Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  At no time since the sanguinary reign of Mary has such a scheme [for Romanization] been possible. But if it had been possible in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, it would still have become impossible in the nineteenth; when Rome has substituted for the proud boast of semper eadem a policy of violence and change in faith, when she has refurbished and paraded anew every rusty tool she was fondly thought to have disused; when no one can become her convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another; and when she has equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history.19

  This was obviously a profoundly anti-Catholic statement, casting doubt as it did on the civil allegiance of British converts or adherents of the Church of Rome, and Gladstone, when republishing the article four years later, appended a footnote of convoluted half-denial that this was what he meant. It was a classic example of Gladstone embracing one cause and argument with such enthusiasm that he did not pause to consider its repercussion on other causes and arguments which over a period were equally or more important to him. And here he obviously ran grave risks to his ability to lead a party with many Roman Catholic supporters, and in particular to pursue a policy of Anglo-Irish reconciliation. For the moment, however, he gave his religious enthusiasms priority over his political ones, and was inclined to welcome any personal disqualification which strengthened his case for shedding the Liberal leadership. By 1878, on the other hand, when Bulgarian atrocities had replaced Vatican aggressions in the centre of his mind, and Midlothian and the return to full political commitment was only just over the horizon, his priorities were different. Hence the footnote.

  These matters for the moment disposed of (and Döllinger having gone to Bonn for an anti-ultramontane conference), Gladstone took himself and his son and daughter on a four-day tour of the Bavarian and Austrian Alps. It was strenuous (his daughter was commended for being able to keep up with the nearly sixty-five-year-old ex-Prime Minister over twenty-nine miles of far from level terrain), the scenery aroused his profound admiration, as did one or two other local attractions (‘Saw the Obersee – Bartholomäus Haus – (& the singularly beautiful waitress)’, was a surprising shaft in the diary) and so, without the future casting a shadow, did a ‘beautiful river walk’ to Berchtesgaden ‘with a Führer . . . who was a charming specimen of these bold hardy active South Bavarians’.20 Then he went to Nuremberg and saw a lot of painted churches before returning to Cologne, where over two days, having got into the habit of talking subjects to destruction, he had thirteen hours of conversation with his sister, which discussions (one wonders what was the balance of listening and talking on the two sides) must have formed much of the basis for his determined conviction at the time of her 1880 death that she was on the brink of return to her Anglican faith.

  On Gladstone’s return to England he based himself at Hawarden for the remainder of the year. He paid four country-house visits, all of them only a night or two except for a full week at Whittinghame with Arthur Balfour (still aged only twenty-six, but ‘how eminently he is del miglior luto’ – of more than common clay – Gladstone wrote), for which he made a special eleven-hour journey from Hawarden. He was deep in religious controversy, his Vatican Decrees pamphlet appearing on 7 November and provoking a rash of rejoinders, including responses from Newman and Manning. Lest there be any danger of the pot ceasing to simmer he wrote a major and stringent review of The Discourses of Pius IX for the January 1875 number of the Quarterly. He finished the year reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch (‘it is an extraordinary, and to me a very jarring book’) over seventeen days. It had been published three years before, so what with that and with Vivian Grey, which was over thirty years old, he was less up to date in 1874 with his novel reading than was his general habit.

  Dominating all this was the imminence of formal escape from the leadership. For all practical purposes he had renounced the obligation nearly a year before, but it was nonetheless a considerable relief and help towards ‘the winding out of the coil’ when, on 3 February 1875, Hartington, with a reluctance wholly appropriate to the empty vessel which he was offered, took over the role. Gladstone at sixty-five saw himself as having a last five years or so of life in which to make peace with his God and war against his religious enemies, whether they be presumptuous Roman pontiffs or Erastian low churchmen. He underestimated his longevity as much as he overestimated his ability to remain politically quiescent.

