Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  At the decisive family conclave Sir John Gladstone advocated the financially sensible course of selling off the whole Hawarden property, which would enable Stephen Glynne to discharge the Oak Farm debt and be left with a comfortable income of approximately £4500 a year. But it would also have left him rootless, a Lord Lieutenant (who would probably have had to resign) without a county base. And it would have left Gladstone without a dimension which had already become important to his life over the previous nine years (Tom Gladstone and not he was the heir to Fasque), Catherine Gladstone without the house in which she had been born and was to live in for nearly nine decades, and Henry Glynne as a squire-parson sitting on a very isolated branch.

  So they decided on a more heroic course. They kept the estate and paid off the Oak Farm debts by a period of stringent economies. Sir Stephen Glynne tried to live on £700 a year. Hawarden Castle was closed with the thought of letting it (a tenant was never found) and did not reopen until early 1852. Even old Lady Glynne suffered a reduction in her jointure from £2500 to £1500. Gladstone, who was largely the instigator of this plan of economies, suffered no reduction in his own circumstances comparable with those of Stephen Glynne (but nor should he have done; he was only a one-tenth partner). His own income was, however, reduced for a time by about 30 per cent, and from first to last he sank £267,500 of his own or his father’s money into the Hawarden estate. But he was also the ultimate beneficiary. After the 1852 return to the big house he increasingly became the head of Hawarden. In 1851, with the death of Parson Henry Glynne’s wife, the likelihood of a Glynne male heir had disappeared (although Henry Glynne caused agitation with one or two lurches towards remarriage), and Stephen Glynne, securely unmarried, was apparently content, not only to become a subsidiary figure in his own house, although he always sat at the head of the table, but also to see the property settled on the Gladstone children. In 1867 Gladstone paid £57,000 to secure its full reversion to himself and his heirs after the deaths of the two Glynne brothers (which both occurred within seven years).

  The only (ambiguous) indication of resentment which Stephen Glynne ever showed was to develop a habit of referring to the Gladstones as ‘the great people’. But so of course they were. Gladstone gave Hawarden a fame comparable with that which Franklin Roosevelt gave to his Hyde Park mansion on the Hudson seventy or so years later. And Gladstone should not fairly be regarded as a cuckoo in Stephen Glynne’s nest. He did not tip him out but treated him with affectionate regard. And, apart from anything else, there would, without Gladstone’s prodigal expenditure of energy in the late 1840s, have been no remaining nest. Far busier than anyone else, he was the only one on the scene who had the vigour to engage with and clear up a disastrous situation. He always subsequently claimed that this immersion into private business was an immensely valuable training for his several chancellorships of the Exchequer. Without it he could not have understood the commercial problems of mid-Victorian England. This was Gladstone in his self-flagellating mood, thanking God for His goodness in allowing him to be beaten up by the bloods of Christ Church in 1829 or brutally examined by the Birmingham inspector in bankruptcy in 1847. The connection between private and public financial skill is minimal. Pitt was a great public financier who left his own affairs in confusion. Most of those who have best served their country have done so at the expense of their own personal wealth. Oak Farm was in no way necessary to make Gladstone a great Chancellor. What it did, before giving him the important and safe harbourage of Hawarden, was substantially to increase both his burden of work and the sense of personal strain and perturbation which was such a feature of his late thirties and early forties.

  MID-CENTURY FRENZY

  ON TOP OF THESE several sources of dismay, Oak Farm, Helen, Newman’s conversion, Gladstone lost his parliamentary seat. When he returned to England on 18 November 1845 from his two-month Helen-retrieving German trip he found that a combination of factors – the Irish famine, a poor harvest in England, a public announcement (on 22 November) by the Whig leader Lord John Russell of his conversion to Repeal – was leading Peel to take the issue of the Corn Laws13 more quickly than he had hitherto intended. Previously he had been content to rest on the doctrine of ‘unripe time’, one to which Gladstone, despite his generally impetuous nature, was always inclined to defer.

