Gladstone: A Biography Read online

  He saw little of Scotland, however, which he never visited between the ages of eight and twenty-one, even though he had succeeded to the earldom, Haddo Castle and large surrounding tracts of land when he was seventeen. When he did see them, in 1805, he was appalled, disliking equally the house, the neglected bog-ridden countryside and the neighbours. A decade or so later, with considerable improvements already effected, he was converted to the attractions of Haddo, began to retreat there as frequently as possible, and became a great Scotsman, much involved for instance in the Scottish Church controversies leading to the schism of 1843, although showing a much cooler religious spirit than Gladstone would have done.

  His bereavements began with and were always dominated by the death of his first wife, the daughter of the then Marquess of Abercorn, when he was twenty-eight. He was exceptionally devoted and continued to wear mourning for her throughout the remaining forty-nine years of his life. She left him with three daughters under five (the couple had also had a stillborn son), all of whom died before they were twenty-one. In 1815 Aberdeen had made a second marriage to his first wife’s sister-in-law, the widow of Abercorn’s recently dead heir. She died in 1833, when Aberdeen was still under fifty. Their fifteen-year-old daughter followed the next year. Three sons, however, survived, one of whom (Arthur Gordon) makes several subsequent appearances in Gladstone’s life and in this narrative.

  In view of all these tragedies Aberdeen’s reclusiveness was hardly surprising. A note of disinterested would-be withdrawal was one which he frequently and genuinely struck. ‘You look for interest and amusement in the agitation of the world and the spectacle it affords; now I cannot express to you my distaste for everything of the kind. . . . I have had enough of the world . . . and would willingly have as little to do with it as is decent.’2 So he wrote to the Princesse de Lieven in 1838.5 And in 1845 he informed Sir Robert Peel, ‘I have no wish ever to enter the House of Lords again.’3

  Nonetheless he was always a sought-after figure and had in many ways a dazzling career, in both early and middle life. And although his premiership, like the end of Asquith’s, was vitiated by his being a man made for the arts of peace caught up in the toils of war, he was venerated in old age, at least by those who knew him well, which category notably included Gladstone. Because of his early succession, he was, together with Rosebery, the only Prime Minister since 1832 who never served in the House of Commons and one of only a few even before that date. His range of public service over half a century was nonetheless wide. He was offered but refused the embassy to Sicily at the age of twenty-three. He was a Knight of the Thistle at twenty-four (and a Garter at seventy-one, again with Rosebery one of the few men ever to hold the two orders). He accepted at the age of twenty-nine the embassy to Austria, which involved not the comforts of Vienna but a rough mission to the field headquarters of the Emperor Franz II during the campaign which extruded Napoleon from the Germanic lands. The rigours of this involved bivouacking for a night in a Thuringian hayloft with Chancellor Prince Metternich – himself then only thirty-nine. Fortified by these experiences Aberdeen became Foreign Secretary for the first of several tours in 1828 at the age of forty-four.

  At the beginning of his association with Gladstone Aberdeen was thus already a great European figure, his fame temporarily equal to that of Palmerston, his repute higher. He was also later to be described by Gladstone as ‘the man in public life of all others whom I have loved’.4 And although Gladstone sometimes said almost exactly the same about Sidney Herbert this rendered the high compliment neither insincere nor unduly diluted. Aberdeen was a mentor, Herbert a contemporary. Altogether it was a fine thing for Gladstone to be his under-secretary at the age of twenty-five. The disadvantage was that it lasted for only three months, at the end of which came the collapse of the last attempt by a sovereign to override the House of Commons in his choice of ministers.

  Gladstone then spent six and a quarter years without office. During much of this period he was concerned more with seeking a wife than with obtaining a department (and was considerably less adept at the former pursuit). He had started so young that he could sustain this patch of slack water and still be a Privy Councillor at thirty-one and a Cabinet minister at thirty-three. He was older at the time of Cabinet entry than Pitt or Harold Wilson, but younger than Canning or Peel or (by three weeks) Winston Churchill, and than all the other participants in the 250-year history of British Cabinet government. His period of slack water between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-one cannot therefore be accounted as even an approach to a serious setback.

