Gladstone: A Biography Read online

  Negatively inspired by Dr Chalmers, although not in direct refutation of him, he set about producing the first of his books, and did so, as became his frequent habit, with white-hot enthusiasm. He wrote most of the manuscript of The State in its Relations with the Church during late June and July 1838. This was a substantial work of 500 or so pages. Gladstone was never economical with words. To do it in little more than a month was to do it in a foolish hurry, particularly as he had been warned that continuous writing or reading was bad for his eyes. But this hurtling-torrent approach was always Gladstone’s way. Packages of manuscript were rushed off to his currently trusted friends and advisers, John Murray the publisher was persuaded to bring the book out by the end of the year, and then the parcels began to fly to Murray as quickly as they came back from the advisers. The rush was as unnecessary as it was potentially dangerous for a young and at least half-ambitious politician, of not notably steady judgement, writing without experience on a delicate subject on which he held extreme views. His first plunge into authorship begins to give point to Archbishop Tait’s superficially most surprising remark about him. ‘What I fear in Gladstone’, he said much later, ‘is his levity.’8

  Gladstone’s principal friends and advisers for the purposes of the book were James Hope, Henry Manning, Philip Pusey and Thomas Dyke Acland. Only Acland had been continuously close to Gladstone since Oxford. He and Pusey, the elder but less interesting brother of Edward Pusey, whose name symbolized High Anglicanism after the mid-century defections to Rome, were members of Parliament. Manning was a rural dean and Hope was a lay dévot; if anyone took Hallam’s place in Gladstone’s affections it was Hope. Although Manning in particular seemed miles away from this precipice in 1838, they were together to shatter Gladstone by being received into the Roman Catholic Church on the same day in April 1851. Gladstone petulantly struck out Hope-Scott (as Hope had become) as an executor of his will, but he was later more forgiving of him than he was of Manning. They had both come strongly into Gladstone’s life in 1836–7. Manning had the devout air and cool but black-and-white mind which made the Barchester-like (and married) clergyman of the 1840s become such a convincingly ultramontane prince of the Church under Pius IX by 1870. Hope was a much less cool zealot who until 1851 was a strong but unsteadying influence on Gladstone.

  As he completed his book Gladstone made one of his then rare descents on the House of Commons to speak and vote against the renewal of the government grant to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth in County Kildare. He argued that the £9000 subvention to the cause of indigenous education and religion in Ireland ‘contravened and stultified the main principle on which the Established Church of England and Ireland was founded’.9 Both the future Roman Catholic converts were in favour of this act of unyielding intolerance, which was to build up vast trouble for Gladstone in the mid-1840s. It must be said, however, that there was no greater irony in Manning, the future leader of the authoritarian populist tendency, largely Irish supported, in British Catholicism, being against Maynooth than there was in Newman, the future patron of a gentler, older, more educated, more English approach to an apostolic and universal Church, having played a key role in driving Peel out of his Oxford University parliamentary seat because of his support for Catholic Emancipation in 1829.

  With his book at the press, and somewhat disenchanted with the British scene, both political and matrimonial, Gladstone set off in August 1838 on another six-month European tour. First he spent nearly a month at Bad Ems, a spa near Koblenz which was to achieve fame during his first premiership by producing the famous diplomatic telegram which sparked off the Franco-Prussian War.6 His purpose there was to help settle in his sister Helen, who was causing trouble already but not nearly as much as she was to do in the 1840s, and who, it was felt, needed a season away from Fasque, where domesticity and being her father’s sole companion were sitting oppressively on her unstable and exhibitionist temperament. He also dealt at Ems with his proofs and sent them back to Hope, who was an eager intermediary.

