Gladstone: A Biography Read online

Gladstone’s first absence from Hawarden that autumn of 1853 was however occasioned more by his first tentative approach to demagogy than by any courtly devotion. On 10 October he went on a five-day visit to Manchester. He had never done anything like it before, and he was not to do so again until nine years later when he went to Newcastle and its surrounding shipyard towns, was received with even more enthusiasm and spoke with still less discretion than at Manchester. Thereafter these excursions among the populace were regarded as a Gladstone speciality, and one which became considerably disapproved of by, among others, the Queen and the majority of metropolitan politicians who, partly because they could not themselves evoke much enthusiasm in the provinces, decided that such activity was a vulgar pandering to the appetites of the masses.

  This side of Gladstone’s activities was to reach its peak in the Midlothian campaigns of 1879 and 1880, but it all began in Manchester in 1853 where the enthusiasm of his welcome and the continuing demands for oratory pleasantly surprised him as much as it dismayed his opponents when reports seeped back. The visit took place under the most respectable of auspices. The central purpose was to unveil a memorial statue to Sir Robert Peel on a site which was then in front of the old Royal Infirmary but which has since become Piccadilly Gardens. The Mayor and all the principal civic leaders and men of business were involved in welcoming and entertaining the visitor. He was accompanied throughout by his old friend ‘Soapy Sam’, the redoubtable Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford, who, whenever there was a pause in Gladstone’s oratory, obligingly intervened with a powerful sermon. The double act was much in evidence at the luncheon in the Town Hall (which was not Waterhouse’s 1868 masterpiece but its less exciting predecessor). Gladstone, who had gone on ‘to the cracking of my voice’ at the morning unveiling ceremony, gave them a further one and a quarter hours at the luncheon before the Bishop ‘laid a strong hand upon the company’.4

  Manchester, then known as ‘Cottonopolis’ and perceived throughout the world as the epitome of the whirling fierceness of the industrial revolution, was approached by the visitors with the slightly bewildered awe with which European travellers looked at New York and Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. They were appropriately impressed with the size and advanced nature of everything from ‘Mr Whitworth’s tool manufactury to Mr Walton’s innovating card-setting and other most curious machines’. But it was the size and composition of his audiences which most impressed Gladstone. His Peel speech was ‘before a great assemblage – of men almost exclusively, and working men’. His Town Hall one and a quarter hours ‘was greatly helped by a singularly attentive and favourable audience’. And on the next day, at the laying of the foundation stone for a new school, ‘I had again to speak to an assembly of the people.’5

  All these speeches, most of them impromptu, were made by Gladstone in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish war, and attention was naturally much focused on what tilt he could give to British government policy, hitherto unannounced on this issue. Morley wrote in rare criticism that he was ‘cloudy’, whereas Shannon thought that he ‘ranged himself ostentatiously beside Aberdeen’ (as opposed to the bellicosity of Palmerston, the leader of the pro-Turkish faction within the government). The two judgements are not incompatible. For Gladstone both to be cloudy and to put himself firmly alongside the Prime Minister required only an adequate degree of cloudiness in the attitude of Aberdeen, and that he was fully willing to supply. Gladstone committed himself to the maintenance of the integrity and independence of the Ottoman Empire, although with so many reservations about the ‘political solecism’ of a Muslim (or, as he called it, Mahometan) sovereign exercising despotic power over twelve million Christians as to drain away any possible enthusiasm for fighting to uphold this integrity. Furthermore he extolled all the non-martial virtues, denounced the ‘glare of glory’ and regretted that the policy of peace and negotiation, which was the only basis of the ‘real moral and social advancement of man’, sometimes failed to sustain itself against the false glamour and romantic excitement of war.

  It was a good speech for the city which John Bright represented in Parliament and where Richard Cobden lived, although viewed critically it could be accused of encapsulating exactly the approach which caused the Aberdeen government to walk backwards into the Crimean War, and then to conduct it without either vigour or efficiency. However, the reports satisfied the Prime Minister (‘Your Manchester speech’, he wrote, ‘has produced a great and, I hope, a very beneficial effect upon the public mind . . .’),6 and the reaction of the audiences more than satisfied Gladstone, who departed for Hawarden on the Friday afternoon (having arrived in Manchester on the Monday), with the Bishop of Oxford still in tow, and full of new-found enthusiasm for northern industrial audiences and self-improving working men.

