by Roy Jenkins
My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widowed race be run
Dear as the mother to the son
More than my brothers are to me.15
What was most remarkable, however, was that, as Professor Robert Martin’s life of Tennyson points out, ‘sixty years after his [Hallam’s] death the Prime Minister and the Poet Laureate were still jealous of each other’s place in his affections’.16 Gladstone and Tennyson, whom Martin jointly and uncompromisingly described as ‘the foremost of all Victorians’, spoke well of each other in public but met only occasionally and with some restraint over their relationship until they went together on a Scandinavian cruise in 1883, during which the Prime Minister persuaded the Laureate to accept the rare offer of a literary peerage.
On 10 October 1828 Gladstone and about half of his Eton friends went to Oxford, and almost without exception to Christ Church. However, Hallam and Wellesley went to Trinity, Cambridge, and Selwyn to St John’s College in that university. Christ Church then had an Oxford dominance much greater, leading and unusual a college though it has remained, than it has enjoyed in the twentieth century. When Gladstone was matriculated there had been twenty-one Prime Ministers and six of them had been at Christ Church. In addition another two – Peel and Derby – who were subsequently to attain that office had already passed through the House, the somewhat solipsistic sobriquet, derived from Aedes Christi, which it liked to give itself. Another four came after Gladstone.
As a seedbed for Prime Ministers, from Grenville in 1763 to Home in 1964, Christ Church has been unmatched in either university. However, its 1828 prestige cannot be measured solely by its position in the Prime Ministerial stakes. Despite having to accommodate a cathedral and the canonries which went with the diocesan church it was a genuine college for the education of the young, and not merely a closed society for the delectation of the fellows, as was then the case with a number of other Oxford houses. It had well over a hundred undergraduates, and, although predisposed to the rich, the titled and the potentially famous, was not much bound by obligation to founder’s kin (Henry VIII’s three regnant children were not in any event fecund) or to special localities producing dim but entitled aspirants. There were perhaps too many from Westminster School (with which there was a more formal link than with Eton), and Christ Church began to suffer from this as the quality of Westminster declined towards the middle of the nineteenth century from its high seventeenth- and eighteenth-century level. But this was after Gladstone’s day. In 1831, Gladstone’s final year, five of the ten first classes awarded in the University examinations went to Christ Church men. In addition the college had managed to get a proprietary grip on one of the two Oxford University seats in Parliament. The second might be competed for among the other eighteen or nineteen colleges4 which then made up the University, but the first was a chasse gardée. Paradoxically this was a disadvantage for Gladstone when he contested the University in 1847. The other seat was already in the Christ Church hands of Sir Robert Inglis, who until he died in 1855 always polled better than Gladstone. For Christ Church to take the second one as well was presumptuous even for the House.
Nor were the other main colleges then in a position to mount much of a challenge. Oxford was only hesitantly rubbing its eyes after its long eighteenth-century sleep, when it had mostly been little more than a seminary for the Anglican Church. Christ Church unusually had kept its grip upon secretaryships of state as well as rectories. In the 1820s Oriel, where was congregated the remarkable constellation of Pusey, Newman, Keble and Samuel Wilberforce, led the awakening. But it was essentially a religious awakening. None of these four was exactly a blushing violet. Pusey had a movement named after him and Keble a college. Newman became the most famous British cardinal since the Reformation, and Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford and Winchester, although sometimes known as ‘soapy Sam’, was more widely given the admiring label of ‘the great diocesan’. But they all became religious leaders rather than rulers of the state, and although the Oriel Common Room was at the time the most brilliant and vital in Oxford, it was unworldly, if not notably saintly, in the vehemence (and even vindictiveness) with which its doctrinal disputes were pursued. Nonetheless, as Newman reflected in his 1852 Dublin Idea of a University lectures, there was at that time a unique spirit working within the ‘hemmed-in small plot of ground’ which was Oriel. It might well have attracted Gladstone, but the possibility does not seem even to have been considered, so well trodden was the path from Eton to Christ Church.
