Gladstone: A Biography (48 page)

Perhaps because of this wider sense of stability some changes in the pattern of parliamentary and associated social life began to set in, which, once made, broadly persisted at least until 1939,
and in many respects until the present day. Gladstone’s diaries, with their obsessive parcelling up of time, are an exceptional source book for patterns of life. Every day is recorded and
often divided into quarter-hour slots. He was exceptional in the amount that he accomplished, and exceptional too in the waging of his unrelenting battle with time, but the fixed points of his days
and his years did not differ greatly from those of other committed and successful contemporary politicians. In the 1860s they still lived under a very different regime, both within a day and within
a year, from that which came to prevail in the twentieth century. The pattern of the day changed within a decade or so, the pattern of the year took nearer half a century to do so. In both cases
the change was associated with a shift in parliamentary habits.

There is a widespread view that Parliament in the mid-nineteenth century was an undemanding occupation for gentlemen of leisure. So far as its leading members were concerned, this is not true.
And even in the case of the larger numbers who saw their duties as being to listen and to vote rather than to speak, their assiduity in providing an attentive audience was much greater than is the
habit today. What is the case is that the parliamentary year was then divided much more equally into a six- or seven-month session of intense activity and an almost equally long recess of
undisturbed calm. Between 1855 and 1870 there was only one very brief autumn session of Parliament. Prorogation almost
invariably took place between the last week of July and
the third week in August and both Houses then remained in recess until the last days of January or, more frequently, the first week of February. (This pattern of six months of guaranteed recess
became somewhat eroded in the last decades of the nineteenth century and disappeared finally by 1914; 1907 and 1913 were the last years without an autumn session.)

These long intervals of opportunity for non-London life and non-political activity were however balanced by the most strenuous parliamentary demands between February and August. The
parliamentary day was slung very late, but it was long, with many of the most crucial hours being those after midnight, and the weekend, a term which has since invaded French but was then many
decades short of establishing itself in English, was accorded little protection. Apart from the short Wednesdays (the equivalent of modern Fridays), Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays were
full House of Commons days, which meant beginning at 4.30, mostly adjourning for a brief dinner interval at 7.30, and then continuing with major debates until an average of about 1.30 a.m., but
quite often until 2.30 a.m. or even later. Saturday sittings were not regular, but not very exceptional either. Between 1948 and 1987 there were only two occasions when the House of Commons met on
a Saturday, one because of the Suez War in 1956 and one on the day following the Argentine invasion of the Falklands in 1982. Gladstone mostly experienced twice as many in the course of a normal
session.

In addition, Saturdays, particularly under the long Palmerston premiership, were the normal Cabinet day. And, to compound the insult, as it would seem to someone used to modern indulgences, one
o’clock was the normal time of meeting; 3.30 or 4.00 p.m. was the normal time by which the business was completed.

Despite these obstacles, and despite the non-existence of any term for it other than a ‘Saturday to Monday’ and even that hardly coming into use until a few decades later, weekending
was nonetheless becoming something of a habit with Gladstone, and no doubt at least as much with other less vigorous ministers too. He would often go to Cliveden, or less frequently to other Thames
Valley, or Surrey, or Kent, or Hertfordshire houses after a Saturday Cabinet. On one occasion indeed he went to Cliveden (then owned by the Sutherlands) after a Saturday evening Buckingham Palace
banquet. Such short journeys, done by train to the nearest local station, Taplow for Cliveden for instance, took no significant time longer than they would today. The railways had become reliable
and quite swift, although not comfortable for long journeys.
There were a lot of smuts and no dining cars. (The first meal served on an English train was in 1874, in a Pullman
car between London and Bedford, but it was the early 1880s before restaurant cars became at all widespread.)

This stage of railway development joined with the habits of official life to make Home Counties retreats essential for weekend entertaining during the session. The great houses of the North and
Scotland were reserved for the autumn and early winter, with the visits more on a midweek than a weekend basis. At these seasons the Gladstones were considerable country-house visitors. To take
ducal palaces alone, and to use again the fifteen-year span between 1855 and 1870, they stayed at Albury, Blenheim, Chatsworth, Clumber, Drumlanrig, Dunrobin, Eaton,
⁶²
Holker, Inverary, Raby, Trentham and Woburn, at most of them more than once, and apart of course from the innumerable Cliveden ‘session’ weekends already
mentioned.

