by Simon Heffer
Gladstone would be a constant presence in British life until his death in 1898. For much of that time he was in high office. He sat on the commission of the 1851 Exhibition; he was a trustee of the British Museum; he was consulted about the contents of the National Gallery and about great architectural projects; he translated Homer; he influenced intense theological questions within the Church of England and within Parliament; he influenced the reform of Oxford University; he stimulated an inquiry that led to reform of the great public schools; he assembled a library of 32,000 books; he resigned and refused office regularly on points of high principle; he developed the hobby of chopping down trees; and he saved fallen women, taking them home and praying for them with Mrs Gladstone. He was learned, brilliant, intensely serious, a moral juggernaut. His was perhaps the highest mind of an age densely populated with them: he embodied the drive to pursue perfection, to advance civilisation and to improve the lives of the British people.
To do this, in a time of rapid social and technological change, entailed making accommodations. Gladstone’s success rested not least in his knack of maintaining a high standard of integrity and honesty while making profound changes of position on great questions. He was driven, in doing so, by his intellect, which presented to him on occasion the inevitable difficulties of persisting with certain lines of policy or thought. He was a high churchman who saw the need to disestablish the Irish Church. He was wedded to the Tory landed interest and yet went against them in his support for repeal of the Corn Laws. He found the idea of divorce an abomination, yet devoted much of his charitable work to women familiar with the lowest forms of sexual depravity. He was an imperialist who saw the inevitability of giving Ireland home rule. Most important, he was a Tory who became a Liberal.
He was born in 1809, the fourth and youngest son of a Liverpool merchant, Sir John Gladstone, the first baronet. The Gladstones were Scottish, part of a distinct community in Liverpool. Both William’s parents were devoutly religious and evangelical, and he was baptised an Anglican. While at Eton he began to keep the diary that is his greatest monument, and which he kept up for over seventy years. He went up to Christ Church, Oxford, distinguished himself academically as Peel had done there twenty years before, and became president of the Oxford Union. However, his fellows regarded him as a legendary prig, not least because of his religious zealotry. He seriously considered taking holy orders, until his father talked him out of it.
At Oxford he acquired a deep-seated interest in politics. At the Union he passed a motion of no confidence in Wellington’s administration. Gladstone was at this stage a supporter of the faction in the Tory party led by George Canning, which favoured Catholic emancipation and a relaxation of tariffs on trade. Gladstone deplored the Whig reform measures that would extend the franchise into the middle classes in 1832, and abolish rotten boroughs in which patronage and not voters controlled an MP’s election. However, he deplored even more Wellington’s blinkered repudiation of the Whig proposals and his unwillingness to negotiate a less seismic measure. Gladstone’s Oxford speech caused him to be noticed at Westminster, and in 1832 the Duke of Newcastle offered him the seat at Newark. Gladstone fought it in the December 1832 election that immediately followed the Reform Act, and took his seat in Parliament the following month. When Peel formed his short administration in 1834 Gladstone was a whip, and then Under-secretary for War and the Colonies. As when Peel held the post, Gladstone’s Secretary of State – the Earl of Aberdeen – was in the Lords, so he gained experience, aged just twenty-five, leading for the department in the Commons.
Macaulay, reviewing The State in its Relations with the Church in the Edinburgh Review in April 1839, famously described its author as ‘the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories’.26 Even those who, like Peel, had the intellects to digest what Gladstone was saying found the thesis expressed problematical, and Gladstone more unfathomable. However, one of the keys to Gladstone’s personality was that for all the ferocity with which he embraced certain positions, he had a flexibility of mind Macaulay could not envisage; when the facts no longer supported the position he had taken, he took a new one.
