Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Homer might have been expected to rank more with Rio than with Trollope, for a main part of Gladstone’s object in writing about him was to propound the improbable thesis that his work was part of the headwaters of Christianity. This gave it more of a religious than of a scholarly or aesthetic purpose. Gladstone was no doubt not alone in feeling some unease at the contradiction between a ruling ethos which elevated godliness above everything else and an educational system (for the upper classes and educated bourgeoisie) which was based almost exclusively on a study of the literature and history of pagan civilizations. In the easy-going eighteenth century it had not seemed to matter much. The fervour of Victorian religion made the contradiction more awkward. Where Gladstone was almost alone, however, was in believing that he might resolve the issue by proving that part of the same divine revelation was made to the Greeks before it was made to the Jews. The attempt – in Magnus’s good formulation ‘to catholicize Hellenism and to canonize Homer’ – was a tribute at once to his innocence and to his daring. It was not a success.

  The Oxford University Press (perhaps influenced by his position as senior burgess for the University, Inglis having died in 1855) published Homer and the Homeric Age in three volumes in 1858. The critical response was unfavourable. No one thought that Gladstone had advanced classical scholarship or shown a high critical facility. What he had done was to try to promote a religious cause and in so doing to provide himself with an intellectual hobby which lasted intermittently over the next twenty years. It was Gladstone in his Lord Longford mood, showing indifference to mockery, vast reserves of both energy and self-confidence and more enthusiasm than scholarly fastidiousness. Fortunately he did not himself suffer from great illusions about either the academic or the popular quality of the work, and he advised a friend to start with the third volume because it was probably the ‘least unreadable’.

  At the beginning of March 1857, Gladstone delivered another of his thundering, government-shaking parliamentary orations. Palmerston was engaged in punitive action against the Chinese for arresting a British-registered boat on a charge of piracy.46 Cobden moved a vote of censure. Gladstone spoke, relatively briefly for him – he was a little less than two hours – at 9.30 on the night of the vote. The faithful Phillimore wrote of the speech as ‘the finest delivered in the memory of man in the House of Commons’.13 Even allowing for elements both of exaggeration and of sycophancy in this judgement, it was undoubtedly a polemic of the highest class, and helped to secure an ‘aye’ lobby of 263 (containing not only Cobden and Gladstone, but such variegated auxiliaries as Disraeli, Bright and Russell) against the 247 which was all that Palmerston, who was surprised as well as discomfited by the result, could rally. The next laugh, however, lay very much with the Prime Minister. He dissolved, and was strongly vindicated by the result of the general election. Cobden and Bright both lost their seats, as did most of the other Manchester School ‘pacifists’. In Flintshire, where Gladstone did most of his campaigning, Sir Stephen Glynne also went down.

  Gladstone himself was lucky to be unopposed at Oxford. However, he treated the national outcome as a personal rebuff and as an invitation to observe a period of silence. He hardly opened his mouth in the House of Commons for the next four months, and attended only fitfully. Carlton House Terrace was let for six weeks from late May (for the remarkably large sum of a hundred guineas a week – about £5000 today), and he spent most of June at Hawarden. He was not proud of his disengagement, and on 29 May, for the first time for several years, scourged himself as a retribution for ‘half-heartedness’.

  He was brought back into committed politics, and for no more than a short month, only in order to fight what turned out to be his last pitched illiberal battle. The Palmerston government followed its election victory by introducing a bill for what could be roughly described as the opening to the middle classes of the possibility of divorce. Hitherto the upper classes had been able to proceed by the prohibitively expensive method of private Act of Parliament. This bill made it possible to proceed, even if over very considerable obstacles, by ordinary civil suit. This aroused Gladstone to a frenzy of opposition, although the Aberdeen government had published but not proceeded with a very similar measure. He regarded it as a major depredation of the authority of the Church, despite the fact that in the House of Lords, where the bill had started, it had been supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury and nine other prelates, including even the normally intransigent Dr Phillpotts of Exeter. (The equally formidable Bishop Wilberforce was, however, on Gladstone’s side.) And he fought it à outrance, despite his being peculiarly vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy in view of the part that he had played in collecting evidence in support of the Lincoln divorce – carried through by private Act, of course. Furthermore his period of strenuous opposition coincided with the slow decline to death, following her twelfth pregnancy, of Catherine Gladstone’s forty-three-year-old sister Mary Lyttelton. It might be thought that he could have done more practical good for the institution of marriage by sustaining his own distraught wife at Hagley than by vainly fulminating for its inviolable principle in London.