  The crucial although intermittent companions of this tour were the Glynne family. All of them, two brothers, two sisters and fragile mother, were committed to an autumn and early winter in Italy, and the prospect of joining them in Rome was sufficient to keep Gladstone heading south when he was seized by doubts in both Milan and Florence about whether concern for Helen, or his father, or his eyesight, or even his constituents, ought not to send him back to Ems or England. However, there was also a Gladstone pull on the Glynnes for they turned up briefly in the Rheingau spa at the end of August, and Ems was by no means a necessary staging point on the road to Italy. When Gladstone began to concentrate his attention on Catherine Glynne is not clear. He had noted her presence, with that of her sister, at a London ‘breakfast’ (really an early luncheon) party in July, but it seems that it was the whole family, although no doubt with her as the salient point, which was assuming a special attraction for him. This was at once strange and symptomatic. It was strange because the Glynnes, with the exception of Catherine, had become a somewhat effete family, singularly lacking in his own quality of pulsating energy. It was symptomatic because Gladstone did in a sense marry the whole family. So far as way of life went he transferred his allegiance from Fasque to Hawarden and took over many Glynne values (although never quite mastering their self-conscious private language) before gradually taking over their estate as well. It was Gladstone rather than Catherine who left home on marriage.

  He also left the Glynnes in Naples quite soon after he had found them in Rome and set off on a most testing twenty-five-day tour of Sicily and Calabria, accompanied by Arthur Kinnaird, Whig MP for Perth, who had been his travelling companion southward over the Alps but who, except on the road, was never one of those closest to him. Storms raged, fleas bit, crowds surged, bandits threatened, Etna erupted, but Gladstone survived it all, including 400 miles on a mule for which he could form no affection, and of which he was reminded, with himself in the role of the mule, by the coolness of Queen Victoria’s final farewell to him as Prime Minister in 1894.7 There was, one suspects, an element of bravado about it, of showing to Miss Glynne that he had a vitality and toughness to which she was unused.

  He was nonetheless very glad to be back in Naples with her and ‘the luxury of a reasonably good bed’,10 although certainly not both at the same time. Indeed so far was he from contemplating such an arrangement that when he went to see the San Carlo ballet he was shocked enough to leave abruptly. (But why, in view of his Munich bookshop temptations of seven years later? Was it only to impress the Glynnes? But it is not certain that they were even present.) Thus, by a fine irony, the ‘Murderer of Gordon’, as he was hyperbolically to be described during his second premiership, reacted in exactly the same way to ‘les femmes à demi-nues’ (Gordon could bring himself to write about them only in French) as that somewhat brandy-sodden general was to do when he passed through Naples forty-two years later. The Bourbon monarchy might have fallen in the interval but the undress of the San Carlo corps de ballet was more stable.

  Gladstone then returned to Rome and received almost simultaneously copies of his book and the news that Helen had used the Ems autumn to engage herself to marry a Russo-Polish count, and that her conversion to the Orthodox Church and removal to Russia seemed to be imminent. Perhaps the allure for an author of copies of his own book, particularly the first, and the knowledge that the Glynnes were following him from Naples helped to steady his mind, for he did not rush off to Ems. This was wise, for the Count’s parents satisfactorily (to the families at least) killed the marriage, and Gladstone settled down to a rewarding Advent, Christmas and New Year in Rome.

  Apart from the Glynnes, with whom there were constant dinners, teas and expeditions, the city was sprinkled with Gladstone’s friends and acquaintances. Lord Lincoln, Gladstone’s Christ Church friend, was there with his Scottish ducal wife of six years’ standing, which made the circumstances very different from those in which Gladstone was next to en
gage with Lady Lincoln in Italy in 1849. Thomas Babington Macaulay, standard-bearer of Whig intellectual commentators, was there and amicably encountered Gladstone as they emerged after observing from different angles of scepticism the Pope at Christmas Eve Vespers in St Peter’s. Macaulay had not then seen The State in its Relations with the Church and was as unaware as was Gladstone that he was to subject it in the April 1839 number of the Edinburgh Review to one of the most famous of mid-nineteenth-century critical polemics. (Macaulay was more vicious against Peel than against Gladstone, whom he treated with a polemicists’ well-known trick as an honest and clear exponent of the views which his leader held but wished to obfuscate.) Manning was also in Rome, and Gladstone persuaded that slightly suspicious Rural Dean, who then disapproved of the Roman tendencies of the Oxford Tractarians, to accept introduction to Monsignor Wiseman. (In 1838 Wiseman was head of the English College in Rome. In 1851, with the setting up of the hierarchy in Britain, he became the first Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. In 1868 Manning succeeded him in that metropolitan see.)

