by Roy Jenkins
The loss between the two Houses of the only major bill of the first session of a government commanding the biggest majority for more than a generation would have been a grave constitutional affront, and an appropriate atmosphere of crisis lay on official London throughout the two middle weeks of July. Despite the result of the second reading division, the opponents of the bill had a secure Lords majority for amendments which were unacceptable to the government, and in a game of shuttlecock between the two Houses twice voted for them. On the other hand there was nervousness as well as defiance among the opponents of the government and the bill. Disraeli’s general strategy was to let the government run into exhaustion and unpopularity rather than to engage it in mortal combat during its youthful vigour. Cairns, the once and future Lord Chancellor and the new Conservative leader in the Lords, had nothing like Derby’s confidence and was more concerned to balance on his recently acquired bicycle than to ride it towards a constitutional revolution.
Nor were many of the bishops enthusiastic for a quarrel à outrance with, on any showing, the first committed churchman to be Prime Minister since Peel and by some criteria the only dedicated Anglican ever to occupy 10 Downing Street. Nor did they wish to risk their position in the House of Lords in a defence of their somewhat shadowy brethren from Offaly or Meath. Their interest was to avoid the weakness of the Irish Church damaging the establishment in England, and it was by no means clear whether discretion or valour best served that end. The ambiguity of the two Primates had already shown itself in their abstention on second reading.
The underlying forces working for a settlement were therefore strong, and when Gladstone on 12 July persuaded the Queen, without supporting the bill or urging a particular settlement, to impress on Archbishop Tait the dangers of a major clash with the government, the cards were stacked for a victory. Gladstone’s final contribution was to fall ill on 22 July. No one else could have marshalled the forces for the bill as well as he had done, but Granville, without passion or indignation, was the man to make the final small concessions and negotiate the settlement with Tait and Cairns. Gladstone then presented the argument to the Commons in a speech which, according to Phillimore, was ‘universally praised’. It was one of his accomplishments, springing out of his taste for constructive solutions, that he could use his oratory to defend a compromise as well as to denounce an iniquity. On this occasion, however, it required a fierce effort to perform at all. He was somewhat unhinged by the strains of his illness and the crisis with the House of Lords. On the day of the settlement he wrote: ‘The favourable issue left me almost unmanned, in the reaction from a sharp and stern tension of mind.’17 And on the next day: ‘Dr Clark came in the morning & made me up for the House [it sounds almost like a scene from Waugh’s The Loved One] whither I went 2–5 p.m. to propose concurrence in the Lords Amendments. Up to the moment I felt very weak but this all vanished when I spoke, and while the debate lasted. Then I went back to bed.’18
The result gave him one of the greatest satisfactions of his political life. The element of compromise was small. Gladstone had got his first major bill through almost unscathed. He had frightened the House of Lords more than they had frightened him. Despite the hesitant recovery of his health, he was exultant as the session came to an end. He made his last appearance of the year in the House of Commons on 5 August, applied himself to working a small ecclesiastical measure, the Bishops’ Resignation Bill, through its committee stage (a task which not even Asquith or Baldwin, let alone a later Prime Minister, would have thought of undertaking), and went that evening to see Cox and Box, the new Sullivan and Burnand operetta (Gilbert was not yet on the scene). The following day he had his final Cabinet until late October, with no very momentous agenda items, except for a preliminary discussion of the next session’s programme. After that he was on a semi-convalescent holiday, keeping to his bed a certain amount, reading Pride and Prejudice and then George Eliot’s Romola, applying himself to the bestowal of honours, which fascinated him almost as much as did the making of bishops, and on 10 August removing himself for nearly a month to Walmer Castle.
