Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  At Como the pursuit turned into an encounter of a sort, with an obtruding mixture of farce and tragedy (from the point of view of the Lincoln marriage, which Gladstone regarded as sacrosanct).

  It was a day of great excitement, constant movement, overpowering sadness. I saw the Govr. of the Province – the head of Police – the landlord [of the rented villa where Lady Lincoln who had assumed the alias of Mrs Lawrence had been staying] – the (false) Mrs L’s courier – the levatrice [midwife] (at night) – & had the lacquais de place [odd-job man] incessantly at work – he did it well & we went at the proper time to watch the departure. I wrote fully to Lincoln in the evening except the horror reported to me.15

  The ‘horror’ was that Lady Lincoln was heavily pregnant, not, it need hardly be said, by Lincoln, and that ‘the departure’, really a flight from Gladstone’s heavy intrusion, brought on her confinement. Magnus thought that the flight was to Verona, but as Gladstone followed by steamer this would have been an improbable journey. In fact she went to Lecco, at the foot of the other arm of the lake, and Gladstone had an agreeable lake cruise to Varenna, higher up that same arm, and then down to Lecco to discover that she had decamped to Bergamo. Although the city of Montagues and Capulets was not on the itinerary, the Kiss Me Kate couplet (‘we opened in Verona, we went on to Cremona’) was beginning to sound appropriate to the musical-comedy aspects of the tour. These had included his being disguised as a mandolinist in order to get near the villa and observe the departure from Como.

  After that Gladstone never again glimpsed Lady Lincoln. At Lecco he called off the chase. Perhaps he was beginning to accept her determination not to see him or to respond to his numerous letters. He returned to Como, collected evidence from Dr Balzari, who sounds like a good Donizetti character, and from the Villa Mancini, which had been her nid d’amour, and departed for Varese, Lake Maggiore and Switzerland. In Lausanne he was desolated by there being no Anglican Sunday afternoon service (he had rushed ‘unwashed and unshaven’ to the late-morning holy communion), contemplated going to the Free Church, but thought better of it, and reflected on the failure of his mission and the tragedy of the errant wife:

  Oh that poor miserable Lady L. – once the dream of dreams, the image that to my young age combined everything that earth could offer of beauty and of joy. What is she now! But may that Spotless Sacrifice whereof I partook, unworthy as I am, today avail for her, to the washing away of sin and to the renewal of the image of God.

  At midnight, started for Besançon.16

  This was classic Gladstone: sanctimonious and judgemental, perhaps over-concerned, made prurient by the recollection of the beauty of the fallen one, oppressed by her sins, yet in no way reduced to inactivity by this or by the rejection of his overtures. It was not even as leisurely as ‘off to Besançon in the morning’. It was off that night and in London four days later. Failure could leave Gladstone dismayed and censorious, but almost never without energy for the next move.

  Yet a combination of filial duty and conventional acceptance of the view that the autumn was not a season for London led him into four subsequent months of bucolic Scottish quietism. Soon after his return from Italy, Catherine’s sixth confinement took place in the Rectory at Hawarden (the Castle being closed as a result of Oak Farm) and five weeks later the whole family sailed from Liverpool to Greenock and hence across to Fasque by train. They stayed there until the end of January 1850, interrupted for Gladstone only by three days with Lord Aberdeen at Haddo, one night in another Scottish house and a twenty-four-hour dentist excursion to Edinburgh. It was the penultimate autumn at Fasque. For the following one they were in Italy, and in December 1851 Sir John Gladstone died within a few days of his eighty-seventh birthday (sixteen months younger than the age his fourth son was to attain), and Fasque passed to Tom, the new baronet. Thereafter William Gladstone virtually severed his connection with Fasque. His 5000 books were moved to Hawarden. At intervals of about five years, sometimes nearer ten, he would call in for a very few days during a round of visits to other Scottish houses, at which the sojourns were mostly appreciably longer.