  The anti-Corn Law position was not an easy one for Gladstone. It divided him from his father, which he disliked not only because of his naturally filial loyalty but because the Oak Farm troubles increased his paternal dependence. It also separated him from his borough patron, the Duke of Newcastle. Once the issue had become actual, however, he did not doubt that he had to be on Peel’s side. Nevertheless he rushed into no frenzy of political activity. He spent only one night at Carlton House Terrace before joining Catherine at Hagley for the last two weeks of November and then only another four days in London before going to Hawarden for ten mid-December days. His correspondence was more religious and Helen-related (with a strong dash of Oak Farm) than it was politically centred. And his reading was much directed to Newman, probably with a view to a refutation, which he did not, however, complete or publish. He recorded only three serious political conversations, all of them with Lincoln, who had been in the Cabinet since 1844 as Commissioner of Woods and Forests: the first on 6 December and the latter two in the week before Christmas.

  The day before the first conversation Peel had resigned, feeling that without the support of a wholly united Cabinet he should leave it to Russell to carry Repeal. The Cabinet was disunited only to the extent that the Duke of Buccleuch and Stanley (Derby after 1851 and the only man before Gladstone to be Prime Minister more than twice, although his triple occupancy of the office amounted to a cumulative total of only three years and ten months) could not accept Peel’s lead. It was not a major split but the two peers (Stanley had been called up to the House of Lords in 1844) paradoxically represented a lot of House of Commons feeling.14

  After two weeks of hesitation Russell declined to pick up the poisoned chalice which Peel, via the Queen, had handed him. He said that he could act effectively only with both Palmerston and Sir George Grey in his Cabinet, but Grey would not serve if Palmerston were Foreign Secretary and Palmerston would not serve in any other position. In addition Russell claimed that Peel offered him inadequate guarantees of support on what they both knew had to be done. So, without great reluctance, Peel took up office again. It was at once a tribute to his public spirit and a criticism of his party leadership that, having seen that Repeal was essential, he had a positive zest, more than the querulous Russell, for carrying it through himself. This was central to the subsequent count against him as a party splitter. Had he just leant back and franchised Russell to do the necessary job, he might have been forgiven. The ‘protectionists’ half knew that it was necessary to abandon protection, which, within six years, they themselves proceeded to do. But they did not want a leader who put country before party. Sixty-four years later the precedent led even so fastidious a politician as Arthur Balfour to say that he could not become another Robert Peel to his party: ‘Peel twice committed what seems to me the unforgivable sin. . . . He simply betrayed his party.’1 Peel chose the path of activity rather than of lying back, and as a result became both excoriated and the architect of the calm and prosperous third quarter of the nineteenth century, relatively the most unchallenged period of material and moral superiority in British history.

  In order to do this, however, he had to plug the gaps in his Cabinet. Buccleuch, mysteriously, plugged his own gap. Having helped to precipitate a Cabinet crisis on 5 December he calmly returned to office on the 21st, and indeed in January 1846 advanced from being Lord Privy Seal to being Lord President of the Council. Stanley was a more resolute resigner and Peel turned to Gladstone to replace him as Secretary for War and Colonies (as it was still quaintly called until 1854, although Sidney Herbert as Secretary at War was already in charge of the War Office). Gladstone was still only thirty-five, but he was l
ooked to as almost a veteran, temporarily in the reserve, whom it was useful to bring back into the front line. It was a relatively young era. Peel was fifty-seven and Russell fifty-three, but Buccleuch only thirty-nine and the resigning Stanley forty-six.

  Gladstone had little hesitation about accepting Peel’s offer. He did so, he wrote to his wife, ‘with a clear conscience but with a heavy heart’,2 which for Gladstone was almost the equivalent of saying that he leapt at it. This was curious, for it involved a serious risk of the loss of his seat in Parliament. Until after the First World War the acceptance of Cabinet office necessarily involved vacating a seat and seeking re-election. And a few fell at the hurdle, most notably Winston Churchill in North-west Manchester in 1908. Gladstone did not take the hurdle. He played with the idea of contesting the seat against the Duke of Newcastle, who was a virulent protectionist, but discovered that he did not have enough support in the town and that his former ‘principal and best supporters’ produced an alternative candidate with humiliating speed and ease. This was ironical, for it was discussion with Newcastle’s son Lincoln which had been most mind-clearing for Gladstone in his approach to office.

