Gladstone: A Biography Read online

  ROY JENKINS

  East Hendred

  February 1995

  PART ONE

  A TALENTED AND TORTURED YOUNG MAN

  1809–1852

  A LIVERPOOL GENTLEMAN?

  WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE was born in Liverpool at the end of 1809. When, just over half a century later, he had introduced the pattern-setting budget of 1860, Walter Bagehot recorded this description of him: ‘Ah, Oxford on the surface, but Liverpool below.’1 Bagehot, founder of the Economist, was in many ways the nineteenth century’s best substitute for Dr Johnson. He could aphorize at the drop of a hat, and often with wisdom. But was he right on this occasion? Gladstone undoubtedly became a great Oxonian, an accomplished scholar in his youth, a member of Parliament for the University for seventeen years in middle age, and towards the end of his life its most famous ornament. The town of his birth, on the other hand, faded into the background while he was still a very young man. Did he nonetheless remain ‘Liverpool below’?

  He was indisputably born in the heart of that metropolis of ships and commerce which from about 1790 to 1925 had a high claim to be the second city of England. Its population in 1810 was 94,000, below that of Manchester (and of Dublin, Glasgow and Edinburgh, but they were not English), but it was growing more rapidly and had more metropolitan quality than its inland rival. The day of Gladstone’s birth was 29 December and the place was 62 Rodney Street. The late-December date meant that he was always a year younger than was signified by a superficial calculation, although his morbidity made him stress the reverse. Furthermore, despite his longevity and the fact that he was Prime Minister later in life than any other holder of the office, he was the youngest among his best-known near contemporaries, Newman or Disraeli, Manning or Tennyson. The Rodney Street address meant that it was a good modern 1793 town house, less than a mile from the waterfront. Over the two centuries that have since gone by Rodney Street property has experienced two transitions: first from merchants’ semi-mansions to consultants’ rooms and residences in what became outside St Marylebone the most eminent medical street in Britain (at the end of which from 1912 onwards there arose the massive solidity of Giles Gilbert Scott’s Anglican cathedral); and then, much more recently, the further change to the sad decay of the Liverpool 8 of the late twentieth century.

  Gladstone did not have many years of the town life of Rodney Street. He was there long enough to be brought downstairs at the age of barely three and shown off at a large dinner party which his father, John Gladstone, was giving for George Canning, whom Gladstone père was instrumental in persuading to stand and be elected for Liverpool against Henry Brougham the future Lord Chancellor. Thereafter Canning remained for William Gladstone a hero until and indeed well beyond his early death six months after he had become Prime Minister in 1827. But John Gladstone was at this period of his life both socially and geographically mobile, and Rodney Street could not long contain him. His wealth, which he had estimated at £15,900 in 1795, had risen to £145,600 by 1812 (and continued to climb to £502,000 by 1828).

  There is no difficulty about knowing the exact current cash value of John Gladstone’s assets. He kept very careful stock of them, and when in 1815 he built two churches, St Andrew’s in the city and St Thomas’s at Seaforth, he entered them in his balance sheet at £10,000 and £4000 respectively, and endeavoured to get a 5 per cent return, mainly through pew rents, on these amounts. What is more difficult is to make a rough estimate of what his wealth was worth in modern terms. If this is to be done simply it must also be done crudely, and the best working rule I have been able to devise is to multiply all nineteenth-century values by a factor of fifty in order to turn them into late-twentieth-century terms. This obviously leaves jagged edges. The last century compared with the present enjoyed relative currency stability. But there were fluctuations from decade to decade for which no allowance is made. There have also, between the centuries, been variations within this general price level, the cost of services rising much more rapidly than that of manufactures. But the ‘fifty factor’ produces results which rarely defy common sense and give a vivid and reasonably accurate impression of the command over resources that went with the relatively modest cash sums which were involved in the various Gladstone family transactions. On this basis John Gladstone’s 1828 fortune would be worth a modern £25 million.

