Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Yet for all his instinctive disputatiousness (six weeks before, in Paris, he had self-revealingly written: ‘Unhappily my manner tends to turn every conversation into a debate’)13, this visit to the areopagus of Christianity did shift his mind. Already the next day, after Vespers at Trinità del Monte, Gladstone, while regretting that the litany was to the Blessed Virgin and, combining his usual opaqueness with an unusual casualness of introduction, wrote: ‘Speaking of the Virgin, surely we are as much too remiss, yet not the Church of England, but her members, in commemorations of saints as the Romish Church is officious and audacious.’14 And six weeks later, in Naples, he recorded:

  Of late and today in particular, I have been employed in examining some of the details of the system of the English Church, as set forth in the Prayer-book, with which I was before less acquainted. To coming into Catholic countries, and to some few books, I owe glimpses which now seem to be afforded to me of the nature of a Church, and of our duties as members of it, which involve an idea very much higher & more important than I had previously had any conception of.15

  This was Gladstone’s contemporary version. Nearly sixty years later he provided a grander but not incompatible account of the same occasion. After testifying that ‘the impression [of that Naples day] has never been effaced’, he wrote:

  I had previously taken a great deal of teaching direct from the Bible, as best I could, but now the figure of the Church rose before me as a teacher too, and I gradually found in how incomplete and fragmentary a manner I had drawn divine truth from the sacred volume, as indeed I had also missed in the Thirty-Nine Articles some things which ought to have taught me better. Such, for I believe that I have given the fact as it occurred, in its silence and its solitude, was my first introduction to the august conception of the Church of Christ. It presented to me Christianity under an aspect in which I had not yet known it: its ministry of symbols, its channels of grace, its unending line of teachers joining from the Head: a sublime construction, based throughout upon historic fact, uplifting the idea of the community in which we live, and of the access which it enjoys through the new and living way to the presence of the Most High. From this time I began to feel my way by degree into or towards a true notion of the Church.16

  Thus, in one of the several major paradoxes of his life, was Gladstone moved by his experience in Roman Catholic Europe towards a position which was (and remained) as firmly anti-Roman as, within the terms of the Anglican debate, it was both emotionally and terminologically Catholic.

  Back in England in the late summer of 1832, Gladstone turned his attention from religion to politics. This has to be qualified to the extent that he would never have admitted that politics was allowed to exclude religion. For the absence of dichotomy he would have argued first on the inner and therefore incontestable if not wholly convincing ground that politics were for him merely a means to religious ends; and second, and more empirically, by always being able to show that political preoccupation never interfered with the intensity of either his religious observances or his theological reading and thought.

  Nevertheless Newark, about which his electoral caution was justified, did require and receive considerable attention. His visit in late September 1832, for which he had posted so hurriedly from Torquay because he was informed that ‘the canvass’ had already begun, lasted well into October. Apart from general canvassing, which took a surprisingly modern form, with Gladstone recording the few occasions when he was refused a handshake (‘principally by women’), he had to underpin his position with the Duke of Newcastle, whom he had not previously met. He was ‘most kindly’ received at Clumber and indeed subsequently wrote to his father about the Duke almost in terms which might have been employed by the Revd Mr Collins of Lady Catherine de Burgh. Patron and protégé both dismayed and comforted each other with agreement on the awful impending threats to the social and moral order. Gladstone appears to have thrown in the possibility of the downfall of the Papacy, to which the Duke looked forward with more complacency than did Gladstone. What they mutually accepted as more decisively good were ‘the virtues of an ancient aristocracy, than which the world never saw one more powerful or more pure’ than that epitomized at Clumber.17

  The Duke, however, was by no means all-powerful in Newark, and Gladstone had to deal not only with independent-minded burghers of that borough but also with magnates who had segments of influence smaller than but separate from those of the Duke. The Earl of Winchilsea and Nottingham was wholly supportive but regretted that his tenants had not been as ‘warm and unanimous’ towards Gladstone as he would have wished. He would endeavour to apply corrective measures. Lord Middleton, on the other hand, replied from Wollaton House, the fine Tudor mansion on the edge of Nottingham, with a heavy rebuke for Gladstone’s approach to him: ‘as an entire stranger to me, I must be allow’d to express my surprise that you should thus early have applied to me’.18

