by Roy Jenkins
Thus, when in early 1832 the time for a major European excursion became as available as the money had always been, Gladstone was eager to undertake the journey. The only surprising element was that he chose to do so with his naval-officer brother, temporarily but not unusually without a ship, and not with one or more of his Christ Church friends. John Neilson Gladstone was then twenty-five and William Ewart Gladstone only twenty-two, but there emerges (admittedly from William Gladstone’s own diary) the strong impression that William was nonetheless the senior partner in the enterprise. What was more important, however, was that they got on well together, much better than William would then have been likely to do with either of his other brothers. This was, to say the least, fortunate for the expedition lasted 179 days and they were rarely apart for more than a few hours.
Their experiences abroad were similar to those of most English travellers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: uncomfortable post-chaises, with a lot of ill-tempered haggling over prices; small-town inns of very variable quality, but the discomfort of these relieved by long stays in spacious lodgings or well-kept hotels in the principal cities, where they enjoyed thorough but leisurely sight-seeing and social contact with other English visitors as well as, although to a lesser extent, with local notables. They were sufficiently cosmopolitan to assume that language was not an obstacle, at any rate with the educated classes, and sufficiently English to have a good deal of concern about the cleanliness of the beds and the strangeness of the food. (They were of course purely Scottish by birth, but it would not have occurred to them so to describe themselves or to enquire for anything other than the English Legation, the English church or the English tea rooms.) On balance, however, they were a good deal more integrated with local life and customs than are most British visitors to France or Italy today.
They left London on 1 February, were in Belgium for five days and then in Paris for another twelve from 11 February. They crossed the Mont Cenis pass on 1 March and descended into Turin for a week, then to Genoa for a weekend, and then by Lucca, Pisa and Livorno to Florence for ten days. They eventually reached Rome a month after crossing the Piedmontese frontier. Rome was then given a full four weeks until the southward journey was resumed and twenty-five days were spent in Naples and around its bay. Every Italian city was given carefully graded allocations of time, with Rome being put in its place above Naples with an additional ten-day sojourn on the way back.
They finally left the Eternal City as summer was beginning and struck north on 5 June. (Most English travellers in those days scampered back across the Alps before even the vernal sun might attack them with heat and fevers.) They got to Venice after two nights in Ravenna and three in Bologna and stayed there for ten days. Then they went via Verona and Bolzano to Innspruck (as Gladstone rather quaintly called it) and back by the lakes of Garda and Como to a final Italian pause of four days in Milan, which impressed Gladstone as having ‘an appearance of wealth, abundance, and activity’ lacking in the rest of Italy. Another three days brought them to Geneva, from where Gladstone accepted the Duke of Newcastle’s offer to sponsor him as candidate for his borough of Newark, on the understanding, distinctly generous for a duke, that he would pay half the election expenses (estimated at £1000 but turning out to be £2000) provided that John Gladstone paid the other half.
This prospect filled William Gladstone with awesome excitement. He wrote of it as a ‘bold and terrible experiment’. He hoped, in the words of the second collect for evensong, that his decision had been taken ‘in a spirit not of utter forgetfulness of Him, who is the author of all good counsels, all holy desires, and all just works’. But he also laid a great deal of weight on the counsel of his father in the flesh as well as of his Father in God. And he seasoned it all with some electoral caution: ‘there cannot be, I should think, anything approaching certainty in a case where the constituency consists of 1600 voters’.1 But he did not hurry home. He and his brother proceeded across Switzerland to Basle, by steamboat down the Rhine valley (the scenery of which failed to impress him) to Cologne, overland to Brussels and Ostend and to London by the morning of 28 July. The Kent country looked ‘well cultivated and the towns along the route beautifully clean’. In addition he had found the Dover ‘Customhouse officers civil, reasonable, and expeditious – and of a genus infinitely superior to the foreign doganieri. No winking nor cheating, little bowing and scraping.’2 He was a good traveller (’always look after your luggage yourself’, he recorded as a sensible precept), and an instinctive European, but not free of the traditional prejudices which, at least since the Reformation, have separated England from the Continent.
