Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  In his edition of Gladstone’s Correspondence on Church and Religion (1910), D. C. Lathbury quoted from Richard Church’s wonderful description of Newman’s sermons to give his reader a sense of how special they were:56 “Plain, direct, unornamented, clothed in English that was only pure and lucid, free from any faults of taste, strong in their flexibility and perfect command both of language and thought, they were the expression of a piercing and large insight into character and conscience and motives, of a sympathy at once most tender and most stern with the tempted and the wavering, of an absolute and burning faith in God and His counsels, in His love, in His judgments, in the awful glory of His generosity and His magnificence. They made men speak of the things which the preacher spoke of, and not of the sermon or the preacher.”57 Gladstone, Lathbury confirms, had no part “in this strenuous and passionate life. Even his friendship with James Hope does not seem to have led him to read the early ‘Tracts for the Times,’ with their brief, direct, stimulating appeals to the consciences of Churchmen. His knowledge of the Movement hardly began till it had passed its first triumphant stage and entered upon a period of reverses and, what was worse, of doubt and hesitation.”58 In a memorandum dated 7 December 1893, Gladstone confirmed Lathbury’s point: “In the year 1841 or 1842, under a variety of combined influences, my mind attained a certain fixity of state in a new development. I had been gradually carried away from the moorings of an education, Evangelical in the party sense, to what I believe history would warrant me in calling a Catholic position, in the acceptance of the visible historical Church and the commission it received from our Saviour to take charge, in a visible form, of His work on earth. I do not mean to touch upon the varied stages of this long journey … I shall only say that the Oxford Tracts had little to do with it: nothing to do with it at all … except to say that it was … due to them that Catholicism, so to speak, was in the air …”59 So to treat Gladstone as an honorary Tractarian is inaccurate. It is true that he did not openly oppose the Movement but neither did he march under its banner.

  Once the ideal religious state set out in his book came to nothing, politics might have become something of a blank to Gladstone, but it was a blank into which he poured furious activity and in which he tried to establish a new religion, a new faith. In 1850 he had gone to Naples and there he saw how the Neapolitan government was persecuting the liberal minister Carlo Poerio and his followers for their support of the constitution of 1848. Gladstone attended Poerio’s trial and was present when the government sentenced him to 24 years’ hard labor in chains. He even managed to gain admittance to the dungeon where Poerio and thousands of other hapless political prisoners were being left to languish. There Gladstone discovered a truth about European conservatism that he never forgot. As he wrote to Lord Aberdeen, the Foreign Secretary: “It is the wholesale persecution of virtue … It is the awful profanation of public religion … It is the perfect prostitution of the judicial office … It is the savage and cowardly system of moral as well as physical torture … This is the negation of God erected into a system of government.”60 After this epiphany, Gladstonian liberalism was born. What it was exactly is not easy to say. John Vincent said that “it was an intelligent way of making the best of a weak international position. Disraeli’s foreign policy pretended the weak position did not exist. For the illusion of morality it substituted the illusion of strength.”61 G. M. Young said it consisted of “a horror of all coercive powers, great or small—Empires, Papacies, Parliaments, Sultans, Colonial Offices, Trade Unions—which do not rest their authority on consent, habitual or expressed …”62 For Matthew it was “fiscal probity.” David Bebbington saw it as having been less liberal than communitarian, embodying Gladstone’s conviction that “Sectional selfishness, at whatever level, must give way to the common good.”63 Whatever definition one attaches to Gladstonian liberalism, it is clear that it made Gladstone peculiarly susceptible to what Newman called “smelling out Powder Plots,”64 particularly plots laid by what Gladstone regarded as a tyrannical Papacy intent on stealing away the hearts and minds of Catholic and even Protestant Europe as it had stolen away his sister Helen and his close friends Henry Manning and James Hope.

