by Edward Short
Comically, it was at Baden-Baden that Gladstone finally got word that his hopes for Newman’s return to the Anglican fold were futile. On 29 October 1845, Newman met with the Passionist Father Dominic Barberi and was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Gladstone’s response could hardly conceal how much he and so many others prized their “front rank man:” “The Church of England, being a reality, is not dependent on this or that individual, the immediate duty is, when one secedes, simply to think of the supplying his place, as a rear rank man steps forward when his front rank man falls in battle.”33
What made Newman’s secession personally unsettling to Gladstone was that it rejected so thoroughly the Catholic claims of the Anglican Church to which he was so passionately attached. On 31 January 1842, he wrote a long letter to The Times in which he held forth on what he meant by the Catholic core of the national Church.
It is one of the conspicuous benefits of the Catholic principle, that as it teaches men they are knit together by the sacred bond of communion in the body of the Saviour, and not by the unsure coincidence of the operations of their own weak judgments upon high and sacred truth, it can no longer remain a question of private inclination or choice founded thereon, whether to adhere to a given form of religion or to leave it. If such a body be bound within that sacred bond—that is, if it be Catholic—it is a duty to remain in it; if the silver cord be broken, it is a duty to depart. It is their business to be, not where they will, or where they like, or where they choose, but where they have the assured promise of the Spirit. But when the character of Catholicity is erased, the Church leaves them, and not they the Church … Upon that word, that one word Catholic, they have concentrated their single hope and desire, their entire and undivided affections. Not because it is in opposition to the spirit of our reformed religion: on the contrary, they harmonize together. Not because it is in substation for the originality and intrinsically higher, but now neutralized, if not profaned, designation of Christian, but because, ennobled and consecrated in the struggles of sixteen hundred years, it has become inseparably associated with the idea of the everlasting Gospel as a permanent and substantive revelation from God, and is the only epithet which can now be said to constitute a fit and a full exponent of that idea. It alone is the fence which infidelity has never overleapt, the weapon it has never dared to handle. Without its bulwark lie the varying and uncertain forms of human waywardness: within it is the City of God.34
Ten years before, John Bowden, Newman’s closest friend at Oxford, had made Gladstone’s point even more boldly: “Our great error has been that we have forgotten ourselves, or at least forgotten to teach others, that we, Churchmen, are the Catholics of England; and, unless we can wrest the monopoly of the term from the Papists, we do nothing. We must disabuse our fellow churchmen of the idea that we belong to a Church, comparatively new, which, some 300 years ago, supplanted the old Catholic Church of these realms. Let us then bear, by all means, our Catholic title on our front …”35 Whether Newman, with his far greater familiarity with the patristic tradition and with the works of the Anglican divines of the seventeenth century, ever entirely persuaded himself that this was indeed the case is dubious. In any case, once Newman denied the Catholicity of the Anglican faith, Gladstone recognized that he was denying his own faith altogether. To understand where Gladstone got what he liked to call his own English Catholic faith we need to revisit his long political career, as well as his personal life.
Of all nineteenth-century public men, none plunged into the business of public life more voraciously than Gladstone and yet, by all accounts, he disliked public life. His grand nephew George Lyttleton calculated that during his sixty years in the House of Commons, during which he led four governments as Prime Minister, he planned to resign eighteen times. The son of a Liverpool merchant who made a pile trading sugar from the West Indies, Gladstone went first to Eton and then to Christ Church, the alma mater of such political luminaries as Canning, Peel, Salisbury, Dalhousie and Minto, as well as such religious leaders as John Penn, John Wesley, and Newman’s good friend and associate, Edward Bouverie Pusey. Yet the sense of destiny that Gladstone brought to his political career can be traced not so much to his patrician education as to an encounter he had in the summer of 1817 when he was eight-and-a-half. While out walking with a schoolfellow a mile or so from his home, he met a madman with an axe and had it not been for an intervening passer-by, Gladstone might very well have been hacked to death.36 The experience left him convinced that he had been spared to perform a special work, one ordained by God. In later life, he would become fascinated with axes, even collecting them.37 His gratitude to the man who saved his life inspired his first recorded writing, a poem of thanksgiving:
Oh! Lord how good wert thou in saving
A poor frail creature like me
When death over my head was waving
Then in the Grave I should be.
I am devoted to thy service
In spite of those wicked ones
And ’tis with thy help O Lord
That I resist their temptations.
