Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Disraeli, without ill will, complacently thought that Gladstone’s career was finished, and Sir Robert Inglis, with whom Gladstone was soon to share the representation of the University of Oxford, assumed that he was freeing himself to join him in the fight for diehard causes, beginning with opposition to the Maynooth Bill itself. Inglis could not have been more mistaken. The resignation was not the first but the last departing swallow of Gladstone’s theocratic intolerance. Since 1838 he had lost his faith, not in God, but in the ability of any government or state to act as the agent of God. His ideal of rule by a clerisy was not possible. It was better therefore for government (if not necessarily for the Church) to respect different routes to God. In fact Gladstone’s 1844 support for the Dissenting Chapels Bill (which underpinned the rights of Unitarians and others to their buildings and endowments) was more significant for the future than his Maynooth resignation.

  He confounded Inglis and confused a great many other people by not only voting for the Maynooth Bill but speaking (for two and a half hours) in its favour. His resignation was the discharge of a debt to the past, and maybe an expiation of what he was coming to see as the foolishness of The State in its Relations with the Church. His support for the bill, even though he confessed it ‘opposed to my own deeply cherished predilections’, was an obeisance to the cause of sense in government. That was something which he was learning, even if slowly and unevenly, from Peel.

  ORATOR, ZEALOT AND DEBTOR

  GLADSTONE’S BEHAVIOUR during the 1840s was nevertheless distinctly erratic. Although it was to be another twenty years before he achieved his unique quality as a platform orator, which both set him apart from all his contemporaries and scandalized many of them, he was already a formidable and fearsome parliamentary performer. He did not have a great advocate’s gift of rendering complexity wholly lucid. He had the still rarer gift of keeping his meaning convoluted and often obscure, yet making his presentation of it compelling and persuasive. It stemmed from the intensely physical nature of his eloquence: ‘his falcon’s eye with strange imperious flash’ in Morley’s unforgettable phrase, and his ‘great actor’s command of gesture, bold, sweeping, natural, unforced’, which also had something of ‘an eager and powerful athlete’ in it.1 And it explained the paradox that he was often as unreadable in prose as he was riveting in speech.

  His oratory aroused apprehension as well as admiration. This was particularly so when, as in the 1840s, his always tempestuous nature became like a huge wheel spinning loose. After his Maynooth speech his next significant House of Commons eruption (and his last for two and a half years) was in July 1845, when from his new independent position he replied for another two and a half hours to a Palmerston attack on the government for its handling of colonial sugar duties in relation to its treaties with Spain. When he sat down Peel turned round to him and said, ‘That was a wonderful speech, Gladstone.’ This gave him particular pleasure, for as he also noted, ‘Peel was the most conscientious man I ever knew in spareness of eulogium.’2 But there was probably relief as well as praise in Peel’s reaction. For once the big gun had pointed in the right direction. It had done a fine job, but an ensuing period of silence from it could be borne with equanimity.

  Apart from his generally unquiet nature there were a number of special reasons for Gladstone’s perturbation in these years. The first was the reception of his sister Helen into the Roman Catholic Church in May 1842. Dr Wiseman, Gladstone’s acquaintance in Rome at the end of 1838, was the agent of her conversion, which took place at Oscott College near Birmingham, where three and a half years later Newman was to go to be confirmed, also by Wiseman, immediately after he had made his first Roman confession at Littlemore.

  Gladstone took Helen’s move as a major family scandal and a direct personal affront. His relations with her were close – much more so than with any of his brothers by this time – but not easy and often unfriendly. As his attitude to his brother Robertson’s marriage had shown, he regarded himself as in charge of family discipline on religious matters. In the six years that had gone by since then he may have begun to move to greater tolerance in public policy, but this did not extend to what he thought was permissible within the family. And Helen was more serious to him than was Robertson. He in no way identified with the latter, but he might well have seen in Helen something of his own susceptibility to temptations. Furthermore he always felt a special responsibility for defending the narrow and crucial line between his own High Anglicanism and what he regarded as the insinuating indulgences of the Church of Rome. He saw himself, in a phrase he (not then dreaming of the apostasy which was to come from that quarter) was to use about Hope-Scott, ‘as one of the sentinels of the Church of England on the side looking towards Rome’.3