  However, despite this, a bumpy passage on the slavery issue and other rebuffs within the town, where it does not appear that his candidature aroused much enthusiasm, Gladstone did win. Indeed, in an election for two seats, he came top of the poll, an experience which, even though he had then become famous, was subsequently to elude him in Oxford, South Lancashire and Greenwich. At Newark there were three candidates for the two seats. The second Tory, Handley, was quasi-anonymous. The sole and defeated Whig was far from this. He was already a well-known lawyer, bearing the rumbustious advocates’ title of ‘Serjeant’. Later, transformed from Serjeant Wilde into Baron Truro, he was to be Lord Chancellor in Lord John Russell’s first government. Gladstone, who on the day of nomination spent six and a half hours on the hustings, was even at twenty-two a near match for him in debating skill and stronger in influence, polled 887, the dim Mr Handley 798 and the future Lord Truro 726.

  On the declaration of the poll, which was at nine in the morning of 14 December 1832, Gladstone spoke for ‘an hour or more – Serjeant [Wilde] procured me a hearing – but a cold one’.19 This might seem early evidence of Gladstone’s life-long taste for inflated oratory in even the most inappropriate circumstances. But the point of the example is somewhat weakened by the fact that Serjeant Wilde followed him for one and a half hours.

  There had been a number of the features of Eatanswill (Dickens’s caricature of a corrupt borough in The Pickwick Papers) to the Newark contest, not least the distribution of far more money on Gladstone’s behalf than he was aware of or subsequently approved. However, it was not quite scandalous enough to lead to a petition against corrupt practices, the usual Gladstone family experience. There was also a good deal of boisterousness, with stones missing Gladstone’s head by only ‘twelve inches’ (his usual precision), but he had sufficient cohorts to be ‘most powerfully escorted [back] to the Clinton Arms’. In that hostelry, appropriately named to mark the Newcastle influence, Gladstone dined on the evening of his election in the company of the members of the ‘Red Clubs’ which were vigorous in the constituency. Red was the local Tory colour, evoking a partisanship comparable with the waving of the ‘bloody shirt’ by the Republican Party in the American presidential elections of 1872 and 1876. Even seventy years later (although this was after the words of the ‘Red Flag’ had been added to the tune of ‘Tannenbaum’ to make a socialist hymn) Morley recorded without irony that the most intense Tory partisan and cheerleader had proclaimed: ‘I was born Red, I live Red, and I shall die Red.’20 The most notable feature of Gladstone’s own speech was an attempt, based no doubt on the new confidence of having the seat under his belt but also somewhat bumptiously maladroit for twenty-two, to solve the problem of his dependence on the Duke of Newcastle with a syllogism. ‘You need not ask’, he said, ‘whether I am your man or the Duke’s man, for the answer is that we are both of us, the Duke and I, equally your men.’

  The new Parliament met two months later, and Gladstone first entered the House of Commons as a member on 7 February 1833. He and his brother Tom walked down together from Jermyn Stree
t, where they were both temporarily lodging, although removing to Albany a month later, and took their seats side by side among the ranks of 160 which was all that the Tories were able to muster in the first reformed Parliament. In George Hayter’s painting of the old chamber, done in 1834 a few months before the fire which destroyed most of the Palace of Westminster, they are visible, still together, sitting on the back row but one. Tom, misleadingly, looks the more distinguished. They were nonetheless shown as being remarkably alike, and Tom’s first speech in that Parliament (he had been in the previous one for about a year), which he delivered on 21 February, was attributed by Hansard to William. This misattribution created lasting confusion and led to William’s alleged maiden speech being described as late as 1971 as ‘a dim début’.

