Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  It was a major indiscretion, stating that the attempt of the North to uphold the Union by force was lost, and implying strongly that Britain was about to recognize the Confederacy. Charles Adams, son and grandson of Presidents and full of Bostonian virtue and style, who was American minister in London, in fact reacted coolly but nonetheless hinted to Russell that had he not been so restrained he would have asked ‘for his passports’ (whatever that diplomatic phrase meant; why did an ambassador or a minister not keep them with him, and why did he in any event need more than one?). Russell was considerably embarrassed and had to explain that Gladstone did not intend exactly what he had said. It is to be hoped that he did better in this respect than Gladstone himself did in a letter which he prepared for his secretary to send to complaining correspondents:

  Mr Gladstone desires me to remark that to form opinions upon questions of policy, to announce them to the world, and to take, or to be a party to taking, any of the steps necessary for giving them effect, are matters which, although connected together, are in themselves distinct, and which may be separated by intervals of time, longer or shorter according to the circumstances of the case.12

  Russell indeed covered up for Gladstone with as much loyalty as could possibly have been expected, but he did write to him saying that ‘I think you went beyond the latitude which all speakers must be allowed.’ Palmerston probably minded less. He was somewhat more pro-South, would like to have organized a mediation between Union and Confederacy and was never averse to Gladstone getting himself into trouble and thus weakening his Cabinet influence.

  Why did Gladstone do it? He was not in fact particularly pro-South. He was much more akin to a man of Massachusetts than to one of South Carolina. And it was not demagogy either, although many of his fellow politicians who were free from temptation in this respect thought that he was making himself drunk with crowds. But the Tyneside crowds would mostly have preferred a more resolute anti-slavery message.

  Gladstone at this stage had some anti-American prejudices of a type prevalent in England for the hundred years between the United States beginning to do things on a big scale and the results of this bigness turning the balance in the Second World War. He regarded them as a crude and braggart people. It never occurred to him to visit them at home. Yet he had become a surprisingly close friend of Charles Sumner, the senator–orator from Massachusetts, who had first visited Hawarden in 1857, and who became for Gladstone something of the equivalent of Plantagenet Palliser’s Ezekiel Boncassen in The Duke’s Children. And at the end of his life when he looked back on the Newcastle speech, he was as warm towards the United States as he was critical of himself. ‘Strange to say’, he wrote in 1896,

  this declaration [that Jefferson Davis had made a nation] most unwarrantable to be made by a minister of the crown with no authority other than his own, was not due to any feeling of partisanship for the South or hostility to the North. Many who wished well to the Northern cause despaired of its success. . . . The friends of the North in England were beginning to advise that it should give way, for the avoidance of further bloodshed and greater calamity. . . . My offence was indeed only a mistake, but one of incredible grossness, and with such consequences of offence and alarm attached to it, that my failing to perceive them justly exposed me to very severe blame.

  He added: ‘And strange to say, post hoc though perhaps not propter hoc, the United States have been that country in the world in which the most signal marks of public honour have been paid me, and in which my name has been the most popular, the only parallels being Italy, Greece, and the Balkan Peninsula.’13

  This was a handsome apology, but written thirty-four years after the event. The comment of John Bright, already in general a considerable admirer of Gladstone, was fully to the point and more contemporary. Three days after the speech he wrote: ‘He [Gladstone] is as unstable as water in some things; he is for union and freedom in Italy and for dissension and bondage in America.’14

  One thing that Gladstone’s blunder did not damage was the success of the remainder of his progress through the North-east. On the following day, the Wednesday, there was a celebratory river expedition, but it was hardly a rural picnic. It proceeded for twenty-two miles past the most industrialized river banks in England, and its purpose was to give an opportunity for public acclaim:

  Reached Gateshead at 12 [the diary account ran], after an Address and reply embarked in the midst of the most striking scene which was prolonged and brightened as we went down the river at the head of a fleet of some 25 steamers amidst the roar of guns and with the banks lined and dotted above and below with great multitudes of people.