  THE TEMPORARY WITHDRAWAL

  WHEN GLADSTONE CAME BACK to London from Hawarden on February 12 1875 he was freer of parliamentary and other political obligations than at any other time since he had joined the Palmerston government in June 1859. He nonetheless continued to observe the pattern of the parliamentary year, more so indeed than in 1874, when he had expressed his chafing at the wheel of duty through long absences during the session. In 1875, by contrast, he did not return to Hawarden, except for a Whitsun week, until 7 August. In London, however, he was both unsettled in his residence and undiligent in his attendance at the House of Commons.

  Within two weeks he (or his agent) had found a purchaser for 11 Carlton House Terrace in the shape of Sir Arthur Guinness, grandson of the first brewer of the black gold of Ireland and himself then head of the family business and Conservative MP for Dublin City until he was made a peer in 1880. Gladstone’s view that the Terrace had become suitable only for men much richer than himself was amply underpinned by the status of his purchaser. The transaction was completed on 15 April, when the Crown lease was assigned to Guinness for £35,000. Gladstone wrote of the departure as being ‘like a little death. . . . I had grown to the House, having lived more time in it than in any other since I was born.’1 He did not, however, react against the ‘usurpers’, Tory and plutocratic though they were. In the summer of 1876 he recorded: ‘Tea at No 11 C.H.T. – Lady O. [Olivia Guinness was the daughter of the Earl of Bantry] kind & simple. Went over the altered rooms.’2 Most of the furniture had been disposed of in an on-site sale, but some of it was taken over by Guinness, a great supporter of the Anglican Church in Ireland, which aroused an ironic but not unfriendly reflection from Gladstone: ‘Sir A. G. has the chairs & sofa on which we sat when we resolved on the disestablishment of the Irish Church in 1868.’3

  Later that spring Christie’s held a four-day sale of the paintings, porcelain and objets which had been collected over nearly forty years. The receipts were £9351. One Italian picture (Bonifazio’s Virgin) made £483 and the next best price was £430 for Dyce’s Marion Summerhayes portrait, Lady with the Coronet of Jasmine, which was thus propelled on its journey to the Aberdeen Art Gallery. A picture which Gladstone had bought as a Giorgione made only £85 and an equally doubtful Murillo only eleven guineas. Nonetheless Gladstone’s cash and income position was substantially retrieved. The leasehold house had provided the equivalent of nearly £1¾ million in today’s money, and the decorative sale came to nearly £500,000 on the same basis. When his London books, less a substantial number removed to Hawarden, had been valued a few weeks earlier Sotheby’s put the Hansards at £150 (how delighted would be most modern MPs to get the equivalent £7500 for their accumulation of those freely issued pale-blue volumes) and the rest at £670 (£33,000). They all appear to have been acquired by Lord Wolverton, formerly his Chief Whip George Glyn, presumably at valuation price.

  For the remainder of the parliamentary session of 1875 the Gladstones rented another but much smaller Carlton House Terrace house fifty yards from their previous one. This (No. 23) he described as ‘our new and humble nest’, although they were quickly giving breakfast and dinner parties there for around ten guests. For his few autumn nights in London he was in Arthur Balfour’s house at 4 Carlton Gardens, and for the winter three months at the beginning of 1876 he rented that for £300, again a substantial sum by Victorian standards.89 During February he had settled on 73 Harley Street, then regarded as a relatively modest and remote residence, as a more permanent establishment, and bought a thi
rty-year lease. It was mid-May before they could move in, and after Easter he was back in the ‘Carltons’, staying with the Frederick Cavendishes at 21 Carlton House Terrace, and even in the following September when he came to London unexpectedly (and excitedly) he stayed with Granville at No. 18. There is no doubt that, even though he thought it inappropriate to the modesty of his wealth, Gladstone regarded that strip of semi-palatial London as his metropolitan village. When his tenure of the Balfour house came to an end he wrote that it was ‘a departure from a neighbourhood where I have lived for forty years, & where I am the “oldest inhabitant” ’.4 For the Harley Street house he never showed much affection. In spite of the thirty-year lease he gave it up soon after he again became Prime Minister in 1880. In this second premiership 10 Downing Street had to serve as a residence as well as an unregarded office. And when he was again in opposition, first in the second half of 1885 and then for five and a half years until 1892, he spent much of his London time in the sylvan but suburban remoteness of Dollis Hill, an Aberdeen-owned villa north of Willesden and Neasden. This was commemorated both by the grounds of the house becoming the public Gladstone Park in 1981 and by an adjacent telephone exchange bearing until 1971 the appellation of GLAdstone.