When Peel offered Gladstone the vice-presidency of the Board of Trade in September 1841 the offer was met with ‘protestations of ignorance and unfitness’.27 Gladstone engaged in a spectacular circumlocution, eventually over several sides of writing paper, about his lack of worthiness. This sentence sums up the tone: ‘It is presumptuous, I fear, on my part, to contemplate in any form the notion that I might hereafter be deemed fit for official advancement; I do it only because you yourself were pleased to allude to the present appointment as one which might furnish a proper discipline and an advantageous introduction to others at a future, probably a distant, period; those other employments, as I have been led to infer, (and that inference forms the only ground of the explanation I now offer) being likewise connected with the trade or the finance of this country.’ After several hundred more such words he accepted the post, however. Almost immediately, Gladstone was corresponding with Peel about intelligence sent by his brother from Liverpool about agitation there for repeal of the Corn Laws.28
By the 1850s Gladstone had become a leader of a sect of Tories – the Peelites, who had followed their former leader on the matter of free trade – and British politics had become increasingly concerned with foreign affairs: the Crimean War, the troubles in India that led to the Mutiny in 1857, and the government takeover of the subcontinent from the East India Company thereafter. It was also the decade when Gladstone carved out a leading reputation as a statesman, and as one clearly heading for the top of what Disraeli would call ‘the greasy pole’. He did this as much in his time as an Opposition frontbencher between 1855 and 1859 as he did as Chancellor from 1852 to 1855 (and he would hold that office again from 1859 to 1866). Although ridiculed by Disraeli, who considered him desiccated and priggish, and regarded with a mixture of awe and curiosity by many others, Gladstone had depths to his character at odds with his public persona.
There was far more to him than even the most observant political colleague would ever discern. He had a tumultuous and intense inner life, something he held in common with his sister Helen, who as well as converting to Catholicism had also become a laudanum addict. In his diary he recorded the basics of his life, and sometimes far more than that. His main inner problems were carnal, and are hardly approached even in a document so intimate as the diaries. He endured long separations from his wife. He had an advanced interest in pornography, though what entertained him was quite unlike what is understood by the contemporary definition of the term: the editor of his Diaries, Colin Matthew, described his interests as encompassing ‘Restoration poems, classical authors such as Petronius, and fabliaux (French verse fables, some of them extremely bawdy).’29 Some have linked his work rescuing prostitutes to this, but in fact it came through his membership from 1845 onwards of a group of well-heeled Tractarians, who together decided to perform regular charity work. Gladstone started off working in Soho with the destitute of both sexes, but by 1848 found this work too time-consuming.
He seems to have begun combing the streets for prostitutes to rescue some time in 1848, and first mentions the activity in his diary on 25 May 1849. By the summer of 1850, in a period of heightened feeling for him when he, and all the other Peelites, were affected by the sudden death of their leader – thrown from his horse in Rotten Row – Gladstone began to be more systematic about this work. Although he seemed to do it most when Mrs Gladstone was away, she was kept fully informed. The women were brought to the Gladstones’ house, where Catherine Gladstone would talk to them. Gladstone would arrange for the women to undergo rehabilitation at the House of Mercy at Clewer near Windsor, after which they were encouraged either to find regular work or a husband, or to emigrate.
He devoted much time to making arrangements for the women but was not especially successful. He recorded on 20 January 1854 that he had spoken to between eighty and ninety prostitutes,
but could think of only one who, thanks to his influence, had mended her ways. Another prostitute who failed to graduate from the House of Mercy told him in 1854 that ‘I have no doubt that you wished to do me some service, but I did not fancy being shut up in such a place as that for perhaps twelve months. I should have committed suicide.’30 As Matthew puts it, ‘for Gladstone rescue work became not merely a duty but a craving; it was an exposure to sexual stimulation which Gladstone felt he must both undergo and overcome.’ The way in which he ‘courted evil’ became a test, to prove to himself that he could deal with temptation.
Even in an age before mass media and a tabloid press such an association as this risked political disaster, but he seemed oblivious to it. When William Wilson, a Scotsman, tried to blackmail him in 1853, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he went straight to the police. He felt he was undertaking a Christian mission and had nothing to be ashamed of. Of his discussions with prostitutes he noted in his diary: ‘These talkings of mine are certainly not within the rules of worldly prudence: I am not sure that Christian prudence sanctions them for such an one as me; but my aim & intention did not warrant the charge wh[ich] doubtless has been sent to teach me wisdom & which I therefore welcome.’31 Wilson was tried at the Old Bailey in June that year, pleaded guilty, and was given a year’s hard labour.