  On 22 December he almost kissed hands with Peel (‘we held hands instinctively & I could not but reciprocate with emphasis his “God bless you”’).3 And over the Christmas holidays (only five days at Hawarden, most exceptionally, followed by a New Year forty-eight hours at Windsor)15 and the first weeks of January he gradually reconciled himself to his exclusion from Newark. He then sought another seat with more urgency than discrimination. There was talk of North Nottinghamshire, Wigan, Liverpool, Dorchester, Chester and South Lancashire. Later Oxford City, Scarborough, Aberdeen and Montrose Burghs were all subject to feelers. For a variety of reasons none of them came to anything.

  Wigan, in the early spring of 1846, approached the nearest to reality. The Tory (and Peelite) member who had been elected at a bye-election in the previous October was in danger of being unseated on a petition. As he was a son of the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, who was also Lord Wigan, he had some territorial strength (which Gladstone after Newark, and indeed because of his own views, was bound to treat with respect) and he was willing to let the Colonial Secretary in only for the bye-election and not for the subsequent general election when his own disqualification would have ceased. Gladstone was prepared to accept this somewhat stringent condition, for the short lease would at least have solved his immediate governmental problem. He got as far as writing his election address and preparing to take the night mail to Lancashire. But it was in vain. On 8 April he wrote, ‘My Wigan vision is dissolved.’4 The reason could be regarded as a parliamentary compliment. The Whigs had withdrawn the petition, thinking it well worth while to forgo a bye-election in order to keep Gladstone out of the House of Commons.

  No other seat presented itself, and the main reason for which Peel wanted Gladstone to replace Stanley was thus frustrated. He could make administrative decisions in his Secretary of State’s office, but he could bring no debating thunder to the government’s aid in the House of Commons. For his six months’ tenure of the Colonial Office, the first and only time that he was a Secretary of State, he could get no nearer to the despatch box than the distinguished strangers’ gallery. There he often sat, for it was a momentous six months for parliamentary clashes and for the fashioning of the shape of mid-Victorian politics. On 23 January 1846, Disraeli delivered the first of his insolently devastating attacks on Peel, rallied the protectionist forces in the Conservative Party and went on to form with Lord George Bentinck (MP for King’s Lynn, a younger son of the Duke of Portland and hitherto more interested in racing than in politics) his improbable but effective partnership: ‘the Jew and the jockey’, as it was irreverently known.

  So effective was it that on the first important division on Repeal, at the end of February and after twelve nights of debate, including another philippic from Disraeli, Peel carried only 112 Tories into the lobby with him; 242 of his ‘supporters’ voted against, and he carried his motion to go into committee (by 97) only with the help of 227 Whigs and Radicals. From that moment the Tory party in which Gladstone had grown up was irrevocably split and it was to be another twenty-eight years before another Conservative Prime Minister commanded an independent majority in the House of Commons. Repeal got through (the House of Lords was strangely quiescent), but the moment the bill was safe the Whigs joined with the Radicals, the Irish and a hard core of only seventy (but enough) Disraeli–Bentinck rebels (‘a blackguard combination’ in the Duke of Wellington’s view) to defeat the government on an Irish coercion bill.

  Peel resigned four days later, ending up with an encomium of Richard Cobden, the Radical leader of the victorious anti-Corn Law campaign, which shocked Gladstone, and of his own performance as Prime Minister which displeased both sides of the House of Commons. Russell became Prime Minister of a Whig government. The anomaly of Gladstone’s position as a non-parliamentary Secretary of State was ended, but not his seatlessness which continued for more than a year. Gladstone had suffered two major blows. Having seen Newman in 1843–5 shatter the high hopes of the apostolic revival within the Church of England he watched Peel producing equally devastating effects upon the Conservative party in 1845–6. There were differences. On the merits of the issue Gladstone agreed with Peel and disagreed with Newman. Furthermore he was never central to Tractarianism (much though it occupied his mind) in the way that he was to the movement away from protectionism in the Peel-led Conservative party. On both issues, however, he found himself in the final stages a spectator rather than a participant.

