Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  This was no doubt the principal reason why Palmerston wanted Gladstone. If he was not in, he devastated ministries from the outside. There was also a feeling that if the finances of the country were to be decently run Gladstone had to be at the Treasury. He had made himself, despite having held the office only for one great budget, a second indifferent one and a third response to the emergency of war, the indispensable benchmark for all nineteenth-century Chancellors of the Exchequer. At one level the last thing which Palmerston wanted was a moralizing, powerful and cheese-paring Chancellor. He liked to spend money, particularly on extravagant fortifications of the south coast against the French, and he was bored with the economical approach to government. Yet he knew that if he wanted his government to last (which it did for six and a half years and was brought to an end only by his own sudden but not premature death on the threshold of eighty-one) he needed an economic discipline which was as firm as it was tiresome, and that if he was safely to pursue his own foreign and defence policy adventures he needed to be tethered to a post by a cord which, while generous and even flexible, would not break under pressure. The only person capable of providing that post and cord was Gladstone, and the reason why Palmerston was a statesman and not just a mountebank with dyed whiskers was that he had the underlying wisdom to see the need for this irksome discipline.

  Palmerston therefore had more than adequate motive for wishing, slightly gloomily, to have Gladstone join him. Why did Gladstone, after all his denunciations of Palmerston’s deficiencies and his wholly unsatisfactory brief experience of office under him in the early months of 1855, wish to join the new Prime Minister? He recorded remarkably little in the way of explanation.51 When he declined or renounced office, in 1855, in 1857, in 1858, he wrote reams of explanation of his negative behaviour. When he accepted it and had something positive to explain, he kept much more silent. ‘Italy’, his one-word explanation, was perhaps more aphoristic than comprehensively convincing. If this was his dominating concern it was not clear why he had insisted on being Chancellor or nothing. Foreign Secretary or a less departmentally exhausting portfolio might have better served that interest. His niece by marriage, Lucy Lyttelton, then only seventeen and later as Lady Frederick Cavendish the widow of the Phoenix Park tragedy and later still the eponym of the Cambridge college for mature women students, provided in her diary a fine example of the mixture of loyalty and mystification with which Gladstone fans received the news of his acceptance of office under Palmerston:

  Uncle William has taken office under Ld. Palmerston as Ch. of the Exchequer, thereby raising an uproar in the midst of which we are simmering, [in] view [of] his well-known antipathy to the Premier. What seems clear is that he feels it right to swallow personal feelings for the sake of the country; besides he agrees at present with Lord P.’s foreign policy, also he joins several Peelites. . . . There is this question, however: why, if he can swallow Palmn. couldn’t he swallow Dizzy, and in spite of him go in under Lord Derby? I don’t pretend to be able to answer this, but one can enough understand things to be much excited and interested. . . .8

  His Oxford constituents were at least as mystified as was his niece and less inclined to balance their surprise with loyalty. A candidate, in the shape of the Marquess of Chandos, heir (if that was the right word) to the near-bankrupt second Duke of Buckingham and himself chairman of the London and North Western Railway, was immediately nominated against him, and ran him fairly but not desperately close in the short contest which followed. On 1 July Gladstone was declared re-elected by 1050 votes to 859.

  His resentment that the contest took place at all was however very considerable. It reduced him, in his diary, to almost total incomprehensibility. ‘I am sore about the Oxford Election; but I try to keep myself in order: it disorganises and demoralises me, while such are the riddles of my “human nature” it also quickens mere devotional sensibility. O that I had wings.9 More important was the permanent disenchantment with the University as a constituency which followed from this contest. Before 1859, whatever disputes or upheavals were involved, Gladstone was proud to be member for Oxford. After 1859, he wished that he had another, less presumptuous constituency. Palmerston, as in so many matters and despite Gladstone’s expression of harmony in his letter to Heathcote, felt the reverse. ‘He is a dangerous man,’ he said in 1864. ‘Keep him in Oxford and he is partially muzzled, but send him elsewhere, and he will run wild.’10 As with a number of more important matters, Palmerston kept the undesirable at bay for what was effectively his lifetime, but Gladstone’s parliamentary divorce from the University seat began in 1859. He visited Oxford only three times in his remaining six years of his tenure as a burgess.

  This was not because of an excessive preoccupation with Treasury and Cabinet business. Indeed his summer was much occupied with three distinctly non-governmental pursuits. In June and again in August he gave generous bursts of sittings to G. F. Watts, already at forty-two an eminent and fashionable portrait painter. The result was two pictures, one of which is now in the National Portrait Gallery and the other at Hawarden.

  In July Gladstone read Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which had just been published, and became fascinated for a time with the works of that great contemporary, one of the few Victorians whose eminence equalled his own. For 18 July, the day on which in a speech lasting one hour and forty minutes he presented a provisional budget, he noted also that he had read Tennyson, ‘who has grasped me with a strong hand’.11 It was a remarkable tribute both to Tennyson’s fascination and to Gladstone’s eclecticism. There must be few Chancellors of the Exchequer who have been grasped by the hand of a poet on budget day.