In 1849 Gladstone had started whipping himself after reading pornography. In 1851 he started doing it after meeting prostitutes, if he felt he had become unduly excited. He did find some of the women beautiful, and would describe that aspect in his diaries, in Italian. The Diaries provide no evidence of whether he ever slept with them: it seems highly unlikely he did, given the lengths to which he goes to record his resistance to temptation, and the spiritual catastrophe that would have occurred – and which would have found some way to manifest itself – if he had succumbed. In 1896 he told his son Stephen, in a sealed letter not to be opened until after his death, that contrary to rumours he knew had circulated he had never ‘been guilty of the act which is known as that of infidelity to the marriage bed’.32
The self-flagellation seemed to follow a pattern. He would have emotionally intense meetings with prostitutes when some other crisis had occurred in his life, perhaps as a means of taking his mind off it – such as when under political pressure, or if some spiritual problem had occurred, such as when two of his closest friends (including Henry Manning, the future Cardinal) left for the Roman Catholic Church in 1851, or when he had read Froude’s Nemesis of Faith. The group of Tractarians to which he belonged – a secret society known as ‘the engagement’ – had indicated self-flagellation as a penance in times of such necessity and when in breach of their rules of devotion. It seems likely that it was that, rather than any pornographic association, that caused Gladstone to whip himself. Unlike other Tractarians he never sought spiritual guidance when in these torments. There is no sense that his wife knew of his internal struggle. He went to church two or three times every Sunday, once on most other days of the week, and prayed morning and night. It adds to the astonishing nature of Gladstone the man that at the height of these troubles in himself he was running Her Majesty’s Treasury, and with conspicuous success. Later in the 1850s, as a means of working off his surplus energies, he took up the hobby of cutting down trees on his estate at Hawarden in Flintshire.
III
The man who until death in 1881 would from the early 1850s become Gladstone’s long-term rival, Benjamin Disraeli, could hardly have been more different from him. He was frivolous, opportunistic, unscrupulous and consumed by personal ambition. In an era of high minds, when those in public life for the most part sought to serve the cause of society’s improvement, Disraeli stands as a reminder that some are only ever in it for what they can get out of it for themselves. When, as we shall see, he eventually led a great reforming government in the 1870s, the main reforms (many of whose effects are still felt today) were the initiatives of colleagues. When he reached the top of the greasy pole, what he most wanted to do was enjoy power and patronage, and revel in his place in society. Such things could hardly have mattered less to Gladstone.
He had a less steady climb to the front bench than his rival, ironically profiting from his shabby part in the political assassination of Robert Peel. Disraeli overcame – to an extent – the suspicions of his colleagues (and the fact that he had been on the wrong side of the intellectual argument over the Corn Laws) to get to Downing Street just before Gladstone did. The two men exemplify the Victorian political mind at its best and worst: Gladstone the man of principle, even if he had to engage in occasional contortions to try to remain principled; and Disraeli the opportunist, craving power for its own sake and not because of any great strategy to transform Britain and, as we shall see at the time of the second Reform Act in 1867, willing to throw away any principle in order to stay in office. Although there were many shades and gradations of the political mind in the mid-nineteenth century, these two men represented its poles.
It was perhaps inevitable that, for one whose career was rooted in opportunism, Benjamin Disraeli should have had the most unconventional path to the First Lordship of the Treasury of any nineteenth-century prime minister. The man who would become the literary muse of the ultra-aristocratic Young England movement would, but for an unintended consequence of an action of his father’s, have been disqualified by birth. He had been born a Jew in 1804, the eldest son of Isaac D’Israeli (young Ben doctored the surname at an early age, one of many amendments made to his past). Isaac D’Israeli had his four children convert to Christianity in 1817. This was not because, at a time when Jews were barred from the House of Commons, he intended one to become Prime Minister, but because he wished to break with the Bevis Marks synagogue in London, which was demanding money from him.