  Miss Glynne, as was indeed to be her experience throughout life, had thus to face considerable competition for Gladstone’s attention. In this Roman winter she triumphantly overcame this competition. But whether this was then her intention is by no means clear. She was certainly not repelled by Gladstone as had been Miss Farquhar and Lady Frances Douglas. But neither did she find him an easy suitor. She and her family called him Gia, a name suggesting a mixture of affection and faintly mocking respect. Gia chose well his mise en scène for a declaration. It was in the Colosseum under a full moon on 3 January 1839. But his words may have lacked the clarity and even the glow of the moon’s beam. When, a fortnight later, he put his proposal to her in writing (at least not on this occasion to her father or brother) she claimed to be taken by surprise. His letter was unmistakable in intent if not succinct in expression. Lord Attlee, Gladstone’s successor but eleven as head of a government and not normally regarded as one of the most romantic of Prime Ministers, when he read it reproduced in Magnus’s 1954 biography, was almost as shocked by it as Gladstone had been by the San Carlo ballet. ‘He really was a frightful old prig,’ Attlee wrote. ‘Fancy writing a letter proposing marriage including a sentence of 140 words all about the Almighty. He was a dreadful person.’11

  Gladstone was not a dreadful person. He was in many ways the greatest figure of the nineteenth century, and taken in the round the greatest British politician of that or any other parliamentary century. But he could be portentous and a little ridiculous, particularly when dealing with young women, and his twenties, which were nearly but not quite over when he wrote this letter, were not his best decade. It was understandable that Attlee should take against the letter, but it was both a little narrow and carrying his laconic dismissiveness too far to build a general censure upon it. Fortunately Miss Glynne took a more perceptive view. She did not say yes, but she did not say no, and Gladstone travelled back to London at the end of January, in the company of her elder brother and in a state of reasonable hope.

  PEEL’S APPRENTICE

  THE FIRST HALF OF 1839 was not politically prosperous for Gladstone. After his return to England on 31 January he came gradually to understand that his State and Church book had not been a success. Macaulay’s Edinburgh Review polemic, which appeared at Easter, he could have dismissed as the howling of the Whig dogs. It at least suggested that the book was attracting attention, and it put into the English language the first of several phrases which are inseparable from Gladstone’s name: ‘the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories’ has retained its resonance after a century and a half. Like most of the best phrases, however, it was doubtfully accurate. Not only was it to be belied by Gladstone’s future political development. In addition the book was at the time ill regarded by the most influential Tories, and their distaste for it was such as temporarily to hinder Gladstone’s prospects of rising.

  They mostly considered it a foolish book, making up in portentousness (it was, for instance, dedicated to the University of Oxford) for what it lacked in sense and judgement. Gladstone noticed their silence more than he divined the cause. ‘Not a word from him [Peel], S[tanley] or G[raham] yet,’8 he wrote on 9 February, ‘even to acknowledge my poor book.’1 Peel was reported as having thrown it on the floor in annoyance at Gladstone’s crassness in gratuitously giving to fortune the hostage of such an extreme and impractical piece of writing. It was probably lucky for the author that, when Melbourne offered his resignation as Prime Minister in May of that year, the Queen’s stubbornness in refusing to install some Tory ladies of the bedchamber led to Peel’s declining to form a government. Had he done so, Gladstone might well have been excluded.