  Yet, if this conveys a sense of a favoured and carefree youth striding to triumphs which were as joyous as they were glorious, it is almost wholly misplaced. Palmerston and Churchill, to take two statesmen who, like Gladstone, both succeeded early and lived long, got far more obvious pleasure out of life and politics than did Gladstone, perhaps ever, certainly as a young man. He was tortured and he was somewhat awkward, both in movement and in words. He was frequently dissatisfied, alike with his performance and with the direction of his effort. Although by the late 1830s he had moved far from the Evangelicalism of his youth, he always retained a legacy from his early Low Church instruction. Sin, condemnation and fear played a great part in his religion. God’s mercy was always more problematical.

  Despite ease of material circumstance and reality of political achievement, the first half of Gladstone’s adult life had in it more of the nature of a painful pilgrimage through a vale of sorrows (and temptations) than of a triumphal walk back to the cricket pavilion after scoring a debonair double century. Several of his aspects and attributes which made this so showed themselves in his determined but flat-footed search for a wife which dominated the years from 1835 to 1839.

  Fragmentary but converging evidence strongly suggests that Gladstone had a sexual drive to match the flash of his eye, the force of his oratory and the vigour of his intellectual and physical energy. It is also the view of Professor Matthew, the unmatched cicerone of Gladstone’s life and œuvre, that he was a virgin when he married. The conjuncture of these two considerations must necessarily have introduced some urgency into his desire for matrimony. But they did not secure its rapid fulfilment.

  Gladstone as a young man appears to have been at once moderately susceptible to the attractions of women and singularly ill at ease in their company. The word ‘moderately’, usually inappropriate to Gladstone, is appropriate here because of the paucity of references to girls in his diaries. There was no question of his falling happily in and out of love with the sisters of his friends. In 1830 there were some references to the two daughters of a Leamington colonel, rather unpromisingly named Pocklington, whom he encountered on one of his Oxford-vacation visits to his spa-waters-imbibing family. One sister, Jane Pocklington, aroused more interest than the other and as he curiously put it, he ‘got upon delicate ground [with her] about the Vicar’s preaching’. How he escaped from this delicate ground is not recorded but his appallingly priggish (and syntactically awkward) summing up of this holiday foray does not suggest that it produced many transports of joy for either side: ‘But it seems to me that female society, whatever the disadvantages may be, has just & manifold uses attendant upon it in turning the mind away from some of its most dangerous & degrading temptations.’5 Then during his 1832 grand tour he was temporarily moved by the beauty of Henrietta Milnes (the sister of Richard Monkton Milnes, later Lord Houghton), whom he encountered in Rome. But again it appears to have been no more than an ineffective flutter towards a flame. And that is all the romantic contact with ‘respectable’ females that is recorded before his approach to (very) serious wooing in 1835.

  Perhaps aided by his idealization of the pure and ethereal qualities of his sister Anne, and to a lesser extent (because she was not so close to him) of his mother, he found it difficult to establish a bridge between his generalized sexual urge and individual women, particularly if they were of his own social class. Thus the temptations to which he r
eferred so frequently and so darkly were essentially those of fascination with sex as an abstract and generalized concept rather than the pursuit of specific girls: masturbation, about which he got into a tremendous state, pouring post-indulgence abuse on to his own head in many diary passages; and pornography, the enticements of which were still making his visits to Munich bookshops, during the intervals of his 1845 theological conversations with Dr Döllinger, into a wearing mixture of excitement and shame.

  There were also early traces of his later obsession, at once semi-innocent and self-indulgent, with ‘rescue’ work among prostitutes. Thus, on his first night of a preliminary visit to Oxford in August 1828, at the age of eighteen and before he was even a member of the University (which might have been as well if the Proctors had been on a patrolling expedition), he went out, encountered a lady of the night and had a long conversation with her. The following night he again met the ‘poor creature’.6 Eleemosynary though part of his motive may have been, and restrained although the outcome undoubtedly was, it is impossible to believe that frissons of excitement did not guide his steps on at least the second evening and that he found it easier to talk to this girl redolent of sin and sexual mystery than to chatter to Miss Pocklington.