  Would it have made any difference had Gladstone been in the House of Commons in the first half of 1846? Certainly his presence would have ensured that the government’s case was presented with more brio. The more or less simultaneous loss in different directions from the Treasury bench of Stanley and Gladstone was gravely weakening to the government in the House of Commons. It left Peel effectively alone to face the banderillas of Disraeli and the lesser weapons of Bentinck (for Aberdeen was in the Lords, Goulburn, Graham and Sidney Herbert not great debaters, and Lincoln, not a great one either, was in Ireland). This had the effect of making the Prime Minister unusually sullen and wooden. Gladstone himself, forty-five years later, told John Morley that the performances against Peel of Disraeli (in whose favour he was hardly biased) were ‘quite as wonderful as report makes them. Peel altogether helpless in reply. Dealt with them with a kind of “righteous dullness”.’5 With Gladstone at his side he might have been more buoyant and less alienating, but the lines of the split were unlikely to have been significantly different. What would have been significantly reduced was Gladstone’s sense of frustration.

  Nor did his Colonial Office achievements provide any relief. To leave Gladstone as an administrator without providing him with a parliamentary sounding-board was like putting Napoleon in charge of army supply while forbidding him to fight any campaigns, except that Napoleon would have been better at intendance than Gladstone was at exercising calm judgement on delicate colonial issues. Gladstone was at best an indifferent Colonial Secretary, as Morley, normally admiring although not sycophantic, delicately makes clear. ‘To colonial policy at this stage,’ he circumspectly wrote, ‘I discern no particular contribution, and the matters that I have named are now well covered by the moss of kindly time.’6 These ‘matters’ were first Gladstone’s unfortunate advocacy of the resumption of convict despatch to Australia, which provoked a sharp reaction there and was promptly vetoed by his Whig successor (the third Earl Grey); and second his clumsy sacking of the Governor of Tasmania, one Eardley-Wilmot. Wilmot probably deserved recall for general inefficiency, but Gladstone, like a sermonizing judge, added to the dismissal letter a homily on the retiring Governor’s private character, details of which he had got, typically, from the local bishop, but by which that dignitary refused to stand when the point became a matter of public and (to Gladstone) damaging controversy.

  The pol
itics of the mid-1840s therefore provided Gladstone with no stabilizing counterbalance to his various personal and religious troubles. And when he eventually regained a seat in Parliament at the general election in the late summer of 1847, neither his new constituency nor the party configuration of the new House of Commons was helpful to his equanimity. The constituency was the University of Oxford. From 1604 to 1950 the University returned two ‘burgesses’ to Parliament. The thought of this unusual constituency excited Gladstone, but as his need was more for calming down than for stirring up there was by no means a clear gain. That subjective factor apart, the seat had some advantages and some disadvantages. The first of the advantages, by no means irrelevant in the year of the Oak Farm bankruptcy, was that it was cheap. There were several grounds of objection to the university constituencies, but an electorate inviting corruption was not one of them. Indeed the voters were so physically elusive that it was difficult to incur even the normal expenses of an austere campaign. This, however, carried its disadvantages from Gladstone’s point of view. In a seat that was never safe for him the man who was becoming the foremost orator of his age was almost uniquely prevented from exercising this form of persuasion upon his constituents.

  Furthermore Oxford exaggerated his natural tendency to mingle politics and religion. The worst convulsions of the Tractarian earthquake were over by the time Gladstone became member, but Oxford nevertheless remained the central battleground of liturgical and theological dispute, and the representation of the University was determined at least as much on religious as on political grounds. It is difficult to believe that Peel, for example, with his own unsatisfactory 1817–29 experience there, not to mention his desire to see Gladstone treat Church matters more calmly, could ever have counselled him to sit for Oxford. Beyond that the pulls of the University electorate were still strongly conservative and even intolerant. It was Gladstone’s early reputation as ‘the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories’ which gave him his initial attraction as a candidate. But already by 1847 he was moving away from that position, and was to do so with gathering momentum over the eighteen years for which he remained a member for the University. This meant that relations with his constituency introduced an additional dimension of turbulence into an already tempestuous period of his life. Yet once the possibility of election for Oxford opened before him there was no question of his refusing. He had great need of a seat, and he loved and respected the institution which on his deathbed he was to salute as ‘the God-fearing and God-sustaining University of Oxford’.