  During that lengthy autumn and early-winter visit of 1849–50 Gladstone’s days were not passed in idleness or even (much) in country pursuits, but were gripped in his usual rigid framework of unrelenting activity, conducting his voluminous correspondence (as well as his father’s), writing a long essay on Giacomo Leopardi for the Quarterly Review, teaching Latin to his nine-year-old son, pursuing his variegated reading, and making the fullest possible use of the new and adjacent St Andrew’s Chapel. It was nonetheless odd that at a period of such agitation in his life he should for so long have accepted such geographical and domestic confinement. There was hardly any non-family company, apart from his three specified overnight visits away there was virtually nowhere outside the estate that he could go, and, substantial though the house was, the presence of his father, his wife, his six children, his sister Helen and numerous servants inevitably made it a restricted terrain.

  This might have been satisfactory had his mood been more contented and calm. It was far from that. During the long visit he reached his fortieth birthday. It is at once a tribute and a surprise that all his previous achievements, vicissitudes and eccentricities should have occurred in his twenties and thirties and before he even reached that early climacteric. Yet he marked it with no sense of satisfaction:

  And this day I am forty years old. Forty years long hath God been grieved with me – hath with much long suffering endured me! Alas I cannot say better of myself. The retrospect of my inward life is dark. . . . In some things I may seem to improve a little: but the flesh and the devil if not the world still have fearful hold upon me.17

  Some reasons for this late-1840s dismay have already been indicated: the undermining of his ‘Church and state’ certainties and the defection of Newman; the break-up of Peel’s Conservative party; the trouble with Helen; and the Oak Farm disaster. This last he singled out in his birthday budget as the ‘only one personal [item] that I venture to indicate in conditional prayer: it is for a lightening of the load of pecuniary cares and anxieties upon me’.

  Helen had achieved what was literally a miraculous cure in Edinburgh during the autumn of 1848. She produced a near repeat of her Baden-Baden condition, with locked jaw, clenched hands and an insistent demand for oblivion-promoting drugs. Dr Wiseman arrived with a holy relic, apparently the knuckle bone of a female saint, conducted some sort of makeshift service, touched her jaw with the bone and effected an instantaneous cure. The proceedings were watched and reported with some cynicism by the (presumably Scots Presbyterian) Edinburgh doctor under whose care she had been placed. Gladstone regarded his sister as having been subject to a ‘deplorable illusion’, typical of the showy trickery of the Church of Rome at its worst. But, if trickery it was, Helen was delighted to take part in a trick which enabled her to recover with drama. She became well enough to resume looking after her father for the last couple of years of his life, and then to withdraw first to the Isle of Wight and subsequently to Germany, where she caused no more trouble until her death.

  The Helen amelioration apart, however, the upheavals of Gladstone’s early forties were if anything worse than those of his late thirties. In April 1850 there came the harrowing and already described death of his daughter Jessy. Over that spring there also hung the shadow of the Gorham judgement, which dismayed Gladstone, as it did all Anglo-Catholics, and which was the major cause of the next great secession to Rome. G. C. Gorham was a Low Church clergyman, a fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge, who at the somewhat advanced age of sixty was in 1847 nominated to the living of Brampford Speke in Devon by the Lord Chancellor, the patron of the parish. It was part of a pattern of Whig Erastianism. In the same year Dr Hampden, whom Oxford had pronounced heretical seven years before, was made Bishop of Hereford. But the Bishop of Exeter (Phillpotts) was not a man for running before the storm. He simply refused to install Gorham on the ground that his views on baptisma
l regeneration were not those of the Church of England. Bishop and vicar were equally intransigent, and fought each other through a series of legal actions. The Court of Arches – an ecclesiastical court – upheld the Bishop, but when Gorham appealed from it to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council – a lay court, although one which took the precaution of enrolling the Archbishop of Canterbury (Howley), the Archbishop of York (Musgrave) and the Bishop of London (Blomfield) as assessors – they overturned the Court of Arches, found against the Bishop of Exeter, and by so doing proclaimed the rights of the courts of Queen and Parliament to overturn those of God and Church on a matter of religious doctrine. It was this which outraged those who believed that, even in the Church of England, doctrinal authority descended from St Peter and not from the Glorious Revolution.