  The only self-protective aspect of The State in its Relations with the Church was that it was extremely difficult to read. Few can have penetrated its opaqueness to the full monstrous intolerance of the doctrine, which broadly amounted to a policy of no public service jobs throughout the British Isles (although maybe the pass had been most undesirably sold in Scotland) for anyone who was not a communicating member of the Church of England. The plenitude of Gladstone’s extremity was underlined by his one ‘moderate’ concession: the doctrine might be difficult to apply in India.

  Among the scarce benefits to flow from the book, and almost the only bonus of Gladstone’s 1839 spring, was that one of the few who did get through it from beginning to end was Miss Catherine Glynne. She even copied out some chosen passages and endeavoured to learn them by heart. It was perhaps the only way in which she could avoid the immediate erasure from her mind of what she had read. Many years later her daughter Mary (Drew) thought that this indicated that her mother who, despite her many gifts of character, personality, and a spontaneous even if disorganized intelligence, rarely then read a book or even a newspaper, must have been something of an intellectual in her youth. It seems more likely that it was a sign of her growing absorption in Gladstone. Had Gladstone been more worldly or less literarily vain he would surely have regarded a detailed acquaintance with State and Church as a certain sign that he had at last succeeded as a suitor. As it was he remained on tenterhooks until 8 June, when she formally accepted him during a riverside walk away from the concourse at a Fulham garden party.

  Although Gladstone had come to her via the Farquhar and Douglas setbacks, and although one reason why she may have been so slow to accept was that she had been heavily jilted in 1837 by Colonel Francis Harcourt,9 neither approached the marriage as in any way a pis aller. They were totally engaged with each other, and each recognized from the beginning, as indeed turned out to be abundantly so, that they had been lucky to be available because rejected.

  Catherine Glynne was almost perfectly suited to be Gladstone’s wife. In the first place she was healthy, unlike the female members of his own family, out-survived him by two years (in full vigour until nearly the end) and died only in 1900, at the same age of eighty-eight which he had attained. She was also buoyant, self-confident and high-spirited, as well as physically graceful and on the edge of beauty, less fashionably and glossily but more vitally so than Miss Farquhar. She was moderately careless of convention and well at ease within her own skin, very much a part of which were her high family connections – Grenvilles, Pitts, Wyndhams – and her chatelaineship of Hawarden, exercised almost since girlhood owing to her mother’s valetudinarianism and her brother’s bachelordom. Her commitment to Hawarden, which was her home for the whole of her eighty-eight years, fortified much less crucially by a large London establishment, meant that she never showed signs of sulky neglect in the face of the frequent preoccupations and occasional infatuations of Gladstone.

  It could be argued that their marriage was not particularly close. They were often and sometimes unnecessarily in different houses, conjoined only by regular but not notably intimate letters. Gladstone nearly always signed himself to her ‘Ever yours affty., W. E. Gladstone’. Later in life he occasionally alternated this with ‘From your
old WEG’. For decades, however, he never varied in writing ‘Mrs W. E. Gladstone’, as though it were a business communication, across the bottom of the letter. But when the last of the wives of his three elder brothers had died, he suddenly shifted, with an extraordinary sense of precedential precision, to writing ‘Mrs Gladstone’.

  Catherine Gladstone was passionately engaged with the success and wellbeing of her husband, but not very interested in either politics or the intricacies of religious doctrine and observance, the two subjects which most interested him. On religion her (1956) biographer describes her as Anima naturaliter Christiana2 – a soul turned instinctively towards God – which was a description Gladstone had applied to Arthur Hallam. This might be interpreted either as a tribute to her spontaneous piety or as a determination to put the best possible explanation on her lack of interest in religious instruction. She never reacted against Gladstone’s religiosity, being affronted neither by the letter which so upset Clement Attlee nor by his engrossment within minutes of her Thameside acceptance of his proposal, in explaining his attitude to the Church. She was appropriately regular as a parson’s sister and a famous layman’s wife in her own public devotions. Yet she cannot be regarded as a wifely sycophant. Her middle-life ‘Oh, William dear, if you weren’t such a great man you would be a terrible bore’3 must be accounted a rarely illuminating expression of exasperated affection.