Gladstone: A Biography Read online

  The two members for the University in the Parliament of 1841 had been Sir Robert Inglis of Christ Church, who had beaten Peel in the immediate aftermath of Catholic emancipation, and Thomas Bucknall-Estcourt of Corpus Christi College, who had sat obscurely since 1826. Inglis was a genial man of reactionary views. His geniality endeared him to the House of Commons (Peel in 1847, and in spite of 1829, came to Oxford to vote for him – and for Gladstone), as his views did to a large part of the Oxford electorate. He was impregnable in his seat.

  Estcourt wished to retire, and Gladstone’s name as a possible replacement began to be actively canvassed in May. Edward Cardwell, recently Financial Secretary to the Treasury, later to be Gladstone’s Secretary of State for War, was already in the lists with Peel’s support, but he was bundled out of the way. Gladstone was formally nominated in the Sheldonian Theatre on 29 July by the Rector of Exeter (Richards) in a Latin speech of notable succinctness. Inglis was nominated on the same occasion by a canon of Christ Church, and a third candidate, Professor Charles Round, by the Master of Balliol (Jenkyns). Round was an Evangelical, procured with some difficulty to run against Gladstone. It was not thought worth running against Inglis.

  Gladstone, however, had considerable High Anglican and liberal Church support. Helpfully from the point of view of rallying the Anglo-Catholics, Keble surprisingly described him as ‘Pusey in a blue coat’. By ‘blue coat’ he probably meant no more than that Gladstone was not ‘of the cloth’, but it was surprising because there were few people who were less inclined to carry the flashier fashions of the Regency into the Victorian age than was Gladstone; and in any event there was by 1847 hardly anyone other than the first Marquess of Anglesey who habitually wore a blue coat in London.

  So the Anglo-Catholics, rallied by Keble, liked Gladstone because they thought (rightly) that he was a Tractarian sympathizer and because they knew that he had come specially to Oxford in 1845 to vote (unavailingly) against the Heads of Houses and in favour of W. G. Ward, fellow of Balliol and father of Newman’s first biographer, being deprived of his degree for heresy. The liberals meanwhile hoped that Gladstone would be in favour of reform of the University, if need be by Parliament. This looked to the curbing of the oligarchic power which the Heads of Houses had appropriated to themselves and which they had used against Ward and attempted to use against Newman’s ‘Tract 90’.

  As a result Gladstone was supported by very few of these Heads – only four, as against the sixteen who voted for Round. But this was balanced by a strong Gladstone preponderance among the fellows of colleges, particularly those who had achieved firsts, double firsts or University prizes. His named supporters included John Ruskin, Arthur Hugh Clough, Frederick Temple (future archbishop and father of another future archbishop) and Benjamin Jowett, who as a future and still more notable Master of Balliol balanced Richard Jenkyns.

  His opponents were equally varied and some distinctly intemperate. He called on Dr Routh, the ninety-two-year-old President of Magdalen, who had held that office since 1791 and had another seven years still to go, but found him adamantly opposed to having a second Christ Church member for the University. This indeed was one of the counts used against Gladstone throughout the election, but it was inoffensively factual compared with some of the other charges against him. One was that he was tainted by his sister Helen’s apostasy, and a secret Roman himself. Ashley (then a Whig MP, later Shaftesbury) showed that an Evangelical philanthropist was well capable of partisan invective by describing Gladstone as a ‘mystified, slippery, uncertain, politico-Churchman, a non-Romanist Jesuit’.7

  Another and largely contradictory count against Gladstone was that he had already shown his liberalism by voting for the Dissenters’ Chapels Bill in 1845. This charge, however, was a dangerous one for Round, who was the candidate not only of the Evangelicals but also of the old high-and-dry faction in the University, which was horrified when it came to light that Round had not only favoured tolerance to Dissenters but was on the verge of being one himself. He had actually attended a Dissenting chapel, once in 1845 and three times in 1846, so he reluctantly confessed. The fact that the Oxford election was fought among an elevated electorate and on religious rather than political issues appeared to increase rather than diminish the petty backbiting.

  A supporter whom Gladstone had difficulty in attracting was his eldest brother Tom. Either out of jealousy or because of the genuine strength of his Low Church principles he wrote to William to tell him that, while blood might be thicker than politics, it was not thicker than religion, which in his view was what the election was about. William Gladstone was merely offended, but Sir John Gladstone was outraged. With an even-handed authority matching that which he had exercised against William at the time of Robertson’s marriage a decade earlier, he dealt with Tom, who duly voted for his brother.