  From where did it come? In his early Liverpool days he had been primarily a corn trader, bringing with him to the Mersey the skill which he had developed in Leith, and making mostly Baltic purchases. Then he was a partner in an East Indian house, dealing mainly with the subcontinent, and coming up against the restrictive privileges of the East India Company. This and Liverpool’s natural direction made him look more westward. In 1789–90 he spent a year buying cargoes in what had just become the United States. He did some cotton trade with Brazil. But it was on the West Indies and particularly on the two territories of Demerara and Jamaica that he became increasingly concentrated. By 1833, which was the peak of his trading activities, he showed total assets of £636,000, of which £296,000 were in Demerara and £40,000 in Jamaica. By 1843, however, he had turned himself from a merchant adventurer into a rentier. The West Indies stake was down to £53,000 and his shareholdings (mainly in railways) were up to £213,000.2 Sugar was the core of his West Indies activity, but tobacco and cotton were also important. He did not trade in slaves, even before the slave trade was outlawed in Britain in 1807, but the plantations he owned operated on slave labour throughout his time as a West Indian magnate.

  In 1811 he began the building of Seaforth House, a full-scale country residence (except that it was not really in the country, having the mouth of the Mersey on one side and the beginning of Liverpool on the other) set in an estate of a hundred acres. By 1815 the family had effectively removed themselves five or six miles downstream to this new location. In 1817 he sent his eldest son, Thomas Gladstone, to Eton. Liverpool wealth did not intend to be shut out from privileged education, and already by 1811, according to William Ewart, a business partner of John Gladstone’s whose name was immortalized in W. E. Gladstone, there were ‘enough Liverpool Etonians to fill a coach’.3

  Then in 1818 John Gladstone became a member of Parliament. His parliamentary career never prospered. He was too old (fifty-four) when he started. But there was more to it than that. He was like an elderly philanderer who always had to buy his favours, and failed to make neat transactions. Liverpool rejected him, and he went to Lancaster. Most of his two years as member for that borough was occupied with fighting off a petition alleging that he had been corruptly elected. In 1820 he transferred to Woodstock, where the Duke of Marlborough had a seat going cheap – for £877 to be exact. But by 1826 the market seemed to have improved and John Gladstone failed to come to terms with the Duke for the renewal of his mandate. With a fine indifference to locality he once more removed himself, this time to Berwick-on-Tweed. There he was elected in second place (in a two-member borough) by a margin of three votes, but was once again subjected to a petition for corrupt practices. This time it succeeded, and his far from splendid parliamentary career (much of it devoted to defending the rights of West Indian slave-owners, of which he was a leading example) came to an end in 1827. But these nine years at Westminster, inglorious though they may have been, required five or six months a year of London residence, for which 5 Grafton Street, between Bond Street and Berkeley Square, was rented, and which constituted a further extension of the horizons of Rodney Street.

  After the débâcle of Berwick John Gladstone never again sat in Parliament. It was not for want of trying. He was humiliatingly defeated at Dundee in 1837 and flickered towards the prospect of a nomination for either Aberdeen or Leith in 1841, when he was seventy-seven. He did, however, largely turn his back on England. He regarded his £500,000 as adequate (although it grew to £750,000 by 1850), and he abandoned Liverpool, the base of his West Indian trading fortune. At the end of 1829 he bought Fasque, a Scottish estate on the northern slope of
the Mearns, between Dundee and Aberdeen, for the very considerable sum of £80,000 and supplemented it with an Edinburgh New Town winter house in Atholl Crescent. Fasque was (and is) a fine mansion, as elegant as it is substantial, built in the year of William Gladstone’s birth. It has a delicate staircase and a particularly good first-floor library with a commanding view to the south-west.

  John Gladstone took time to move in to these two houses, and for the years around 1830 led a somewhat nomadic existence taking his invalid second wife (William Gladstone’s mother) and his invalid elder daughter (William Gladstone’s senior by seven years) on an ineffective search for health at some of the watering places of England. Thus when William Gladstone was at Oxford he several times did the forty-five-mile walk to join his family at Leamington, and when he was summoned to Newark for the beginning of his first election campaign in September 1832 he was at Torquay and had to do some hard posting to get there via London in forty hours.

