Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  It all appears venial and rather pathetic, the picture of this ex-Cabinet minister, already of commanding presence and authority, two-thirds accusing himself and one-third excusing himself over the guilty reading of the most marginally salacious material. Yet the weakness and for him the sin depended not on the objective strength of the pornographic content of what he read, but on his having decided he ought not to do it, and nonetheless succumbing time after time to the recurring temptation; and also on mild depravities being obviously sufficient to arouse in his mind the most lustful thoughts. Thus, in April 1849, he accused himself of committing ‘adultery in the heart’, and also of ‘that which is well called delectatio morosa [enjoying thinking of evil without the intention of action]’.6

  His recurring but not very frequent surrenders to temptation are shown by one of the two lists which he subsequently and gradually added to his 1845 schema. Twenty days, one in 1845, one in 1846, three in 1847, ten in 1848, and five in the first four months of 1849, were marked with an ×, the symbol which made the ‘black mark against the day’, already exemplified by 13 May 1848. That there were no dates recorded subsequent to April 1849 does not mean that a ‘cure’ was then effected, although it could be that this was nominally so. It could equally be that he merely gave up keeping records on that particular piece of paper, which also contained another list, and was becoming full.

  The second list was made up of six dates between 13 January and 29 April 1849 against each of which there was placed the symbol , presumably, as is suggested by the editor of the diaries, because of its resemblance to a whip. As a mixture of retribution and possible cure Gladstone had from the beginning of 1849 adopted a policy of scourging or self-flagellation. Exactly how he applied it, and to which part of his anatomy, bearing in mind that the most obvious part must surely have been excluded by the fact that the discipline was self-administered, or exactly what form the instrument took, is not clear. What seems certain, however, is that the chastisement was solitary and that there was never any other person, male or female, involved in administering it. Nor did any spiritual counselling seem to have been sought, either before or after the punishment. Gladstone, perhaps surprisingly, for its absence separated him from many of his Anglo-Catholic friends, never sought relief from his tensions in the confessional box. Judged by the ethos and outlook of today it must seem highly unlikely that, even had he done so, he could easily have discussed, still less found any encouragement for, his self-scourging practices. By mid-nineteenth-century standards, however, this is far less implausible.

  Newman used a scourge and, with considerable attention to detail, described one ‘studded with nails’ in his 1848 novel Loss and Gain. Edward Pusey asked James Hope-Scott to bring him such an instrument from France (in view of French views about le vice anglais this might be regarded as an example of coals to Newcastle), and hoped that Keble, his confessor, would advise him to use it. Another curious feature about Gladstone’s self-punishment was that, while it was undoubtedly solitary, it did not require excessive privacy. When he first used the scourge at the beginning of 1849, he was at Fasque, in the family surroundings already described, which while not exactly overcrowded were certainly not hermit-like.

  If there was a lifting after three months’ use of the scourge of the temptations of erotic reading it seems likely that this was not so much a cure as a transference to a different, more famous and interesting, maybe more dangerous ‘vice’. This was Gladstone’s well-known involvement with prostitutes. In some form this dated from as far back as 1827 when he paid his pre-matriculation visit to Oxford (in 1848 he also dated his pornographic ‘plague’ as having lasted ‘more than twenty years’), and in the mid-1840s he had directed the charitable efforts of the Margaret Street brotherhood towards the redemption of ‘fallen women’. But it was only in May 1849 that he began systematic late-night encounters with identifiable women, several of whom he saw many times over, occasionally accompanying them back to their rooms for long conversations. Moreover he came to regard some of them not as poor, deprived and bedraggled creatures but as ethereal dreams. ‘Half a most lovely statue’, he wrote (in Italian) about one Elizabeth Collins on 1 July 1852, ‘beautiful beyond measure’.22

  The traditional view of Gladstone’s activities in the field, which was long accepted apart from a few sniggers of cynicism, was that it was no more than a particularly bold form of charitable work in which he had chosen to engage (and continued with until well into old age). It clearly exposed him to certain risks, but his mixture of innocence and moral authority enabled him to stride through the murk while hardly accumulating a single stain. He might equally well have applied himself to rescuing deserted children or caring for elderly alcoholics. Instead he applied himself to what was in a sense a nobler task because it was work which very few men of substance, even had they not been Privy Councillors and potential Prime Ministers, would have dared to undertake.