Walmer went with the wardenship of the Cinque Ports, in which office Granville had succeeded Palmerston in 1865, but Gladstone went there more as to a rented holiday house (without, however, any rent) than as a guest. ‘We prowled about,’19 he noted when he arrived, and Granville came only for one night during the whole stay. Gladstone had some walks along the coast, over and under the white cliffs, and some drives around south-east Kent, but he did not bathe, probably because of the intermittent persistence of his complaint. In the last week of August he was back in bed, although saying that this relapse was ‘caused I fear by a high wing of grouse yesterday’.20 He did, however, manage several games of what he described as ‘cricket round the hat with my four sons’.21 He had some family visitors, including his brother Robertson. Bishop Wilberforce came for three days, and Archbishop Tait drove the fourteen miles from Canterbury for dinner and ‘much conversation’. Tait wrote a curious account of the visit, which suggests that the grouse had done more harm than the cricket had done good. ‘Reached Walmer Castle about 6.30,’ he recorded. ‘Found Gladstone lying in blankets on the ramparts eating his dinner, looking still very ill. . . . He joined us at night full of intelligence. His fierce vigour all the better for being a little tempered. . . .’22
From Walmer Gladstone made his way via London (two nights), Raby Castle in Durham as the guest of the Duke of Cleveland (four nights), and the Great Northern and Caledonian Railways (one night) to Balmoral. There he stayed for two weeks as minister in attendance. Full vigour seemed to have returned, although on 7 September at Raby he was complaining that ‘there is a weakness of the organs not yet overcome’. By Saturday the 11th, however, having arrived at Balmoral at 6.00 that morning, he had a visit from his clergyman son Stephen accompanied by the two younger boys and walked fourteen and a half miles with them in the afternoon and then another four miles home on his own. ‘Met the Queen out: and dined with her,’ he laconically recorded.
On the next day he had reluctantly to accept ‘Crathie (Presbyterian) Ch. with H. M. at 12.’ He had had his fingers burnt by a royal complaint during one of his Chancellor’s visits in the early 1860s that he had taken a Household carriage twenty-eight miles to escape from the austerities of Presbyterianism into the lusher ritual of Episcopalianism. He was still attempting to fight back in 1869 but was defeated by Scottish weather: ‘A plan for meeting S. and the boys to have service in the wood half way to Braemar was stopped by ceaseless rain.’23 When he left Balmoral on 25 September, he did so even more heroically, abandoning all mechanical or horse-drawn transport at Banchory to walk fifteen miles over the Cairnmount, which brought him into Fasque for a brief fraternal weekend by, as it were, the back door. (What, it is tempting to ask, happened to his luggage, and indeed the considerable quantity of working papers – he complained that on the previous day he had had to dispose of sixty-two letters – by which he must have been accompanied? He had no private secretary with him, but there was presumably a servant who conducted his bags by train or carriage.)
While at Balmoral Gladstone settled no less than four episcopal appointments71 as well as a list of forty-seven to whom lay honours were to be accorded. ‘I take it there are few among them whom it would not be creditable to appoint,’ he cautiously wrote to Clarendon. The composition of this list had been broadly settled at a ‘conclave’ of ministers just before the holidays. Gladstone had approached the task in an ecumenical mood, and had proposed a Jew,72 two Roman Catholics (the one a Liberal MP and Norfolk younger son who became Howard of Glossop, and the other Acton, already mentioned), as well as seeking a Nonconformist peerage, about the candidates for which he consulted John Bright. He also offered a Garter to the current Duke of Norfolk. But Norfolk was a less good Liberal than his MP younger brother and turned it down on the ground that it might commit him to support the government. The Duke of Leinster also refused one of the Garters which ha
d been made available by the deaths of Derby and Westminster, and they eventually went to de Grey, who was a serving member of the government, and to Stratford de Redcliffe, the most eminent living ex-ambassador, whose diplomatic skill was such that he had almost single-handedly caused the Crimean War. Stratford was not, however, a landed grandee of the sort that Gladstone had originally wished to honour. This experience, buttressed by the lord lieutenancy of Staffordshire having to be offered three times before it was accepted, pointed to some separation of the territorial aristocracy from Liberalism well before 1886.
Despite these occasional setbacks, Gladstone enjoyed patronage. He liked sending little notes such as that to the Speaker (Denison) on 12 August: ‘I wrote a few days ago to your Chaplain to offer him the Chair of Modern History at Cambridge.’24 He was alleged to have said, echoing Melbourne, that he thought bishops died only to vex him with the problems of appointing their successors. And he did in fact write in the autumn: ‘In consequence of the death of the Bp of Carlisle, a perturbed Sunday.’25 In reality, however, he loved shuffling the ecclesiastical pack, and although he did so with care and concern for fairness in liturgical balance, he was by no means immune from expecting some political return for religious preferment. He wrote to each of the four bishops whose promotion he had secured during his 1869 Balmoral visit urging them to vote for the following session’s Irish Land Bill. His conviction of the virtues of his own policies stilled any doubts which he might have had about twisting episcopal and other arms in order to put them through. Norfolk was probably wise to refuse a Garter if he wished to remain independent of the government.
