Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Hawarden, after four hard years, was looking faintly up in that summer. ‘I am now at the bottom I think of his [Stephen Glynne’s] difficulties, which although lessened are still frightful,’21 Gladstone wrote on 28 August. All the family were still in the capacious Rectory, but there was a prospecting visit of William and Catherine Gladstone to the Castle and discussion of the possibility of setting up a joint residence there with Stephen Glynne. This was in a way made easier by another family tragedy in early October. On 15 September, when the Gladstones were at Fasque for three weeks, Lavinia Glynne gave birth to a fourth daughter, who lived until 1940 and as Lady Penrhyn became chatelaine of the vast stone castle of that name which at the time of her birth was arising out of both the profits and the products of the North Wales quarries. But two weeks after the birth the mother died and with her went the likelihood of a Glynne male heir. The way to the passing of the Hawarden property to the Gladstone side of the family was thus opened up.

  At the time of this event, at once tragic and seminal, Gladstone was in London, and indeed engaged in two further fruitless sorties for Emma Clifton, but that seemed to be the end of his preoccupation with her. He went back to Hawarden for the Glynne funeral, then grouped his party of wife, daughters and servants in London, and on 18 October set off for another long Italian expedition, of which the centrepiece was a sojourn of over three months in Naples. He did not return to London until 26 February 1851, and Catherine Gladstone and the children were away until 10 April.

  This Naples winter was immensely agitating to his mind on the iniquities which he discovered within the Bourbon kingdom and led to his putting into circulation the first of the great liberal phrases which came to be associated with his name. ‘This is the negation of God erected into a system of Government,’ he wrote in a public letter to Lord Aberdeen in April 1851.23 It did, however, appear to calm his sexual tension and to diminish both the forms of temptation to which it gave rise. He recorded no ‘days of impurity’ or encounters with ‘fallen women’ while he was away, and in consequence there were no applications of the scourge or deep outbursts of remorse. (He inverted the habits of many rich Victorian Englishmen who did things ‘abroad’ which they would not have dreamt of doing at home. He, on the contrary, was far more rash in Covent Garden than outside the San Carlo theatre, or even at the top of the Duke of York’s steps, where a famous incident was to take place in 1882, than in the Place de la Madeleine.)

  Even on his birthday, normally a day for great diary self-prostration, he was relatively restrained in Naples. After noting that the year had been ‘one of anxiety and of labour’, he complained that he ‘would to God I could add that it has been one of progress in obtaining the mastery over my most besetting sins which I think are impurity and lukewarmness’. (‘Lukewarmness’ was surely a most extraordinary fault for the raging tornado that was Gladstone, who was currently engaged in gratuitously – although admirably – stirring up a Europe-wide agitation against the Neapolitan government, to attribute to himself.) The year ‘has sorely taught me . . . how little even sorrow has in itself a virtue to overcome sin . . .’.22 But this was very mild stuff by the standards of some other years.

  Turmoil began again when he got back to London. Although he had always intended to return in advance of his family, a short-term political upheaval brought him across the Channel from Paris more quickly than would otherwise have been the case. The excitement was occasioned by the defeat in the House of Commons and resignation of Lord John Russell, which led to the Queen offering Stanley the commission to form a Conservative government. For this, Stanley felt he needed the support of the Peelites and offered Gladstone almost any position within it. But he proposed to restore a small duty on corn and that for Gladstone and the others was a sticking point. Although Gladstone psychologically needed office (he had been out for four and a half years) it took him only about six hours after his morning arrival at London Bridge Station on 26 February to dispose of Stanley’s offer. In general he admired Lord Stanley (he had described him on 17 June 1850, as making on the Greek question, that is against Palmerston’s Don Pacifico policy, ‘the finest speech I ever heard from him’, and almost exactly a year later at the Merchant Tailors’ banquet, he was to bring his acclamation up to the absolute by writing that ‘Lord Stanley made the best after dinner speech I ever heard’). But he was not willing to countenance any return to protection.