  This was probably the view of most of his contemporaries, including those who knew him best, although his friends were frequently frightened for his reputation, and maybe a little puzzled themselves. There is an 1882 story of Granville and Rosebery tossing a coin to determine which of them should undertake the intimidating task of delivering a warning to the Grand Old Man. Granville was then his Foreign Secretary and the urbane and easy-going Whig (a group from which Gladstone’s close friends did not often come) with whom he found it easiest to get on. Rosebery, who lost the toss and therefore had to perform, was over thirty years younger, more prickly, less nice and altogether less suitable for the task, but was at the time close to Gladstone because he had been his host and sponsor during the Midlothian campaign of 1879–80. What were the assumptions (perhaps hidden from each other) on which these two worldly figures proceeded? What is certain is that Rosebery got nowhere with his démarche, Gladstone blandly assuring him that he was not going to break the habits of half a century and that the night walks were beneficial to his health. In 1886, when Gladstone’s vulnerability to calumny had been made greater by the bitterness of the Home Rule split, Edward Hamilton, his principal Downing Street secretary, got a somewhat more forthcoming response from the seventy-six-year-old Prime Minister to a similar warning. Even then, however, Gladstone did not entirely desist.

  Morley in his massive 1903 biography virtually ignored the whole subject. Later, in 1927, Herbert (Viscount) Gladstone, former Home Secretary and Governor-General of South Africa, assisted by his elder brother Henry (Lord Gladstone of Hawarden), managed to circumnavigate the general rule that courts of law cannot be used to protect the reputation of the dead. One Captain Peter Wright published a book which contained some scurrilous material about William Gladstone’s relations with his prostitutes, whereupon Herbert Gladstone countered with an attack of such vehemence that it took Henry Gladstone’s breath away.7 He sent it first direct to Wright, who did not immediately rise, and then to the secretary of the Bath Club, of which Wright was a member and Herbert Gladstone one of the founders. The Committee decided to expel Wright, nominally on the ground that he had used the club’s address in controversial public correspondence on the issue, but omitted to give him a hearing. Wright then mounted two legal actions: one against the club, which he won on the procedural point and was awarded £125 damages; and the other against Herbert Gladstone, which became a very much bigger affair. The case turned on the truth or otherwise of Wright’s original allegations. He failed to sustain them under a destructive cross-examination from Norman Birkett, and the outcome was a triumph for Herbert Gladstone and his father’s reputation. Mr Justice Avory delivered a withering summing up against Wright, and the jury requested permission to add a rider recording their unanimous view that the evidence had ‘completely vindicated the high moral character of the late Mr W. E. Gladstone’. When the Gladstone brothers came out of the Law Courts into the Strand they were greeted by a cheering crowd. Rarely has a statesman been able to arouse a favourable public demonstration twenty-nine years after his death.r />
  Magnus in 1954, while devoting far more attention to the streetwalking issue than Morley had done, took as wholly exonerative a view as did the 1927 judgement. He wrote:

  [Gladstone] had schooled himself early in life to sublimate absolutely the tensions which seethed inside him. The rescue work was an important aspect of that process of sublimation. He had experienced a call to enter the Church, and he had not responded to it. He had nursed the ideal of a sacred union between Church and State, and he had watched it dissolve into air. In his rescue work he found a priestly office which he could fulfil as a layman, and in which his duty to God and man could be discharged together.8