  Gladstone then read or re-read Tennyson’s previous published collections, Poems from 1842, The Princess from 1842, In Memoriam from 1850 (it had taken Tennyson seventeen years after Hallam’s death to produce this threnody) and Maud from 1855. In mid-August Gladstone wrote to Whitwell Elwin, the editor of the Quarterly Review, suggesting that he might do a substantial critical article. ‘Will you let me try my hand on a review of Tennyson. . . . I have never been fanatical about him: but his late work has laid hold of me with a power that I have not felt, I ought to say not suffered, for many years.’12 Elwin having agreed, this became his main holiday task. Penmaenmawr that year became as devoted to Tennyson as to sea-bathing.

  The result was a highly readable 15,000-word essay.13 The style is measured and orotund, with his praise couched in a schoolmasterly mode. But it was less obscure and convoluted than many of his speeches and it bounded along with interest and verve. Tennyson was rebuked for the ‘somewhat heavy dreaminess’ of Maud, ‘the least popular, and probably the least worthy of popularity, amongst his more considerable works’. But it was essentially Maud’s militarism which offended Gladstone. ‘No more shall commerce be all in all, and Peace / Pipe on her pastoral hillock a languid note’ was a couplet which struck an unacceptable note for Gladstone, and he set about refuting Tennyson’s apparent belief that war was an antidote to mammon-worship with a statistical intensity which would have been more appropriate to a Cobden speech against the Corn Laws than to a piece of literary criticism. Nearly twenty years later Gladstone himself came to see this, and added a footnote apologizing that the ‘war-spirit in the outer world’ at the time of the article had ‘dislocated my frame of mind, and disabled me from dealing even tolerably with the work as a work of imagination’.

  In Memoriam got much more approval, for not only was it ‘perhaps the richest oblation ever offered by the affection of friendship at the tomb of the departed’, but it also contained an advance antidote to Maud in the lines ‘Ring out the thousand wars of old, / Ring in the thousand years of peace.’ Idylls of the King, which had provoked the article, did even better. The romance of the Arthurian legend and the character of the King himself, a sort of mixture of Hope-Scott and the Prince Consort (or ‘crowned curate’ as George Meredith called him), made an instinctive appeal to Gladstone. ‘Wherever he [Arthur] appears,’ he wr
ote, ‘it is as the great pillar of the moral order, and the resplendent top of human excellence.’ Towards Lancelot he was predictably more ambivalent, but the temptation and guilt of Guinevere fascinated him, although also bringing out his schoolmasterly mode. The following passage might almost have been written by one of Gladstone’s appointments as Warden of Glenalmond College:

  In any case we have a cheerful hope that, if he continues to advance upon himself as he has advanced heretofore, nay, if he can keep the level he has gained in Guinevere, such a work will be the greatest, and by far the greatest poetical creation, that, whether in our own or in foreign poetry, the nineteenth century has produced.

  The conclusion of the article was even more glowing: ‘Of it [the Idylls as a whole] we will say without fear, what we would not dare to say of any other recent work: that of itself it raises the character and the hopes of the age and the country which have produced it, and that its author, by his own single strength, has made a sensible addition to the permanent wealth of mankind.’ Even so it is doubtful whether Tennyson, who never forgot and rarely forgave a bad review and was riding very high at the time, Laureate (appointed by Russell) since 1850 and earning much fame and money, regarded the praise for In Memoriam and Idylls as balancing the attack on Maud. It is always the criticism rather than the praise which writers best remember. It was to be another twenty-four years before enough grass had grown for the joint Scandinavian cruise of Prime Minister and Poet Laureate to take place and to lead to Tennyson (who had previously refused a baronetcy from both Gladstone and Disraeli) accepting a peerage from his sailing companion.

  The third of Gladstone’s non-governmental pursuits of the first summer of his return to office began on 30 July 1859 when he met Marion Summerhayes. His first diary entry described her as ‘full in the highest degree both of interest and of beauty’.14 He then saw her on twelve out of the next nineteen days, having been away from London for three of the blank seven. She was his greatest infatuation since Elizabeth Collins in 1851. It was probably less physically urgent but more romantic than that previous obsession. She became intermingled with his current fascination with Tennyson and the Arthurian legend. He read The Princess to her, and began to see her in a heavily charged pre-Raphaelite light. She was an artists’ model, as well as a courtesan (not a unique combination), and his suggestion on their eighth day of acquaintance that he would commission a portrait of her by William Dyce was therefore perhaps not as far-fetched as it at first sounds. Both she and Dyce seem to have responded with at least adequate enthusiasm, and the calmly madonna-like result now reposes in the Aberdeen Art Gallery under the title, at once demure and romantic, of Lady with the Coronet of Jasmine.

  Gladstone was then away for a month but during a brief return in mid-September there was a fresh burst of Miss Summerhayes, mostly with a richly romantic undertone. On the 16th he read Tennyson with her for no less than four and a half hours, and was ‘much and variously moved’. On the 17th there was ‘a scene of rebuke [of and by whom?] not to be easily forgotten’, and in the evening of the 19th after seeing her from 6.30 to 7.30 he brought her to Downing Street at 11.00 ‘for 1 hour, espy. to see the pictures’.15 She remained a frequent subject of encounter throughout the autumn and winter, and continued (having in the meantime become Mrs Duke) to cross his path in varying circumstances until 1867. In July 1861 he wrote: ‘Altogether she is no common specimen of womanhood,’16 a remark well justified both by her appearance in the Aberdeen Art Gallery and by her impact upon him.