  He was therefore in favour of the most unforgiving sanctions. He advised his father to turn Helen out of Fasque and himself forbade her to see his children. Once again John Gladstone was more tolerant and sensible. He quite rightly regarded Fasque as Helen’s home (much more than it was William Gladstone’s), continued to make her welcome and permitted her (much to William Gladstone’s disgust) to be visited there by her confessor. This gentler treatment did not prevent her becoming increasingly addicted to opium and anxious to get away from any family interference or supervision. In the autumn of 1845 she was in a terrible state in Baden-Baden, and William Gladstone, always the most officious member of the family, set off to bring her back, although it was a task which could probably have been more neatly exercised by any of the other brothers. But he was the one who, in spite of being much busier, always had the energy to be available.

  He appeared to have given up denunciation and even went to Birmingham to get a letter from Dr Wiseman telling her that she should obey her father (from whom Gladstone also had a letter) and return. In Birmingham Gladstone was in a relatively ecumenical mood, recording himself as being ‘most kindly received’ and visiting the new Catholic cathedral of St Chad.4 Having got the letter, however, he did not rush to Helen but spent two weeks on the way, calling on Guizot in Paris, and devoting six days to theological discussion with Dr Döllinger in Munich.

  When he eventually reached Baden-Baden he found Helen worse than he had expected. There was an horrific scene when, having taken the vast dose of 300 drops of laudanum and become partly paralysed, she had to be held down by force while leeches were applied. Gladstone stayed in and around Baden for five gloomy weeks, doing his clumsy best. Eventually, assisted more by his father’s threats to cut off money than by his own persuasiveness, he got Helen to travel with him (and a priest and a doctor) to Cologne. There, however, she stuck, and Gladstone ‘after much deliberation’ had to go home alone. After three weeks she followed, but to her father’s house in Carlton Gardens and certainly not to her brother’s a couple of hundred yards away.

  While Gladstone was away, indeed almost exactly when he was witnessing Helen’s convulsions, John Henry Newman was being received into the Roman Catholic Church. Rather as with Hallam’s death, Gladstone did not learn of this until some time later, and then it was more of a depressant than a shock to him. Magnus, indeed, says that he accepted the news ‘with equanimity’, but that is an exaggeration. Gladstone reacted to very few things with equanimity, and insofar as he was not bowled over by the Newman news it was because he had been expecting it for nearly two years. He knew the contents of the letters which Newman had written to Pusey and Manning in the autumn of 1843. When he received this 1843 intelligence he was thrown into a state of extreme shock and himself wrote to Manning: ‘I stagger to and fro like a drunken man. I am at my wit’s end.’ He was censorious as well as shocked. Some of Newman’s language struck him as, ‘forgive me if I say it, more like expressions of some Faust gambling for his soul than the records of the inner life of a great Christian teacher’.5 But censorious although he might be – his next letter to Manning referred to Newman as ‘a disgraced man’ – he could not doubt the disintegrating blow that the departing enchanter had delivered to
the High Anglican movement, a cause which had been gathering momentum only a short time before and about which Gladstone cared deeply.

  Gladstone and Newman were never close to each other. They both had too much star quality for either to be comfortable too close to the other. But there were several similarities as well as some sharp contrasts between them. Almost without trying, they both infused nearly everything they said and did with an excitement which was in no way diminished by uncertainty about what would come next. Beyond this their religion had much more in common than the obvious apostolic historicism. They both retained considerable traces of the Evangelicalism of their youth. ‘Fear’, Geoffrey Faber wrote in The Oxford Apostles, ‘is the driving force of [Newman’s] arguments. . . . Again and again in his sermons it seems as if he had to force himself to speak of God’s love and mercy.’6 Condemnation and sin were more real to him. This was equally true of Gladstone, who had a pervading sense of human sin, and of his own special contribution to it. They were both essentially religious pessimists, trying to erect ramparts, whether in the form of a new church building, a new argument or a new hymn, against man’s terrifying prospects.