  The margin was not such that this was crucial in terms of anything except family relations, but it was not handsomely wide either. Inglis soared away with 1700 votes, Gladstone polled 997 and Round 824. Gladstone was at Fasque when he heard the result on 5 August and did not come south until 20 October, or visit Oxford until five days later. There was probably nobody much there to visit until October, and the victory, while it satisfactorily put him back in the House of Commons, was not so glorious as to call for celebration. In any event he had other things heavily on his mind – Oak Farm and family illness. In the second half of September his five-year-old daughter Agnes nearly died of erysipelas (‘Just twelve years ago my Mother died in this same house of the same terrible complaint,’ he wrote in his diary before going into a comparison of that deathbed and the current sick room).8 Agnes recovered and lived to marry Edward Wickham, the headmaster of Wellington College, but the Gladstones were sufficiently oppressed by the threat that when it was removed they installed a window of thanksgiving, replete with a fine Latin inscription done by William but which he cautiously and modestly noted as needing to ‘pass under the eyes of a fresher and better scholar than myself’.9

  Relief from this anxiety uncovered the problem of his sister. On 3 October he wrote: ‘In the evg I saw poor Helen & was greatly shocked. I thought her voice quite altered, her frame more emaciated but more utterly shattered; and although she conversed rationally about others her mind quite gone in relation to herself.’10 Altogether it was not an easy early autumn and was made no more so by the fact that Catherine Gladstone was in her fifth and perhaps most difficult pregnancy.16 When the Gladstones came to London by railway on 20 October (filling a second-class compartment) they had a hostile Helen with them until Rugby, where she was handed over to Tom, who installed her in a Roman Catholic convent at Leamington. The various family tensions during that long day of primitive rail travel must have been formidable.

  In London they were confronted with the prospect not only of a new baby, a new Parliament and a new constituency but also of a (to them) new house. John Gladstone no longer came to London, and particularly with the drain of Oak Farm it had become a ridiculous extravagance to keep up both 13 Carlton House Terrace and 6 Carlton Gardens within a couple of hundred yards of each other. The William Gladstones accordingly prepared to give up the former and take over the paternal house.

  Despite these preoccupations Gladstone paid significant attention both to Oxford and to Parliament during the remainder of the autumn. But what he did in Parliament, while courageous, was not strengthening of his position in Oxford. He paid two five-day visits to the University (with calls on all the Heads of Houses) within a single fortnight, which was far more than he had ever done at Newark after his 1832 introduction to the town and more too than he was to do anywhere else until he got to Midlothian in 1879. Oxford might free him from the rigours of an actual campaign but it certainly did not free him from the need for courtesy visiting and patient discussion.

  Gladstone balanced these social obeisances with no concessions to the politico-religious prejudices of the University. His first House of Commons speech for two and a half ye
ars was in favour of a minor Roman Catholic Relief Bill, and he made an appropriately minor speech. But it was not calculated to propitiate his Oxford critics. Then, eight days later on 16 December, he made a more substantial speech on a more important issue, that of ‘the Jew Bill’, as it was habitually called. It arose out of the election of Baron Lionel de Rothschild, the current head of the Rothschild banking house and the father of the first Lord Rothschild, as member for the City of London (jointly, as it happened, with the new Prime Minister, Lord John Russell). Rothschild could not sit because he could not take the ‘Church and state’ oath. (Disraeli, thanks to his father’s sudden lurch towards baptizing his children, was subject to no such inhibition.) Russell moved a bill to allow his City and Whig colleague to take a Jewish oath. Gladstone, to the surprise of almost all his supporters from his father to Edward Pusey, and to the collective indignation of the University, on whose behalf Sir Robert Inglis presented a petition of opposition from Convocation, spoke and voted for the bill, which got through the Commons but failed in the Lords. Rothschild, several times re-elected, had to wait until 1858 to be allowed in. It was a less convulsive pre-run of the drama of Bradlaugh (who was an Anglo-Saxon atheist and not a theocratic Jew), which from 1880 onwards was to dominate the life of the second Gladstone government, and substantially limit its effectiveness.

  Why did Gladstone do it? His speech, which it is difficult to believe can have been one of his more successful, provides neither directly nor indirectly much explanation of motive. His old friend Thomas Acland had begged him beforehand, if he had to speak, to be direct. Despite this advice, which Gladstone engagingly believed he had followed, the subordinate clauses hung like candelabra throughout his oration with few of his sentences containing less than seventy words, and some twice as many.

  His conclusion has long seemed overwhelmingly right, but most of his arguments must have appeared specious. First he erected a very pompous theory about his duty as member for Oxford University. This, he claimed, put him in a different category from other members. They were superior to their constituents ‘in mental cultivation and opportunities of knowledge’, and were therefore clearly entitled to exercise their own judgement. His constituents, on the other hand, were ‘either superior or, on the least favourable showing, equal to myself’. Nevertheless he must also be free to speak for himself and not for them, a worthy Burkeian sentiment, but one which made the distinction pointless.

  Much of his argument was a de minimis one. There were not going to be many Jews in Parliament even with the removal of the disability. This was a perfectly sensible argument of expediency, but it sat ill with any high statement of principle. The central theme of the speech was, however, an uncharacteristically defeatist piece of historical analysis which probably stemmed from his difficulty in evacuating the untenable ground of The State in its Relations with the Church without allowing the withdrawal to become a rout. He said: ‘we have now arrived at a stage in which, after two or three generations had contended for a Church Parliament, and two or three generations more contended for a Protestant Parliament, each being in succession beaten, we are called upon to decide the question whether we shall contend for a Christian Parliament.’11 And his answer to that was only the very modified affirmative implied by his argument that there would not be many Jews elected in any event.