  After Hartington took over as leader for the session of 1875, Gladstone continued to sit on the front bench, which, he said, was what both Hartington and Granville (the leader in the Lords, and the senior of the two) desired. ‘I . . . took my seat nearly in the same spot as last year, finding Bright my neighbour, with which I was well pleased,’ he wrote to his wife on 18 February.5 His attendance was far from regular, however, and even more noticeable was the absence of the long and late hours in the House which had previously been his habit. ‘H. of C. 4.30–6.00.’ became a regular entry. Quite frequently he would intervene, often on an unexpected subject, during one of these brief parliamentary forays. Thus on 15 March (although he then went back to the House after dinner) he spoke on the Regimental Exchange Bill in a way which produced an unforgettable account from Disraeli to the Queen. ‘Mr Gladstone not only appeared but rushed into the debate . . .’ he wrote. ‘The new Members trembled and fluttered like small birds when a hawk is in the air.’6 His front-bench colleagues were even less enthusiastic about these sudden depredations than were the fluttering new members or the new Prime Minister, who was, however, well schooled in preserving in such circumstances a sardonic calm.

  Partly to underline the severance of his political ties and partly to economize, Gladstone kept no secretary during the second half of the 1870s. This meant that he spent much of his time grappling with and complaining about the ‘chaos’ created by his incoming correspondence. Particularly after the Bulgarian and other aspects of the Eastern Question brought him back into the mainstream of political controversy in the autumn of 1876, the volume of his mail would have been crushing to almost anyone else who tried to handle it with his meticulousness. When he returned to either Hawarden or Harley Street he was typically confronted with about 300 unopened items, and the daily intake was a substantial proportion of this. The only assistance on which he called was that of available children – Mary, Helen, Herbert and even Willy, although the last was then a member of Parliament in his late thirties. (But as Gladstone himself when not merely an MP but a Privy Councillor and an ex-Cabinet minister had been called upon at almost exactly the same age to perform the same function for his own father, there was an element of poetic justice about this.)

  For the most part, however, Gladstone hacked through the correspondence himself, although this involved him in writing letters of a type with which the pens of few subsequent ex-Prime Ministers can have engaged. The superintendent of the Lost Property Office at Euston Station got a missive in early June 1875, and the stationmaster at Chester as well as the manager of the bookstall there was a constant recipient of letters which would presumably produce a substantial price today. Perhaps because of these burdens Gladstone had one of the earliest telephones installed at Hawarden. It was there from 1880. But evidence of use is missing. There were indeed few others with whom he could have communicated. He referred to it as being ‘most unearthly’, and it is indeed easy to imagine that anyone – Granville seems the most likely target – assaulted down 200 miles of cable by Gladstone’s unmistakable tones would have found the experience extra-terrestrial and unnerving.

  Throughout 1875 and most of 1876 Gladstone’s life was active in the production of pamphlets but quiet in his engagement with politics. The white heat of his opposition to ultramontanism produced not only his Expostulation of November 1874 but a follow-up entitled Vaticanism: An Answer to Reproofs and Replies which was published in February 1875. He had carefully collected the various ripostes, including a paper of 200 pages from Manning, which his first pamphlet had attracted, and set himself to refute them. Although this second instalment was more violent in tone than the first (the Roman Church he described as ‘an Asian monarchy: nothing but one giddy height of despotism and one dead level of religious subservience’), it made less impact and the sales were barely a quarter those of the first. Nonetheless the two together earned him substantial sums, and Granville wrote optimistically from Italy that the ‘enormous profits’ from his pen might render unnecessary the sale of 11 Carlton House Terrace. This was probably prompted by the fact that the royalties were about the only aspect of the pamphlets of which Granville’s unpolemical mind approved.

