Gladstone: A Biography Read online

  On politics she never betrayed any views of her own beyond a fierce loyalty to her husband and a more moderate one to others whose personality and behaviour earned her approval. This ideological detachment, which put her firmly in the category of a Mrs Baldwin or a Mrs Attlee rather than a Mrs Asquith or a Mrs Roosevelt, was perhaps as well in view of the meteoric progress across the political sky which Gladstone pursued in the course of his marriage. It also meant that Gladstone’s early decision to tell her all his political secrets (in a typically Manichaean way he thought the alternative was to tell her none), to which he stuck throughout his life, was made safer. In the early days she occasionally betrayed one through carelessness, but never at any stage by malevolent or even benevolent intent. The ideological detachment was, however, accompanied by a willingness, when in London and after the birth of her eighth and last child more or less coincided with the completion of Barry’s new Palace of Westminster, to spend long hours in the old grille-covered ladies’ gallery of the House of Commons. It was indeed a legend of the pre-1941 House that, just as the despatch boxes bore indentations caused by the vehemence with which over the years Gladstone had pounded them with his heavy rings, so in the ladies’ gallery there was a patch of brass railing in front of her habitual corner seat which Mrs Gladstone had polished bright with her gloved hand. (The length of her husband’s speeches ensured that both the despatch boxes and the railing had plenty of time in which to receive punishment or massage.)

  The question which arises is whether Catherine Gladstone’s disorganized self-confidence amounted to a gushing self-satisfaction. There are one or two signs which point in that direction. ‘Glynnese’, the private family language, which Gladstone had the independent good sense never fully to master, was surely a most tiresome affectation. The use of ‘young mawkin’ for stranger, of ‘hydra’ for disorder or of ‘with a magpie’ for underdone was surely more a search for exclusivity and a sign of self-regard than an aid to clear communication. Glynnese makes Winchester ‘notions’ appear almost rational. And Catherine Gladstone was near to being the keeper of the shrine of this piece of nonsense. Her familiar names were also a little arch. As girls she and her younger sister Mary were known as the ‘two pussies’. Gladstone, happily, never took to this name and preferred ‘Catherine’ or ‘Cathie’ or ‘C’. However, on her side of the family Mary surrendered the joint claim and taught her own children (an even greater quiverful of twelve) to refer to ‘Aunt Puss’ or ‘Auntie Pussy’.

  Catherine’s influence upon Mary was so strong that the latter announced her own engagement three days after her sister’s betrothal with Gladstone. When her sister had hesitated, so did she. When her sister decided, she followed suit. Mary’s husband-to-be was George Lyttelton, of Hagley Hall, Worcestershire, who had succeeded as the fourth Lord Lyttelton of the second creation in 1837 when he was still an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was only twenty-one at the time of the engagement (four years younger than Mary Glynne) and had a somewhat immature appearance. Nonetheless his later achievements were considerable. He became a fellow of the Royal Society, received honorary degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, was the first Principal of Queen’s College, Birmingham, and the first President of the Midland Institute there. He was the leader of West Midlands intellectual life.

  Among his children (he added three by a second wife to make a total of fifteen) were Lucy, who married Lord Frederick Cavendish, the assassinated Chief Secretary for Ireland in Gladstone’s second government; Lavinia, who married Edward Talbot, the effective founder of Keble College, Oxford, and later Bishop of Rochester, Southwark and finally Winchester; and Alfred, the great cricketer who was Colonial Secretary under Balfour. George Lyttelton himself was as enthusiastic a cricketer as he was an intellectual, and one of the reasons for his excessive number of children, which led to the searing death of his wife, aged forty-three, in 1857, was said to be his desire to produce a family eleven. He was a tragic as well as a gifted figure. In a fit of melancholia he committed suicide at the age of fifty-eight.