Christ Church was the most privileged college, but Gladstone (or his father) did not claim the most privileged status there. Unlike several of his friends (the Acland brothers and Lincoln) he did not pay the extra fees to be treated as a gentleman-commoner (sometimes called nobleman-commoner). Whether such a status was open to him is not clear. No Gladstone had attained rank as opposed to wealth by that stage, but money has always been a great lubricant of the transition to nobility. Whether or not because of this abstinence William Gladstone at first did not get good rooms. He was turned out of one set. Then he was in a dark ground-floor corner of Chaplain’s Quadrangle (since demolished), which required distempering to make the rooms even tolerable. Then he moved (probably when after four terms he had been made a student – a special and elevated rank at the House, more or less equivalent to a fellow elsewhere) to what he described to his mother as ‘the most fashionable part of the college’. This was on the first floor to the right (on entering) of the back gate in Canterbury Quadrangle which had been designed by James Wyatt thirty-five years earlier. And writing of the Oxford of a hundred years later John Betjeman in Summoned by Bells still envied ‘the leisured set in Canterbury quad’. These rooms were for a time preserved as a sort of Gladstone shrine (a rare Oxford distinction shared by Newman but by very few others) and were for some years devoted to the editing of the Gladstone diaries by Professor H. C. G. Matthew.
From this base on what might be called the University side of Christ Church (with Oriel, Corpus and Merton within a few yards, whereas the other side of the college, looking on to the Meadow or St Aldate’s, has more the feel of a great liner moored off the shore of the rest of Oxford), Gladstone was a highly successful undergraduate. His continuing Eton friends were Gaskell (who had rooms alongside his), Doyle, Charles Canning, a younger son of the Gladstone-family hero who himself later became Governor-General of India and an earl, Bruce, who succeeded as eighth Earl of Elgin and punitively burnt the Summer Palace in Peking, Walter Kerr Hamilton, who later became Bishop of Salisbury, and Henry Clinton, Earl of Lincoln, who succeeded as Duke of Newcastle in 1851 and was a Peelite Cabinet colleague of Gladstone both in the Aberdeen and in the second Palmerston governments. From outside Eton there were Thomas and Arthur Acland, Rugbeian scions of an old Devon family, Joseph Anstice, who came from Westminster School and became the first Professor of Classical Literature at King’s College, London, before dying at the age of twenty-six, and Robert Phillimore, also from Westminster, who became a considerable jurist and short-term MP, which roles he combined with being something of a Boswell to Gladstone, who eventually rewarded him with a baronetcy in 1883.
From outside Christ Church there were two Harrovians who were later to play a considerable and at times intimate part in Gladstone’s life: Sidney Herbert, a younger son of the Earl of Pembroke, who was at Oriel and who later became another Peelite colleague of Gladstone, and also, in Morley’s words, ‘perhaps the best beloved of all his friends’; and Henry Manning, who at Balliol was then a rather Low Church Anglican, with his ambitions directed more towards marriage and archdeaconries than towards cardinals’ hats and ultramontanism. But these last two at that stage were more acquaintances than close friends. James Hope (Hope-Scott after, by marrying Sir Walter Scott’s granddaughter, he acquired Abbotsford, Scott’s house on the Tweed), with whom Gladstone was to have one of his intense friendships in the 1840s, was then in the same category. F. D. Maurice, who had come from Cambridge to Exeter Colle
ge in 1830, and Edward Pusey, who became a canon of Christ Church on becoming Professor of Hebrew in the same year, were also influential acquaintances of Gladstone at Oxford. With Keble and Newman, on the other hand, he had little direct contact, although much aware of them as eminences of the University.