With these and other short excursions the late Saturday arrival was balanced by the return not normally being necessary until late on the Monday morning. Indeed there is an impression throughout
the week of light morning work. Breakfast parties were frequent, and were Gladstone’s favourite form of entertaining, although he and his wife also gave small dinners, mostly for eight or ten
guests, and occasional evening parties, including in June 1865 a ball to which the Prince of Wales came and stayed until half-past two.

The ‘breakfasts’ were however predominant. Gladstone did not do them on the relentless scale of Monckton Milnes, of whom it was said that his reaction to news of the Second Coming
would undoubtedly have been to send the Saviour a card for one of these repasts. Gladstone would probably not have approved of the joke (although his sense of humour was often unpredictable), but
he did enjoy Milnes’s parties, and his own were by no means entirely different. In late July 1863 he noted, perhaps with relief: ‘Eight to breakfast. The twelfth and last [of the
session].’ A detailed and friendly description of one which took place in June 1866 was given by Charles Adams, American minister in London, a commentator capable of considerable astringency
(although not as much as his son Henry Adams, whose satirical novel
Democracy
portrayed the Washington scene of the 1870s in far from flattering terms). Adams wrote after he had received an
oral invitation from Mrs Gladstone:

The breakfasts took place in Carlton House Terrace and not in Downing Street, and in this as in other ways were wholly dissimilar from Lloyd George’s working and persuasive meals of that
name which were held first in 11 and then in 10 Downing Street a half-century later. Gladstone’s breakfasts were social as much as political in intent, and did not involve bacon and eggs or
toast and marmalade. They comprised meat dishes and wine, spread themselves over most of the morning, say from 10.00 or 10.30 to 11.30 or noon, and might just as well have been called
early-luncheon parties. They were comparable with, although less Lucullan than, the ‘breakfasts’ which in the 1870s Charles Dilke gave for Gambetta and other guests at the Café
Anglais in Paris.

These ‘breakfasts’ obviously precluded much serious morning work being done, either before or after them, particularly as at the latter end Gladstone often went on a picture-viewing
or buying expedition. How much could be done before obviously depended on what time he got up, and on this his diaries are curiously uninformative. But it cannot have been very early. Although he
could perform short-term feats of endurance, he needed on average a good deal of sleep. At Hawarden, where there was nothing to keep him up at night, he habitually began with church at 8.30. But
that implied no more than a 7.30 or 7.45 rousing, and in London with the persistence of nights which began only at 2.00 or 3.00 a.m. it is difficult to believe that he was not later.

Once the breakfasts, whether they were social or private, were over, there was no question of any further meal distraction until dinner. The hours between one and three, in
complete contrast with, say, Churchill’s habits even under the worst stresses of the Second World War, were free for meetings or other business. Apart from the ‘luncheon’ at the
Seaforth Rectory in 1853
⁶⁴
and one or two provincial public occasions (as at Burslem, Staffordshire, in October 1863, where the lunch with speeches went on
until past seven, and was then followed by a dinner at eight), the first diary mention of a London ‘luncheon’ was on 13 July 1862 and took place at Lord Granville’s house. But it
was a Sunday (and therefore not a day of normal pattern), the time was not specified and there was no subsequent use of the word until an occasion, again on a Sunday, at Lord Lothian’s in
1867.

If there was no Cabinet or other meeting, the early afternoon up to about 4.30, around which time Gladstone mostly went to the House of Commons, was thus free for Treasury work. But there is
little evidence that he did it in any routine office way. He was constantly writing political letters, frequently acquainting himself with official reports and occasionally preparing papers for the
Cabinet. But there is little record of his ever going into the old Treasury Chambers between Whitehall and 10 Downing Street. He operated from one or other of his residences, 11 Downing Street or
11 Carlton House Terrace, and this meant that his own private reading and writing was much more intermingled with Treasury business than would otherwise have been so, or would normally be the case
today. He spent very little time sitting in the Chancellor’s official room, with his officials on call, and working systematically through Treasury papers.