  After about 1834, however, John Gladstone settled down in his two Scottish houses. He was seventy that year, he had already lost his elder daughter and in 1835 he was to lose his second wife. His old age was long and prosperous but lonely and sometimes irascible. He was eighty-seven when he died in 1851. He had been made a baronet in Peel’s resignation honours list of 1846, but this was more of a tip to William Gladstone than a mark of personal regard to his father, who was a very reluctant Peelite. John Gladstone made the money on which his sons lived in near affluence. He was shrewd, mostly generous to his children and sometimes more broad-minded in family matters than they were. But he was dominant and demanding. He imposed upon his only surviving daughter a lonely isolation at Fasque which helped to turn her into a drug addict and a religious fanatic. And he treated his distinguished fourth son even when he had been a Cabinet minister – and no doubt so treated the other three too – as though he was still at the end of his adolescence. William Gladstone was pietistic and used habitually to spend a couple of autumn months at Fasque. During these visits he had to superimpose on his own voluminous letter-writing the copying out of dictated replies to his father’s correspondence.

  John Gladstone had not been born a gentleman. Nor indeed was he born Gladstone. His own father was called Gladstones, and John Gladstone abandoned this usage, simply on the ground of euphony, it appears, only after he went from Leith (the port of Edinburgh) to Liverpool in 1787. Thereafter the ‘s’ never appeared south of the border, not in his own name, his trading designations or the names of his children, although he waited until 1835 to formalize the change by letters patent. There is no suggestion of social climbing in the change, although it is difficult to imagine the more tentative name of ‘Gladstones’ ringing down the nineteenth century with quite the clear-cut authority of ‘Gladstone’. What was more to the social point was that John Gladstone, although his father (who had come from the Lanarkshire town of Biggar in 1746) had evolved into a modestly successful Leith corn merchant, left school at thirteen. He was fully literate and for seventy years and more could write business letters of singular pith and force. But the Scottish Enlightenment, which was pulsating through the Edinburgh of his youth, was as alien to his experience as it was to a crofter on the most remote Hebridean island.

  John Gladstone had two wives, who were both nearly as ‘delicate’ in health and as retiring in tastes as he was vigorous and domineering. The wives had little else in common. The first, Jane Hall, was the daughter of another Liverpool merchant but one of less note and fortune than himself. He married her soon after his 1790 return from America, which was the only oceanic journey that he ever made, despite his controlling so many argosies and speaking with such dogmatic authority of the beneficial conditions in which slaves lived on the West Indian sugar plantations. Jane Gladstone was the first mistress of Rodney Street, but filled it with neither children nor local society. She quietly subsided and survived only six years of marriage.

  Two years later in 1800 John Gladstone married Anne Mackenzie Robertson, whose father (dead in 1796) had been a gentleman lawyer and Provost of the little Ross-shire county town of Dingwall. Her mother was also of Highland gentry stock. Anne Robertson was twenty-eight years old and a distinct beauty. It was surprising that she had not been married before, although what was even more surprising (and unexplained) was how John Gladstone found her. The Gladstones, father and sons, both before and after the onset of the railway age, were remarkably mobile within Britain, but it was a long way from Dingwall to Liverpool, or even to Leith, and there was no obvious reason for John Gladstone to go to the far north or for Miss Robertson to come south.

  Once they had met, however, there was no obstacle to the match. There was a suggestion that John Gladstone wished he had been better educated for the polite society of Dingwall (which must have been very select, for the total population of the town was only 750) but his wealth more than made up for this. He carried his bride-to-be off to Liverpool for marriage. They arrived almost simultaneously with two Raeburn portraits of his parents which he had commissioned for the Rodney Street dining room. The wedding took place in the parish church of St Peter’s, for Anne Robertson was a Scots Episcopalian and John Gladstone, although brought up in the strictest tradition of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, had slipped over to the Church of England in Liverpool. But he did not do so in a latitudinarian way. Both he and his wife embraced the most determinedly Low Church Evangelicalism, which was very different from the High Anglicanism to which their fourth son shifted as a young man. There is a paradoxical suggestion that they rejected the Scottish kirk in Liverpool because it was too easy-going and did not produce a sufficient fervour of hell-fire preaching for their taste.