Gladstone was thus far from being a lonely undergraduate. But nor was he a generally popular one. He surrounded himself with a defensive coterie who were all of some distinction but to whom he was the central figure. When towards the end of his first year he organized them into an essay club, which he hoped might be a counterpart to the Cambridge Apostles, it was known as the Weg, after his own initials; whether or not because of this label it achieved neither the fame nor the permanence of the Society, as the Apostles were alternatively known. He was much less vulnerable than the reclusive brass-rubber, Paul Pennyfeather, whose dismayed reaction to ‘the sound of the English county families baying for broken glass’ was immortalized by Waugh’s Decline and Fall portrait of Christ Church a century later. But Pennyfeather and Gladstone were beaten up in somewhat similar circumstances, although in Gladstone’s case the incident started no sequence of tragi-comic events. Late on a March night in the middle of his second year, Gladstone’s rooms were invaded by a boisterous party of Christ Church ‘bloods’ who had clearly decided that Gladstone was priggish, pious and self-righteous. Unfortunately his diary reaction was an orgy of holier-than-thou self-abnegation which had it been available to his assailants would have confirmed them in their worst suspicions:
Here I have great reason to be thankful to that God whose mercies fail not . . . 1) Because this incident must tend to the mortification of my pride, by God’s grace. . . . It is no disgrace to be beaten for Christ was buffeted and smitten. . . .
2) Because here I have to some small extent an opportunity of exercising the duty of forgiveness. . . . And if this hostile and unkind conduct be a sample of their ways, I pray that the grace of God may reveal to them that the end thereof is death. Even this prayer is selfish. I prayed little for them before, when I knew that they were living in sin and had rejected Christ their Saviour. . . . I ought to have prayed before as much as now. . . .’17
This was Gladstone at his worst, particularly as he was only twenty at the time. But in general the immense seriousness of his purpose was tempered by the width of his interests, which prevented his work being too obsessive, just as the delicacy of his conscience was tempered by a sense of fun and a liking for companionship. He did not work excessively hard at Oxford, except perhaps in the late summer and autumn of 1831, which culminated in his taking two ‘Schools’, Literae Humaniores and Mathematics, between 7 November and 14 December, and getting secure firsts in both. The feat was the greater because he was not really interested in mathematics. He merely absorbed the subject in order to get the coveted scalp of a double first.
Even during this period of pressurized preparation he took five days off in early October to go to London and listen to fifty hours or more of the House of Lords debate which culminated in the rejection of the Reform Bill. His listening stamina was formidable, even though he was ‘compelled to leave the House by exhaustion’ before the reply of the Prime Minister (Grey). But he was already both a gourmand and a gourmet of rhetoric. During the debate he thought that Brougham’s speech was ‘most wonderful’, Grey’s (opening) speech ‘most beautiful’ and Lansdowne’s ‘very good’,18 even though they were all on the wrong (Whig) side from his point of view.
In the same way his appetite for sermons stemmed as much from his growing connoisseurship of oratory as from his devoutness. On a normal Sunday, whether in Oxford or at home in Liverpool or with his family in one of their spa towns, he would almost invariably listen to two and occasionally to three sermons. His diary for 6 March 1831 provided a fairly typical example of such a day, except that the Newman comment added a special piquancy:
Chapel & sermon twice. Newman preached in the afternoon – much singular not to say objectionable matter if one may so speak of so good a man. Bible [reading] – D. Wilson – Leighton’s Praelect[iones Theologicae] – writing a little – heard Buckley preach most admirably – walked to Marsden [should be Marston, about two and a half miles from Christ Church] to see a poor man – heard a prayer at a Dissenting Chapel (standing at the door) on my way back.19
In and around Oxford Gladstone walked a lot and also rode. But he engaged in no country sports nor in any organized games, although he occasionally watched both cricket and rowing, including an expedition to Henley (which he described as ‘an exceedingly pleasant day’) to see the first Oxford and Cambridge boat race in June 1829. His principal recreations were conversation and debating. He gave and went to frequent wine parties, and paid some attention to the quality that was served. He was never censorious about alcohol indulgence in himself or others, and noted with satisfaction the delivery of wine stocks to his rooms.