  His attitude to the ‘Jew Bill’ did not (just) prevent Gladstone being given an honorary degree by Oxford in the following July. It had long been the custom for the University to confer a DCL (doctorate of civil law) upon its burgesses. There was some attempt to break the convention with Gladstone, but the Hebdomadal Board held firm to precedent, and on 5 July 1848, not without trepidation, he duly presented himself. The Encaenia, as described by Gladstone, was not very different from today, although it appears that Chancellor Wellington (then aged seventy-nine) was not present:

  joined the V.C. and doctors in the Hall at Wadham: and went in procession to the Divinity Schools provided with a white neckcloth by Sir R. Inglis who seized me at the Station in horror and alarm when he saw me in a black one. In due time we were summoned to the Theatre where my degree had been granted with some non-placets [negative votes] but with no scrutiny. That scene so remarkable to the eye and mind, so pictorial and so national, was I think trying to Cath. but she has no want of strength for such things. There was great tumult about me mite that I am:17 the hissers were obstinate and the fautores [supporters] also very generous and manful. ‘Gladstone and the Jew Bill’ came sometimes from the gallery, sometimes more favouring sounds. The proceedings lasted till two. Then we went to luncheon and speeches at University [College]18 then to a long but interesting concert at 4: after this and a rest for C. in New College Gardens to the Provost of Oriel’s for tea; finally to town at half past nine. . . .12

  A year later, in July 1849, Gladstone indulged in a fresh burst of eccentricity verging on the unbalanced. The Countess of Lincoln, born Lady Susan Douglas, daughter of the tenth Duke of Hamilton, after seventeen years of marriage to Gladstone’s long-standing Eton, Christ Church and political friend, had bolted to Italy with Lord Walpole, heir to the Earl of Orford, and descendant of the first Prime Minister. She left not only her husband, who was dismayed although less agitated than Gladstone became on his behalf, but also her five children, for whom Catherine Gladstone unsuccessfully provided vice-parental care,19 and her prospect of becoming a duchess (her father-in-law was to die in 1851). Most people other than the impetuous and beneficently interfering Gladstones would have assumed that she knew what she was about. Gladstone, however, strongly supported by his wife, decided that it was his duty to go in search of ‘dearest Suzie’ (as Catherine addressed her in an accompanying letter), persuade her of her sin and bring her back. Manning was an alternative candidate for the task, but the then Archdeacon and future Cardinal shrewdly decided that his Sussex parochial duties made him much busier than an ex-Colonial Secretary and opposition front-bencher. Catherine was within two months of her sixth confinement, which produced the second Helen Gladstone (the choice of name marked some improvement in his relations with his sister), who became vice-principal of Newnham College, Cambridge. Otherwise Catherine Gladstone might have come too.

  As it was William Gladstone set out alone on 13 July 1849, with Europe still in a considerable state of chaos following the 1848 revolutionary upheavals and with some ambiguity both of destination and of what his function was going to be when he reached it. Obviously his optimum objective was to redeem the fallen and bring Lady Lincoln back to a renewal of conjugal duty. But did he also envisage the fall-back role, which he ended up playing, of acting as a witness of her adultery before the House of Lords, when her husband in the following year sought a divorce by private Act of Parliament, then the only possible way of proceeding? And did he apprehend that such a position might leave him looking ridiculous and even a little squalid?

  But he rarely feared ridicule, he was a keen traveller, he loved Italy, he thought Naples the most promising site for his quarry, and he set off with enthusiasm on a journey according to his own most careful calculations of 3010 miles and twenty-seven days, during which he spent only eleven nights of an average length of five hours ‘in bed ashore’.13 He was preoccupied by his sad mission, but not to the extent of wasting his time or missing any sightseeing. He arrived in Marseille (which he had not previously visited) in great heat and after a testing fifty-hour journey from Paris, and had to wait there for a couple of days before getting a boat to Genoa, Livorno and Civitavecchia. During this delay he dealt with a lot of travel arrangements, read three books, climbed up to Notre Dame de la Garde, ‘purchased a cask of the wine of the country to send home’ (not too locally of the country, one hopes), dined twice at the table d’hôte of the (extant) Hôtel Beauvau, on the first occasion talking animatedly to an Italian neighbour on one side and a Peruvian on the other, and after one dinner going to a play and after the other to hear Donizetti’s then relatively new Lucia di Lammermoor.
/>   He reached Naples eleven days after leaving London, but discovered that the birds had flown, probably to Milan, and so set off north again, mainly by sea. Five days later he got to Milan, and there had a splendid day except for the thought that ‘the business I was about was really horrible’. Having reached the city at 10.30 a.m. he:

  Breakfasted (luxuriously) at the Albergo della Città & then set out on my search for Lady L. . . . This kept me till past 3. I was too late for the Brera [gallery] – went to the Duomo and S. Alessandro, bought some books arranged to go to Como tomorrow morning: dined at the Table d’Hôte and then went to work with pen & ink & my books. . . . At 8 went to the Teatro Ré and heard the Masnadieri [an unfamous Verdi opera which had been first performed in Rome the year before] sung with two good basses & good Choruses – home at midnight but my sleep was bitten away.14