  Up to his middle age Gladstone was always a little unhinged on anything to do with the institution of marriage. Its disciplines had to be preserved at all costs. It was reminiscent of an intoxicated guardsman who could prevent himself falling over only by standing too rigidly to attention. This lack of balance was shown by his uncharitable censoriousness towards the unions, projected and actual, of three of his brothers and sisters, by his foolish gallivanting for the sake of Lady Lincoln’s virtue, and above all by his frenzied opposition to the 1857 legislation. He made seventy-three interventions against that bill, twenty-nine of them in the course of one protracted sitting. He was in a small minority which often failed to muster more than a few dozen votes.

  Fortunately and surprisingly, however, he did not carry his intolerant censoriousness into the next generation and his role as a father-in-law. Five of the seven surviving Gladstone children married during their father’s lifetime (Helen, the vice-principal of Newnham, never did, and Herbert, the future Home Secretary, did so only in 1901) and their spouses were a fairly mixed bag (and a less fashionable one than that acquired by the Asquith offspring a generation later): one curate, one headmaster, one daughter of a Tory Scottish landowning peer, one of another peer who was a late Gladstonian creation, and one of a Liverpool doctor. William Gladstone appeared content with them all as sons- and daughters-in-law, although one of the latter (Mrs Henry Gladstone) was to evolve into a silly and pretentious middle-aged lady.

  A SHORT ODYSSEY FOR A BRITISH ULYSSES

  THE DIVORCE BILL APART, Gladstone followed a pattern of political detachment in 1857 and 1858. He let the Palmerston government get on with it, and he got on with Homer. Between 18 August 1857 and 16 February 1858 he was in London only for ten days in early December and four days in late January. He slept 153 out of 172 nights at Hawarden during that long parliamentary recess, the highest proportion of static rusticity in any year of his life until 1886–7. His Carlton House Terrace residence was closed, and even when he at last removed himself semi-permanently back to London in February it was to lodge at the convenient address of 18 Great George Street, Westminster, with a Mrs Talbot, who was a distant family connection through the Lytteltons.

  Within three days of his return he had the satisfaction of both speaking and voting for the defeat of the government on the Conspiracy to Murder Bill. It was an ironical issue, for Palmerston was arraigned for being too subservient to a foreign government. An Italian terrorist, Felice Orsini, operating from a British base, had attempted to assassinate the Emperor Napoleon III. Responding to a strong despatch from Foreign Minister Walewski, whose birth and office were in combination a symbol of the continuity of the First and Second Empires, Palmerston introduced one of those criminal justice measures which fall within the category more of gesture than of efficacy. Gladstone was torn between his dislike of Palmerston and his beli
ef in the Concert of Europe, but he was able to resolve the issue by bringing in a third libertarian factor, and voted ‘234:215’, a remarkably small vote (on both sides) for a division which toppled a government. Palmerston, although within nine months of his 1857 electoral triumph, nonetheless resigned.