Gladstone’s respect for rank also made him enjoy adjusting the higher grades of the peerage. When he made de Grey Marquess of Ripon in 1870 it was a rare elevation without such special reason as service as a viceroy (which Ripon did later, but that was hardly relevant at the time), and when he made Westminster a duke in his resignation honours of 1874 it was positively the last creation of a non-royal dukedom. Gladstone himself was one of the only four post-1865 Prime Ministers who never accepted ‘a ribband to stick in his coat’ (the others were the odd trio of Bonar Law, Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain), but he enjoyed sticking them in the coats of others.
After his return from Balmoral and Fasque at the end of September, Gladstone divided that autumn of run-up to his sixtieth birthday between Hawarden and London. He spent October at Hawarden. Then he had three and a half weeks in London, with intervals of three nights at Windsor and two with Clarendon (‘a delightful hospitality’) near a still unsuburbanized Watford. The main purpose of this London period was the holding of no less than five Cabinets of preparation for the 1870 session, with the shape of an Irish Land Bill, a heavier cloud from the west than the Church Bill, providing the central issue of contention. Then he had another two and a half weeks at Hawarden before an Advent two weeks in London and another five Cabinets trying to get Whig magnates to reconcile their (mildly) reforming instincts with their passionate belief in the supremacy of property rights, above all in land.
During the first of the Hawarden chunks of time he was much occupied with the purchase of the adjacent Aston Hall estate, including two collieries (which however seemed to be more productive of embarrassing industrial disputes than of any flow of profits). He paid £57,000 (nearly £3 million at present values) for the acquisition, £12,000 of which was raised by a mortgage, and wrote the distinctly unradical comment: ‘If I have an ambition, it is to make an Estate for my children.’26 On the first day of his second Hawarden interlude he more mundanely recorded: ‘Moved my clothes & c. into my new (old age) dressing room on the first floor. Worked a little on my books. Cut down a stump.’27 He always liked advancing to meet the end of his mortal life, book arrangement was his best mental relaxation, and tree-cutting his best physical exercise.
Gladstone’s major preoccupation during that autumn was, however, Mrs Thistlethwayte. Laura Thistlethwayte was a splendidly indeterminate figure sitting on the crossroads between respectability and the demimonde, geisha-like malleability and opinionated pontificating. In social origins she was not unlike the ‘Jersey Lily’ who came along a generation later. Lillie Langtry was the daughter of a Channel Islands canon, Laura Bell (as Mrs Thistlethwayte was born) of a minor member of the Ulster gentry, Captain Bell of Bellbrook, County Antrim, which coincidence of names gave him perhaps more of an air of territorial substance than he deserved. Miss Bell had undoubtedly been an available London courtesan in her youth, but in 1852 she had succeeded in marrying a gentleman of wealth and connection even if not of much discernible interest or achievement. A. F. Thistlethwayte had a house in Grosvenor Square and, later, another in east Dorset. The marriage transformed her social position more than it filled her emotional needs. It also set her free to embrace some half-baked theosophical ideas, which would have been anathema to Gladstone had they not come from her.
He appears to have first met her riding in the park in 1864, the year of the death of the Duke of Newcastle, of whom she had become a considerable friend. Arthur Kinnaird, MP for Perth and last encountered as Gladstone’s Italian travelling companion on his 1838 Catherine Glynne courtship tour, also played some intermediary role. Mrs Thistlethwayte’s relationship with Gladstone did not however much ripen until after he had become Prime Minister. This might be interpreted as an indication of her worldly ambition, although Gladstone was a very good worldly catch at any time in the 1860s or even before; in addition Mrs Thistlethwayte always remained noticeably reticent about exploiting her relationship with him for gain or prestige.