  This refusal had the effect of leaving him on his own and relatively unoccupied in London for a month and a half, gloomily awaiting the defection of Manning and Hope-Scott from the Church of England, which event duly occurred on 6 April. The combination of circumstances amounted to an almost perfect recipe for sending him back to his night prowls. On both his third and his fourth and again on his seventh, eighth and tenth evenings in London he was scouring the purlieus of Shaftesbury Avenue for Emma Clifton. On these nights he never found her. But he had a number of other encounters, some specified and some anonymous and, perhaps because this more generalized intercourse strengthened the missionary and weakened the sexual aspects to his activities, he recorded no evidence of subsequent remorse.

  Then at the end of March he became more particularly involved with P. Lightfoot (her Christian name never emerged). On the first evening (28 March) that he met her he recorded, ‘Saw . . . P.L. a singular case indeed,’ which was his way of confessing to a special interest. The next evening he searched for her, it appears in vain. On the third day, a Sunday, he gave Manning an argumentative paper he had written for him, and thereby provoked a depressing, indeed shattering, discussion, followed by another encounter with Miss Lightfoot which led him to the already quoted confession of carnality in his habitual obscurity:

  [Manning] smote me to the ground by answering with suppressed emotion that he is now upon the brink: and Hope too. Such terrible blows not only upset & oppress but I fear demoralize me: which tends to show that my trysts24 are Carnal or the withdrawal of them would not leave such a void. Was it possibly from this that thinking P.L. would look for me as turned out to be the fact, I had a second interview and conversation indoors here [Carlton Gardens?] and heard more history: yet I trusted without harm done.23

  The next evening he was less sanguine about the absence of harm:

  Saw P.L. again indoors and said I thought it must be the last time: as I fear lest more harm was done than good. There seems to be little guilt, & good affections, but an ill-informed conscience, & a want of depth & strength in impressions. I was certainly wrong in some things and trod the path of danger.24

  Then followed a period of relative calm on this front, even though it included the actual (although already somewhat discounted) reception of Manning and Hope-Scott into the Church of Rome. On 9 April Gladstone was in Paris to meet his wife and daughters and bring them back to London. He indicated pleasure at having them back, but in less than another week was off, without them, on nearly a month’s Easter visit to his father at Fasque. There he reverted on ‘Easter eve’ to writing one of his budgets of guilt. ‘But I must write a bitter thing against myself. Whether owing (as I think) to the sad and recent events (of the 6th) or not, I have been unmanned & unnerved & out of sheer cowardice have not used the measure which I have found so beneficial to temptations against impurity. Therefore they have been stronger than usual in Lent: and I had no courage!’25

  In July, that aspect of his courage revived and there were three symbols, the first for more than a year. They coincided with the peaks of his erotic obsession with young women whom he was genuinely (but almost always unsuccessfully) endeavouring to rescue from their life of sin. In May he had been only mildly involved, although he saw P. Lightfoot again on the 28th, but on 11 June, after listening to Stanley’s oratorical gem in the Merchant Tailors’ hall, he had his first meeting with Elizabeth Collins, who was to be an obsession for the rest of that summer: ‘Saw Collins – Seymour – and a person from Stourbridge – in the first I was much interested.’26 He did not, however, record see
ing her again until the 27th, although there was the ‘sad case of some flowergirls’ on the 16th. Then he was with her for an hour and a half, maybe saw her again on the 30th (the text is corrupt) and then on 4 July, after writing to her in the morning, went unavailingly to meet her in the evening. He wrote to her again on the 7th and saw her at night, mysteriously writing ‘and closed with advising a day visit and appeal to C[atherine] for advice’. Then next day he again saw her ‘but did not advance in the matter’.27

  He again looked for her unsuccessfully on 12 July, and on the 13th: ‘Went with a note to E.C.’s – received (unexpectedly) and remained 2 hours: a strange and humbling scene – returned to .’ The next day was something of an anti-climax, except for its diary entry encapsulating the contradictions of his life: ‘Saw Bp of Oxford – Ld Aberdeen. H of C [where he spoke] 5–7¼ and at home in evg. except a short time looking for E.C.’ So was the next day’s, although ending less quietly: ‘Attended the Dentist and saw the D[owage]r. Dss of Beaufort. Mr and Mrs Gaskell dined with me. Corrected proofs. Fell in with E.C. and another mixed scene somewhat like of 48 hours before – afterwards.’28