  Derby came in, for the third of those Conservative attempts at government which punctuated the 1850s like short showers in a fine (or at least a non-Tory) summer. He asked Gladstone and other Peelites to join him. The offices were not specified. For once the Exchequer does not seem to have been on offer. But the Colonial Office, then a major secretaryship of state, almost certainly would have been, particularly as it was eventually filled by Derby’s son, who must have been expendable. The offer clearly embarrassed other Peelites, at least Herbert and Graham. These two and Gladstone met together with their erstwhile chief in an almost instinctive feast of abnegation at Aberdeen’s house after (for Gladstone) evensong at Westminster Abbey. There was no particular reason why they should refuse: Gladstone liked and even admired Derby, and was going through one of the less vehemently anti-Disraeli phases. Refuse they nonetheless did. The Peelites were becoming a group of vestal virgins. Their enthusiasm for saying no had become a form of self-indulgence. ‘The case though grave was not doubtful,’ Gladstone wrote. ‘. . . we separated for the evg. with the fervent wish that in public life we might never part.’1 47

  Despite this wish the Peelites were in disarray, with Graham and Herbert pulling increasingly towards the Whigs, while Gladstone was experiencing the last Conservative tug upon his heartstrings. On 19 April he delivered a friendly speech on the budget, in sharp contrast with the denunciation which Disraeli’s previous budgetary essay had called forth five and a quarter years before, and in contrast too with his hostility to Cornewall Lewis’s efforts in 1855–7. On 4 May Gladstone followed this with one of his major moralizing foreign policy philippics, this time in favour of the rights of the inhabitants of Wallachia and Moldavia (later Roumania) against both the Turks and the Austrians. This was much more critical of the government, but it was not conducive to a Whig alliance either.

  In mid-May Lord Ellenborough, who had been intermittently President of the Board of Control since 1828, resigned from that office as a result of a dispute with Gladstone’s old Eton and Christ Church contemporary Charles Canning, who was Governor-General in Calcutta. Indian affairs were at a crucial juncture, with the Mutiny only a few months over and the governor-generalship and the presidency of the Board of Control about to be turned into respectively a viceroyalty and a secretaryship of state. Derby sent an envoy to offer Gladstone the vacancy, accompanying it with the alternative offer of his old office of Colonial Secretary. This was presumably designed to cover the possibility that he might be disposed to enter the government while remaining unstirred with the challenge of India, a department of public affairs from which he remained almost wholly detached throughout his career. The offer was maladroitly made. It was confined to Gladstone alone at that stage, for it was to fill a specific vacancy (but the Colonial Office alternative made rather a nonsense of that), although there were hints that other Peelites might be brought in later, and more than a hint that Disraeli might be prepared to give up the leadership of the House of Commons to Graham. The existence of these nuances made it the more mysterious that Derby (who always had a good relationship with Gladstone) did not see him himself rather than using Spencer Walpole, the Home Secretary, as an intermediary.

  Three days later, having returned a negative but not perhaps totally door-slamming reply to Derby via Walpole, Gladstone received a more surprising but equally maladroit letter from Disraeli. This was in sharp contrast with the coldly affected style of his ‘Exchequer robes and Downing Street furniture’ 1853 letters. Disraeli began without prefix and on a note of almost gushing urgency:

  I think it of such paramount importance to the public interests that you should assume at this time a commanding position in the administration of affairs, that I feel it a solemn duty to lay before you some facts, that you may not decide under a misapprehension.

  Listen, without prejudice, to this brief narrative.

  Disraeli then deployed three or four points designed to show that he had always been prepared to behave unselfishly to promote the reunion of the Conservative party.

  Thus you see, for more than eight years, instead of thrusting myself into the foremost place, I have been, at all times, actively prepared to make every sacrifice of self for the public good, which I have ever thought identical with your accepting office in a conservative government.

  Don’t you think the time has come when you might deign to be magnanimous?

  Mr Canning was superior to Lord Castlereagh in capacity, in acquirements, in eloquence, but he joined Lord C. when Lord C. was Lord Liverpool’s lieutenant [that is, leader of the House of Commons], when the state of the Tory party rendered it necessary. That was an enduring, and, on the whole, not an unsatisfactory connection, and it certainly terminated very gloriously for Mr Canning.

  I may be removed from the scene, or I may wish to be removed from the scene.

  Every man performs his office, and there is a Power, greater than ourselves, which disposes of all this.