One of the several paradoxes which racked his life was that while he believed passionately in the unity of Christendom (and in its political manifestation, the Concert of Europe), he also felt that idolatry began at Calais. He had been brought up in what Magnus described as ‘the narrowest form of Evangelical religion’,3 although Matthew is perhaps more accurate when he calls the atmosphere of the household ‘moderately Evangelical’.4 The Gladstones never contemplated leaving the Church of England, which many Evangelicals did, and were therefore necessarily in some contact with the other strands of Anglicanism. Even when John Gladstone had added two to the number of Evangelical churches in Liverpool there were no more than a total of three. Secondly, the home atmosphere was argumentative and questioning rather than flatteningly authoritarian. The children were encouraged to engage in courteous dispute.
This moderation did not make the family cool Evangelicals. Coolness indeed was one of the last qualities it would be appropriate to attribute to anything to do with William Gladstone. He could sometimes be patient, as shown by the immense quantities of time which he was prepared to devote to listening in the House of Commons or by the meticulousness with which he would refute the most minor points of argument. He was never good at understanding positions opposed to his own, but he was good at taking trouble to expose error. Yet his patience never stemmed from coolness. He had a consistently tumultuous nature. It was often (but not always) held in check by rigid discipline. The result, however, was not a calm lake but a mill-race controlled by a dam of steel.
The other two dévotes in his family were his mother and his sister Anne. They were not tumultuous personalities in William Gladstone’s sense. Their invalidism would have made it difficult for them to emulate his turbulence. But they were dominated by religion, and his sister in particular was a powerful spiritual influence upon him. Her death in February 1829 was the greatest trauma that he experienced during the mounting success of his school and Oxford years. The effect was to increase both his morbidity and his religiosity. It strengthened his view that the central purpose of his life, not only spiritually but also organizationally, should be the upholding of religion. He felt (and announced in a turgid and sometimes incomprehensible 4000-word letter to his father) that this should take the form of his becoming a clergyman, but when John Gladstone firmly opposed this course William Gladstone was quite easily turned away from it, even though the moment of decision was little more than a year after his sister’s death.
He persuaded himself that this was because of a combination of the duty that he owed his father and of his own feeling that he could perhaps better serve the cause of religion as a political warrior on its ramparts than as a priest protected within the citadel. Yet he accepted the turning away sufficiently easily that it is difficult to believe that there was not an element of relief. As a forum for his powers a cathedral close, even in the days of thundering bishops and liturgically authoritative deans, could not have compared with Parliament when Britain was powerful and politicians were treated as heroes. He attempted to square the circle by always insisting that his primary task in politics was to uphold religion. However, his view of how best this could be done changed drastically over the years.
Although there can be no doubt of the depth, dominance and consistency of Gladstone’s religious passion, it is nonetheless surpri
sing, this being so, that an Evangelical from Liverpool took so easily to the virtually pagan Eton (as both Morley and Magnus put it) and to the worldly Erastianism, tempered only by the first stirrings of Tractarianism, of Christ Church. At Eton, Gladstone wrote much later, ‘the actual teaching of Christianity was all but dead’, and Magnus made much of Gladstone’s disappointment at the ‘empty show’ of his 1827 Confirmation service. But the only criticism that Gladstone committed to his diary was that ‘the Bishop [of Lincoln was] not dignified in appearance’.5 As Bishop Pelham died six days later it would perhaps be unfair to stress his demeanour on that particular occasion. What was undoubtedly the case, however, was that Eton religious teaching and observances during the reign of George IV were much more a hangover from eighteenth-century scepticism than a harbinger of Victorian fervour. Gladstone would have wished it otherwise, but it did not put him out of joint with the school.
