Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Among old resorts, Gladstone went for a three-week visit to Penmaenmawr at the end of October 1896. It was the first return for nearly ten years. There was no sea-bathing or even climbing of the Gwynedd hills, but he found the house – Plas Mawr – more comfortable than hitherto, and the visit left a sufficient glow of pleasure that Catherine Gladstone went back in 1899 during her two brief years of widowhood. On the other hand Biarritz was never revisited during the interval between office and the grave. It was superseded by Cannes, where the comforts of Lord Rendel’s villa and the relative beneficence of the winter climate convinced Gladstone that it would massage his constitution. But it was all for health and not for interest. At Biarritz, a few years before, he could at least look at the wild seas and make inland drives into the Pyrenees. At Cannes, apart from Lord Acton’s intermittent presence, it was healthful repose rather than stimulus which was on the menu. It was an old man’s rest home, and it was appropriate that when he left it for the last time in February 1898 he should have gone immediately to Bournemouth, its nearest English equivalent, for a final and unhappy month away from home.

  Cannes was central to his years of decline. He was there from early January to late March 1895 (with a side excursion to Cap Martin), from the end of December 1895 to early March 1896, and from January 1897 for another couple of months, and then for a final painful visit from late November of that year to the retreat to Bournemouth in February 1898. It was extraordinary the virtues which the English of that epoch attributed to the unreliable winter weather of the Côte d’Azur. Its exaggerated reputation brought Queen Victoria to Cimiez for a season during Gladstone’s penultimate visit, and they met briefly in a Cannes hotel for the last time. The Queen came over to Cannes to visit what Gladstone described as ‘a copious supply of Hanoverian royalties’. Princess Louise, later Duchess of Argyll, got the Gladstones to come to tea with her, and then slipped them into her mother’s presence. It would be difficult to present the occasion as one of reconciliation. The Queen wrote: ‘Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone came in for a moment, both looking much aged’4 (which appeared to give her satisfaction). Gladstone set the visit at ten minutes rather than ‘a moment’, but made it clear that the Queen had brought it to an end and propelled them into a mêlée of Hanoverians. ‘To speak frankly,’ he wrote, ‘it seemed to me that the Queen’s peculiar faculty and habit of conversation had disappeared.’5

  The Queen in the South of France was composing herself for the rigours of her Diamond Jubilee, which took place on and around 22 June 1897. Although he was the senior Privy Councillor (he believed himself to be the second senior, but a search even with the aid of the Privy Council Office fails to reveal a rival) as well as the most famous British statesman, the Gladstones do not seem to have been invited to perform any special participatory role. In view of the highly imperialist tone of the proceedings this was perhaps as well, but it was an added slight. The Colonial premiers, however, made a pilgrimage to Hawarden after the London festivities, and the Prince and Princess of Wales were also briefly there in that summer.

  Apart from these three long sessions in the Alpes Maritimes, Gladstone’s only other expedition beyond the shores of Britain was another northern-waters cruise for a fortnight in June 1895. Sir Donald Currie was again the provider, and the places visited were Hamburg, Kiel for the Kaiser’s opening of the new canal, and Copenhagen. Gladstone recorded it in a then rare diary entry and in a mixed but above all flat way, contrasting with his previous exuberance of holiday enjoyment: ‘Cruise to the Baltic in the Tantallon Castle. We did not see the places we mainly wished, but the weather was very good, the hotel incomparable [Where? How one misses the daily entry!] and the sanatory effect admirable!’6

  His intellectual vigour at least for the two years or so between his recovery from the cataract operation and the end of 1896 was greater than might be inferred from this somewhat flaccid account of his sea trip. Indeed immediately after his return he exceptionally spent five days in London, mostly working in the British Museum on material relating to the eighteenth-century divine Joseph Butler, Bishop first of Bristol and later of Durham, to whom Gladstone devoted the main part of his post-Prime Ministerial energies. He prepared and annotated a new edition of Butler’s works, which was published in February 1896, and was followed a few months later by a 150,000-word theological volume of his own, entitled Studies Subsidiary to the Works of Bishop Butler. Although it bore the Clarendon imprint, which is the Oxford University Press’s seal of academic quality, it was bereft of an index, a deficiency much more common then than a century later. But it was a spirited work of not very subtle theology, including some philippics against ‘Mr Bagehot, Mr Leslie Stephen and Mr Matthew Arnold’ (two of them dead), whom he saw as detractors of Butler.