  In 1839, however, he like Gladstone was an eager husband-to-be and they agreed to a double marriage at Hawarden in July. Both the bridegrooms, against more recent custom, took themselves there nearly two weeks before the wedding and naturally attracted considerable attention in the estate village, where Gladstone, taller, more handsome and eight years older, contradicted the impression that he had made on Caroline Farquhar at Polesden Lacey by causing a group of villagers mistakenly to murmur: ‘It is easy to see which one is the lord.’ The wedding passed off well on 25 July as a great estate and families celebration (John Gladstone was delighted with the match), and the two bridegrooms were sufficiently pleased with each other and their brides that, after a brief separation when the Lytteltons went to Hagley and the Gladstones stayed at Hawarden, they all four set off on what proved to be a rain-sodden tour of the Scottish Highlands. Then the Gladstones settled down for a quiet October and most of November at Fasque. After that they did a month’s tour of Edinburgh, the Borders, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and Nottinghamshire, including a brief visit to Newark (and Clumber), before returning to Hawarden for Christmas.

  They spent two days at Dalmahoy, Lord Morton’s house in Midlothian. Lady Milton, as Lady Frances Douglas had become, was there, and Gladstone wrote of her in his diary with somewhat elephantine delicacy:

  Cath. walked a little with Lady Milton & liked her very much. In appearance she is just as two years ago. She dresses in excellent taste plainly, evincing thereby a higher tact. She seems to me in all respects now the same person as she seemed then. No one of the family alluded ever so indirectly to my having been here before. They were most kind to us.

  Dearest C. not very well here.

  There was some awkwardness in meeting Lady (F.) M. She felt it too and lingered on the handle of the door when she entered. But why should she? She has nothing to regret. I have a precipitancy blamable [sic] in itself though I do not believe that it at all affected the issue. In other respects, I received here a sharp instruction which I believe will chasten me for my life long with respect to all objects of my desire: combined, that is to say, with what preceded it in 1835. And I say deliberately, & I think not self-deceived, that I now see how much more wisely God judged and ordered for me: C. & I talked over these matters for two hours and read Scr[ipture].4

  Gladstone was always incapable of glossing over things where others might have thought it wiser to do so. Thus, well before this marriage excursion, he had already taken Catherine through the Farquhar and Douglas campaigns. She had retaliated by giving him the names of her previous suitors, rejected and rejecting, which he wrote in his diary in a continuous stream of Greek characters, presumably as a modification of his habit of always there expressing difficult or prurient thoughts in French or Italian. This had the effect, when translated, of sounding like either a cricket team (which should have pleased his brother-in-law) or a courtesan’s engagement sheet: ‘Seymer Newark Hill Vaughan Egerton Anson Harcourt Lewis Mordaunt’.5

  However, they both appeared to survive these mutual bombardments without undue casualties, and on 14 January 1840 they left Hawarden together and proceeded by railway to Wolverhampton, where they separated, Catherine going to Hagley and he on to London. A week later he went for a few days to Hagley and then brought her to London on the 27th. Gladstone was a great early user of railways. He had so travelled from Euston to Crewe (and then on by road) before his wedding, and had then written: ‘9–9. 200 miles to Hawarden. Dust from engine annoying to the eyes and filthy in the carriage. I had dreaded the motion backward.’6 Of the shorter journey from Hagley he merely wrote: ‘11¼ to 7½ . . . by B[irmingha]m Railway. C. weary.’7 On 8 February he concluded an arrangement with the Marquess of Cholmondeley to take over his deceased mother’s house at 13 Carlton House Terrace. Three days later, having taken over most of the furniture as well, they were able to move in.

  It was a very grand house for a young MP of bourg
eois origin, even one who had married into the upper squirearchy. However, the Gladstones survived in proximate grandeur for thirty-five years. He transferred to 6 Carlton Gardens, which his father made over to him, in 1847. And then in 1856 he moved back the few hundred yards to Carlton House Terrace, this time not to No. 13 but to No. 11, which was a bigger house. Only in 1876 did he finally abandon the ‘Carltons’ and retreat to Harley Street. After he lost his Prime Minister’s salary of £5000 a year, he complained that he was left with a residual and encumbered £6050 of his own, while everyone else in the Terrace had £25,000 or more. In 1840 he calculated his income at £4260 and his expenditure at £2168. By 1846 the figures had risen to £6987 and £4007. The near doubling of expenditure was more surprising than the surge in income, which was, however, very much the boom before the slump.

