The reason for doing this was that he fully understood the role and function of a constitutional monarchy and he knew that the monarchy, if well managed, possessed a magic that could unite the nation. In constitutional terms, he adhered to Bagehot’s insight that the uncodified British Constitution required both a visible Sovereign, in the words of our present Queen, ‘I must be seen to be believed’, and one so far above the fray that she was a focus for patriotism. To this recipe, Disraeli further added his own flamboyance. As with the nation, so with the Empire. Victoria could unify both entities and bring them together. Her new role as Empress of India would command the fealty of her colonial subjects to whom she must inevitably appear as a distant figure. Disraeli had theatrical flair, he possessed the impresario’s feel for what the people wanted and the determination to put this into action. By 1897 he would have seen, had he lived, the success of his plan as adoring crowds celebrated Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and statues erected to the Queen Empress across the dominions and colonies.
He did not view the Empire merely as a theatrical spectacular. He was also interested in its material reality and he was determined to make it stronger, sturdier and more vigorous. In this, perhaps his biggest coup was the purchase of the shares in the Suez Canal owned by the the Khedive of Egypt, Isma’il Pasha, who ruled from 1863 to 1879, when he was toppled by the British. By 1875, the Khedive was effectively bankrupt and in great need of money. He had mortgaged his interest until 1895 and Disraeli feared that this situation might have allowed the French to take control of the Canal, as they already owned 56 per cent of the ordinary shares outstanding. The Canal, which opened in 1869, rendered the old shipping routes around the Cape of Good Hope at a stroke redundant. It made the route from India to the UK shorter by thousands of miles and many weeks and it facilitated not only trade but also rapid troop shipments in the event of a second Indian mutiny. Disraeli understood that the Canal was the most vital artery of Empire and now brought off a great coup to buy the Khedive’s shares and to assume control of the Canal itself. According to Blake’s account, Disraeli visited Lionel de Rothschild in a theatrical whirl and requested a loan of £4 million. This unorthodox approach was necessary because Parliament was not sitting so that the normal and cheaper process of raising money was not available at a political moment when time was of the essence. When did Disraeli need the money? ‘Tomorrow.’ ‘What is your security?’ ‘The British Government.’ ‘You shall have it.’ Disraeli, in other words, was able to leave office in 1880 for the last time with a sense that the nation, the Empire and the monarchy were in good heart.
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In his whole career Disraeli saw one thing with great clarity and acted upon his knowledge both in theory and in practice. Although he romanticised the aristocracy, not least in his explanation of his own origins, he knew that the democratic society that was developing would depend on the multitude being successfully engaged. This in turn involved symbolism, something he understood exceptionally well, hence the time and effort he spent on winning Victoria’s favour. In this he differed markedly from some of his predecessors. Palmerston, for example, did not care to engage in such schemes, because he considered that power had passed from the Crown to an oligarchy, even if a popular one. Disraeli did care because he realised that the people could have an affection for a monarchy that they were unlikely to feel for politicians and his understanding still provides a backbone of stability to the nation today. Empire fulfilled a similar role. It was an idea all classes could rejoice at and take pride in and was an idea that required practicality and concrete reality to make it work. Most importantly he knew that the condition of the people, of overwhelming significance compared to symbolism, had to be improved regardless of whether they were voters or not.
The vast expansion of the electorate in 1867 fitted with Disraeli’s long-expressed views, yet even if it had been as much influenced by chance as his detractors would suggest, he recognised that the millions still disenfranchised needed to see their lives improve. This explains the message contained not only in his early novels but in his speeches and legislative programme too. Add to this the campaigning and administrative reforms he set in place to put the Tories ahead of the game for years to come and a politician for all seasons emerges. The father, perhaps, of the democracy that is enjoyed today.
Gladstone: An Eminent Moralist
At the conclusion of his biography of Liberal Party politician and Victorian statesman William Ewart Gladstone (29 December 1809–19 May 1898), Sir Philip Magnus wrote, ‘In the last analysis what Gladstone was is of vastly greater importance than what he did.’ These words, written by an admirer, are an interesting reflection on a politician, because politics is usually about doing rather than being. Gladstone was certainly an Eminent Victorian, one of the towering political figures of the nineteenth century, yet his policy successes are much more difficult to pin down than those of his contemporaries. Peel has the repeal of the Corn Laws as his legacy, Palmerston is remembered for a magisterial command of foreign policy and Disraeli trademarked the ‘condition of the people’ and ‘onenation Conservatism’. Which leaves Gladstone with, as he exclaimed in 1845, ‘Ireland! Ireland! That cloud in the west, that coming storm, the minister of God’s retribution upon cruel and inveterate and but half-atoned injustice.’
Ireland was a policy that did not work and one that split his Liberal Party.
So what was Gladstone’s legacy?