  Their eloquence was at once a similarity and a difference. They were both remarkable although utterly contrasting orators. Newman was the more delicate. Matthew Arnold’s description of his preaching in the University Church of St Mary’s at Oxford (of which he was vicar from 1828 to 1843) is not easily forgotten. Arnold wrote of ‘that spiritual apparition gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St Mary’s, rising into the pulpit and then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music – subtle, sweet, mournful’.7 Newman’s sentences were always carefully prepared, which was in contrast with Gladstone’s flashing eye, thundering tone and cascades of spontaneous words. But this did not mean that Newman was more austere in his use of rhetoric, or that, although he never addressed great multitudes, his command over the spoken word was a less necessary part of his armoury of argument. To quote Faber again: ‘Other men have known better how to stir up a sudden tempest of emotions; others have argued as skilfully, but few, if any, have equalled him in the art of using reason as a lever for the prising of hearts.’8

  Another quality which Newman had in common with Gladstone was the ability to recover from a failure, which sometimes led in his case to a collapse. Faber says he did so in a way which ‘went just as far above normality as the collapse had fallen below it’. Aberdeen’s remark about Gladstone ‘in the rebound’ immediately springs to mind. Even though detached from and even censorious of Newman, Gladstone therefore had quite enough understanding of his power and importance to know that it shattered the movement which had begun with Keble’s Oxford ‘Assize Sermon’ in 1833 and in the slipstream of which Gladstone had hitherto lived his whole adult life. Since leaving Christ Church Gladstone’s religious life had never been physically centred on Oxford, although he had closely followed the liturgical controversies which had convulsed the University in those schismatic years.

  Gladstone’s London spiritual home had gradually become the Margaret Chapel north of Oxford Circus, which the polychromatic architect William Butterfield later rebuilt as All Saints, Margaret Street. Here he became part of a Tractarian lay brotherhood with a membership of fifteen, which included the Acland brothers (who were the initiators), Frederic Rogers, J. T. Coleridge, Roundell Palmer (who as Lord Selborne became one of Gladstone’s Lord Chancellors), Butterfield himself and James Hope. The rules of the brotherhood mainly related to liturgical observance, but they also contained provisions for devoting proportions of both time and energy to ‘some regular work of charity’. This ‘engagement’ as it came to be called was at first directed towards male or female destitution and was centred on the House of St Barnabas in Rose Street, Soho. But as the 1840s wore on it came in Gladstone’s case to concentrate on the attempted reformation of prostitutes, many of whom were far from destitute.

  This concentration led Gladstone somewhat to disengage from the brotherhood, which in any event showed signs of faltering. However, the framework of his work among the ladies of the streets was eminently respectable, even if there is more room for doubt about some of his motives.11 When in 1848 he set up the Church Penitentiary Asociation for the Reclamation of Fallen Women his principal collaborators were Bishop Blomfield of London and Bishop Wilberforce, who had just been translated to the see of Oxford from the deanery of Westminster; and when a few years later he helped to found (for the same purpose) the Clewer House of Mercy at Windsor his wife too was closely involved in the project.

  He was also centrally involved in major ecclesiastical building. His plans for a new church in Leicester Square proved abortive, although he did establish a small chapel of ease off St Martin’s Lane, but in Scotland he was more successful. He got Trinity College, Glenalmond, an Episcopalian public school for 160 boys on a greenfield site in Perthshire, built and opened by 1846. And in the grounds of Fasque there arose a public St Andrew’s Chapel.