  In the summer of 1840 Catherine Gladstone gave birth to their first child and William Gladstone to his second book. The book was entitled Church Principles Considered by their Results, was written in the same spirit of intolerant Anglicanism as was the first, but fell much flatter. Manning and Hope-Scott had again been his principal consultants. Those others who noticed it at all (for instance Dr Thomas Arnold) thought it as theologically unsound as it was politically opinionated.

  The only parliamentary significant event for Gladstone in his first session after marriage was his speech on 8 April 1840 denouncing the so-called Opium War which Palmerston as Foreign Secretary had launched against China. It was his first major speech since his defence of the West Indian sugar planters three years before, and was very different from it both in motivation and in impact. Unusually the diary gives some indication of preparation: ‘Wrote to Mr Campbell – Mrs Hickey, read on China. House 4–6 + 7–10½. Spoke 1¼, heavily: strongly agt the Trade & the war. . . .’8 Of the motivation he wrote (several weeks later), ‘I am in dread of the judgements of God upon England for our national iniquity towards China.’9 Undoubtedly, however, another part of it was his growing dislike and distrust of Palmerston, whom he saw as bumptious, chauvinist, libertine without guilt, and compounding his sins by claiming to be the heir of Canning. Gladstone in general, while moralizing easily on issues, was personally tolerant about political opponents and allies – his progress across the political sky meant that at one time or another most were both – but there were two major figures who, throughout his middle political years, he could not abide. The one was Palmerston and the other was Disraeli. His desire to keep away from both of them had an almost astronomic quality to it. It was, however, impossible in the cosmology of mid-nineteenth-century politics to do both at the same time, and for the last six years of Palmerston’s life Gladstone was his independent, powerful and warily detached Chancellor of the Exchequer. Palmerston was the earlier of the two in engaging his antipathy, for by 1840 Gladstone had had little more contact with Disraeli than meeting him at a dinner party of Lord Lyndhurst’s in 1835 and finding him ‘rather dull’, although noticeable for the foppery of his clothes. Disraeli compensated by irritating Gladstone for sixteen years after Palmerston had gone.

  This Opium War speech was both Gladstone’s main political incursion in that flat session of 1840, during which the Melbourne government subsided and the Whig decade came to an end, and his first foreign policy foray. Eighteen-forty-one, by contrast, saw a general election with a major turnover of seats, and a new government which marked as dramatic a change of political weather as 1906 or 1945 or 1979. The new model Conservative party (as the Tories were coming to be called) of the Tamworth Manifesto, accepting the Reform Bill and attempting to embrace a good proportion of the new manufacturing class as well as the Church and state squirearchy, was in office with a majority of eighty. And Peel, who was the epitome of the new Conservative balance, was beginning his first period of secure power.

  Peel was not only Gladstone’s leader but his political mentor. He and Gladstone had a similar social provenance, and even more strikingly, with a gap of a short generation (twenty-one years) between them, did their careers follow similar courses. They were both the sons of rich first-generation baronets who had made their money in Lancashire. Peel’s father was more a manufacturer than a merchant, and somewhat richer even than John Gladstone. The sons both retained distinct accent traces of their county of origin. Peel was one of Harrow’s seven Prime Ministers rather than one of Eton’s eighteen, but he was as naturally a Christ Church man as was Gladstone, and there produced as notable an academic result as Gladstone was to do.

  Within a year of Oxford, again as with Gladstone, Peel was in the House of Commons, in his case as member for Cashel, a Co. Tipperary borough which made Gladstone’s election for Newark look positively democratic. They were later both members for Oxford University over sizeable spells, and were both eventually turned out by the electorate of graduates (a high proportion of whom were then country clergy) for liberal sins, Peel for promoting Catholic emancipation, which he had hitherto strongly opposed, and Gladstone for a cumulative list of similar offences. As a young MP Peel’s career prospered even more than Gladstone’s was to do. He became Chief Secretary for Ireland (the post which Gladstone coveted in 1841) for a six-year period at the age of twenty-four, and Home Secretary for five years at the age of thirty-four.