  There were even said to be men providing a swimming guard of honour in front of the Gladstone boat, a scene recalling Betjeman’s poem about ‘Captain Webb the swimming man’, who made his way endlessly through the murky industrial canals of the West Midlands. ‘The expedition ended at six, I had as many speeches as hours,’ Gladstone continued. ‘Such a pomp I probably shall never again witness: circumstances have brought upon me what I do not in any way deserve. . . . ‘The spectacle was really one for Turner and for no one else.’15

  On the Thursday they moved from Tyne to Tees, and repeated the steamboat cavalcade from Middlesbrough. It had been prefaced by a public tour of Newcastle, by an address to the Naval Reserve there and by a speech to a large meeting in the Town Hall and another at Sunderland, where he was seized by giddiness and ‘had to take hold of the table’ before continuing his speech. That day amounted to fifteen hours of continuous activity, concluding with another public banquet. That night he wrote: ‘I ought to be thankful: still more ought I to be ashamed. It was vain to think of reading, writing or much reflecting on such a day.’16 Saturday, with only a luncheon speech in York, must have seemed like a holiday after his exertions.

  What did the crowds signify? Most of all the simple undiscriminating fact that Gladstone had become a name which tripped off people’s lips, that he had an identifiable appearance which did not betray his fame and his authority, and that when they went home and said they had seen Gladstone that bestowed prestige rather than caused mystification. There was also some feeling that he was on their side, not in the sense of an economic class struggle, for he was never strong on the social condition of the people, but in the sense that he was for seriousness against cynicism, for moral purpose against frivolity, for the achievements of industrial and industrious Britain at a time when it was supreme in these respects, and also in some sense for the solid striving of the northern provincial centres as against the glitter of London and the soft landscape and more traditional society of the South of England.

  There was no other ministerial politician who could fill this role. Of the others who could claim to be household names, Russell and Palmerston were very much metropolitan and South of England Whigs, in spite of their both having been (briefly) at Edinburgh University a half-century or more before. Disraeli was too brittle, and Derby, even though he lived in ‘a stink of chemicals’ on the edge of Liverpool, was essentially a parliamentary politician. The view of Gladstone as an elevated but nonetheless popular politician was neatly captured by the jingle locally composed for the occasion:

  Honour give to sterling worth,

  Genius better is than birth,

  So here’s success to Gladstone.

  His wife, who had been through all the strenuous Tyne and Tees days without complaint, thought it was the first time he had ever been properly honoured.

  For Gladstone’s democratic progress William Hutt and the several other local MPs and aldermen who organized visits and attended him on them were important agents. The steamers and the Town Hall banquets had to be provided, and the populace informed where they might see and cheer the great man. For these owners of large and comfortable houses conveniently adjacent to the big provincial cities, and often themselves substantial manufacturers or engineers as well as civic dignitaries, there was a lot to be said for tying the big gun of the Chancellor
as firmly as possible into the Liberal party (of which, by no stretch of the imagination, could he be regarded as having been a supporter for more than three years), and in particular to their non-Whiggish and provincial tendency within it.

  For Gladstone things were never quite the same again after Newcastle. He may have made a nonsense of his American Civil War speech, but this was more than balanced by the rapture of his reception. He became, to put it vulgarly, hooked on crowds. His diary remark about thankfulness and shame showed a good deal of insight. His quarter-envious, three-quarters disapproving colleagues might have been mildly assuaged by his self-criticism, but not more.

  Six months after Newcastle, in the budget of 1863, Gladstone launched his Don Quixote attack on charities. The attack was made the more quixotic by the fact that he had absolutely no need to do it. Despite the adverse trade effects of the American Civil War and severe distress in Lancashire, to the relief of which the Gladstones were forthcoming in their personal capacities although William was cautious in his Exchequer role,57 he ended the financial year 1862–3 with a surplus, massive for those days, of £3¾ million. Some concessions were obviously called for and he reduced the rate of income tax from ninepence to sevenpence in the pound, as well as bringing down the tea duty. But he sought to make one move the other way. He proposed to bring in £¾ million by removing the tax exemption which the income of registered charities had hitherto enjoyed. How his rather querulous Cabinet colleagues let him do it is difficult to imagine. There is no record of any stiff Cabinet struggles, such as those he had experienced with his paper-duties concessions in 1860 and 1861. The whole budget was approved in a two-hour sitting on the day before he presented it to the House of Commons. It is impossible to avoid the thought that there must have been some colleagues who were quite willing to see him take a tumble.