  The Judicial Committee pronounced on 8 March 1850, and it was another thirteen months before Manning and Hope-Scott were received into the Roman Catholic Church. The Gorham judgement was nonetheless a crucial cause of their action. Gladstone was never tempted to move with them, greatly though he felt the severance, particularly from Hope-Scott. Nevertheless the traumatic effect of the judgement was probably greater upon him than upon them. It marked the final stage of his disillusionment with the view that the Church could and should live in the bosom of the state. At the time of his 1838 book he had believed that such a partnership should impose the doctrines of the Church upon everyone who wished to be a full citizen. During the 1840s he had come to see that as impractical, and maybe indefensible. But Gorham made him apprehend that a Church which looked for privileges from the state was likely to have to pay for them by depending for its doctrine more upon Acts of Parliament and judgements of lay legal luminaries than upon apostolic truth. In reality this was a liberation for him, because it opened the way to his accepting first Irish and then Welsh Church disestablishment for the very good reason that he was henceforward only half happy with establishment even in England. But at the time it left him floundering, yet unwilling to strike out for the shore of Roman certainties which welcomed Manning and Hope-Scott.

  The second reason why Gorham became a peculiarly unhappy issue for him was that he failed to go through with the wave of opposition which he originally helped to mount. There were plans for a declaration of protest to be signed by the most prominent Anglo-Catholic laymen and to be addressed jointly to the bishops. Although the plans were partly hatched at meetings in his own house on 12 and 14 March, Gladstone began to hedge. Manning thought it was because he became doubtful whether, as a Privy Councillor, he ought to sign a denunciation of the Council’s Judicial Committee. But that did not appear to be his motive. It was a more general and uncharacteristic sense of caution and tactics. Manning and Hope-Scott thought that he had blown unsatisfactorily hot and cold, and forty-five years later Purcell, Manning’s combative and unreliable biographer, delicately compared Gladstone’s role in the whole affair to that of Judas Iscariot. This produced a vehement denial from Gladstone (then aged eighty-six) of Manning’s whole version of events. But what cannot be denied is that it was the beginning of his separation from his two closest religious associates (one of whom was also his closest friend at the time). As a result he suffered full dismay at the Gorham judgement without having the compensating stimulus of treating it as a call to arms. ‘It was a terrible time,’ he wrote in 1894, ‘aggravated for me by heavy cares and responsibilities of a nature quite extraneous: and far beyond all others by the illness and death of a much-loved child, with great anxieties about another. My recollection of the conversations before the declaration [which he declined to sign] are little but a mass of confusion and bewilderment.’18 And at the time he wrote (in Italian) on 19 August 1851 of ‘these two terrible years . . . [which] may yet succeed in bringing about my ruin, body and soul’.19

  LADIES OF THE NIGHT

  THE MID-CENTURY YEARS of 1850 and 1851, and the period of preliminary vicissitudes which led up to them, were not only terrible, they were also frenzied. Between October 1845 and July 1851 (that is from his thirty-sixth to his forty-second years) Gladstone experienced four religio-sexual emotional crises, which were perhaps exceptional more for the abjectness of the guilt which they produced than for the strength of the temptation. But temptation and guilt in combination indisputably produced high states of neurotic tension.

  The first was at Baden-Baden, during the long, dismal and solitary sojourn which he sustained in the autumn of 1845 in the hope of being able to bring his sister back to England, and when the circumstances therefore provided considerable excuse for any aberrations of either behaviour or thought. He had been for a couple of days of sightseeing to Strasbourg, where he had looked at everything in a jaundiced light (‘I was disappointed with the Cathedral except the West front and the stained glass. There is no proportion between the Western mass and the building in general; even the spire has not the harmony of our best: the transepts add nothing . . . the arches of the nave want elevation’),1 and returned to Baden on the Saturday evening with the prospect of a depressing Sunday ahead of him. The English service occupied him for no less than four hours from 11.15 to 3.15. One feels he must have been like a cinema-goer who saw the film several times round, for it is difficult to believe that even in that age of relative fervour there were many subjects of Her Majesty who in a fashionable and pleasure-seeking foreign spa town required that length of devotion. Then he got down to the construction of a remarkable table of introspection. It was separate from and folded into the diary for that day. Additions to it must have been made up to four and a half years later, but it started life on that German October Sunday.