  His slightly weary ‘why-does-he-make-such-a-fuss’ disapproval was, however, mild compared with that of Cardinal Cullen, who in 1874 ordered prayers that Gladstone might see the error of his ways to be said in every Catholic church in Ireland, and three years later was still sufficiently resentful that when Gladstone called upon him in Dublin he managed a cool rebuff which few other than the Queen could have achieved: ‘You know Mr Gladstone we could have given you a warmer reception had it not been for certain pamphlets which we in Ireland did not like very well.’7 But nor of course did Gladstone like Cullen, remembering too clearly his part in the death of the Irish University Bill.

  By the time of that Irish visit in the autumn of 1877 the iniquities of the Pope in Rome and the Vatican Council had been largely superseded in Gladstone’s mind, and this process was reinforced by the death of Piux IX three months later and the election of Leo XIII, who, while hardly ecumenical (he proclaimed the invalidity of Anglican orders, although he also laid the foundations of Christian Democracy with the encyclical Rerum Novarum), was markedly less ultramontane, and made Newman a cardinal four years after Manning had been elevated by Pio Nono.

  Gladstone turned from what he called ‘my polemical period’ in a variety of directions. Over the summer and autumn of 1875 he was unusually free of any sustained intellectual task, although as there was always work to progress on one or other of his eccentric Homeric monographs the threat of idleness was kept at a far distance. But over much of that year’s recess his effort was more physical than mental. He was preoccupied with getting the thousands of the Carlton House Terrace books which he had not sold into an orderly amalgamation with his previous Hawarden ones. Thus for 6 September he wrote: ‘3½ hours work on books, carrying and arranging. 2¼ hard work on getting my tree down. Rather overtired,’ he not surprisingly concluded.’8

  In the spring of 1876 the appearance of G. O. Trevelyan’s life of Macaulay provoked him to a major appraisal of the then sixteen-years-dead Whig historian and poet who had coined the most memorable (and mocking) of all the phrases about Gladstone’s early career. But there was neither rancour nor sycophancy about Gladstone’s review, and it remains one of his best literary pieces and a remarkably balanced judgement of Macaulay – and balance was not normally Gladstone’s foremost quality.

  In that summer he turned to the content rather than to the frontier battles of his religion and worked on the outline of a never completed book on Future Punishment (that is, Hell). This produced a clutch of papers on which, when putting them aside, he wrote: ‘From this I was called away
to write on Bulgaria.’9 And with that call there began another chapter which led to Midlothian, to his return to the premiership and the leadership, and eventually to the Irish crusade of his last active decade.

  The withdrawal from politics was therefore short-lived, at most from Easter 1874 until the return began in the closing months of 1876 and gathered momentum during 1877. But while it lasted it was genuine enough both in interest and in the change in his pattern of life. Apart from his concentration on mainly religious writing, he was also much preoccupied with family affairs: deaths, marriages, even a birth, and settlements. Robertson Gladstone, the brother to whom he had latterly been closest, died in Liverpool in September 1875, and with his death the extent of the mismanagement of the Seaforth property, and indeed of the other remaining family interests in Liverpool became even clearer. Robertson had several sons, all of whom died unmarried and fairly unprosperous too, so that 1875 was effectively the end of the strong Gladstone mercantile presence in Liverpool, which John Gladstone had started eighty-eight years before. Then, in April 1876, George Lyttelton threw himself into the staircase well of his Marylebone house and died without regaining consciousness. There were another twenty-two years of married life still ahead for the Gladstones, but the other couple in the Hawarden double wedding of the summer of 1839 were both dead, the one at forty-three, the other at fifty-eight.