Gladstone’s debating was centred upon the nascent Union Society, which had been founded less than five years before, and was then very different from the imitation Palace of Westminster, gothic-designed and pre-Raphaelite-decorated, in which Asquith, Curzon and F. E. Smith later disported themselves. Gladstone was the first of the household gods of the Union but he had to make do with a primitive version which was more frequently and prosaically called the Debating Society, had only just acquired permanent but rented and modest premises in the High Street (the St Michael’s Street site was not acquired until 1853), and attracted audiences of very limited size. On the evening of 14 November 1830, when Gladstone was elected president (for a term), his motion to censure the Wellington government for its pusillanimity in accepting Catholic emancipation was carried by only 57 to 56 votes, as compared with the nearly 600 who voted at the end of the Munich debate in 1938. After his most notable speech in the Union, on 17 May 1831 and in vehement opposition to the Reform Bill, he carried the motion by 94 votes to 38. He spoke for forty-five minutes. The debate was an ingrowing affair for he came immediately after Gaskell, who had followed Lincoln. It was his first speech of compelling power. ‘When [he] sat down,’ Francis Doyle wrote, ‘we all of us felt that an epoch in our lives had occurred.’20 Charles Wordsworth, nephew of the poet and son of the Master of Trinity (Cambridge), described it as ‘the most splendid speech, out and out, that was ever heard in our Society’.
It was hardly a moderate speech. Its thesis was that the Reform Bill, if carried, would break up the social order not merely in Britain but throughout the civilized world. Chesterton’s satire on F. E. Smith’s claim ninety years later that the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill had ‘shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe’ could have been applied with an equally deflating mockery to Gladstone’s onslaught on the immorality of reducing the number of rotten boroughs.
Gladstone himself in later life was to be only mildly embarrassed by the direction and extremity of his views at this time. When Disraeli in 1866 not unreasonably mocked him for these opinions, he replied, semi-complacently: ‘My youthful mind and imagination were impressed with some idle and futile fears which still bewilder and distract the mature mind of the right honourable gentleman.’21 And he also claimed, latterly and blandly, that ‘while I do not think that the general tendencies of my mind were, in the time of my youth, illiberal, there was to my eyes an element of the anti-Christ in the Reform Act’.22 His more serious and self-critical mature view was that while Oxford taught him to respect truth it did not teach him to love liberty.
Nor did it teach him to avoid excess. But excess was always one of his salient qualities. He could lie back from a subject because he thought that the time for it was not ripe. But, once he had engaged with it, he did so with a commitment which excited his allies on the issue (who were often surprising because of the oscillating nature of his interests and views), affronted his opponents and filled his long-term friends with apprehension. As a result many of his most memorable speeches did him more direct harm than good, although at the s
ame time they built up, as a stalagmite grows, the respect for and fear of the most formidable orator in Parliament.
His Oxford Union anti-Reform effusion, by contrast and measurably, brought the most direct benefit. It led Lord Lincoln, in no way offended by being out-orated, successfully to recommend him as a parliamentary candidate to his father. This fourth Duke of Newcastle, whose distinctions were mainly the accidental ones of holding the dukedom for fifty-six years and of having so many boroughs more or less at his disposal that the great Reform Act, which he opposed as vehemently as Gladstone but less articulately, merely ruffled his feathers in this respect. One of his boroughs, Newark in Nottinghamshire, he bestowed upon Gladstone. It was a fine parliamentary property to acquire at the age of twenty-two, but it came very much as a leasehold and not as a freehold.
A GRAND TOUR ENDING AT NEWARK
THERE WAS A YEAR between Gladstone leaving Oxford and his election to Parliament, and he spent half of it making his grand tour. He was always a natural traveller, geographically somewhat restless in spite of his great powers of concentration and love of book learning, curious to see new sights, and powerfully resilient against the fatigue of long days and nights in bumping coaches. He liked planning journeys and he enjoyed moments of departure, particularly if they came after periods of high strain. Thus, on 14 December 1831, the day on which he did his last examination papers in the morning, and received the news of his mathematical (and hence double) first in the afternoon he managed after an evening of letter-writing, packing and farewells to leave by the night coach to London, where he stopped only for breakfast before proceeding to Cambridge for a five-day visit (during which he was ‘excellently lodged’ with the Master of Trinity). In much the same mood, when he was a leading politician and the railways had come, he would mark the beginning of a holiday from London business by a dawn departure from Euston to Chester (for Hawarden) or Birmingham (for Hagley), sometimes walking the final six or twelve miles from the railway stations to the country mansions which were his destinations.