  Gladstone’s approach to the issue was based on a tramlines logic which could sometimes take over his mind, and was buttressed by what Palmerston saw as his ability to persuade himself of the rightness of any view which he chose to hold. Here he persuaded himself that tax on the income of charities was not just a fiscal convenience but a moral imperative. If ever a man deliberately poked a stick into a wasps’ nest it was he. He supported his action with the following arguments. Most money at the disposal of charities came from legacies. But deathbed bequests were not nearly as laudable as giving away money during a man’s lifetime, when he genuinely deprived himself of spending power. In a legacy he merely deprived someone else. (To this precept Gladstone gave considerable practical effect. Throughout his adult lifetime he gave to charity £114,000, the equivalent of £5½ million today, spread surprisingly evenly over the decades.)17 Lifetime gifts were, however, made out of taxed income and, assuming they went to the revenue accounts of charities, enjoyed no concession. This was perverse, and meant that not only did the existing law on the taxation of charities offend the principle that all money, ‘a trust from God’, should be taxed alike, but also favoured the less worthy over the more worthy form of giving. To make sure that no wasps in the nest were left undisturbed he added, for good measure, the argument that most charities were inefficiently and even corruptly run.

  The furore was considerable. The ‘wasps’ assembled a most formidable deputation which waited upon Gladstone at 3.30 p.m. on 4 May. It was headed by the Duke of Cambridge (Commander-in-Chief and the Queen’s cousin) and made up, inter alia, of both Archbishops58 and of that Earl of Shaftesbury who epitomized philanthropy. Gladstone received them for forty-five minutes, and then, less than an hour later, got up in the House of Commons and spoke for three hours and ten minutes in defence of his proposals. It was widely thought to have been one of the two or three outstanding parliamentary performances of his life. It was cogent and trenchant and defiant, but it was inevitably defensive, and its artistry and muscular skill lay in the triumph of technique over circumstances. It was the equivalent of a captain’s 80 on a bad wicket in a Test match which was in the course of being lost. He put everything he had into it: ‘Worked hard on my papers all the morning. Spoke 5.10–8.20 with all my might, such as it was; after such prayer as I can make.’ But it was a dying fall: ‘The feeling grew more favourable to the act of justice we recommended: but we could not fairly ask our friends to divide, and withdrew the Clauses.’18

  The retreat was complete, redeemed only by the brilliance of the bugle call by which it was ordered. Yet Gladstone took it very much in his stride. Eighteen-sixty-three was altogether a good year for him, much better than 1860 and 1861 when he had experienced heavy strains in living with Palmerston. His position in the government had become secure and powerful. He was in full command of the Treasury, and could run it without undue effort. That summer he spent the whole of August at Hawarden, an almost equally complete September at Penmaenmawr, and then two weeks ‘in attendance’ at Balmoral. The last does not sound much like a holiday but Gladstone was surprisingly successful in making it so, with long walking expeditions (one of nineteen miles) on his own. The fortnight appeared to involve only two dinners and three audiences with the Queen, who when she had tried to have a fourth had found Gladstone missing in the hills. These limited contacts he found perfectly agreeable, and it was only after a similar tour of duty in the following year that he recorded a little maliciously: ‘she weighs I am told 11 stone eight pounds – a secret! Rather much for her height.’ And again: ‘Mrs Bruce says the Queen was not well: and it seems she drinks her claret strengthened, I should have thought spoiled, with whisky.’19