  However one views Gladstone’s “rescue work” on behalf of London’s prostitutes—and I am inclined to agree with Colin Matthew that, whatever else it was, it was not ignoble—he often seemed to prefer the company of pretty young trollops to his aging wife. Gladstone’s love for his wife was strong but restive. This is important to keep in mind because when he confided to a friend about the intensity of his sense of political vocation, to what he called his “master-pursuit,” he referred to its object rather tellingly as “My country-wife, i.e., the country as my wife …”65 From this, Matthew argues, rightly, that Gladstone’s religion was “intricately and essentially linked to his sense of organic nationality.”66 F. D. Maurice put the nationalist case for Anglicanism in terms that Gladstone would hardly have disputed. “If our Church is both Catholic and Protestant, our Nation is wholly Protestant. In so far as we are a nation, united together under one king, we do by the very law of our existence protest against any power which assumes control over our kings, and denies their direct responsibility to God … The nations were brought into their distinct life by the church … they cannot retain their distinct life without the church … conversely, the universal body sinks into a contradiction, when it refuses to recognize the personality of each national body … We are not striving to make ourselves a Protestant nation … we have been so implicitly at all times …”67 Like Maurice, Gladstone found Rome unacceptable not because it was not the true Catholic Church—though, of course, he never thought it was—but because it was not the true English Church. Duff Cooper once said that for the English there are only two religions: Roman Catholicism, which is wrong, and all the others, which don’t matter.68 Most of Gladstone’s various articles on religion can be seen as an attempt to get his countrymen to agree that at least one of those other religions did matter.

  The woman to whom Gladstone confided his remark about his “country-wife” was Mrs. Laura Thistlethwayte, suitably enough for the Gladstonian ηθος a former courtesan and an Irishwoman, whom he had met one afternoon in 1864 while riding in Rotten Row. When Lord Carnarvon got wind of their friendship, he had no doubt as to its import: “Gladstone seems to be going out of his mind … He goes to dinner with her and she in return in her preachments to her congregation exhorts them to put up their prayers on behalf of Mr. G’s reform bill.”69 Lord Stanley was equally astonished by the Liberal leader’s new association. “Strange story of Gladstone frequenting the company of a Mrs. Thistlethwaite, a kept woman in her youth, who induced a foolish person with a large fortune to marry her. She has since … taken to religion, and preaches or lectures. This, with her beauty, is the attraction to G., and it is characteristic of him to be indifferent to scandal. But I can scarcely believe the report that he is going to pass a week with her and her husband at their country house—she not being visited, or received in society.”70 Two days later, he records in his diary: “Malmesbury called … and confirmed the story of Gladstone’s going to visit the Thistlethwaites! A strange world!”71 For Gladstone, Mrs. Thistlethwayte was an irresistible amalgam, combining as she did the allure of the pretty young prostitutes he met on his rescue missions, with his own passionate religiosity. As he confided in his Diary, “Duty and evil temptation are there before me, on the right & left. But I firmly believe in her words ‘holy’ and ‘pure,’ & in her cleaving to God.”72 Whether duty altogether prevailed as their relationship progressed is not clear from another entry: “It is difficult to repel, nay to check or to dissuade, the attachment of a remarkable, a signal soul, clad in a beautiful body.”73 What appears adulterous might have been innocent. Certainly the appearance of impropriety never ruffled Gladstone. When a Scot tried to blackmail him for talking to a prostitute after he submitted his 1853 budget, Gladstone nonchalantly turned the blackguard’s letter over to the polic
e. “These talkings of mine are certainly not within the rules of worldly prudence,” he admitted, but he would not stop them to avoid threats of blackmail or obviate malicious gossip.74 To those who tattled about his relationship with Mrs. Thistlethwayte he showed the same imperturbable indifference.