At Christ Church the cathedral services were conducted almost as perfunctorily as those in Eton Chapel. Gladstone at the end of his first term wrote: ‘Sacrament: as cold and unprepared as usual’.6 He attended frequently but he got more spiritual sustenance from St Mary’s, the University church in the High Street, of which Newman had just become vicar, from a variety of Oxford shrines most of which have since become ecclesiastically redundant, St Ebbe’s, St Martin’s at Carfax, St Peter’s-in-the-East, and even from the extra-mural activities of the Revd Mr Bulteel. Bulteel was a curate at St Ebbe’s when Gladstone arrived in Oxford, but soon got himself expelled from that church for preaching in Dissenting chapels (that is, outside the communion of the Church of England) or in the open air – it is not clear which was the worse. He was an early exponent of ‘born-again’ Christianity who invited his hearers to experience an apocalyptic conversion.
Gladstone never underwent such a single experience, although he liked listening to Bulteel, even if he did so with enough circumspection that when he observed his outdoor revivalism it was from an open window and not among the crowd. There was perhaps a certain symbolism in this position. Gladstone as a young man retained a good deal of the spirit and language of Evangelicalism (which indeed persisted throughout his life), but his position was firmly within the tabernacle of the Apostolic Church, with institutional religion, not in the formal and material sense of the pomp and emoluments of a rich state Church, but in the historical and theological sense of the Church as a carefully ordained unity which uniquely represented Christ on earth, becoming increasingly important to him.
There were at that time three main parties within the Church of England. They could perhaps be better described as tendencies, for not everybody belonged to one or other of them and many who did held their tenets fairly loosely, often, if they were of a non-ideological turn of mind, combining some aspects of one outlook with some of another. As a result, while the parties provided plenty of ground for dispute and even bitterness, they were not so fissiparous as to make impossible coexistence within the frontiers of the established Church. They were like three hillocks in a landscape, on each of which the more disputatious leaders could stand, while their varyingly committed followers could occupy, closer or further away from the hillocks at will, the intervening folds of ground.
The most intellectually exciting, although in other ways the weakest of the three parties, was the Apostolic, or Catholic, or as they later came to be called when the Oxford Movement had gathered momentum the Tractarian party. For them the Bible was all very well in its way, but it needed the sacred authority of an apostolic, sacramental, priestly Church to interpret it properly, and the Prayer Book was at least an equally important textbook of faith. And the lives of the saints and of the early fathers were just as worthy of attention as were the doings of the titans of the Old Testament. The label most abhorred by the adherents of the tendency was that of Protestant. They were Catholics, although those who were not tempted over the dreadful border disapproved of many of the pretensions and abuses of the Church of Rome. Since the Reformation, which provided an awkward kink but not a full break in tradition, they had been Anglicans. But they were no more Protestants than they were Dissenters. The Apostolic Church was the only means to salvation. To dissent from it was to exclude oneself from the hope of grace. The Church was the Church in the realm, but this was so because it was Christ’s Church rather than because it was the King’s Church, although it was desirable that it should be that also. But the state should serve the Church, rather than the Church serve the state. Indeed the Erastian view of the Church in which archbishops were as subordinate to Prime Ministers as were parsons to Whig magnates was so intolerable that disestablishment might be better. ‘Church and King’ was a tolerable motto but not ‘State and Church’.
The Evangelical party did not much involve itself with this competing institutionalism for it was primarily concerned with the direct relationship of the individual with his God, and did not allow high place to either Church or state. Its tradition stemmed from the Puritans and had been much fortified by the Wesleys and by Whitefield in the middle of the eighteenth century. For its adherents the Bible rather than the Church was man’s essential route to God. Personal salvation could be achieved by personal conversion. Ministers of God’s word might assist in this process, but they were not essential agents. They were the organizers and, maybe, the inspirers of congregations but they were not ‘the stewards of the mysteries of God’.