Having gone to the House of Commons at 4.30 or so, he rarely stayed there continuously, even when he was making a major speech. Indeed he claimed towards the end of his sixty-two years of
membership that he had only once dined in the House. This must have been more a matter of habit than of gastronomy for although a healthy eater he never showed much interest in the refinements of
cuisine. His normal breaktime began at 7.30, although it could be a little later, and was sometimes as brief as half an hour. Thursday and Friday, 13 and 14 March 1862 provide a fairly typical pair
of House of Commons days. For the first: ‘H. of C. 4¾–7½ and 8½–1’; and for the second, when he dined at Lord Russell’s, ‘H. of C.
4½–7½ and 10½–11’.
²

The three hours for dinner which he took on the second day, assuming that the Russell dinner started as soon as the House was suspended (and dinners, while they had receded
a lot from six o’clock, which was quite usual in the early part of the century, were still earlier than the 8.30 which became fashionable in the 1880s and 1890s), was generous. Often he would
be away from a dinner party within an hour and a half of arriving, thus posing a difficulty of reconciling the great number of courses which were offered and at least sometimes
consumed
⁶⁵
with the speed with which they must have been served. This was not only to meet the needs of importunate parliamentarians but also because of the
press of post-dinner activity in which the
beau monde
then engaged. These were the opera, the theatre, a considerable round of late-evening parties at Cambridge House (Lady Palmerston),
Stafford House (Duchess of Sutherland), Derby House (Lady Derby) and many other Mayfair residences, as well as the occasional ball.

The Gladstones participated surprisingly fully; and when it is remembered that he added to these, not only his considerable late-night parliamentary commitments, but also his
‘rescue’ activities, often involving a couple of nocturnal prowls a week, it is amazing that he got any sleep at all. The six months of a mid-Victorian parliamentary session were
sufficiently strenuous that the balancing length of the recess was not so much an indulgence as a need.

The interval of just over three years between the death of Palmerston and the beginning of Gladstone’s first premiership was a period of political confusion and paradox. It was also one in
which Gladstone did not cover himself with glory. First as leader in the Commons with Russell as Prime Minister in the Lords, and then as a slightly inadept leader of the opposition trying in vain
to deal with the weaving manoeuvres of Disraeli, he was not happily placed. He avoided again being leader of the opposition until 1886, when he had become so senior that he could discharge his
duties at least as loosely as Churchill did in 1945–51.

The confusion, paradox and opportunism were memorably caricatured in Trollope’s
Phineas Redux
(published in 1873–4), in which Mr Daubeny (Disraeli) explained to his bewildered
but bewitched party that, in order to maintain the values of conservative England, the true duty
of the party of squire and parson was to dish the Whigs by disestablishing the
Church. Substitute the franchise issue for disestablishment and this was an almost exact description of Disraeli’s behaviour in first wrecking both the Reform Bill and the government of Lord
Russell, and then carrying through a much more radical Reform Bill of his own. Gladstone was the bewildered (but not bewitched; his opinion of Disraeli was never lower) victim of these
kaleidoscopic tactics. He was not nimble enough to deal with Disraeli’s opportunistic turn of speed. As a result the good humour of his speeches, on which Dean Stanley had so strikingly
commented in 1854, temporarily deserted him and he was judged by many to be blundering and blustering. This applied particularly after the last Derby government, which elided into the first
Disraeli government, came in at the beginning of July 1866. Until then Gladstone had his continuing authority as Chancellor, and while not adjudged to be quick-footed as leader of the House was
counted as formidable. At the end of April 1866, less than a week before his last budget, he even managed to make, on an amendment to the Russell government’s Reform Bill, which had been
debated over eight nights, one of the most remembered of all his parliamentary orations. He spoke from one to past three in the morning, but was rewarded only with a government majority of five,
well below its nominal strength. Nevertheless, ‘it was a famous victory’, or at least a famous speech.