  Dim that February speech certainly was, with much of it inaudible and the subject the hardly inspiring one of the defence of the alleged corrupt parties in Liverpool local elections. But it was not by William Gladstone, who did not make what he and others regarded as his maiden speech until 3 June, although he had uttered a few sentences on both 30 April and 21 May when presenting petitions. Then (on 3 June) the subject-matter was little more elevating for he chose to speak in opposition to a Slavery Abolition Bill and did so very much as a ‘West Indian’ representative. Both the Gladstone boys made pietistic starts in the House, defending not only their father’s interests but his name as well. However, it was a fully effective speech, which Gladstone recorded in his diary as having lasted for fifty minutes and being ‘very kindly’ received by the House so that ‘my friends were satisfied’.21

  Thereafter the House of Commons careers of the two Gladstones could hardly have diverged more sharply. William went on to be the dominant parliamentarian of the century, outpacing Canning, Peel and Disraeli by the sheer length of his span in the House of Commons, and elbowing aside Palmerston and Lord John Russell by the greater fervour of his oratory. Tom Gladstone’s parliamentary experience, by contrast, was if anything still less glorious than that of his father. He suffered in an extreme form from the family disability of rarely being able to keep a seat over two elections without either defeat or unseating on petition. For the 1830 election the almost unknown Kent town of Queensborough, lurking in the shadows of the Isle of Sheppey, had been procured for him. He lost his seat on the poll, but a few months later retrieved it on petition. For the 1832 election he transferred to the Irish Midlands borough of Portarlington and secured a majority of its 150 electors. But by the next general election in 1835 he had got on to such bad terms with almost every local interest that there was no question of his even contesting Portarlington. He contemplated both Nottingham and, bizarrely, Orkney, but settled upon Leicester. He sat for this town until 1837, when for the last time a change of sovereign involved the dissolution of Parliament, which resulted in Tom Gladstone’s temporary disappearance from it. At the 1841 general election he contested Peterborough, and although again defeated reversed the result at an 1842 by-election. But he had overdone his enticements to the electors and was unseated on petition. For the remaining forty-seven years of his long life he was never again in the House of Commons.

  John Neilson Gladstone had an almost equally chequered electoral experience. When he could no longer get a ship he sought a seat, and in 1841 he won a by-election at Walsall. He was petitioned against for corrupt practices, but that year’s general election intervened and the petition was overridden by his defeat. In 1842 he won another by-election at Ipswich and sat there until the next general election of 1847, when he was again beaten. In 1852 he secured at Devizes a seat in a county which was his own (by adoption at least) and survived there until his death eleven years later, which was a long constituency association by the standards of all members of John Gladstone’s family other than William, and a moderate one even by his.

  William Gladstone’s parliamentary service covered sixty-two and a half years, with a break of twenty months in 1846–7. But this great span was divided between five constituencies as disparate as Newark, Oxford University, South Lancashire, Greenwich and Midlothian.

  The inescapable conclusion is that John Gladstone and his three parliamentary sons were both peripatetic and opportunistically coldhearted in their approach to constituencies. The father and the two elder sons were unsuccessfully so; William by contrast, despite the problems which might have been caused by his move across the political spectrum, had an almost complete command over what he wanted. He changed constituencies like an exigent hunting man demanding a new horse whenever he felt the old one was tiring. Admittedly much greater mobility in this respect was usual in the nineteenth century. Canning, Peel, Russell, Palmerston, Disraeli were all wanderers, although the last two, after early strayings, settled down to thirty years in, respectively, Tiverton and Buckinghamshire.

  The single constituency throughout a political lifetime and the geographical identity which goes with it came in only with Joseph Chamberlain, whose pattern in this respect if not in most others was followed in the twentieth century by such diverse figures as Lloyd George, R. A. Butler, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher. In the nineteenth century before Chamberlain there was by contrast no figure of the first rank who stuck to a single constituency. Nevertheless the Gladstones, taken collectively, were unusually fickle. Between them, and including constituencies considered as well as fought, they spattered the map of England, Scotland and even Ireland with as many red spots as did the British Empire on an old globe. Only Wales was free from their attentions, which was strange both because it provided much of the hinterland to Liverpool and because William Gladstone lived there, even if barely over the border from Cheshire, for half a century. However, his brother-in-law, with whom Gladstone cohabited at Hawarden, was a Flintshire member for fifteeen years and thus repaired the Gladstone omission.