Evangelicals provided much of the energy and of the enthusiasm of the Church of England. They sustained the Biblical Societies and the Protestant Missions throughout the world. Most of the great practical reformers and philanthropists – William Wilberforce or Shaftesbury – were Evangelicals. It was a form of religion which released energy rather than satisfied intellectual sophistication. As Gladstone wrote when he looked back on his youth: ‘The Evangelical movement . . . did not ally itself with literature, art and general cultivation; but it harmonized well with the money-getting pursuits.’7
The third party in the Church were the liberals or Latitudinarians. They dated back at least to the reign of Charles I, but their wonderful century had begun in 1688. They did not much believe in religious glory, regarding as almost equally far-fetched Anglo-Catholic views about grace transmitted through the priesthood and Evangelical views about grace spontaneously generated by an inner experience of conversion. They were the religious beneficiaries of the Glorious Revolution. Their cool rationalism, which had made them hostile to Stuart claims of divine right, made them at home with a Whig oligarchy and well attuned to the mannered cultivation of the so-called Augustan age. They were somewhat insular (although, if they were rich enough, venturing into the occasional grand tour and the importation of Italian works of art), which made them anti-Catholic, and they were against excessive enthusiasm, which made them anti-Evangelical. They thought that religion should be an affair of sense, morals (within reason) and good behaviour. John Locke and Bishop Butler were their philosophers and Jane Austen was the best chronicler of the background against which they flourished.
This liberal (in ecclesiastical terms) or Broad Church approach has over the three centuries since the Whig Revolution shown a persistent if fluctuating strength and has been the dominant trend within the Church under different manifestations alike in Butler’s Durham, Trollope’s Barchester and Runcie’s Canterbury. But it was at a relatively low ebb circa 1830, when the clerical spirit of eighteenth-century Oxford had encouraged Latitudinarianism to degenerate into lethargy. In any event it never held much appeal for Gladstone. It was too cool and detached for him, and it was not religious liberalism but the rival enthusiasms of the Apostolic and the Evangelical Churches which, as in Housman’s Welsh Marches, ‘ceased not fighting, east and west, on the marches of [his] breast’.
An important engagement of that continuing conflict occurred during his Italian sojourn in the spring of 1832, when he was just over twenty-two years of age and poised between his Oxford academic triumphs of December 1831 and his election to Parliament
in December 1832. He had travelled for two months, mostly finding English services for Sunday mornings (although having to make do with Prussian Protestantism in Turin), but also taking in, generally with disapproval, a wide range of Roman Catholic observances. The low mass at the Cathedral of St Gudule in Brussels was ‘an unmeaning and sorrowful ceremony’.8 In Florence he saw two baptisms administered in the Baptistery and wrote of himself as ‘dissatisfied with the matter, disgusted (I cannot use a weaker term) with the manner of the service’.9 The next day he went to a minor church and was at once sad and severe: ‘It is painful to speak disrespectfully of any religious services but these certainly seemed no better than mummery.’10 The underlying causes of his trans-European censoriousness were idolatry, the elevation of the Virgin to a position almost above Christ, and the disengaged mumbling of the services by unprepossessing priests (although he ought to have become used to the last fault by ‘the mumblings of toothless fellows’, as he had expressed it, in Eton Chapel).
On 31 March, his first day in Rome, he went to St Peter’s. He was not at first impressed by the architecture (’my humble homage is reserved for that Gothic style, which prevails in our own English cathedrals’)11 and could not easily equate the baroque with a religious atmosphere. Yet the great basilica achieved what must be adjudged its central purpose and set him meditating on the unity of Christendom in a way that he had never done before. In so doing he made few concessions to the authority of the Holy See:
In entering such a Church as this, most deeply does one feel the pain and shame of the schism which separates us from Rome – whose guilt (for guilt I at least am well persuaded there always is where there is schism) surely rests not upon the Venerable Fathers of the English Reformed Church, but upon Rome itself [there then follow nine balancing subordinate clauses of a convolution which make the net effect almost impossible to follow]. . . . May God bind up the wounds of his bleeding Church.12