  Butler was the central work of Gladstone’s twilight years, but by no means the only one. When he went out of office he had four tasks on hand, and three of them he completed. In spite of his diary claim that he had ‘finished’ his version of the Odes of Horace on the day that he came back from his resignation audience at Windsor, he in fact did a good deal of subsequent tidying-up work on them. They were a form of high-grade crossword puzzle for him, which suited his fading eyesight well. His translations were eventually published by John Murray in late 1894.

  The third task which he had on hand in March 1894 was a long article on the Atonement which he wrote for the Nineteenth Century and which was published in its September number. With his unique capacity always to seek (and find) a rebound, he had begun work on this not altogether recreational subject, which he curiously mingled with a review of Annie Besant’s Autobiography (a chapter of which also engaged with the Atonement), on 18 February 1894. That was a day when the whole of the London political world was obsessed with the question of whether or not he really was going to resign, and when he himself (according to Algernon West at least) was still waiting to see what the House of Lords would do to the Parish Councils Bill before finally making up his mind.

  The fourth task was the autobiography which he had started, at an even more strange moment than the article on the Atonement, at Dalmeny during the 1892 election campaign. By then he knew that he was going to be Prime Minister again (at eighty-two), although with a small majority which, as he put it, was ‘the heaviest weight I can bear’. Yet, because he could not read, he chose that extraordinary moment to start on an autobiography. This, however, he never completed, despite vast if slightly vague financial incentives. There was a firm offer from Cassell of £5000 (£250,000 today) in 1891, which could have been supplemented by at least an equivalent amount from Putnam’s of New York. Hamilton however recorded that in 1887 he had been offered, probably through his friendly acquaintance Andrew Carnegie, the then fantastic sum of £100,000 (£5 million today) for full rights in a full-scale autobiography. It would have been tempting, first because Gladstone liked to have money, not to spend on himself, but to give away alike to his descendants and to his eleemosynary causes; and second, because Disraeli, at the height of his fame and for all his writer’s professionalism, had earned no more than £10,000 for his semi-autobiographical Endymion (1880). But the temptation, if it was seriously there, was resisted, and the contract was not made.

  This was as well, for Gladstone never got near to completing the autobiography. In the five years to 1897, he wrote interesting fragments about both his early life and his old age (weaker on the middle), rather but not excessively self-justificatory, but anything approaching a continuous whole was elusive. Had he achieved completion he would have anticipated the mid- and late-twentieth-century pattern, which affectively began with Lloyd George, of it being almost obligatory for Prime Ministers (and others) to sell their lives dearly. As it was he nominally stuck to and, together with Rosebery and Salisbury, rounded off the nineteenth-century tradition of leaving others to write biographies rather than oneself taking the first cut of the cake. Nevertheless Gladstone’s outpouring of written words, some but not most solipsistic, was on a scale whi
ch no other Prime Minister except Churchill has ever rivalled. It is matched, again with this solitary exception, only by the enormous bibliography from others which has accumulated around his name.