  His main enterprise at Hawarden that autumn was the creation of what became known, perhaps a little pretentiously, as the Temple of Peace. This involved his building a medium-sized library, running back from the main drawing room, which itself filled the south-west corner of the house on the park side. This new or ‘north room’ became an intensely crammed work-room and a repository for books, for papers and mementoes. Much later he built on to it a small circular tower with gallery as well as a ground floor which was entirely a book and paper storehouse. The Temple of Peace itself had two good windows. To the west it looked out to the original ruined castle on a hillock, to the path (about three-quarters of a mile long) which Gladstone made to the church and which at that stage ran alongside the ruin. It was also open to the evening clearness and bright but unstable sunsets which, often at the end of wet and cloudy days, are a compensation for the ‘Western approaches’ weather pattern.

  It is one of the most vividly evocative political shrines in the world, comparable perhaps only with Churchill’s Chartwell and Franklin Roosevelt’s Hyde Park. All three make it possible without great effort to imagine the physical presence of the commemorated heroes. But both Hyde Park and Chartwell produce the atmosphere of a theatre piece with other characters surrounding the hero on the stage. In the Temple of Peace at Hawarden, on the other hand, the image created is essentially a solitary one. The house might be full of other people, whom Gladstone might join for church or meals or walking or evening music, but in the room which for forty-four years was central to his life away from London he was nearly always alone on the stage. He needed no supporting players. There, for many hours of each Hawarden day, he sat solitary, driving his pen through his letters and pamphlets, pursuing his vast and eclectic range of reading, sealing his envelopes and packages, sorting his books and papers, fighting his endless battle for the victory of activity over time.

  The first reference to the Temple of Peace in Gladstone’s diary was in the entry for Saturday, 15 October 1853. ‘Arranging books papers & c in the north room to wh. I migrate.’ It was not, however, until the following year that the full frenzy of his book arrangement developed. The 5000 or so which he began to move from Fasque soon after his father’s death seem to have taken some time to find their permanent home. His London book rooms were also in a state of flux. When he moved into Downing Street in 1853 he kept 6 Carlton Gardens, the house which his father had transferred to him in 1849, but when his two last children, Henry (or Harry) and Herbert, had been born in April 1852 and March 1854 he began to feel that this hardly bijou town house was not big enough for the whole family, and in 1856 he exchanged it for 11 Carlton House Terrace (next door to the smaller No. 13, which had been his first married house in London).

  With Oak Farm behind him and with the bonus of £5000 a year (£250,000 today) as the large although insecure salary of a senior minister and in addition to the total assets of circa £150,000 (about £7½ million at today’s prices) which came to him from his father, some towards the end of John Gladstone’s life and some on his death, William Gladstone’s affairs gave a considerable impression of affluence during the mid-1850s. In the summer of 1853 he had bought Murillo’s Virg
in and Child, which became the chef d’œvre of his modest picture gallery. He was also frequently engaged on china-shopping expeditions, accumulating a considerable collection of Wedgwood and other porcelain, which he eventually sold in 1875 when, after the end of his first premiership, he suddenly decided that he was a relatively poor man, sold 11 Carlton House Terrace, abandoned the grand and convenient neighbourhood in which he had lived for thirty-five years, and retreated to Harley Street.

  There is some dispute about the quality of his china collection, as indeed there is about his general aesthetic taste. Francis Birrell, in a penetrating 1933 Gladstone essay, was mildly mocking about his over-enthusiasm in ‘explaining the beauties of his rather chipped collection of old china’. But over-enthusiasm was always an essential part of Gladstone’s power, as well as, for some people at least, of his charm. And there can be no doubt that the china, chipped or not, absorbed him. As Matthew points out, a diary entry of ‘Worked on China’ (Gladstone mostly gave it the upper case) from the 1850s and 1860s almost invariably referred to porcelain and not to the Middle Kingdom.