  He then continued for another page before concluding, still in a gush: ‘Think of all this in a kindly spirit. These are hurried lines, but they are heartfelt.’2

  G. W. E. Russell, devoted Gladstone acolyte and chronicler of his later life (Russell, nephew of Lord John and himself an MP and junior minister, was born only in 1853) interpreted this letter (in a short, hagiographic but often perceptive biography of Gladstone which was published in 1891) as a coldly machiavellian ploy by Disraeli to turn Gladstone into his creature, with ‘the satisfaction of knowing that the one contemporary statesman whose powers and ambition were equal to his own was subordinated, in all probability for ever, to his imperious will’.3 This was ludicrous. Disraeli’s motives may well have been mixed, but there was more (possibly self-deceiving) spontaneity than plotting about them, and he would never have been so foolish as to believe that he could permanently turn Gladstone into a subordinate.

  What is certain, however, is that Disraeli’s letter was not well directed to achieving its immediate objective of getting Gladstone into the government. The flattery was too transparent, the attempt to persuade him that he could be Canning to Disraeli’s Castlereagh (was Disraeli suggesting that he might follow Castlereagh in committing suicide?) was too blatant an appeal to Gladstone’s ambition rather than his duty. Above all, however, Gladstone was not going to have Disraeli lecturing him about ‘a Power, greater than ourselves’. His reply was much more superficially courteous but fundamentally just as chilling as Disraeli’s 1853 brush-off:

  My dear Sir,

  The letter which you have been so kind as to address to me will enable me, I trust, to remove from your mind some impressions with which you will not be sorry to part. . . .

  At the present moment I am awaiting counsel which at Lord Derby’s wish, I have sought. But the difficulties which he wishes me to find means of overcoming are broader than you may have supposed. . . .

  I state these points fearlessly and without reserve, for you have yourself well reminded me that there is a Power beyond us that disposes of what we are and do, and I find the limits of choice in public life to be very narrow.

  I remain, etc4

  The ‘counsel’ which Gladstone took was with Aberdeen and the other members of the little band of Peelites, and the result, arrived at more or less unanimously but on what all agreed was a narrow balance of considerations, was to confirm the negative. Thus passed Gladstone’s last sight of the shore of serving in a Conservative government. The refusal was in a sense instinctive, but it gave Gladstone no sense of the exhilaration of freedom. He was beginning to feel the futility of his political position. Having played a material part in bringing down Palmerston in February, he was inhibited from doing the same with the only practical alternative g
overnment. Yet he did not feel enough affinity to join it. It was the old ‘devil and the deep blue sea’ paradigm between Palmerston and Disraeli which afflicted him throughout the 1850s. He attempted to resolve (or at least to escape) it by retreating to Hawarden for much of June and July and then by accepting an unlikely overseas mission for the autumn and winter which kept him abroad for four months.

  That flaccid summer led him partly to fill the vacuum with what became the most famous recreational activity of the second half of his life. For 31 July 1858 one of his diary lines read: ‘Spent the afternoon in woodcutting & the like about the old Castle: my first lesson.’5 Thereafter the felling of trees became a central occupation. In Lord Randolph Churchill’s unforgettable phrase of a quarter of a century later, ‘The forest laments, in order that Mr Gladstone may perspire’.6 There were another seven arboreal assaults during that August. One even took priority over accompanying Bishop Wilberforce (who was staying at Hawarden) to a Society for the Propagation of the Gospel meeting at Mold.

  In that third summer out of office, without even the compensation of having a clear thrust to oppose the government, there was something which Gladstone needed more than either an opportunity for sweating or even a new subject for holiday studies, and that was some public occupation into which he could get his teeth. The morsel which he succeeded in masticating was the very modest one of the string of a dozen islands which run down the west coast of Greece from Corfu to Zante, and the status in which he performed was that of a quasi-constitutional governor-general. The islands had been made a British protectorate in an almost absent-minded disposition of the spoils of victory in 1815.