  None of these temptations, however, was conducive to finding Gladstone a wife. This he set about without guilt but also without guile. His first target was Caroline Farquhar, the sister of an Eton friend and the daughter of a Surrey baronet of considerable and somewhat older wealth than that of the Gladstones. The family did not therefore regard Gladstone as a particularly good match, but nor would they have been likely to be resistant had Miss Farquhar, who was considered by Gladstone and others to be a ‘beauty’, been responsive.

  She was exactly the reverse. Gladstone persuaded himself that her religious position was satisfactory, but may well have over-estimated the aphrodisiacal effect of telling her this. He also mistakenly believed that appeals to her father and brother would advance his suit. He had no idea how to interest her. She had no insight to the qualities behind his awkwardness. Her main contemporary comment (a little unreliably recorded in Farquhar family lore) was the exclamation, when she saw Gladstone walking across her family’s park at Polesden Lacey with a case in his hand: ‘Mama, I cannot marry a man who carries his bag like that.’ What sort and size of a bag it was is not recorded – it was well before the days when he gave his name to that somewhat commercial-traveller-like receptacle, the Gladstone bag. Nor is the fault of style (unless it was the mere fact of doing it at all) in his porterage. It was presumably akin to his alleged bourgeois stiffness, which provoked Emily Eden over twenty years later to complain to Lord Clarendon that there was ‘something in the tone of his voice and his way of coming into a room that is not aristocratic’.7

  Miss Farquhar was probably a fairly silly woman. She subsequently married (General) Charles Grey, a younger son of the Reform Bill Prime Minister, who became first the Prince Consort’s and then Queen Victoria’s private secretary. General Grey always treated Gladstone with respect and friendliness, but Mrs Grey followed up 1830s unresponsiveness with 1880s sourness. There is a story of her finding herself next to Gladstone at the communion rail in the Savoy Chapel in 1886, and immediately getting up and leaving. Prejudice took precedence over the sacrament. Gladstone was lucky to have escaped her, but his trouble was that it was not only the luck which (understandably at the time) he could not accept, but also the fact of the escape. For nearly a year he continued with his embarrassing siege and his foolish attempts to use her male relations as his Trojan horses.

  Gladstone’s discontent at the Farquhar outcome was increased by two of his brothers successfully contracting marriages during 1835. The unesteemed Tom, his brief parliamentary career already almost over, married the daughter of a substantial Norfolk squire. There could be no objection to the background of Miss Fellowes, but William Gladstone nonetheless managed to be distinctly unenthusiastic about her personality. In the case of the intended wife of the second brother, Robertson, William was subject to no such limitation. Mary Ellen Jones, indigenous to Liverpool, was a Unitarian. William Gladstone treated this affiliation as bringing about the disgrace and damnation of the entire Gladstone clan. The tolerance of Unitarians which Mrs Milnes Gaskell was alleged to have taught him on a Yorkshire visit with her son seemed to have been dissipated during his first Parliament. He made a portentous and Pharisaical fuss, aided by his younger and then twenty-year-old sister Helen, who was always a hysteric in anything to do with religion, and in a good many other things too. (On this occasion she was the ally of her brother’s Anglican intolerance, although when she later became a Roman Catholic she was to be very much the victim of it.)

  William Gladstone’s behaviour towards his brother was appallingly presumptuous and made the more unedifying by a strong whiff of snobbery. The implication was that it was time Robertson grew out of Liverpool trade as well as away from dangerous religious unorthodoxies. Eventually John Gladstone, rather impressively, called his youngest son to order, reminded him of his family duties (perhaps also of the source of his family wealth), and made him desist from his sanctimonious preaching. William Gladstone was a reluctant, if not a convivial, guest at the wedding, in Liverpool, in January 1836.