  Mrs. Thistlethwayte is important because it was to her that Gladstone revealed the extent to which politics consumed him. In a typical letter he wrote: “My profession involves me in a life of constant mental and moral excess. I must before long endeavor to escape from it … And what must be my destiny and duty, when that day arrives? Surely to try to recover & retain the balance of my mind: to awaken and cherish in myself the life of faith, of ‘the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen’: to unwind and detach that multitude of ties and interests which now bind me to the world I live in: to do something, if it be permitted me, for the glory of God …”75 These profoundly introspective letters are interesting when one recalls that what Gladstone most objected to about the Roman Church was auricular confession, which he considered ‘priestcraft.’ Queen Victoria shared his horror of confession, telling Dean Stanley in a memorandum of 1873, “A complete Reformation is what we want. But if that is impossible, the Archbishop should have the power given him, by Parliament, to stop all these Ritualistic practices, dressings, bowings, etc., and everything of that kind, and above all, all attempts at confession.”76 The essayist William Hazlitt might have been radical in some respects, but in his views on confession he was thoroughly conventional. “The contrariety and warfare of different faculties and dispositions within us has not only given birth to the Manichean and Gnostic heresies, and to other superstitions of the East, but will account for many of the mummeries and dogmas both of Popery and Calvinism—confession, absolution, justification by faith, etc; which, in the hopelessness of attaining perfection, and our dissatisfaction with ourselves for falling short of it, are all substitutes for actual virtue, and an attempt to throw the burden of a task, to which we are unequal or only half disposed, on the merits of others, or on outward forms, ceremonies, and professions of faith.”77 It was this widespread revulsion from confession that gave Lady Georgiana Fullerton’s fictional treatment of the subject in Ellen Middleton (1844) such a fascination for Newman’s contemporaries. Newman, for his part, even as an Anglican, held firmly that “Confession is the life of the Parochial charge, without it all is hollow.”78

  In another letter to Mrs. Thistlethwayte, Gladstone wrote: “If I were to send you the counterpart of what you have sent me [she had sent him an unfinished autobiography which he found ‘like a story from the Arabian nights’], I should certainly repel you. But to do it would be beyond my power. I must in honesty say to you, probe me deeper; I will conceal nothing, falsify nothing consciously, but … make sure that you know me. Do not take me upon trust … I am a strange mixture of art and nature.”79 This was shrewd self-analysis. Gladstone was an unusual mélange of guilelessness and calculation. Whenever his defenders and detractors made their respective cases for or against him, they did so by citing one or the other of these qualities. Agatha Ramm, for example, the editor of the political correspondence between Gladstone and Granville, attributed Gladstone’s political success to three things: his oratory, his manipulation of public opinion, and what she called his “most advantageous appearance of unworldliness.”80

  In his sermon “The Danger of Accomplishments” (1835), Newman roundly declared that “all formal and intentional expression of religious emotions, all studied passionate discourse, [is] dissipation … a drain and waste of our religious and moral strength.”81 This could apply to a good deal of what Gladstone wrote and uttered over the years, especially when spurred on by what his wife feared might degenerate into religious mania, but it does not apply to the passage above, or many others, in which Gladstone captured that sense of desolation that strikes so many public men when they recognize how public life banishes them from their true country. Indeed, the spiritual poverty of public life was one of Gladstone’s great themes. Again, in another diary entry he says: “I feel like a man with a burden under which he must fall if he looks to the right or left, or fails from any cause to concentrate his mind and muscle upon his progress step by step. This absorption, this excess … is the fault of public life, with its insatiable demands which do not leave the smallest stock of moral energy unexhausted and available for other purposes … Swimming for his life, a man does not see much of the country through which the river winds …”82

  After the Gorham Judgment, which caused Manning and Hope to defect, Gladstone did not want to see that country. When the Judgment was imminent, he wrote: “If Mr. Gorham be carried through … I say not only is there no doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration … but there is no doctrine at all.”83 In 1847, when the liberal Rev. G. C. Gorham was presented a vicarage in Exeter, Henry Phillpotts refused to install him because he refused to accept baptismal regeneration. Gorham appealed to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and in 1850 they overruled Phillpotts. Just how hard this hit Gladstone is evident from a letter he wrote to Lord Lyttleton: “The case of the Church of England at this moment is a very dismal one, and almost leaves men to choose between a broken heart and no heart at all.”84 When Manning wrote to Hope and said he was shocked by the Erastianism85 of the Judgment, Hope wrote back: “If you have not hitherto read Erastianism in the history of the Church of England since the Reformation, then I fear you and I have much to discuss before we can meet on common ground.”86 It was the Tractarians’ refusal to concede the Erastianism of the English Church that gave their movement so much of its passionate unreality. The Gorham Judgment proved that liberal politicians, not bishops, would be the final arbiters of what constituted Anglican doctrine. In the wake of the Judgment, Robert Wilberforce, the second son of the philanthropist, suggested to Manning that they find a colonial bishop and set up their own Free Church. “No,” replied Manning. “Three hundred years ago we left a good ship for a boat; I am not going to leave the boat for a tub.”87