  The day after that P. Lightfoot created a diversion from Elizabeth Collins; on this occasion his conversation with her seems to have been confined to her conditions of life. On 19 July he looked unsuccessfully for Elizabeth Collins, and on the 21st he found her: ‘Saw E.C. again in the same [?] manner: and did not afterwards: thinking there was a change.’29 On the 23rd there was a dinner at the Clarendon Hotel in New Bond Street for the American Minister (Lawrence) and Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary and already by no means a favourite of Gladstone’s. Gladstone spoke, as did several others, but ‘At half past twelve I came away: the first to do so. I then in a singular way hit upon E.C.: two more hours, strange, questionable, or more: followed by . Whether or not I have been deluded in the notion of doing good by such means, or whether I have sought it through what was unlawful I am not clear. God grant however not for my sake that the good may be done.’30

  That was the trough of his mid-century crisis of nerves and sex. He was away at Hagley and Hawarden for the first half of August. He wrote to Elizabeth Collins on the 17th and again on the 19th. He looked for her unsuccessfully that evening having returned to London in the afternoon, saw her alone on the following evening for two and a quarter hours and wrote extensively in Italian after this meeting. But the tension sounded in some way relaxed. He moved on easily from describing the meeting – ‘Things went partly as before’ – to her relations with a prospective husband, to his relations with God and to the devastation caused in him by the defections of Manning and Hope-Scott. On the 20th he left London for five months, spent mostly at Fasque.

  Throughout the 1850s (and for decades beyond) he continued with sporadic rescue work. In 1859 he got considerably involved with a courtesan called Marion Summerhayes. He found it necessary to write of their relations, ‘My thoughts of S. require to be limited and purged,’31 but everything was then, and had been for seven or eight years past, on a somewhat quieter plane. The frenzy of 1845, 1848, 1849, 1850 and above all 1851 was never repeated.

  Did Gladstone believe that he was doing much good with his rescue efforts? Probably not, for although sometimes priggish he was not basically hypocritical. In 1854 he recorded that, in differing circumstances, he had over five years or so engaged with between eighty and ninety prostitutes of whom ‘there is but one of whom I know that the miserable life has been abandoned and that I can fairly join that fact with influence of mine’.32 He was perfectly aware that his motives were mixed and that his obsession must be explained by temptation and could not be justified by results.

  What did his involvements amount to on the occasions when he was filled with remorse and even felt it necessary to apply physical correction to himself? The locus classicus for this is the 1896 statement which he made to his clergyman son Stephen, who together with the Bishop of St Andrews was his main pastoral confidant at the end of his life. This was that he had never ‘been guilty of the act which is known as that of infidelity to the marriage bed’.33 The denial was obviously both precise and limited, and while this may have carried conviction it also led to a decision, on counsel’s advice, at the time of the Wright–Herbert Gladstone trial in 1927, that more harm than good would be done if the statement were put in as evidence.

  One reason why the tide of mid-century madness, which at its height threatened to engulf Gladstone, began to recede after the summer of 1851 was that he became more engaged politically, although the future for him as a Peelite, a disciple without a messiah, a Conservative (just) who had lost his faith in most Conservative causes, remained hazardous.

  THE TREMENDOUS PROJECTILE

  GLADSTONE’S PREOCCUPATIONS and derangements of 1850 and 1851 did not prevent his making occasional major political forays. Indeed it could be argued that it was during these two years that he made the breakthrough, both at home and abroad, from being merely a figure of promise and interest, of whom there were perhaps thirty in the House of Commons, to being one of a handful of four or five whose names had world resonance. Yet it was a confusing time for him politically as well as emotionally. He was losing a lot of old moorings while only tentatively edging towards new ones, and making the crossing among the swirling waters of both political and religious uncertainties. As a result some of his forays pointed to his future Liberalism while one or two pointed back to the Toryism of his early years in Parliament. It was a period when he came to justify Morley’s famous description of his ‘formidable powers of contention and attack which were before long [Morley was writing of 1843] to resemble some tremendous projectile, describing a path the law of whose curves and deviations, as they watched its journey through the air in wonder and anxiety for its shattering impact, men found it impossible to calculate’.1

  The first of these forays owed more to old Toryism than to new Liberalism. In April 1850 a motion for the setting up of a Royal Commission to enquire into the affairs of Oxford and Cambridge was brought before the House of Commons by a Radical backbencher. Gladstone was at this stage strongly opposed to the proposal, despite the hopes that he had aroused among the University reformers in 1847. Rather surprisingly, he did not speak in this debate, but left it to Inglis to fulminate for Oxford obscurantism. He had been brought ‘very reluctantly to town’ (from Brighton, where Catherine Gladstone with the younger children was convalescing after the death of Jessy) and applied himself to caballing against the proposal, including a call on the Duke of Wellington as Chancellor of the University.