  Although he resisted, or found insubstantial, the extreme literary blandishments of Mammon, he nonetheless distributed very considerable sums during these final years, and gave the impression of doing so from a satisfactorily elastic bran-tub. In November 1895 he made his main bequest (apart from the site and 20,000 books) to the St Deiniol’s residential library which he had founded at Hawarden. When the transactions were complete he wrote: ‘I am now 40m. poorer than this day week. All right: & may God prosper the work.’7 By 40m he meant of course £40,000 or 40 mille, which was mostly his way of expressing large sums of money, and not £40 million. But allowing for the change in the value of money it meant that he had endowed the St Deiniol’s trust with approximately a modern £2 million. Such underpinning has been one reason why a remotely situated and strongly theological library has more than maintained its vitality over the changes of a century which have not been naturally helpful to such an institution.

  In the autumn (1896) after the St Deiniol’s transaction he ‘completed the arrangement for a third and probably last partition of property among my children’. He calculated that until then each of his three surviving sons had received £27,000 from him, and each of his three surviving daughters £15,000. (The discrimination, while there, was not gross by the standards of the time.) He further calculated that his remaining capital amounted to about £58,000 (‘besides copyrights if they are worth anything’), and decided to distribute almost all of it by giving another £10,000 to each of his sons, which meant that they had each done nearly as well as St Deiniol’s, and another £5000 to each of his daughters, which brought them up to a modern million apiece. In addition he had written in December 1893 of arranging ‘my little money presents for the 13 grandchildren’. This left him with disposable assets of at most £15,000. Nonetheless his will was eventually proved at £57,000, much of which was made up of collections and personal possessions which were not easily disposable.8

  This sloughing off (but not dissipation) of capital seemed to give him a positive satisfaction: ‘It is a comfort and relief to me thus to narrow and reduce my temporal cares. God be thanked.’9 Any shortage of income from the £15,000 was balanced, substantially but not extravagantly, by his having an annuity of £3400 a year as a charge upon the Hawarden estate, which he had made over after the death of Sir Stephen Glynne in 1874 first to his eldest son Willy Gladstone and then, when he died in 1891, to Willy’s son, William Glynne Charles Gladstone, who had been born in 1885. By the 1890s the estate had been restored (mainly by the efforts of Gladstone himself) from its mid-century vicissitudes to a fine upper-medium-sized property of 7000 acres and 2500 inhabitants, producing an income of £10,000 to £12,000 a year and carrying relatively light debts. Indeed it was sufficiently attractive that Gladstone, to whom it briefly reverted between son and grandson, had to fight off a determined attempt by Lord Penrhyn, the slate-quarry magnate and inhabitant of the vast Victorian castle further along the North Wales coast, to contest the succession and get it back for his wife, the daughter of the Revd Henry Glynne.

  His grandson and heir naturally became an important symbol of the future for Gladstone. When Millais painted his third and last Gladstone picture in 1889 the boy was portrayed standing by the chair of the GOM. Eight years after that Gladstone wrote him a long testamentary letter, to be read when the recipient was older and the writer probably dead, in which he expressed some remarkably conservative sentiments about the ownership of land, local leadership and the structure of county society. The Hawarden estate should be a leading influence in Flintshire. ‘Should it be possible, through favouring influences, to reunite to it the lands which it has lost, or other lands, I contemplate such a contingency with satisfaction. Society cannot afford to dispense with its dominant influences.’10 The outlying Glynne lands were not regained, but otherwise the boy in the brief time available to him more than fulfilled his grandfather’s hopes. When he was killed in France in April 1915, at the age of twenty-nine, he had been President of the Oxford Union and was currently Lord Lieutenant of Flintshire and Liberal member of Parliament for Kilmarnock Burghs. The estate then passed to the descendants of Stephen Gladstone, the second and clergyman son, and in a later generation was reunited, not with the lost local lands, but in a more dramatic swoop with old Sir John Gladstone’s Fasque estate in Kincardineshire. The late-twentieth-century Sir William Gladstone became the seventh holder of the baronetcy to which Peel nominated John Gladstone as in effect a recognition of the early Cabinet services of W. E. Gladstone. This he inherited by the normal automatic rules of succession. Fasque he inherited separately by the decision of his bachelor uncle Albert, Stephen Gladstone’s son, who had previously received it in the same way from another bachelor uncle of his own, Thomas Gladstone’s son. In 1985, Sir William Gladstone also became Lord Lieutenant of Clwyd (which includes Flintshire), a tribute not only to him but also to the solidity with which the GOM secured the future of his family as ‘a leading influence’ in the county.