  In writing to Manning when he was on the brink of conversion, Gladstone made lightly veiled references to Newman that crackle with resentment, which show the rage he was storing up that would explode in the Expostulation (1875). “If you go over, I should earnestly pray that you might not be as others who have gone before you but might carry with you a larger heart and mind, able to raise and keep you above that slavery to a system, that exaggeration of its forms, that disposition to rivet every shackle tighter and to stretch every breach wider, which makes me mournfully feel that the men who have gone from the Church of England after being reared in her and by her, are far more keen and … far more cruel than the mass of whom they joined.”88 Much is made of Newman’s prose style but Gladstone could also write. He was one of those good, sloppy writers, rather like the Melville of Moby Dick. When his passions were aroused, he wrote with real power. His writing might be prolix, rambling, convoluted and overwrought but it captures perfectly his messy grandeur. The actress Ellen Terry, who first met Gladstone at the salon surrounding the painter G. F. Watts at Little Holland House in the early 1860s, recalled something of this grandeur when she wrote of the liberal politician, “Like a volcano at rest, his face was pale and calm, but the calm was the calm of the grey crust of Etna. You looked into the piercing dark eyes, and caught a glimpse of the red-hot crater beneath the crust.”89

  Another cause for the anger behind the Expostulation came from a prediction that Gladstone made to Manning in January 1851, four months before Manning converted. “Some things I have learned in Italy [he was writing from Naples] that I did not know before, one in particular. The temporal power of the Pope, that great, wonderful, and ancient creation, is gone; the problem has been worked out, the ground is mined, the train is laid, a foreign force, in its nature transitory, alone stays the hand of those who would complete the process by applying the match … When that event comes it will bring about a great shifting of parts … God grant it may be
for good. I desire it because I see plainly that justice requires it, and God is the God of justice. Not out of malice to the Popedom: for I cannot at this moment dare to answer with a confident affirmative the question, a very solemn one: ‘Ten, twenty, fifty years hence, will there be any other body in Western Christendom witnessing for fixed dogmatic truth?’ With all my soul, I wish it well …”90 Here Gladstone gloated over the imminent demise of the Pope’s temporal power. When that was dynamited, Popedom, as he called it, would be considerably weakened, as would “fixed dogmatic truth.” Gladstone treated this as unavoidable: the justice of God. But twenty years later, events proved his bold prediction wrong: “Popedom” was thriving and with the advocacy of his old friend, Manning, which only added to his fury.

  Of all the political projects that would consume Gladstone after the Gorham Judgment, none demanded more of his energies than trying to bring some solution to the religious, agrarian and political problems that made Ireland a byword for English misrule. G. M. Young might dismiss Gladstone’s Irish efforts as “that heroic squandering of heroic endowments on a problem which (we may now say) the intellectual equipment of the age was not capable of solving,”91 but there was as much practicality as heroism in Gladstone’s vision of Irish Home Rule. Margot Asquith recalled the Grand Old Man telling her when she was a girl: “We are bound to lose Ireland in consequence of years of cruelty, stupidity and misgovernment but I would rather lose her as a friend than as a foe.”92 Roy Jenkins, in his wonderfully sprawling biography, sees Gladstone’s Irish campaign in still more pedestrian terms: for Gladstone, the “cheese-paring” Chancellor of the Exchequer, Ireland was a “potentially dangerous source of demands upon the Treasury,” and he was determined to see to it that the Irish were not allowed “to plunder the public purse.”93 Better, in other words, that they be their own rather than England’s beggars.