  The books were more numerous if individually less valuable and still more time-consuming. In the autumn of 1854, still Chancellor, when he was at Hawarden for October and the first ten days of November and then in London until the day before Christmas Eve, he was equally occupied with them at either end, packing up in Carlton Gardens and unpacking and arranging at Hawarden. ‘Worked 3½ hours on my books,’ he wrote of 10 November, his first full day back in London. And this was fairly typical at both ends. Throughout his life he had both a physical and an intellectual obsession with books. One of the most vivid and symbolic pictures from his extreme old age was ‘the wheeling of the books’. When he had built and endowed the St Deiniol’s Library in Hawarden village as a place of study for visiting students and a final repository for his collection, he himself spent several days at the age of eighty-six pushing barrows full of the contents of his own library along the connecting route.

  It was not just that the handling of books appeared to give him the same sort of satisfaction that a dedicated old-style grocer might get from cutting and wrapping pounds of butter or cheese. He also believed that, in his unending battle against the efflux of time, he might gain a few yards of territory by unrelenting and often indiscriminate reading. Birrell again, who was far from an unfriendly critic, thought that he would always prefer to fill in a spare few minutes by reading a ]second-rate book than by giving himself the opportunity to think a first-rate thought. (Such a rigid dichotomy surprisingly assumes that a first-rate thought can be ordered up at will.) This wild and almost pointless eclecticism was splendidly illustrated by Gladstone’s recording that on 28 October 1853 he read ‘Colt on his revolvers’.’7 This meant that, in the first year of his first chancellorship of the Exchequer, he had at least perused a recently published work by the American inventor of a type of pistol (a side-arm in which Gladstone was neither in theory nor in practice particularly interested) and which bore the unpromising title of On the Application of Machining to the Manufacture of Rotating Chambered-Breach Fire-arms and their Peculiarities.

  There were two other private events during that autumn of 1853 which provoke comment on Gladstone’s idiosyncrasies. In early November he went for two and a half days to Liverpool, mainly to keep an eye on the Seaforth property. Curiously in view of his other preoccupations and of the powerful and prosperous presence of Robertson Gladstone in the city, this had been included in William’s share of his father’s assets.43 On this and other occasions he stayed with Robertson in the latter’s large house (as he was well over twenty stone he needed space) called Court Hey, at the other end of the city from Seaforth. Robertson was at that time (and thereafter) the brother with whom William got on best, even though his religious position remained as unsatisfactory as William feared at the time of his Unitarian marriage. They were both moving to the left in politics, although Robertson was at this stage several paces in advance of his brother.

  There was a Liverpool dinner party on the first evening, with which William seemed entirely content, but his main interest was to get across to Seaforth on the next morning and to inspect in particular the churches which his father had built. (That he was more concerned with the litany than with the state of the roofs may have had something to do with the ill-management of the property.) After dismissing the sermon as ‘well-meant’, he went off into a very natural retrospective reverie, but one which seemed to give him peculiarly little nostalgic pleasure:

  the occasion was one of interest to me. The memory of my ungodly childhood came thickly upon me. Others may look back upon that time as one of little strain; for me it offers nothing in retrospect but selfishness and sin. May the Eternal Priest absolve it and the Manhood wh. has followed. I sat an hour and had luncheon with the Rawsons.8 44

  Immediately before Gladstone’s Liverpool visit he had been confined to bed for a day with a return of the erysipelas which had laid him so low for so long in Scotland. It again attacked him in the leg and prevented his riding, which he was most anxious to resume, until the middle of January. He therefore experienced a total of three bed-confining bouts of this tiresome complaint, one of them severe and sustained, in the course of a single year, as well as a general period of malaise causing him to miss some House of Commons occasions soon after his budget. This makes mystifying his birthday summing up of 1853, which baldly stated: ‘The singular blessing of this year has been health.’9

  Something of an explanation, but hardly a complete one, may lie in the fact that 1853 was by no means an exceptional Gladstone year for illness. In the following one he had chicken pox for a week in early July, five days of digestive incapacity during a family seaside holiday at Broadstairs in early September, and a month later at Hawarden started another five mostly bedridden days on account of diarrhoea followed by a heavy cold. The truth was that Gladstone, despite his exceptional vigour and longevity, did not exactly have robust health. He was not often seriously ill, but he was always liable to be struck down by some bug or self-generated complaint, and habitually made a good deal of fuss about the attacks, summoning doctors and demanding doses of physic. It was a rare year in which he did not several times retreat to his bed.

