Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  He contrasted that day of mountaineering with life in the House of Commons, where his assiduity remained exceptional. He could sit on the Treasury bench for rather similar periods – seven or so hours – with only the shortest breaks, and without any recorded tendency to go to sleep. He spent more time in the Palace of Westminster than any subsequent Prime Minister with the exception of Baldwin. But he devoted his long hours there to the chamber, always listening, often intervening, whereas Baldwin was much more in the corridors, dining room and smoking room, alien territories to Gladstone, gossiping and absorbing atmosphere rather than directing business. Gladstone also continued his voracious general reading, his night walks in London, perhaps once a week, his tree-felling at Hawarden, and his extraordinary capacity, however heavy the press of official burdens, to get on with postponable tasks, such as the arrangement of books and papers, the keeping of his own accounts, and the writing of family or eleemosynary letters, like those to Lady Susan Opdebeck.

  On the other hand he had indisputably come to look an old man. The change set in during the late seventies of the century and the late sixties of his life. Until the end of his first premiership he still looked middle-aged. Then, for the mid-1870s, there is a paucity of photographs. They were the years of his withdrawal, and the photographers were perhaps taking him at his word, although likenesses in those days were a product more of visits to studios than of enterprise and intrusion. By 1878, when Millais painted his first Gladstone portrait (there was a second in 1884–5), and still more by 1879, when he was both photographed and (more flatteringly) painted by Franz von Lehnbach in Munich, he had passed over the divide. His hair had become white and wilder, his clothes more dishevelled and his general air slightly disordered.

  Soon afterwards he began to suffer from an old man’s chronic ailments as opposed to the sudden onset of illnesses from which he quickly bounced back. His eyesight weakened. He had several bouts of insomnia (although not as bad as those of his wife), and at Hawarden he sometimes alternated between sleeping in the castle and sleeping in the rectory in a somewhat illogical search for the more reposeful bedroom. He was not as bad in this respect as his Midlothian patron and Prime Ministerial successor Rosebery, nearly forty years his junior, who refurbished Barnbougle, a ruined tower on a Forthside promontory in the park at Dalmeny in the vain hope that it might provide a haven against sleeplessness. Gladstone also had trouble with his teeth and, more seriously, with his voice, which was the equivalent of a great pianist being threatened with a stiffening of the fingers.

  In spite of these infirmities he remained a most formidable beast of the political forest, a target for lesser animals who wished to earn prowess by taking a nip out of his haunches. He was unmatched in authority or experience by any of his colleagues or opponents, the more so since Disraeli’s death in the spring of 1881. Beaconsfield, to give him at the end his designation of the last five years, expired on 19 April in the Curzon Street house on which he had recently taken a seven-year lease, and to which he was confined for four weeks of bronchial decline. Before that he had been about and even active in his waxen way, ‘an assiduous mummy’ in Lytton Strachey’s terrible phrase, moving ‘from dinner party to dinner party’. He had last spoken in the Lords on 15 March, and he had last seen the Queen, at Windsor, two weeks before that. Gladstone had twice called at Curzon Street to enquire about the patient but (as he expected) had seen only a secretary (Lord Barrington) and a doctor.

  When the end came he was at Hawarden for Easter. He re-acted strongly, as his diary shows, although the language he chose was careful and not hypocritical:

  At 8 a.m. I was much shocked on opening a telegram to find it announced the death of Ld Beaconsfield, 3½ hours before. The accounts 24 hours ago were so good. It is a telling, touching event. There is no more extraordinary a man surviving him in England, perhaps none in Europe. I must not say much, in presence as it were of his Urn.

  I immediately sent to tender a public funeral. The event will also entail upon me one great difficulty.4

  The ‘great difficulty’ was the encomium he would have to deliver in the House of Commons. The ‘public funeral’ (by which was meant a Westminster Abbey or St Paul’s occasion, for the obsequies which took place at Hughenden were hardly private) was refused in accordance with Disraeli’s clear instructions. He wished to be buried in the Hughenden churchyard alongside his wife.