  His collaborator in most of these enterprises was James Hope. Throughout the 1840s Hope and Manning were Gladstone’s closest politico-religious advisers. But Gladstone loved Hope, whereas he did not love Manning. He said many years later that he could only look ‘at him [Manning] as a man looks at the stars’;9 and the stars are clearest on a cold night. Hope, he said, possessed ‘the most rare gift, the power of fascination, and he fascinated me’.10 Hope was one of the three men whom Gladstone loved. The first was Hallam, and the second and the third (it is difficult to place these two in chronological or other order) were Hope and Sidney Herbert.12 The only one of the three who did Gladstone no harm (although he was sometimes obstructive to him in Cabinet) was Herbert. Hope did him the considerable harm, given Gladstone’s already surging temperament, of always stirring him up and not calming him down. He was like a wife who encouraged rather than corrected her husband’s misjudgements. Mrs Gladstone was if anything the reverse, but she did not much engage with matters for decision. And Hope, who was very close – the godfather (with Manning) of Gladstone’s first child, an executor of his will – egged him on, over the hurried publication of his book, over his Maynooth resignation, over Helen, over disapproval of Newman. And then, to crown it all, Hope himself deserted his post on the ramparts and betrayed Gladstone, as the latter saw it, by being received as a Roman Catholic on the same day in April 1851 that Manning went over.

  To add to these various destabilizing factors there came in 1847 the major financial embarrassment of Oak Farm, a curiously rural and gentle name for an establishment which was to cause such upheaval in Gladstone’s life and wreak such havoc in the fortunes of his wife’s family. At the time of the Gladstone–Glynne marriage in 1839 Sir Stephen Glynne had been a rich bachelor, not extravagant (except perhaps on election expenses), who pottered comfortably along on an annual income of over £10,000 (about £500,000 at present-day values) coming mainly from agricultural rents. Of this, £2500 went under a generous settlement to his mother, who took to living mostly with her Lyttelton daughter at Hagley. But he had few other family obligations, for the Gladstones were self-supporting and his younger brother, as already noted, had the £3000 a year benefice at Hawarden. However, great possessions, even among the gentle and unthrusting, by no means always provide an immunity against the desire to accumulate more. When therefore Stephen Glynne saw other landlords becoming magnates as a result of turning their fields into coal mines or ironworks, and when Oak Farm, a property of his detached from the main Hawarden estate and on the edge of Worcestershire and Staffordshire, near Stourbridge, showed itself rich in mineral deposits, he was tempted.

  Glynne began to exploit Oak Farm in 1835. When the double marriage took place in 1839 he got both Lord Lyttelton and Gladstone to take one-tenth shares in it. In 1840 he sold land for £55,000 in order to put the money into the ironworks. In that same year Oak Farm provided a revenue of £9454 as against £12,300 from the traditional est
ate rents. But by 1841 the first clouds were gathering. John Gladstone had to provide credit, and disliked doing so, partly because of his distrust of Boydell, the manager, and partly because his old merchant’s nostrils (although he was never an industrialist) disliked the smell of the business. It was, however, six years between then and the crash, and it seems almost incredible that, during that period and so forewarned by the only close observer who knew anything about business, the three partners could not at least staunch the potential liability. On the contrary it became a pre-enactment of Charles Kingsley’s poem of 1869 immortalizing the legend of the sands of Dee, visible appropriately enough from the mock battlements of Hawarden, and from which, once the mist came down and the suction set in, there was no escape.

  In late 1844, when John Gladstone had become more urgent (disengage ‘at almost whatever sacrifice may be required’; ‘events the most disastrous are possible’),11 the three partners tried to end their unlimited liability by retiring to the position of mortgagees. But they could not avoid the fact that the future of the whole Hawarden estate was committed to the declining fortunes of approximately ninety-four acres of ill-fated and ill-managed land on the edge of the Black Country.

  In the autumn of 1847 there was a Stock Exchange crash and a general financial shake-out. Oak Farm fell under its impact as predictably as does a windfall apple to the puffs of autumn wind. It left a liability on Hawarden of approximately £250,000 (£12½ million today). There were bankruptcy proceedings at Birmingham provoked by Lord Ward (the future Earl of Dudley), who was the principal creditor. For the handling of these (including what he called an ‘indecent cross-examination’) Gladstone accepted responsibility, Glynne having been packed off to Constantinople, for it was thought he was better out of the way. Gladstone then devoted himself with portentous care and some ingenuity to clearing up the mess. He had been little use so long as there was life in the company. But, true to his longstanding proclivity for deathbed scenes, the closing of the eyelids released a storm of activity from him. Freshfields were the solicitors and they received from him no fewer than 140 letters on the subject. They must have groaned when yet another franked envelope in the well-known handwriting arrived.