  Gladstone’s summer, his first in office for five years, was obviously not occupied entirely with Tennyson, Watts and Summerhayes. There is nonetheless a strong impression that he treated his return to both Cabinet and Treasury more as though he were conferring a favour upon his colleagues than panting thankfully back to office under a Whig Prime Minister. It may be that the ease with which he had stepped from the support of one government to a key job in its successful adversary (as pointedly expressed by Lady Clarendon) had gone temporarily to his head. The strict Whigs were always an alien group to him. The superficial explanation was that he was not aristocratic enough, either in origin or in manner. But this is contradicted by the fact that, of the three dukes in the government (Somerset at the Admiralty was the third), one (Newcastle) was his oldest political friend and another (Argyll) became his closest Cabinet ally. It was more that he was too serious, too God-fearing and too resolutely nineteenth century to suit the general run of the Whig cousinage who liked to believe that they kept alive the easier-going spirit of the eighteenth century. It is certainly almost impossible to imagine Gladstone in the coloured coats which went out with or before the accession of the Queen. However, in that Cabinet the only members to have been born before 1800 were Campbell, the Lord Chancellor, who balanced it by having also been born the son of the Presbyterian minister in Cupar, Fife, and Russell, who while of impeccable lineage was not exactly a ball of rakish fun. No doubt the spirit of the eighteenth century did not just depend upon date of birth, and was probably epitomized after Palmerston by Granville (born in the year of Waterloo). But here again there is the confusion that, of all the ministers who came to serve under Gladstone, Granville was the one whom he most liked, who could talk to him most persuasively, and who even managed to get Gladstone to write him letters which were almost jaunty rather than architectonic in style.

  What is less open to dispute is that the heritage into which Gladstone was entering was a potentially glorious one. He became one of a triumvirate of power, with the first of the other members twenty-five years and the second seventeen years his senior. Palmerston had many reservations about Gladstone, and was in (1864) to say: ‘Gladstone will soon have it all his own way; and whenever he gets my place, we shall have strange doings.’17 Yet by persuading him to accept office in 1859 Palmerston not only gave Gladstone the opportunity to become both the longest continuously serving and most dominant Chancellor of the Exchequer of the century but also threw to him the future leadership of the newly founded Liberal party. There was one unspoken proviso, which Gladstone just, but only just, managed to meet. This was that he should not resign. And although he claimed (as a joke) that he never attended a meeting of the Palmerston Cabinet without the precaution of having a letter of resignation in his wallet, and although Palmerston claimed (as a joke) that he kept the fires of his Broadlands house burning with the fuel of such letters from Gladstone, there is no record of them in the Palmerston archives (perhaps naturally if this was the use which was made of them), and, still more to the point, Gladstone stayed put.

  This was in spite of a good deal of provocation from Palmerston. The Prime Minister did not really want Gladstone to go, but he much enjoyed teasing him, and was determined that he should not think himself either indispensable or omnipotent. ‘However great the loss to the Government by the retirement of Mr Gladstone,’ he wrote during the great fortifications dispute to the Queen, to whom he was consistently disloyal about his Chancellor of the Exchequer, ‘it would be better to lose Mr Gladstone than to run the risk of losing Plymouth or Portsmouth.’ (To the French rather than to the Tories, although the latter risk may also have been in Palmerston’s mind.)

  This was good for Gladstone, who under a more nervous Prime Minister might have been inclined to overplay his hand and not to last the course. Their correspondence is interesting not so much for the issues discussed as for the light that it sheds on the balance and interplay of their personalities. Palmerston was much neater in phrase than Gladstone. This applied as much when he wanted to compliment his Chancellor as when he wanted to controvert him. Thus, after Gladstone’s budget of February 1860, he wrote: ‘I hope you are none the worse for that triumph on Friday for which the Government is much the better.’18 It would have taken Gladstone three paragraphs to say this. The seventy-five-year-old Prime Minister was much faster over the ground than was his forty-nine-year-old Chancellor. His jauntiness, which sometimes so irritated Gladstone, expressed itself in an admirab
le pithiness. Gladstone, however, was a powerful if not a darting correspondent. He was courteous, firm, fearless, and formidable in argument. They were a remarkably dissimilar yet balanced pair, each providing enough weight on the rope to ensure that neither fell into the mud and that the contest, never out of control, lasted long enough to see Palmerston out and to prepare Gladstone for coming to full power.

  Gladstone had been right to jump the way that he did in 1859. It was better to have Disraeli as an opponent across the floor of the House than as an enemy on his own side. And it was better to have Palmerston as a chief with whom he could live, partly because he was so old and partly because he and Gladstone were so different that they could not be jealous of each other. It was a hostile partnership, but it worked, or at least it creaked along for six and a half years.

  GOD’S VICAR IN THE TREASURY