Oh! Lord I pray thee bless the Man
The man that was so brave
Oh! Lord I pray thee bless the Man
That Saved me from the Grave.38
Gladstone remained in politics for as long as he did largely out of a quixotic sense of duty. Duty to the royal family, duty to the nation’s finances, duty to the lower orders, duty to Ireland, duty to the Liberal Party, duty to the Bulgarians, duty to the Armenians. (The undergraduate F. E. Smith spoke in the Oxford Union against his Armenian agitation on the grounds that “A man with a family has no right to become a knight-errant.”39) In a letter to his father, the 21-year-old Gladstone confided his doubts about his “future destiny”—he was torn between the Church and politics—but said he was inclined to ministerial office because “Nothing could compete with the grandeur of its end or of its means, the restoration of man to that image of his Maker which is now throughout the world so lamentably defaced … Spreading religion has a claim infinitely transcending all others in dignity, in solemnity, and in usefulness.”40 Four days later, Gladstone wrote in his diary: “On Monday when I was in Oxford and saw the people parading with flags and bands of music my first impulse was to laugh, my second to cry: and I thought how strangely men had missed the purpose of their being.”41 Ambivalence about public life would follow Gladstone to the grave. And yet in all his political schemes he retained an almost pastoral solicitude for what he called “the moral wilderness of the world.”42
Later, in 1839, he told his wife-to-be Catherine Glynne that he would have preferred being a clergyman but had decided instead to make politics Christian. That remarkable woman agreed to be engaged to him then and there—at a garden party given by Lady Shelley at Lonsdale House, Parson’s Green. Indeed, she confided to her religiose suitor that she had copied out extracts from his book in order to learn them by heart.43 The aristocratic connections that Catherine brought to the marriage, including the Hawarden estates, sweetened the considerable means Gladstone’s father provided his son (including pocket money for “Linen, Books, Carriages, Plate &c”) and paved the way for Gladstone’s unprecedented political influence, which, as Colin Matthew remarked, made him “the arbitrator and mediator between the aristocracy and the middle class.”44 The deep attachment that large numbers of aristocratic and middle-class Catholics felt to Newman, as well as middle-class Anglicans, gave him a comparable influence, though the extent to which he understood and appealed to the lower orders is still not sufficiently recognized.
Most political marriages are complicated things—commingling the private and the public, passion and policy—but the Gladstone marriage was complicated still further by the tenacious sense of honor that bound husband and wife. In July 1851, Gladstone wrote to his wife: “When you say I do not know half the evil of your life, you say that which I believe in almost every case is true between one human being and another; but it sets me thinkin
g how little you know the evil of mine of which at the last day I shall have a strange tale to tell.”45 Disraeli was famously funny about Gladstone being “inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity,” but he could be concision itself when he spoke from the heart.46
“Politics,” Gladstone wrote to his friend Manning in 1835, “would be an utter blank to me were I to make the discovery that we were mistaken in their association with religion.”47 This was an ironic remark coming from a man who would later connive at both the Jerusalem Bishopric48 and the Gorham Judgment,49 both of which proved that in the Church of England there was a very close association indeed between politics and religion, though not the sort that the author of The State in its Relations with the Church (1838) had in mind. In that book, Gladstone argued that the State should take an active role in reaffirming the established religion, as “that form of belief which it conceives to contain the largest portion of the elements of truth with the smallest admixture of error,” without, however, encroaching on what he believed should be the English Church’s spiritual autonomy. The Times described the book as full of “popish biases” and “contaminated” with the “new-fangled Oxford bigotries” being spread by “certain stupid and perfidious pamphlets entitled ‘Tracts of the Times.’”50 (Newman’s response to this was amusing: “Gladstone’s book has come out,” he wrote to Charles Marriott, “and the Times denounces it as Puseyism. I suppose his avowals are magnificent. But the papers are now all up in arms as if against Popery. The Jesuits are scaring every one out of his life, and pushing us all ‘from our stools.’”51) Yet for all his admiration of Newman’s criticisms of evangelicalism in his Parochial and Plain Sermons, Gladstone never entirely embraced Tractarianism: it was too Roman.52 In his lifelong insistence that the State advance the interests of religion, Gladstone had more in common with the “two-bottle orthodox,” as conservative High Churchmen were called, than with the Tractarians.
Gladstone only attended one of the legendary four o’clock sermons at St. Mary’s that gave the principles of the Oxford Movement their most eloquent definition: the third of the Oxford University Sermons, “Evangelical Sanctity the Completion of Natural Virtue” (1831), which he thought contained “much singular, not to say objectionable matter, if one may so speak of so good a man.”53 What Gladstone probably disliked about the sermon was that it took a dubious view of the moral efficacy of religion, about which Gladstone always tended to be sanguine. In one passage, Newman wrote:
It is indeed by no means clear that Christianity has at any time been of any great spiritual advantage to the world at large. The general temper of mankind, taking man individually, is what it ever was, restless and discontented, or sensual, or unbelieving. In barbarous times, indeed, the influence of the Church was successful in effecting far greater social order and external decency of conduct than are known in heathen countries; and at all times it will abash and check excesses which conscience itself condemns. But it has ever been a restraint on the world rather than a guide to personal virtue and perfection of a large scale; its fruits are negative. True it is, that in the more advanced periods of society a greater influence and probity of conduct and courtesy of manners will prevail; but these, though they have sometimes been accounted illustrations of the peculiar Christian character, have in fact no necessary connexion with it. For why should they not be referred to that mere advancement of civilization and education of the intellect, which is surely competent to produce them? Morals may be cultivated as a science; it furnishes a subject-matter on which reason may exercise itself to any extent whatever, with little more than the mere external assistance of conscience and Scripture.54
These were distinctions that Gladstone never made in his own view of established religion, which, as he saw it, must have as one of its defining principles the amelioration of the nation’s morals. In Newman’s sharply distinguishing between religion and morality, and, worse, claiming that religion was only negligibly effective in reforming morals, Gladstone saw unwarranted pessimism. For Newman, on the contrary, to blur religion and morals was to confuse religion with ethics, to make it a kind of “moralism.” Tracey Rowland, in her excellent book, Ratzinger’s Faith (2008), nicely defines this as “the Kantian rationalist tendency to reduce Christianity to the dimensions of an ethical framework, or to equate faith with obeying a law.”55