  Following the publication of the diaries, it is no longer possible to take so sacerdotal a view. Nor, still more to the point, did Gladstone himself. What is indisputable from the diaries is that, while there was a strong beneficent aspect to his rescue work, and while his self-discipline held him back from a full use of his protégées’ services, there was also (at least during his middle-life crisis) a powerful element of sexual temptation, which he found impossible to resist, about his nocturnal forays. So far from having ‘schooled himself early in life to sublimate absolutely the tensions which seethed inside him’, he was irresistibly led by them to actions which filled him with remorse. On one occasion Gladstone referred to his ‘rescue’ activities as ‘Carnal, or the withdrawal of them would not leave such a void’.9 On another he described them as ‘the chief burden of my soul’.10 And, after the first months of its use as an anti-pornography corrective, he began to use the scourge as a possible but on the whole ineffective remedy against excessive involvement with prostitutes.

  This self-punishment appears to have continued until the summer of 1859, when the sign appears in the diaries for the last time. Yet it is not always easy to tell whether Gladstone’s records, meticulous and self-accusing though they were, embraced all his peccadilloes (or worse, as he regarded them) or what was the exact sin for which, on a particular occasion, he was endeavouring to punish himself. On Sunday, 22 April 1849, he both brought to an end his lists opened in October 1845 (except for a solitary subsequent entry for the following Sunday, 29 April, but with no indication of the reason), and summed up his three months’ experience of the use of the scourge. He thought he might have been depending upon it too much (as opposed to the observance of his other rules) and he doubted whether it was proving as useful as he had at first found. He thought ‘the sin of impurity’, while not showing quite the force of the previous year, had ‘lingered more’. As a result he abstained from taking holy communion for two successive Sundays.

  There is a sense of a change of gear at this stage, but to what exactly? There is no mention of any concourse with prostitutes until 25 May, as indeed there had not been since the generalized and clearly charitable rehabilitation efforts of the mid-1840s. And it then comes in such a casual entry as to raise a doubt whether it could have been the beginning of a new pattern. At this time he was leading a very active parliamentary and social life. On Thursday the 24th he spoke in the House of Commons in the early evening, gave a small dinner party (ten) at Carlton Gardens for the intriguing combination of Manning and the Duchess of Buccleuch (they both subsequently became Roman Catholics) before returning to the House for the wind-up. On Friday the 25th he (briefly) spoke again, dined at Lord Wenlock’s, went to an evening party given by Lady Essex and then ‘Conv with one of those poor creatures, a very sad case’.11

  Five weeks later there occurs the only sign for that summer but without any explanation. As there is no reference to any night walk it was presumably for the old pornographic sin, although his reading list for the day does not provide much sustenance for this: ‘Read Irish Eviction papers – Lords Railway Audit Report. Quintilian – Simpson – Newman on the Soul.’12 Perhaps Quintilian was the trouble, although it was not the first diary entry showing that he was engaged with that exponent of classical oratory and literature, who is not in any event widely regarded as notably corrupting or depraving. His Lady Lincoln expedition occupied him in the late summer of that year, and then, after a Hawarden interlude, there was his long October–January visit to Fasque. During this period there were his self-abasing fortieth-birthday reflections but no return either to the sign of the whip or to accounts of late-night encounters until May 1850, three weeks after the tragedy of Jessy. Then on 2 May he laconically recorded, ‘Conv at night with an unhappy woman’, and on 4 May after the Royal Academy Banquet he encountered her again and was more informative, although in a way which indicated much more charitable concern than erotic excitement. ‘Found again the same poor creature at night. She has a son to support: & working very hard with her needle may reach 6/- per week as a maximum: pays 5/- for lodging – sends her boy to school at 6d a week. Lives No 6 Duke’s Court.’13

