, could hold both the House of Commons and popular audiences transfixed for hours at a time. This was largely a function of his physical magnetism, his flashing eye and the eagle’s swoop of his cadences. He had all the earnestness of Victorian England, yet he was rarely dull. He was always the biggest beast in the forest, and he had inherent star quality, difficult to define but on the rare occasions when it exists easy to recognize. Everything he did he infused with a touch of magic. In this respect he was comparable among his near contemporaries with Newman, with Tennyson, with Darwin, maybe Carlyle, and some (but not I) would say with Dickens. In any event it was a select company.

  To attempt to write afresh about such a creature, by and about whom the number of books is already incomparable and whose papers, in the British Library Catalogue, amount to 750 volumes, is obviously a formidable undertaking. This mammoth bibliography, at least ten if not twenty times that relating to Asquith for instance, does not however comprise much in the way of recent general biography. In this category Disraeli has proved far more of a modern honeypot. One or two long essays apart, there has been nothing written as complete biography since Sir Philip Magnus’s Gladstone, which appeared forty-one years ago. Magnus still reads freshly and is in the idiom of modern biography, although to my mind wrong on a number of points, including in particular Gladstone’s motivation in his prostitute-reclaiming activities. And the interval back to Magnus is now almost as long as the fifty-one years separating his work from John Morley’s massive and splendid three volumes which appeared simultaneously only five years after Gladstone’s death. Morley’s was a commissioned ‘tombstone’ life, although one at the very top of this category, and inevitably therefore now appears somewhat dated in format and over-respectful in content.

  Complete biographies apart, there is the dense, informative and controversial half-life by Professor R. T. Shannon of Swansea. The first volume (up to 1865) appeared in 1982, and was obviously intended to be followed by another, but as that has not yet been forthcoming there arises some doubt whether the half will become a whole. Then there are the collected introductions of Professor H. C. G. Matthew, the doyen (in spite of his relative youth) of Gladstone experts, who has just brought to triumphant completion the fourteen-volume edition of Gladstone’s diaries, which work of dedicated and brilliant scholarship he took over from Professor M. R. D. Foot twenty-three years and twelve volumes back. The two volumes of Professor Matthew’s introductions between them cover the complete life, with an 1874 break point, but they were not written as a whole or with an explicit biographical intention, even though the result, almost as a by-product, has been a considerable biographical achievement.

  Nonetheless Gladstone biographical territory is not over-populated, and, although I encountered many difficulties in comprehending some facets of Gladstone’s multifarious interests and activities, I never found myself short of new things to say about him. My book is written from published sources. I have no new cache of material, as I did in the case of Asquith with the then unused letters to Venetia Stanley. But the published sources are in Gladstone’s case so vast and variegated that I in no way felt that this constrained me to move only along over-trodden paths.

  Throughout I have been anxious to set Gladstone in the context of other British Prime Ministers and proximate political figures, those who have come after him as well as those who came before. I have also tried to relate nineteenth-century patterns of political life to those of today, although often more by contrast than by affinity. For this purpose I have drawn extensively on the details of Victorian habits, travel arrangements, meal-times, property values, for which Gladstone’s diaries are an unusually rich and detailed source, as well as on my own experience of modern political life. I have also tried to retain Gladstone’s vivid interest in landscape and buildings. Relating Victorian mentalité, particularly in matters of religion, to that of today has presented a more difficult problem. Yet it is impossible to write adequately about Gladstone, even more during his first forty than during his last twenty years in politics, without engaging closely with both the framework and the content of his religion.

  This has been the more necessary because I have to some extent adopted a policy of ‘front-end loading’. The image of Gladstone which readily springs to most people’s minds is that of a somewhat wild-eyed and wild-haired old man in a hurry, a prophet from the Midlothian hills to his admirers, a destructive obsessive concerned only with Ireland to his detractors. Yet Gladstone’s career cannot possibly be seen in perspective if his old age is allowed to obscure either his talented if somewhat priggish youth or his occasionally unhinged but immensely productive middle age. He was a Cabinet minis
ter at thirty-three. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer for fourteen budgets between his forty-third and his fifty-seventh birthdays and was so successful that he enhanced not only his own career but also the long-term status of the office. And until almost his sixtieth year his interest in Ireland was less than that of the average British politician.

  His life will not be seen in focus if it is looked at primarily through the telescope of his last two or even his last three premierships. I have therefore given full weight to the earlier period, devoting nearly half the book to the years before even the first of his four premierships. This was made easier by my belief that he led the most interesting pre-Prime Ministerial life of any of his predecessors except for the Duke of Wellington.

  I have accumulated many debts in the process of bringing the large ship of Gladstone into some sort of harbour. My agent Michael Sissons and my then publisher Roland Philipps were responsible for the original idea. Michael Sissons has remained an invaluable adviser and Roland Philipps’s successors at Macmillan, William Armstrong and Tanya Stobbs, have provided much publishing skill and attention. Peter James has once again, as with my autobiography A Life at the Centre, been an exceptional freelance editor, and Douglas Matthews, former librarian of the London Library, has once more compiled a complicated index. None of them would, however, have been able to function had not Mary Rundell transformed my increasingly elusive handwriting into a series of typescripts of diminishing inaccuracy.

  Outside the process of book-making my largest debt is to Professor H. C. G. Matthew. The Gladstone diaries, in spite of their author’s taste for obscurity, are made almost pellucid by the quality of his editing. And, once understood, they constitute a unique background of detailed fact, like a fine tapestry dominating one wall of a library, against which to construct a Gladstone narrative and try out Gladstone theories. In addition Colin Matthew was good enough to apply his eagle eye to any inaccuracies in my manuscript, while standing well back from its opinions and interpretations.

  My second debt is to Sir William Gladstone, the present holder of the baronetcy which Peel conferred upon old John Gladstone in 1846, and also the proprietor of both the Hawarden and the Fasque estates. By several times welcoming me to Hawarden and straightening out some of my topography (and occasionally my history as well) he has greatly facilitated my task.