  However, the Prime Minister of the day was more important to the issue than one of twenty-one years before, even if a field-marshal as well as a duke. Lord John Russell was persuaded by the debate and, a few months later, announced the setting up of such an enquiry. Gladstone then intervened heavily but ineffectively. On 18 July he delivered himself of one and a half hours of the most intransigent opposition, but was as unavailing as Inglis had been. The Commission was appointed in August, began work in October and produced by May 1852 a report which was as expeditious as it was effective. Its competent chairman was Samuel Hinds, the dry and donnish Bishop of Norwich, and its secretary was the future Dean Stanley (then a fellow of Balliol). Among its members were Tait, then Dean of Carlisle and later Archbishop of Canterbury; Liddell, then headmaster of Westminster and later one of the most famous of Christ Church deans; Jeune, then Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, and later Bishop of Peterborough; and Baden Powell, Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford and grandfather of the future Chief Scout.

  Its report converted Gladstone. The ‘tremendous projectile’ swooped into an awesome curve. Gladstone then devoted the equivalent of what for most men would have been a major part of their energies (but could not be for him as he was a particularly active Chancellor of the Exchequer over most of the relevant period) to devising and carrying through Parliament a bill implementing its main recommendations. In the two years over which this secondary activ
ity was spread his correspondence on the issue amounted to 520 letters of substance. This might be thought to be natural. He had a peculiarly literate constituency and the subject was of most vital and direct interest to his electors. But what was not natural was that Gladstone wrote 350 of them (in his own hand) and that only 170 came from the Heads of Houses, professors, fellows and outside ecclesiastical dignitaries who made up the collectivity of his constituency. This inversion of the normal proportion illustrated one facet of the qualities which made Gladstone unique.

  His second foray in that summer of 1850 was in the Don Pacifico debate. As long previously as Easter 1847, a Greek mob which included several well-connected youths had pillaged the Athens house of a merchant by the name of David Pacifico, who liked to call himself Chevalier Pacifico, but who became known to history as Don Pacifico. Pacifico was a Spanish Jew who had been born in Gibraltar (which entitled him to British citizenship) but had lived much of his life in Portugal, had acquired Portuguese nationality and had indeed been the consul of Portugal in Athens until dismissed for forgery. He had wisely acquired a British passport before the pillaging took place and as a result Palmerston was willing to add Pacifico’s vast claim for damage to the house (totalling £31,000, the equivalent to a good £1½ million today) to other claims and grievances against the Greek government. When Pacifico’s claims (inter alia) were not met, Palmerston proclaimed the doctrine of Civis Romanus sum (that a British connection, however tenuous, entitled the holder to the full panoply of imperial protection) and ordered a naval blockade of the Greek coast.

  The imperious action of the Foreign Secretary, which set him at odds with both Russia and Austria as well as leading to a sufficiently serious diplomatic quarrel with France for the French ambassador to be withdrawn from London, was challenged first by a motion of Stanley’s in the Lords, which was carried against the government, and then in the Commons. As a parliamentary occasion, that Commons debate was the great setpiece of the nineteenth century, just as the Norway debate of 7–8 May 1940 was that of the twentieth century. They were both characterized by the participation of almost every member of the first rank, and by the continuing resonance of the phrases used by at least some of them. Eighteen-fifty has the edge over 1940 in that the debate lasted four nights (with no cut-off point) rather than two (with an 11.00 p.m. close-down) and that the speeches, led by Palmerston with an oration of over four and a half hours and buttressed in this respect by Gladstone with one of nearly three hours, were immensely longer. The 1940 debate has the edge in that much more flowed from it.