  As her health declined, which it did fairly steadily at least from 1815, Evangelical religion became the central feature of Anne Gladstone’s life. This did not separate her from her husband, for he, although engaged in the most vigorous pursuit of mammon, professed an equal attachment. Furthermore, Anne Gladstone, unlike her predecessor, produced six children, all born between 1802 and 1814, rather liked entertaining provided she could spend most of her days reclining upon an invalid’s couch, and survived until the age of sixty-three.

  William Gladstone’s brothers and sisters had no qualities of personality, energy, intellect or success comparable with his own. As he was by any standards among a handful of outstanding figures of the Victorian age this was hardly surprising. What was perhaps more so was that, although his three brothers were almost as drawn to politics (local Liverpool politics in the case of the second) as he was himself, and although in theory at least he was naturally family minded, they constituted no continuing close-knit phalanx of support or even of companionship. After his marriage in 18391 he saw far more of his wife’s family than he did of his own. This was not only true of her brother, Sir Stephen Glynne, where there was the special factor of Gladstone’s gradual taking over of his Hawarden estate, although Glynne continued to live there, almost as a guest in his own house, until his death in 1874. It was also so with his wife’s sister’s husband, Lord Lyttelton, whose Hagley Hall outside Birmingham became almost a second country house for the Gladstones. An account of the political and religious differences, and largely ineffective ambitions, of the other brothers belongs to later in the story, as does the tragedy of the surviving sister Helen Gladstone. William Gladstone was mostly detached from them during their lives, although occasionally interfering and intolerant, particularly with his sister, and immensely solicitous at the times of their deaths.

  When William Gladstone left Liverpool to go to Eton for the first time in 1821, his eldest brother Tom had been there for four and a half years, most of the time as unhappy as he was unsuccessful, and his second brother Robertson had just been removed from the school after two years. So far the Gladstones were a determined rather than a successful Etonian family. Tom had several times asked to be taken away. He was no good at composing Latin verse, which was the basis of the very limited curriculum. He quarrelled constan
tly with his ‘dame’ (house matron) and with Keate, the famous flogging headmaster. He found the atmosphere harsh and irreligious, and he made few friends. But his father was determined that he should not leave. To do so would mean that the Gladstone attempt to infiltrate the citadel of upper-class education had failed at the first encounter. So Tom accepted not merely that he could not leave voluntarily but that he must submit to several Keate floggings in lieu of expulsion.

  Robertson was different. He was not the eldest son, and when it was decided, entirely with his own concurrence, that his future lay in continuing in Liverpool the mercantile tradition of the family, he was smartly removed from Eton. John Gladstone’s approach to education was strictly vocational. He was willing to pay to turn his sons into members of the ruling class. But if they were going to become merchants rather than rulers there was no point in paying. And the cost was surprisingly high, particularly as Eton was not well run at the time, with too few masters, and those that there were of uncertain quality. Its main advantage was the opportunity to make influential friends. For this the total cost in Tom’s case, according to the meticulous Gladstone accounts, was £261 for a year, a figure which was somewhat above the average for the all-in expenditure of an Oxford undergraduate 120 years later.

  Robertson, who had been doing rather better at Eton than Tom but had acquired no affection for it, was then despatched to Glasgow College, as the 270-year-old university was known at the time. It was still on its old High Street site around the cloisters of which Adam Smith had recently paced, and its curriculum, while far from narrowly commercial, was thought more suitable for Liverpool trade than an almost exclusive diet of hexameters. Glasgow seemed to do well for Robertson, an effective and intelligent man of business, who became Mayor of Liverpool before he was forty. Like his youngest brother but not many others, he moved across the political spectrum to the left as he got older, but his habits of thought and pattern of life were never remotely like those of William Gladstone. He was an immense mountain of a man, over twenty stone in weight, and he aged early, leading a disorganized and even dishevelled life after the death of his wife in 1865 until he too died in 1875.