  The residence, the brother-in-law and the tenuous Welsh parliamentary connection followed from his marriage into the Glynne family. This, however, did not occur until 1839, shortly before his thirtieth birthday, and in his seventh year as a member of Parliament. This was despite determined attempts from 1835, involving two failures, to find himself a bride. Those refusals, and his ultimate success with Miss Glynne, belong to the next chapter.

  A CLUMSY SUITOR

  THE TEN YEARS from his 1833 entry into the House of Commons to 15 May 1843, when he was promoted to Peel’s Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade, were on the surface a period of vaulting success for Gladstone. In politics it was mostly a Whig decade, but nonetheless one in which the cohesion and reforming zeal of the 1832 majority gradually dissipated themselves, and the Tories, although requiring three general elections over which to do so, came back from the rump of 160 among whom Gladstone first sat to a party of approximately 360 with a majority of 80. Each of the general elections had gone smoothly for Gladstone. In 1835 and 1837 he was unopposed at Newark, and in 1841 he was top of the poll, with Lord John Manners, his new running mate, three votes behind him, and the sole Whig challenger nowhere near either of them.

  Gladstone had also got as early (and substantial) a bite at office as the minority position of his party made possible. At the end of 1834, when William IV rashly dismissed his Whig ministers, Peel hurried back from a Roman holiday to form a government. He took several weeks on the journey, for the railway age was still just over the horizon. After his arrival, however, he quickly sent for Gladstone, who was also inconveniently placed in Edinburgh, but who managed to get back to London in time to accept a junior lordship of the Treasury on Christmas Eve. The January election brought a gain of nearly a hundred seats but no majority for the new government and a fortuitous outcome for Gladstone. The Under-Secretary for War and the Colonies (J. S. Wortley) was defeated in Forfar and Peel gave Gladstone the vacancy.

  This was a desirable slot because the Secretary of State was Lord Aberdeen, and the under-secretaryship therefore carried the sole spokesmanship for a major department in the Commons. It also fitted Gladstone well. It
matched what he thought of as his continuing ‘Liverpool’ interests (there was also room for embarrassment there, but the government did not last long enough for them to develop), and he formed a lasting affection and respect for Aberdeen, whom he had not previously met. Aberdeen, in turn, was equally impressed, although he stated his first approbation in terms which failed to do justice to Gladstone’s force and turbulence. ‘He appears to be so amiable that personally I am sure I shall like him,’ he wrote.1 Aberdeen quickly corrected the blandness of this view and became an affectionate and occasionally amused connoisseur of the eccentricities and extravagances of Gladstone’s genius. Their lives were closely intertwined for a quarter of a century, and Aberdeen’s political influence upon Gladstone was second in intensity only to that of Sir Robert Peel. Furthermore he was able to exercise it for ten years after Peel had fallen off his horse.

  George Gordon, fourth Earl of Aberdeen (1784–1860) is the most elusive of all the post-1832 Prime Ministers. He was cultivated, pacific and public-spirited, with a withdrawn charm. His reclusiveness was perhaps to be explained by a combination of his lonely childhood and grief-ridden second twenty-five years. His father died when he was seven, his mother when he was eleven. His grandfather, the third Earl, neglected both his heir and his estate and was not on speaking terms with his daughter-in-law, who when widowed had migrated with George (who had then become Lord Haddo) and her other sons to England. After her death Haddo was taken into the London household of Dundas (later Lord Melville), the legendary manipulator of Scottish patronage under Pitt, and saw much of both Prime Minister and proconsul. They, rather than the reprobate and remote third Earl, procured his education, first at Harrow and then at St John’s College, Cambridge.