  This was despite his taking considerable care of his health. The riding was very much directed to that end. He always walked several miles a day, both in the country and in London, where the late-night rescue expeditions helped, and was capable of occasional prodigious feats of self-propulsion. In September 1855 on a North Wales tour he walked forty miles one day and on another added at least fifteen road miles to the ascent and descent of Snowdon. He was also a determined sea-bather. ‘I find it a very powerful agent,’10 he wrote in 1859, without specifying of what it was an agent, but clearly of something beneficial. It was this which took him to Broadstairs in 1854, although that was an unusual and not repeated destination for a full-scale holiday. It also led him in 1855 to pay the first of many visits to Penmaenmawr, between Conwy and Bangor, where under some of the highest cliffs in Europe he rented a variety of substantial seaside houses for about a month in the late summers of that and several subsequent years. Between 1859 and 1868 the Gladstones were there in eight Septembers.

  The main purpose in Gladstone’s case was sea-bathing, which he sometimes continued to do, with a fine indifference to the North Wales weather, into the early days of October, and on one occasion at least immediately after rising from one of his sudden sickbeds.45 In 1861 he recorded twenty-seven bathes between 15 August and 10 September. But there were some other attractions too. He liked the dramatic Caernarvonshire scenery and found Penmaenmawr a good base for excursions into the misty mountains. He had Dean Liddell of Christ Church, the great Greek lexicographer and the father of Alice (in Wonderland), as a near holiday neighbour. And he felt at home with the spirit of the Anglican Church in Welsh Wales, which Flintshire hardly was, even occasionally listening (without understanding the words but appreciating t
he rhythm of the oratory) to a sermon in Welsh, which language however he found inadequately latinate to be a good vehicle for the traditions of Christendom.

  It was in that first 1855 Penmaenmawr summer that he seriously embarked on one of the most bizarre of all his intellectual exercises. Homer had long been the Greek writer from whom he derived most satisfaction. ‘Old Homer’, at once respectful and familiar, was often Gladstone’s form of diary reference to him. His niche in Gladstone’s literary pantheon predated that of Dante, his only possible rival in the temple, by at least ten years, and Homer never ceased to keep a sporadic place in his voracious reading. But it was only in 1855, out of office and with some energy to spare, that Gladstone took to serious work as opposed to literary browsing on the slopes of the blind epic poet. On 7 July at Hawarden (that he was at something of a loose end, insofar as that phrase can ever be applied to Gladstone, is indicated by his presence there for three weeks at that time of year) he recorded that he had ‘looked into my papers on Homer [accumulated in 1847 and 1848] and I am strongly tempted to undertake something, avoiding Scholarship however on account of inability’.11

  A few days later he went to London for three weeks, but returned to Homer as soon as he got back to Hawarden. ‘Began the Iliad,’ he wrote on 6 August, ‘with serious intentions of working out something on old Homer if I can.’12 Thereafter he worked at the Iliad or the Odyssey or the writings of others on Homer for a substantial part of every day (except Sundays) of the next two months, half of them at Hawarden and half of them at Penmaenmawr, to where he seemed to have transported enough books and other material to be equally well equipped as in the Temple of Peace.

  The exclusion of Sundays was an odd habit. Gladstone did not practise a strict sabbatarianism. He normally went to church twice, but in London he frequently dined out, and he used part of the day for his general correspondence as well as for reading, which while not strictly devotional had more of a religious bias than was his pattern on weekdays. When, for instance, in the spring of 1858, a few months after its publication, he read Barchester Towers (as he did most of the great mid-Victorian novels, although rather eschewing Dickens) he consumed it in six days, which pointed to a high degree of interest and engagement. He nonetheless missed the intervening Sunday, substituting A. F. Rio’s study of four martyrs, which he obviously regarded as more suitable for the day than a portrayal of diocesan life if seen through eyes as worldly as Trollope’s.