Disraeli was twenty-one when his first novel, Vivian Grey, was published, to some acclaim. This was as well, because he had manufactured a lifestyle that far exceeded any income he might have from his father, and the royalties were useful. So was the minor celebrity he acquired. He made the best of what talent he had and was an assiduous networker in a high society of which he was otherwise a complete outsider. Critics of his art occasionally savaged him. One was Richard Monckton Milnes, who loathed Disraeli from the start (they were near contemporaries in the Commons), and who wrote a lengthy critique of him as a novelist after the fall of Peel. In it, Disraeli is teased for liking to make his characters dukes, and for having so little imagination. Another critic was Anthony Trollope who, in his autobiography, damned his novels as having ‘all had the same flavour of paint and unreality’.33 He felt the novels were aimed at turning the heads of the impressionable young; they were certainly written to keep Disraeli in with Young England, for by that stage he realised that ingratiation with the rich and influential was an essential tool in his career progress. ‘He has struck them with astonishment and aroused in their imagination ideas of a world more glorious, more rich, more witty, more enterprising, than their own. But the glory has been the glory of pasteboard, and the wealth has been a wealth of tinsel. The wit has been the wit of hairdressers, and the enterprise has been the enterprise of mountebanks.’
His novels were used as a weapon against Tory orthodoxy: Coningsby less so than Sybil, which directly attacks the Tamworth Manifesto and the conduct of office of Peel. The motivation appears to be personal ambition rather than principle. Some have detected in Disraeli a dislike of utilitarianism; which, ironically, would prevail even more when Lord John Russell took the Liberals into office in 1846, after Disraeli had helped destroy Peel’s administration. However, Disraeli’s dislike of this, while genuine no doubt, seems ramped up for opportunistic effect, as was much else he said and did after his disappointment of 1841 when he had unsuccessfully sought office. He never seemed to have a coherent programme to offer instead; no sign of where the romantic Toryism of Young England would lead in terms of policy. Neither did Carlyle: but Carlyle was a professional controversialist and polemicist, whil
e Disraeli was supposed to be aspiring to the role of statesman.
Politics for Disraeli was about keeping up appearances. Lord George Bentinck, a leading protectionist and younger son of the Duke of Portland, became his patron; and he decided to bankroll Disraeli as spokesman for the aristocracy’s landed interest. He and his two brothers set Disraeli up on a 750-acre estate at Hughenden in Buckinghamshire, so he could have some of the attributes of a great Tory figure and could represent the county in Parliament, which he did from 1847. However, as the deal was going through, Bentinck dropped dead from a heart attack. Desperate negotiations with the other brothers followed, and the Portland fortune eventually found the £25,000 needed to set Disraeli up. This elaborate, almost preposterous exercise in aggrandisement came when Disraeli was still heavily indebted elsewhere, despite his wife’s having come to his aid several times.
Once Disraeli conceived political ambitions – which he appears to have done as a means both of acquiring some social respectability and because of a childlike delight in the ‘game’ – his need for money became more desperate. He was badly, and chronically, in debt. He entered Parliament at the election of 1837 occasioned by the death of William IV, as one of the two Tory Members returned for Maidstone. It was a stroke of luck for him that his fellow incumbent, Wyndham Lewis, died shortly afterwards, leaving a well-provided-for widow, Mary Anne. Disraeli, though a dozen years the lady’s junior, married her. His origins were still mocked by the crowd at the poll in 1837, who assailed him with cries of ‘ou’ clo” (the cry of ‘old clothes’ as popularly uttered by Jewish dealers in that commodity) and ‘Shylock’. However, as his biographer Lord Blake points out, England was not a nursery of anti-Semitism at this time, and Disraeli does not appear to have let this unpleasantness defeat him. The same cannot be said for his florid maiden speech, which was popularly accounted a disaster, and which culminated in his yelling above a baying House: ‘I will sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me.’34