What is much more probable is that it required the death of the Duchess of Sutherland (in October 1868) to create a vacancy in one half of the slot which Mrs Thistlethwayte came to fill. This does not mean that Gladstone saw Laura Thistlethwayte as remotely the equal of Harriet Sutherland. He greatly admired the Duchess’s intellect and judgement and there was only a latent sexual element in their relationship. There is no evidence that he admired Mrs Thistlethwayte’s intellect and judgement. It would indeed have been a grave matter had he done so. He once attended one of her religious lectures at the London Polytechnic and wrote of the experience: ‘I would not much want to repeat it.’ When she was bombarding him with twenty-three separate packages of her fortunately unpublished autobiography in September–October 1869 he recorded: ‘A fresh supply of Mrs T’s MS: XI–XIII. The tale is told with great modesty, & its aspect is truthful though not quite coherent.’28
With Laura Thistlethwayte there was for him a strong element of physical infatuation. Yet she was not the equivalent of one of his ‘rescue’ cases, even though he often wrote the culpatory × symbol (but not the ) one, which he had last inscribed in 1859) after an encounter with her. She had more than rescued herself. It would not have been much good telling her that she ought to give up Grosvenor Square and the Dorset manor in order to improve herself at the Clewer House of Mercy, which he had helped to establish at Windsor. Yet Gladstone’s near obsession with her in the autumn of 1869 required the absence of any other woman outside his family whose interest he wished particularly to arouse and in whom he wished to confide. Hence the importance to the Thistlethwayte relationship of the death of the Duchess of Sutherland. It also required an effective cessation of his general ‘rescue’ activities, which indeed was markedly so in that autumn of 1869.
Yet in the phrase ‘near obsession’ at least equal weight needs to be put upon the qualifying adjective as upon the noun. When he returned to Hawarden from Balmoral he began to write to her intensively, and did so eleven times that October. In the course of the correspondence she appears deliberately to have heightened the emotional atmosphere, provoking a semi-quarrel, the resolution of which produced a tighter sense of mutual commitment. ‘The letter of yesterday from Mrs Th. caused me to ruminate in a maze,’ he wrote on 19 October. And on the 20th: ‘A letter from Mrs T. much wounded [and] disturbed me. I have a horror of giving inner pain to a woman.’29 The last phrase sounde
d distinctly impersonal, but this was misleading for from this time he (unfortunately) began his letters to her ‘Dear Spirit’, although ending them no more committingly than ‘Ever yours, W. E. G.’ He also took to wearing an engraved ring which she had given him.
When he returned to London she was away and the letters continued to pour from him – six in the next ten days. Then she returned, and Gladstone took to calling on her in Grosvenor Square. He was there eight times in the next ten days, in addition to an occasion when he dined with ‘the Thistlethwaytes’, and one call which she made at Carlton House Terrace. The Grosvenor Square calls were sometimes in the early evening, sometimes after dinner and mostly lasted for one and a half to two hours. They were snatched with great determination. ‘Cabinet 2–4. Saw Mrs Th. 5¼–7¼’ (10 November),30 and ‘Mrs Thistlethwayte on the way to G. W. R. Off to Windsor at 5. We dined with H. M. and a party of 13’ (16 November).31 Gladstone seemed relatively immune from guilt after these encounters, although he had recorded on 28 October: ‘Wrote to Mrs Thistlethwayte: in great gravity of spirit. Duty and evil temptation are there before me, on the right and left. But I firmly believe in her words “holy” and “pure”, & in her cleaving to God.’32
When he went back to Hawarden for his late-November visit a similar pattern of letter-writing was resumed, as was a pattern of visiting when he returned to London for a cluster of Cabinets on 6 December. Attention was increasingly concentrated on the Saturday to Monday visit which Gladstone had arranged to pay to the Thistlethwaytes’ Dorset house on 11–13 December. It was an engagement which he had not only arranged but was resolved to fulfil. It coincided with the most crucial period in the difficult Cabinet discussions on the Irish Land Bill. There had been a Cabinet on the Thursday afternoon, a ‘conclave’ (on the subject) on the Friday morning and the determining Cabinet was due on the day after his return from the Thistlethwayte weekend. But nothing was going to divert him from Boveridge (the Dorset house). ‘On Monday till evening I shall be out of town,’ he firmly informed the colleagues with whom he was locked in discussion. And so for the Saturday morning he was able to record: ‘Off at 10.30 with A. K[innaird MP, who appeared to be constantly on hand in the relationship, performing either a procuring or chaperoning role] to join Mrs Th. and her party at Waterloo. We reached Boveridge in heavy rain between 2 & 3. Saw the fine stud. And walked a little about the place. Saw Mrs Th. several times.’