  His pleasure in Penmaenmawr was at its peak in those years of the early 1860s. In 1862 he had there enjoyed twenty-seven sea-bathes, the presence of two bishops (Oxford and Gloucester who must have treated each other warily in view of the impending York choice), as well as having two deans within driving distance, and a twenty-four-hour visit from the Dowager Duchess of Sutherland, whose husband, the second Duke, had died in 1861. They had both often entertained Gladstone when the Duke was alive, notably during his enforced twenty-six days at Dunrobin in 1857, but it was with Harriet Sutherland, an intelligent and forceful woman, four years older than himself, that Gladstone’s particular friendship lay. During the parliamentary sessions of 1862 and 1863 he spent respectively six and seven weekends at Cliveden, the Sutherland palace on the middle Thames which Barry had built only a decade or so before and which was to pass through the Grosvenors before finding its way to the Astors in 1893. The Dowager Duchess died in 1868 but not before she had played a notable part, at Gladstone’s instigation, in entertaining Garibaldi on his somewhat swaggering visit to England in 1864. The hero of the Risorgimento was said to be the only man who had ever smoked a cigar in her private sitting room, as well as requiring carefully placed spittoons.59 Duchess Harriet was a considerable source of political solace and advice to Gladstone, and it was a pity that her son, the third duke, became so virulently partisan as to call him a Russian agent in 1878.

  In 1863 Penmaenmawr was almost as good as in the preceding year. The Duchess did not come and there was only one bishop in the neighbourhood, but he was a major prelate. Tait, already Bishop of London, later succeeded Longley at Canterbury. There were twenty-one sea-bathes, but some concern about ‘my stiffening limbs’. After a walk of twenty-five and three-quarter miles (very precise) on his way across North Wales from Hawarden he feared that his days ‘of long stretches’ were over. In general, however, he seems to have been less obsessed with growing old than had been the case at the beginning of his fifties. Of the turn of the year 1862–3, when he became fifty-three, he wrote with a satisfaction and an optimism which, while not complacent, would have been unimaginable a dozen years before: ‘thus ending well what has been so good a year. We sat, and heard the bells chime in 1863; may its course be blessed to us all.’20 And a year later, while there was some of the old introspective note about sin, his birthday entry was very calm compared with his previous habit. Two days after that, at the end of that calendar year, there was more of an attempt at high-fl
own prose than a repetition of the old breast-beating: ‘And so farewell old year. May the next if given fly away with wings unsoiled.’21

  One almost inevitable disappointment of the period was that, as Willy Gladstone came to the end of his Oxford years, so his failure to emulate his father became manifest. He had got a first in Honour (classical) moderations two years before. But the diary entry for 7 June 1862 read: ‘Heard in the morning of Willy’s second class [in Greats]. The news was chill; but it is easy to see it may be good.’22 Then it was decided that Willy should go back to Oxford, and read for another honours school in Law and History, and perhaps try for an All Souls fellowship. Six months later, however, there came the even worse result from this: ‘A letter from Willy informed us he had only a 3rd Class in the Law and History Schools. Both his virtues & his faculties excellent: it would be very wrong to complain if his energy is not quite on the same scale.’23 It is with deep sympathy for Willy that one feels the struggle between Gladstone’s parental affection and his difficulty in understanding how anyone called William Gladstone could possibly fail to have almost infinite reserves of energy. The All Souls prospect naturally evaporated and it was not clear what Willy was going to do. However, he became MP for Chester three years later (at a cost to his father of £2000), but not to much more purpose than had been achieved by the parliamentary careers of his uncles and grandfather. And in the autumn of 1862 Stephy followed the well-worn path from Eton to Christ Church, and Gladstone had a second horse in the Lit. Hum. stakes. Admirable and dedicated a parson though Stephen Gladstone became, however, he did no better in this race than had his brother.

  To balance these disappointments there were two reconciliations across the Anglican–Roman frontier, neither of them complete, but each marking some assuagement of old wounds. His sister Helen had regained an even keel and after 1858 settled for several years, until she again went to live in Germany, in the appropriately named St Helen’s Priory in the Isle of Wight. There she was surrounded by a calm if very Catholic atmosphere. She was also close to Osborne, which enabled Gladstone to combine Court visits with calls on his sister. On at least one occasion (in 1859) he even had her over to Osborne House for luncheon with the Household (that is, not with the Queen) after a Privy Council meeting. Ironically it was General Grey, the husband of Caroline Farquhar, who extended the invitation, and the visit, which seems to have gone smoothly, certainly indicated a vast revival in Gladstone’s trust in her. On another (1861) occasion he found her entertaining Cardinal Wiseman and his chaplain Dr Vaughan (later himself Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster). So far from upsetting Gladstone this was followed by his travelling back to London with them and having ‘much conversation’ on the next day.60