  It was Gladstone’s habit to set everything down. But it was also his habit to do so in forms so obscure that the meaning was often incomprehensible. And sometimes it was not only the mode of expression but the thought itself which was so cloudy as to defy rational interpretation. When he went into Italian, which he frequently did when dealing with ‘delicate’ subjects, he was generally clear enough. It was in English that obfuscation became an art form. This was peculiarly so in parts of this budget of guilt which he set out at Baden. It was divided into four sections, which were entitled ‘Channels’, ‘Incentives’, ‘Chief actual dangers’ and ‘Remedies’. The ‘Channels’ section is impenetrable. In both the heading and the contents perfectly simple words seem to be used in a way and an order which render them meaningless. The next section ‘Incentives’ is comparatively lucid and sets out the factors which particularly exposed him to temptation. They are listed as ‘1. Idleness; 2. Exhaustion; 3. Absence from usual place; 4. Interruption of usual habits of time; 5. Curiosity of knowledge a) as such. b) [in respect of things of a certain kind, an Aristotelian term which Gladstone habitually used for erotically stimulating subjects]; 6. Curiosity of sympathy.’ It may be thought that the meaning of the first three is perfectly clear, that of the fourth a little elusive, the fifth somewhat curiously expressed, and the sixth back to the higher meaninglessness of ‘Channels’. However, the fourth section on ‘Remedies’ has for most of its length something of the naive clarity of a primitive painting, although even here cryptic elements enter towards the end:

  1. Prayer for blessing on any act about to be done.

  2. Realising the presence of the Lord crucified or Enthroned.

  3. Immediate pain

  4. Abstinence

  5. Examination

  6. Withdrawal from presumption and first appearances of any exciting cause.

  7. Interpreting every case of doubt on that side.

  8. Not to deviate

  9. Not to linger

  10. Until D[ecember] 29. 4620 not in E[ngland] to look over books in bookshops except known ones.

  11. Do. as to looking into printshop windows.

  12. Till E[ngland] to apply 6 to 13 to 8, 10, 11

  13. Withdrawal upon first affect.2

  It is something of an anti-climax to know that the sins which were obsessing Gladstone when he wrote out this elaborate sche
dule of temptation and guilt and possible cures were almost exclusively those of reading pornography. And the sense of anti-climax is increased, although perhaps this is balanced by a diminution of dismay at the contrast between his secret vice and his public persona, when it is realized how very restrictive was the frontier over which he felt he ought not to step. Restoration poetry, some classical authors and what he refers to as the Fabliaux were all treated by him as most dreadful black holes of temptation and sin.

  Thus on 13 May 1848, he described (in Italian) how he had encountered the several volumes of Fabliaux et contes des poètes français du XI–XV siècles:

  I bought this book because it had within it the name of Mr Grenville,21 to whom it had belonged: and I began to read it, and found in some parts of it impure passages, concealed beneath the veil of a quite foreign idiom: so I drank the poison, sinfully, because understanding was thus hidden by a cloud – I have stained my memory and my soul – which may it please God to cleanse for me, as I have need. Have set down a black mark against this day.3

  Then five days later, after another go at the Fabliaux, he wrote:

  But it seems to me necessary to shut up these last two volumes for good, having fallen yet again among impurities: how strong and subtle are the evils of that age, and of this. I read sinfully, although with disgust, under the pretext of hunting soberly for what was innocent; but – criminal that I am – with a prurient curiosity against all the rules of pious prudence, and inflaming the war between the better qualities of man and the worse.4

  Nine months later, in February 1849, however, he was back at the Fabliaux, just as in July 1848 he had stumbled upon ‘two vile poems’ of Rochester’s. Although he had avoided (‘I believe’, he rather doubtfully added) reading some earlier objectionable material, he nonetheless read these ‘with disgust I hope but certainly with a corrupt sympathy’ and under the pretext ‘of acquiring a knowledge of the facts of nature and the manners of men’.5