  Gladstone’s reactions to these arrangements were mixed. To his son in India he wrote at the time that there was something ‘very touching’ about Disraeli’s determination to be buried with his wife. But he later complained to Edward Hamilton that the mock modesty was typical of Disraeli’s play-acting: ‘As he lived, so he died – all display, without reality or genuineness.’ But this was after he had himself been greatly criticized for not going to the ‘private’ funeral – Hartington, Harcourt and Rosebery did, as well as the Prince of Wales, all but one of Disraeli’s former Cabinet and a vast crowd of onlookers – and also for mishandling the timing of the House of Commons tributes. Although the House was adjourned over the hours of the funeral, these were not paid until 9 May, three weeks after the death. Gladstone claimed that he strictly followed the Palmerston precedents (but Palmerston died during a recess) and acted in full agreement with Northcote, the Conservative leader.

  When the tributes eventually came, which was on a motion to erect a public monument (against which Labouchère and fifty-five others divided), Gladstone performed with skill and good feeling, satisfying even the Queen, who wrote of ‘his fine speech abounding greatly to his honour’. Contemplating it beforehand had made him ill, and he had spent two days in bed with one of his frequent stomach upsets. It was symptomatic of his fundamentally uneasy relationship with Disraeli, based, as he was probably right in stressing, on ‘something totally different from personal hatred’, but not much on respect either, except for Disraeli’s political courage. This he put on a level with that of Peel and Russell and of no one else. But in Disraeli’s case he would instinctively have qualified it by regarding the courage as impudent – a gambler’s nerve – rather than principled. Above all, however, it was incomprehension which characterized his attitude to Disraeli.

  It was also Henry Labouchère, the leader of the revolt against Disraeli’s monument, who in that same April of his death fastened on Gladstone one of the most famous catchphrases of the nineteenth century. Half by accident and encased in an implausible passage, he coined the phrase the ‘Grand Old Man’, which stuck for the rest of Gladstone’s life. (There was a touch of mockery as well as affection about its use, particularly after 1885 when GOM could be transposed into MOG for Murderer of Gordon.) Labouchère was Bradlaugh’s fellow member for Northampton and was speaking for him in the first of the by-elections which the intolerance of the House of Commons forced Bradlaugh to fight. In these circumstances Labouchère imaginatively described the blessing which Gladstone had given him on his departure from London: ‘And, men of Northampton, that grand old man said to me, as he patted me on the shoulder, “Henry, my boy, bring him back, bring him back!”’5 It is impossible to imagine Gladstone calling Labouchère either ‘Henry’ or ‘my boy’ or indeed using the phrase ‘bring him back, bring him back’. Nonetheless Labouchère had invented one of the great sobriquets of the nineteenth century. Then, a few years later, Gladstone used of himself the phrase ‘an old parliamentary hand’, and that too stuck.

  To balance Gladstone’s real but not excessive infirmities there was the cosseting with which, in the 1880s, he came increasingly to be surrounded. In that second premiership his family and his secretaries melded into an interlocking protective cocoon which was different from anything which had prevailed during his previous periods of office, whether in 10 or 11 Downing Street. There is a remarkable picture of him, circa 1883, bearing a somewhat quizzical expression and surrounded by his four private secretaries, the two smaller but senior ones (Seymour and Hamilton) looking eager, the two junior but taller ones (Lyttelton and
Leveson-Gower) a little more detached. Catherine Gladstone gave up her substantial periods of absence, either at Hawarden or at Hagley when Gladstone was in London, or occasionally in London when Gladstone was at Hawarden, and became immanently protective of her husband’s health and welfare. But she never urged him to retire. She probably sensed that responsibility was a better shield to his body than was rest. The children were also mobilized as part of the protective penumbra.

  All the Gladstone children remained close to their parents and all, with the possible exception of Willy, the heir and at least the nominal squire of Hawarden, were totally dedicated to their father’s beliefs and interests. Not only Willy as squire but Stephen as rector was based at Hawarden, as was Mary, the second living daughter who remained wholly at home until she married in 1886, at the age of thirty-nine, and even then could hardly have contracted a more solidifying alliance. After romantic flickers with Lord Lorne and Arthur Balfour, and apparently arousing flirtatious feelings (but hardly thoughts of marriage) in Ruskin and Tennyson, she settled for the handsome Hawarden curate, Harry Drew. It is difficult to avoid the feeling that the advantages of his location, which enabled her to go on acting as her father’s domestic secretary and the organizer of the household, must have been as powerful a factor as Drew’s good looks. She was known in family and adjacent circles, with a mixture of affection and irony, as von Moltke. She was indefatigable on her father’s behalf.