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Like Sir Robert Peel, William Ewart Gladstone was not born into one of the great families which had dominated British politics since the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, and, as was also the case with Peel, the Gladstone family’s wealth was self-created. His father was John Gladstone, later Sir John Gladstone of Fasque, a strong-minded, strong-willed and deeply religious Scottish merchant who had settled at Liverpool. His Liverpudlian first wife Jane died in 1798 and in 1800 John Gladstone married Anne MacKenzie Robertson, like her new husband of Scottish extraction. William Ewart Gladstone was the fifth of their six children.
A few years after John Gladstone’s second marriage, the family ceased to attend the local Presbyterian church at Liverpool. They began instead to worship within the Church of England, thus signalling their intention to join the Anglican mainstream of English life. William Gladstone himself would end his life a committed High Anglican. The family also left their original home on fashionable Rodney Street close to Liverpool city centre for a newly built mansion on one hundred acres of land at Seaforth, north of the city. John Gladstone was rising in the world and he had many professional and commercial interests. He became a parliamentarian in 1818 and he also held significant global investments, trading as far afield as Russia, India and the West Indies. His sugar plantations in Jamaica and Guyana were worked by slave labour and conditions were brutal. Later, as slavery was phased out across the Empire, John Gladstone, with the assistance of his newly elected son, William, was among the most assiduous of the mercantile class in obtaining generous compensation from the government. When he died in 1851, he would leave over £600,000. In today’s money he died a millionaire many times over.
The young William Gladstone grew up in a household where piety, money and politics were the abiding interests of the family. All three spheres remained at the heart of his personality throughout his life, although he concentrated more energy on the nation’s finances than on his own. Again, as with Robert Peel, his parents despatched him to one of the great public schools, though in the case of Gladstone to Eton rather than Harrow. It is worth noting briefly the similarities between the two fathers in these stories. They were both driven and highly successful businessman, they were both elected to Parliament, although neither went on to have especially distinguished careers in public life, and they were both highly aware of the benefits that might well accrue from an advantageous and socially privileged education for their sons. It is fair to assume that the energy that drove both men was inherited by their sons and it is certainly th
e case that the work ethic of William Gladstone was extraordinary and was recognised by his peers.
The younger Gladstone settled well at Eton. He became a happy and conscientious scholar and was much influenced by Edward Craven Hawtrey, the school’s dynamic and reforming headmaster and later its Provost. Eton was followed by a degree in Classics and Mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained a double first and served as President of the Union. It was during these years of education at Eton and Oxford that Gladstone established lifelong habits of reading voraciously, diarising faithfully and working very long hours.
There was little that Gladstone would not read. Over the course of a long life, he accumulated a vast library of over thirty thousand books the contents of each described in his diary. Towards the end of his life, this most ardent of bibliophiles gave most of his collection to what is now Gladstone’s Library, which he founded near his country seat at Hawarden in Flintshire, and he delivered the thousands of volumes to the library himself with the aid of a wheelbarrow.
This story captures not only his character as a lover of books but also glances at the great physical strength that matched his mental abilities and that sets him apart from such peers as Disraeli, who sensibly disliked any form of exercise more arduous than the occasional walk. With this vigour, however, came something perhaps a little less praiseworthy: a degree of impatience for those less endowed with energy than he was. He expected others to be similarly industrious. He counselled one of his sons, for example, to ‘establish a minimum number of hours in the day for study’ and this was to apply in the vacations as well as the term time of his university career.
This glimpse of the elderly Gladstone also reveals the thread of zeal, of evangelical certainty, that ran through the family as a whole. As a young man, he considered becoming a clergyman but when his father opposed the idea, Gladstone seemed to decide that his vocation must be as a politician. He would maintain throughout his life a commitment to these two channels of religion and politics. He would regularly pray for God’s guidance and this divine imprimatur had the effect of making him utterly sure of the justice and wisdom of his course. Queen Victoria herself was just one among many who would complain about the effects of such moral certainty.
It can well be imagined that such rectitude could easily be seen as priggishness and would not always recommend him to his colleagues. Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, his most sympathetic biographer, described with some impatience a scene in which Gladstone’s rooms at Christ Church were invaded by a crowd of less pious men. Gladstone’s reaction was to tell his diary that ‘to suffer for Christ was no disgrace’. He resolved to forgive his attackers and pray for them more earnestly so that both they and he could benefit. As for the twentieth-century Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, he judged Gladstone to be a ‘dreadful’ man because of the letter he wrote proposing marriage to Miss Catherine Glynne which contained a sentence of 140 words concerning the Almighty. Miss Glynne obviously cared less than Mr Attlee did about such matters as she became Mrs Gladstone in 1839.
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This was for the future but the developing character and preoccupations of this profoundly, perhaps excessively moral and evangelical young man may already be seen. It is important to focus for a moment on passages in Gladstone’s life that illuminate this religious element, for it is necessary to understand this aspect fully in order to comprehend the man himself. A deeply felt sense of religion influenced not only Gladstone’s political outlook but that of British society as a whole in the Victorian period. Throughout the nineteenth century, religious issues were frequently at or close to the forefront of the national debate. The rumbling debate surrounding the Emancipation of the Catholics of Britain and Ireland has been mentioned before and to this we can add tensions surrounding such issues as the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, in which Gladstone played a role.