  From there he skulked off to a large landed estate on the borders of Cheshire and North Wales. It was called Hawarden and his host was Sir Stephen Glynne, a well-connected baronet who, like Farquhar, had been somewhere between an acquaintance and a friend at Eton and Christ Church, and who was currently sitting silently in Parliament as member for Flintshire. Glynne’s immediate family was composed of a widowed and valetudinarian mother, a younger brother, the Revd Henry Glynne, who had briefly been an MP himself before taking orders and who held the local living, which had the remarkable characteristic of being worth £3000 a year (more than many bishoprics), and two sisters, Catherine, aged twenty-four and Mary, two years younger. He also had about 8000 acres of land which was of reasonably good quality by English standards and spectacularly so by Welsh ones, a substantial park with fine trees and wide views, a moderate-sized eighteenth-century house which had been gothicized by his father, an adjacent ruined fort on a small hill which justified the rather grand postal direction of Hawarden Castle for the whole establishment, and a substantial estate village.

  This domain was to be the centre of gravity of the last two-thirds of Gladstone’s life, but during this visit of recuperation from the strains of witnessing a Liverpool marriage no impact was made upon him by Catherine Glynne. It was she, however, who eventually solved his matrimonial problems, became his partner for fifty-nine years of stable and sustaining but often physically separated marriage, and enabled him gradually to imbue Hawarden with a Gladstone rather than a Glynne spirit and give it a late-nineteenth-century fame unparalleled among properties of a similar size. Perhaps she was away during his visit. Perhaps his mind was still on the dying embers (not that they ever had much warmth in them) of his Farquhar hopes. In either event he was to mount another matrimonial foray before his beam settled in a Glynne direction.

  This second attempt was conducted from the base of his father’s Atholl Crescent house in Edinburgh, and was as unsuccessful, for much the same reasons, as his Surrey assault on Caroline Farquhar. The object was Lady Frances Douglas, daughter of the eighteenth Earl of Morton, who came of a long line of Scottish notables and whose wealth, while less impressive than his lineage, was sufficient for there to be no attraction in a Gladstone match unless it was infused by a romantic passion on the daughter’s part. Yet once again Gladstone tried heavy-footedly to use the reluctant parents as stepping-stones to the citadel. Lady Frances (only eighteen years old) remained unmoved, Lord Morton had formally to request Gladstone to desist, and the only positive outcome was to increase the enthusiasm of everyone except Gladstone for Frances Douglas’s early marriage to Lord Milton, the heir to the third Earl Fitzwilliam. She lived until 1895 and, unlike Miss Farquhar, showed subsequent frien
dliness to Gladstone. In 1837, however, she cast him down even more than the previous failure had done, and he wrote of the ‘icy coldness’ in his heart and of living ‘almost perpetually restless and depressed’.

  Restless he may well have been, and no doubt depressed in bursts, but certainly not perpetually so, or to the extent of being driven to lethargy. Lethargy was the last thing from which Gladstone ever suffered, and there is no evidence that it attacked him in the interval between the Douglas rejection and the Glynne acceptance. He had not been particularly active in the House of Commons in 1836 or 1837, but in March 1838 he delivered the first of his marathon speeches. He filled thirty-three columns of Hansard with a defence of negro apprenticeship schemes on West Indian plantations. This long speech, delivered by a young man of twenty-eight holding no official position who nonetheless did not hesitate to detain the House for well over two hours, may leave room for doubt about his wisdom, his modesty, even his motives, but not about his energy. Moreover it was regarded as a successful tour de force which considerably enhanced his oratorical reputation.

  Later that spring he attended in the Hanover Square Rooms a fashionable series of lectures (at one the packed audience included seven bishops and the Duke of Cumberland) by Thomas Chalmers, a famous Edinburgh divine, on the role of the state in relation to established Churches. Gladstone knew Chalmers well. During the two previous Edinburgh winters he had been considerably more successful in achieving relations with him than with Lady Frances Douglas. But he did not approve of Chalmers’s relatively liberal doctrine, which left the state unconcerned with theology, and able, comfortably and calmly, to support one form of establishment in England and another in Scotland. Gladstone was shocked by this easy-going attitude, incompatible as it was with his belief in a theocratic state, which he assumed, both curiously and complacently, would uphold exactly his own doctrinal position. Whether he would have seriously advocated imposing Episcopalianism upon Scotland is not clear, but he was certainly then terrified by the dangers for the (Anglican) Church of Ireland which might follow from the easy acceptance of the national position of the Scottish Presbyterian Church.