  Agnes, her senior by five years, was more detached with her Wellington headmaster husband and five children, but was nonetheless quite often at Hawarden. Helen, the youngest daughter, was an early female don, absent at Newnham for the short Cambridge terms, but unwilling to accept the principalship of Royal Holloway College because she thought it would keep her away from Hawarden too much. Lucy Cavendish was also almost a supernumerary daughter, often at Hawarden, sometimes providing London lodging for her aunt and uncle by marriage in the grand house at 21 Carlton House Terrace which she maintained until her forty-three years of widowhood came to an end in 1925.

  Of the two younger Gladstone boys, Henry (or Harry) was in Calcutta laying the foundations of a substantial fortune from March 1880 to April 1884, when he came home for two years before returning to his crock of gold. Although he was more money-orientated than any Gladstone since Sir John he was not as a result cut off from communion with his father. During his four early-1880s years of absence, the GOM wrote him letters in which he often revealed his inmost political thoughts more completely than anything he wrote for home consumption, thereby not only providing documents of inherent interest but also showing a close affinity between himself and Harry. Herbert was the most political of the boys, MP for Leeds from 1880, and an eagerly beavering Liberal. He was always available to help his father, and occasionally to embarrass him.

  Willy Gladstone, unlike Herbert, was not a natural politician, and his semi-detachment stemmed partly from this. His main interest was in the tunes and words of hymns, and his main skill was at Eton fives (for which he built a rare court at Hawarden). He was parliamentarily unhappy, and he did not stand at the 1885 general election, which was perhaps as well for he did not agree with his father on Home Rule. It would have been terrible had he voted against the bill in June 1886. Also, his position as owner of the estate was distinctly anomalous. The house was run for his parents. Gladstone summoned guests to it at will, and his occasional flitting to the rectory in search of sleep was a sign that he was lord of the whole demesne and not that he was always a guest in one house or the other. Indeed Lord Blantyre, Willy’s father-in-law, found the arrangements unsatisfactory for his daughter and thought that the Willy Gladstones ought to have a house of their own, which was achieved with the completion and occupation of the Red House (in the park) in 1884. Hawarden Castle, whether Stephen Glynne or Willy Gladstone was the nominal owner, was always essentially the house of the ‘great people’ from the 1850s onwards.

  Nor did Willy Gladstone survive to inherit fully. He died in 1891 of a brain tumour, which may have affected him for some time previously. But he looked healthy in a striking Hawarden family photograph, which is attributed to the early 1880s and must have been taken either before Henry’s departure for India at the beginning of 1880 or after his return four years later. Here everyone appears exactly as they ought to: Willy the broadening forty-year-old squire with his handsome rather than animated peer’s daughter of a wife; Stephen, the fine-profiled and wavy-haired clergyman, contrasting with the bald intellectual head of Wickham the headmaster (also a clergyman of course) and his maternal wife Agnes; Harry and Herbert looking like favoured young men, Harry more confident, Herbert more eager. Of the Gladstone women, Mary looked pert, Helen satisfied with her academic life, but white- rather than blue-stockinged. Catherine Gladstone looked adequately matriarchal, but also disengaged and well content that Mary should have taken over much of the household authority from her. Gladstone himself has an air of trying hard not to dominate. It is altogether a remarkable and informative picture.

  For most of the life of the 1880 government the luck, both personal and political, ran heavily against Gladstone. There were the two great traumas in the life of the government: the May 1882 Fenian hacking to death of Lord Frederick Cavendish in Phoenix Park within twelve hours of his arrival in Dublin as Chief Secretary; and the immolation of General Gordon in the Governor-General’s palace at Khartoum after 320 days of siege. The loss of Cavendish, whom he regarded almost as a son, was a much more severe personal blow to Gladstone than that of Gordon, whom he regarded as an insubordinate and erratic junior general. But the latter was a much more severe political blow to the government. Both left indelible stains.