  Gladstone’s final intervention in politics was a reprise, inevitably in a very minor key, of his explosive re-entry in the summer of 1876, twenty years before. The Armenians were a thousand miles from the Bulgarians and on the other side of the Black Sea, but they were nonetheless roughly in the same part of the world in British eyes, their oppressors were the same Constantinople regime, easily portrayed as a cruel and lustful oriental despotism, and Gladstone swept down in both cases like an avenging prophet from the hills, providing some justification for Harcourt’s diatribe to Hamilton about his destructive effect upon the Liberal party.143 Of course in 1896 his force and capacity for follow-through was immensely less than in 1876. On the other hand he was on the second occasion dealing with a more thin-skinned and selfish, even if, in the context of the time, equally right-of-centre Liberal leader. Hartington in the second half of the 1870s was not particularly selfish and at least had the advantage of being phlegmatic. Rosebery in the second half of the 1890s was looking even more urgently than usual for an excuse to flounce.

  When therefore Gladstone went on 24 September 1896 to Hengler’s Circus in Liverpool, which although a vast arena was, he claimed, one of the most agreeable in which to speak, and there delivered an hour and twenty minutes of denunciation of the Turks and demanded that the British government should take somewhat unspecified action against them, it had more effect on the internecine warfare within the Liberal party than on that in the area between the Black and Caspian Seas. Rosebery resigned from the leadership twelve days later, citing this as the ‘last straw on his back’ and complaining that it would enable ‘discontented Liberals to pelt [him] with [Gladstone’s] authority’.11 But Harcourt was Rosebery’s real trouble, even though he too did not approve of Gladstone’s speech. To him, although – or maybe because – he was leader in the Commons, Rosebery absolutely refused to speak. The Liberal party was in fact stultified until it got rid of both of them and, although the last Gladstone eruption was from a party point of view self-indulgent, its objective results were not bad. Two years after Rosebery, Harcourt flounced in turn, and the party moved on to Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith and the possibility of revival.

  The Liverpool speech was Gladstone’s last direct impact upon politics, and a typical one. (His indirect impact of course lingered for decades, through his legend, his friends, his enemies, his disciples, his youngest son, his photographs in innumerable – mostly Nonconformist – cottage homes.) But it was not absolutely his last speech. That came only on 2 August 1897, when he addressed the Hawarden Horticultural Society. It is easy to imagine the semi-feudal, late-Victorian scene, with fine blooms exhibited at the beginning of the holiday season, and the sonorous if somewhat exhausted voice, no doubt with a felicity of elevating, slightly portentous allusion which had always been his forte, advising his listeners
to continue to cultivate their gardens in a seemly and traditional way.

  Early that autumn Gladstone entered his final decline. At his great age, which never failed to surprise him and which was of course much more exceptional then than today, a quiet subsidence might have been expected and deserved. Alas, it was not to be. He developed a cancer of the cheek, which first showed itself through an unpleasant catarrh and advanced to an extreme neuralgic pain. It was not diagnosed until the following March, but it caused him much misery in the meantime. He stayed with Armitstead in Perthshire in October, and Morley, who joined them there, thought that, although he was already complaining, it was the last time that he heard Gladstone talk with ‘all the freedom, full self-possession, and kind geniality of old days’. With peculiar vividness he retailed an exchange between Armitstead and Gladstone which revealed both the obsequiousness of the host and the dismissive fatalism which was then settling on Gladstone. ‘Oh, sir, you’ll live ten years to come,’ Armitstead had said. ‘I do trust that God in his mercy will spare me that’ was Gladstone’s sombre reply.12