  These two diary entries were indeed wholly compatible with the most innocent view of Gladstone’s nocturnal activities. There was no indication of his being in a high state of tension during the days concerned. On 4 May he spent nearly three hours looking at the Academy summer exhibition – ‘there was much to see’ – and in the evening he had been sufficiently relaxed to write of the banquet, ‘there I sat by Disraeli who was very easy and agreeable’.14 But a week later he again abstained from holy communion, ‘for I have had much wicked negligence to reproach myself with of late as respects particular temptations’;15 and when he approached the beginning from 1 June of a new manuscript volume (each one normally covered just under two years) he instituted a new system of noting days of ‘impurity’. However, it appeared to lean even more on the side of catching the venial as well as the vicious. ‘I now think of marking days in two classes,’ he wrote: ‘one those of distinct offence against my rules: the other that of ill impressions without such distinctness of offence. Thus I hope to cover the debatable ground. . . .’16 And he marked 1, 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 19, 20, 21 and 22 June as being within his new broad category; 13 and 22 June were also days which received the symbol indicating the use of the scourge. The diary entries for none of these days contain any indication of the nature of the transgressions. At the end of that manuscript volume (which went up to February 1852) he added another table which, in addition to 1–21 June (which he repeated without differentiating between the days), he added 7, 21 and 28 July and 2 September, all in 1850. These dates were accompanied by a gnomic series of figures, letters and signs, of which even Professor Matthew has failed to provide an interpretation, and which might have been qualifying, or exacerbating or merely otiose.

  This second series of dates does, however, bear more relationship to relevant events recorded in the diary than did the first June list. On 7 July he was still much concerned with the death of Peel, which had taken place on the 2nd, and with his funeral on the 9th. But on the 8th he recorded an attempted rescue of a prostitute named South. Then around, although not exactly coinciding with, the two late-July dates, he became much preoccupied with a lady called Emma Clifton. At this time he took up a ‘beat’ opposite the Argyll Rooms in Great Windmill Street (off Piccadilly Circus). This was a choice of locale which compounded his habitual rashness, for the Rooms were the best-known centre of upper-class dissipation in London. It was therefore the place where, a hundred years before the television age made leading politicians recognizable by the masses, he was most likely, next perhaps to the entrances of the Carlton Club (of which he was still a member), Westminster Abbey and the House of Commons, to be identified. But in Great Windmill Street, if his innocence allowed him to contemplate the risk, he could perhaps have assumed a mutual desire for anonymity. There, on 22 July, he first took up his stand and encountered one E. Herring. But it was on the following (Tuesday) night that Emma Clifton, who became a much more immanent figure, first appeared in the diary.

  He saw Miss Clifton again on the Wednesday evening from 6.00 to 7.30, and again on the Friday, and on the Saturday, when he wrote: ‘Saw E Clifton at night and made I hope some way – But alas my unworthiness.’ It soun
ded altogether a day of frenzied and disagreeable activity: ‘Worked on letters, papers and accounts and on draft of will,’ he recorded after the meeting with Miss Clifton (but his diary was not always chronological within a day). ‘My cough very bad and headach [sic] almost unmanageable.’17 On the Sunday he composed an ‘MS [manuscript] meant for E.C.’.

  On the Tuesday he saw her at night. On the Thursday (1 August) he went into a spate of activity: ‘Before nine I went to find E.C.: but failed: after 1¼ hours came home . . . went again at 11½ to O[range?] Street, and again failed. Resolved to go to E.C.’s lodgings: I found her there, and left her with the resolution declared of going in the morning by my advice and with her child at once to Mrs Tennant [at the Windsor Clewer House].’18 He returned late to Carlton Gardens, and after only two and a half hours in bed took the early train to Birmingham for Hagley.

  Then came ten days of relative peace there, followed by another three in the Rectory at Hawarden. But on 15 August he wrote: ‘Mrs Tennant’s letter this morning showed that matters had not moved with respect to E. Clifton: and after consulting with C[atherine] I thought it my duty to go to town. I reached my house at 8pm – failed in finding E.C. for the evening, although I did all I could.’19 The next day he devoted himself to seeing the officers of various charities which might (if she wished) have provided Emma Clifton with support, but concluded, ‘I failed in getting at night a separate commun[icatio]n.’ On the following morning he returned to North Wales – ‘5¾–2½ from my door to Hawarden’,20 as for those who like precision and railways he satisfactorily put it. Euston to Chester (179 miles) must have consumed about six of the eight and three-quarter hours of journey time.