As early as 1864, Gladstone had advocated disestablishment, much to the irritation of his Prime Minister, Palmerston. Gladstone saw the measure as both righting a wrong, in that there were very small numbers of Irish Anglicans in a predominantly Catholic country, and as politically opportune, in that disestablishment in Ireland would please British Nonconformists, who formed a significant element in the evolving Liberal power base. Palmerston blocked the measure at this time but only five years later, with Gladstone now Prime Minister, the bill passed through a bitterly divided Parliament. This particular saga usefully illuminates how Gladstone viewed religion. It was never an independent entity but was instead always one thread in a great web of social, ethical and political concerns.
Gladstone’s religious preoccupation also affected his personal relationships, not least the tense and tetchy relationship he endured with the Queen. Victoria famously detested him, complaining that he addressed her as though she were a public meeting and describing him as a ‘mischievous firebrand, arrogant, tyrannical and obstinate … a half-crazy and in many ways ridiculous, wild and incomprehensible old fanatic’. She and Gladstone clashed repeatedly over ecclesiastical appointments. These had a distinct political influence through the House of Lords, which was in those days a smaller and more powerful body than it is today, and Victoria continually agitated for appointees who would check the effects of High Anglicanism upon the Church of England, while Gladstone as continually pushed back against the Queen’s wishes.
Gladstone’s close personal relationships were also affected as a result of his strength of religious feeling. For ten years, he had no contact with Cardinal Manning, one of Lytton Strachey’s most unfairly treated Eminent Victorians, who had been a great friend of his youth. He had been an Anglican cleric who converted to Catholicism and became, in 1865, the second Archbishop of Westminster and thus leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales. For Gladstone, Manning’s breach with the Church of England was too much to bear and even after the breach was seemingly healed, the pair were never as close again. When Gladstone’s younger sister Helen in her turn converted he was even less sympathetic. ‘You are living a life of utter self-deception,’ he bawled in ink. ‘Not in religion alone but in all bodily and mental habits’ and he advised his father to turn Helen out of the family home and cut off her allowance. Thankfully, John Gladstone was kinder and he declined to follow his son’s advice. There was no particularly happy ending to this story. Helen Gladstone became addicted to laudanum until she was cured miraculously by Cardinal Wiseman.
The tenor of Gladstone’s own private life and leisure time was also bound up with these intense socio-religious feelings and the sense of obligation and duty which flowed from them. In the aftermath of the General Election of 1874, which Gladstone’s Liberals lost to Disraeli and the Conservatives, Catherine Gladstone counselled her husband against quitting the political scene. She claimed that observers would blame his decision on a form of religious mania that had led him away from his true public calling.
Even his most sympathetic biographers, however, have not been able entirely to absolve Gladstone of the charge of hypocrisy, stemming from his notorious ‘night walks’ and practice of self-mortification. Gladstone was given to walking the streets of London in the hours of darkness seeking out prostitutes – ‘fallen women’ – with the intent of saving them and getting their lives back into good moral order. This habit resulted in at least one blackmail attempt which ended up in court, the details of the case engendering widespread sniggering among society at large.
It was, to put it mildly, not a wise practice. His friends were embarrassed by it and on one occasion Lord Rosebery, later himself a Liberal Prime Minister, drew the short straw and was pushed forward to ask Gladstone to stop. Even Gladstone eventually recognised and acknowledged that his efforts were simply not effective. In 1854, he recorded in his diary that of almost ninety prostitutes he had tried to save ‘there is but one of whom I know that the miserable life has been abandoned and that I can fairly join that fact with influence of mine’.
Gladstone revealed to his diary all so
rts of additional details that help illuminate the religious dimension of his life. In its pages he habitually and faithfully listed his ‘days of impurity’ and his diaries were littered with little ‘whip’ signs believed to indicate days of self-mortification. The implication must be that his various meetings with ‘fallen’ women were not always or entirely innocent, in addition to which he had one or two remarkably intimate links to married women. One such was the splendidly named Mrs Laura Thistlethwayte, a one-time courtesan whom he rescued. His meetings with her, conducted over thirty years to the all too evident consternation of friends and colleagues, were invariably accompanied by an appearance of the ‘whip’ symbol in his diaries again.
How does all this very peculiar behaviour square with Gladstone’s strongly developed sense of Christian duty, his presumed knowledge of the Sixth Commandment and the declaration he made near the end of his life to his son, the Reverend Stephen Gladstone, that he had never ‘been guilty of the act which is known as infidelity to the marriage bed’? This last remark carries with it a definite sense of sophistry. One is reminded forcibly of Bill Clinton’s use of careful and legalistic language as he defended himself in the Monica Lewinsky case, and it has led many to believe that Gladstone was not as holy as he liked to appear. This is unfair. His precision with language and his deep religion, which he in earlier life declared had been very much a Bible-based one, provide a different interpretation.
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