  They both began their effective premierships in their fifties, having each fashioned a new-style political grouping to sustain him in that role. Peel at fifty-three became in 1841 the first Conservative Prime Minister with a majority (there had previously been Tories), and Gladstone at fifty-eight became in 1868 the first Liberal Prime Minister who had nothing of Whiggery about him, except for some of the followers by whom he was sustained. And towards the end of their lives they both caused considerable mayhem in the parties they themselves had created. They both had phenomenal energy, and were by any standards towering statesmen, Peel the most effective between Pitt and Gladstone himself, and Gladstone still more pre-eminent, dominating both the third and fourth quarters of the nineteenth century at least as completely as Peel had dominated the second quarter.

  Beyond this, however, there were very substantial differences. In the first place Peel had no old age and no possibility of return to Downing Street after 1846, whereas Gladstone had the longest twilight and the greatest number of encores in the history of politics. Peel was cut down at the age of sixty-two, falling off his horse on Constitution Hill, and dying dramatically in his Whitehall Gardens house three days later. It needed the nature of his death to infuse his end with drama, for he was in many ways a cool man, even in external manner a cold one. There is some doubt whether it was his smile which Daniel O’Connell compared to the silver plate on a coffin, but there was in any event some applicability about the simile. This could never have been said of Gladstone.

  Peel was a commanding figure, prickly and vain, although attracting loyalty and even affection, but never tempestuous. Bagehot’s critical view of him was that he had ‘the powers of a first-rate man and the creed of a second-rate man’. By that he meant that Peel, who in the case of ‘almost all the great measures with which his name is associated . . . attained great eminence as [their] opponent before he achieved even greater eminence as their advocate’,10 always changed his mind at the time when the average man and not the pioneer did so. This made him a wise and truly Conservative man of government, but it did not give him Gladstone’s swoop of an eagle’s flight.

  The other gulf between them was in their attitude to religion. Peel is said to have gone beyond the demands of observance normal in the first half of the nineteenth century and to have been on the threshold of private devoutness. But he was not tortured or obsessed by religion, and he did not allow it to obtrude on to his political decisions. Professor Gash, his 1972 biographer, wrote: ‘Peel’s own religion was a simple, rational, pious Protestantism. The enthusiasm of the “Saints”, the high sacerdotal principles of Gladstone, were as foreign to him as the intellectual pessimism of Melbourne or the tortured self-examination of Lord Ashley [Shaftesbury].’
11 He may have been less cynical than Melbourne but, adjusting for the fact that he was the leader of a more clerical party, he was nearly as Erastian as any Whig. Although he had a fine rational mind, he was essentially unable (perhaps because unwilling) to understand what Gladstone was going on about. Whether or not he threw State and Church on the floor, the depth of the chasm which separated them on the issue with which it dealt is even more strongly (because more calmly and dismissively) expressed by his reported comment: ‘that young man will ruin a fine career if he writes books such as these’.12

  Gladstone was Peel’s political heir. As Morley puts it: ‘we cannot forget that Peel and Mr Gladstone were in the strict line of political succession’,13 and Morley, relying on his own experience as a minister under Gladstone (which experience only began thirty-six years after Peel’s death), then proceeds to pay eloquent tribute to the way Gladstone’s whole habit of conducting public business still owed a great deal to Peel’s assumptions, his methods and even his phrases (as revealed in his published correspondence). Gladstone also proudly called himself a Peelite for a full decade after the death of the eponym. Of the distinguished band who originally bore this label the others – Aberdeen, Goulburn, Graham, Sidney Herbert – were all dead by 1861. But Gladstone’s pre-eminence stemmed from much more than a capacity for survival. He was indeed the one political figure of the nineteenth century whose quality and fame came to exceed that of Peel himself. And it may be that a presentiment of this – on both sides – was part of the reason why, despite all the centripetal factors, relations between Gladstone and Peel were never as close as might have been expected. There was always some delicate curtain between them. Gladstone was loyal to Peel, but not with quite the spontaneous and affectionate loyalty which he had felt towards Canning as a very young man, and which the memory of Canning continued to excite in him. Peel used, recognized and three-quarters admired Gladstone’s qualities, yet stood a little back from him and queried his sense of proportion. ‘That young man [might] ruin a fine career’ was a phrase which almost perfectly expressed his conditional benevolence.