  Yet Gladstone maintained verve and zest. Edward Hamilton, son of the High Churchman whom Gladstone had persuaded Aberdeen to appoint Bishop of Salisbury in 1854, came to work for him in 1880 and succeeded Godley as the principal private secretary in 1882. Hamilton was as dedicated a diarist as Gladstone himself, although with a more flowing and less cryptic style, and his first two volumes, published in 1972, sixty-four years after his death, provide a balancing but on the whole confirmatory account, seen from the other side of the private secretaries’ green-baize door, of Downing Street life in 1880–5.

  Hamilton, who although far from being an extreme Liberal became a devoted Gladstonian, was struck by the persistent high spirits of his chief. Gladstone could have occasional brief periods of gloom, but for the most part the more dire the events from Majuba Hill to Maamtrasna,104 the more he was beset by the recalcitrance of his colleagues, or obstruction in the House of Commons, or the constant time-consuming complaints and advice of the Queen, the more he retained his equanimity. And not only his equanimity: undimmed was his quest for new solutions, and above all his ability, even on the darkest days, to throw himself into enthusiastic conversation or concentrated reading on totally detached subjects. Hamilton at Hawarden was impressed above all by his animation at unhurried breakfasts and by his willingness to deploy the force of his conversational enthusiasm not just before important guests but before whoever was at his table, family and private secretaries receiving as full a treatment as secretaries of state and bishops. ‘At dinner,’ Hamilton added, ‘though in a general way he perhaps hardly lays himself out as much as at breakfast, he is never silent and always bright.’6

  On the other hand H. C. G. Matthew thinks that by this stage in his life there was becoming something contrived about Gladstone’s conversational performances, and that ‘performances’ was indeed the right word for them. ‘In this period, it was almost certain that one of the guests would note his conversation or mood in a letter or a diary.’ Matthew referred to his flow of erudite conversation on a vast range of subjects as something that ‘at first almost always charmed’, and cited the accounts which Lord Derby wrote of two Gladstone visits to Knowsley as an example of the wearing-off effect.7 Derby, as his already quoted comment on a Hartington visit has shown, was a sharp-eyed as well as a large-scale host. Durin
g Gladstone’s first visit, which was in late October 1881, Derby, who had already moved into Liberal communion but was unwilling to join the government because of the recentness of his conversion, wrote:

  The general impression seems to be, & certainly it is that left on my mind, that he is more agreeable, more light & easy in conversation, than would be expected from his manner in public: no subject comes amiss to him, he is ready to discourse on any; great or small, & that with the same copiousness & abundance of detail which characterises his speaking. He has no humour, rarely jokes, & his jokes are poor when he makes them. There is something odd in the intense earnestness with which he takes up every topic. I heard him yesterday deliver a sort of lecture on the various different ways of mending roads, suggested by some remark about the L[iver]pool streets. He described several different processes minutely, & as if he had been getting up the subject for an examination. . . . Since the days of Lord Brougham, I have heard nothing like his eager and restless volubility: he never ceases to talk, and to talk well. Nobody would have thought he had cares on his mind, or work to do. His face is very haggard, his eye wild. . . .8

  By the time of the second visit, two years later, Derby had become Colonial Secretary, but the impact of Gladstone’s many-faceted talk continued to be a source of wonder to him in spite of their frequent Cabinet encounters. This time he wrote that he had ‘heard nothing like it since Macaulay’, and continued:

  Talk with the Premier in his room, and later out of doors: he began by saying that he wished to discuss some pending questions with me: but after the first five minutes he seemed to forget them & wandered off into a general dissertation on politics, interesting in parts, less so in others, but curious as beginning out of nothing in particular, & leading up to no conclusion. For the first time, a suspicion crossed my mind that there is something beyond what is quite healthy in this perpetual flow of words – a beginning perhaps of old age. . . . He left us at 3 for Hawarden: at the last moment there was a scramble & bustle about missing or forgotten luggage, & in the end he went off with a greatcoat of mine, his own being lost. I imagine his & Mrs Gladstone’s domestic arrangements to be incoherent.9