Gladstone: A Biography (5 page)

Gladstone’s command over Greek as well as Latin was already considerable, and remained with him throughout his life. He read the Bible every day and often in a Greek text. Homer was a
constant companion, and indeed his Homeric studies were a long-term intellectual hobby, into which he would retreat, sometimes at inappropriate
moments, and led to his producing
some fantastical and unscholarly theories about the roots of Christianity. French he was working at hard with Monsieur Berthomier, a sort of supernumerary Eton master. German was still beyond him,
but he later acquired enough to be able in middle life to hold theological discussions with Ignaz von Döllinger in Munich. Italian he taught himself more thoroughly, and Dante (although not
until 1834) ranked with Homer as his most sustaining literary refuge. His attitude to modern languages was reminiscent of a tank cutting its way through undergrowth. It was not subtle. His letters,
even in French, whether to station masters or statesmen, lacked much sense of elegance, or idiom, or the subjunctive (which had he been French would have been made for him), but he could say what
he wanted to.

His concepts of a common civilization and of a united Christendom, which were strong, convinced him that an educated Englishman (which his Anglicanism and his Thames Valley school and university
inevitably made him even though his blood made him the most Scottish of all Prime Ministers, with the possible exception of Ramsay MacDonald) ought to be able to communicate in all the principal
languages of civilized Europe. So he did so. He conversed with Döllinger in German. He corresponded with Guizot in French notwithstanding that the latter’s command of English was such
that he had translated all thirteen volumes of Gibbon. And when he was briefly (and eccentrically) Commissioner for the Ionian Isles he made a major policy speech to the Corfu National Assembly in
Italian. (It is possible on this occasion that speaker and audience were united in an equal imperfection in their grasp of the language which he had decided should be the bridge between them.) His
ability, from his first Italian visit in 1832 to his last in 1889, to listen to vernacular sermons from Milan to Naples and appraise their theological worth was more impressive. In any event he
despised allowing languages to be a barrier in the Concert of Europe, a concept which for him had a lively and consistent meaning.

Gladstone’s six and a quarter years at Eton were also rewarding on the plane of personal friendship. With the exception of the Earl of Lincoln, later Duke of Newcastle, who was to perform
a crucial role in the advancement of Gladstone’s early career, he made no grandee friends. But there were plenty of figures of Eton and subsequent note. There was Francis Doyle, who became a
fellow of All Souls in 1839, succeeded to a baronetcy, was best man at Gladstone’s wedding, and after thirty years as a Customs official became Professor of Poetry at
Oxford in 1877. There was James Milnes Gaskell, whose Unitarian mother first opened Gladstone’s mind to the possibility that all true Christians, whatever their liturgical
faults, might look forward to salvation rather than to eternal damnation. There was George Selwyn, Bishop of New Zealand at thirty-two and then of Lichfield at a more normal episcopal age, in whose
memory Selwyn College, Cambridge, was founded. There was Gerald Wellesley, only nepotically ducal, who was to be Dean of Windsor for nearly thirty years, the strongest Anglican influence upon Queen
Victoria (although that was not saying a great deal) in the plenitude of her widowhood, and the man with whom Gladstone most liked to discuss the ever fascinating subject of ecclesiastical
patronage during his first premiership.

Above all there was Arthur Hallam, the
jeune homme fatal
(in several senses of the last word) of his age, the Rupert Brooke of the early nineteenth century. He lived only twenty-two
years, but achieved an entry in the
Dictionary of National Biography
, which was richly deserved by anyone who could captivate Gladstone and then inspire Tennyson to write
In Memoriam
.
Arthur Hallam, the son of a constitutional historian, was two years younger than Gladstone – a big gap in their late teens – and thought dazzlingly beautiful. Gladstone was also very
handsome as a young man. There is no evidence of any homosexual behaviour, but it is impossible to believe that there was not the electricity of infatuation and jealousy between them. Hallam was a
Foxite Whig, and he appears to have been the one person at Eton, not Lincoln, or Wellesley, who gave Gladstone some sense of inferiority of background. ‘He had evidently, from the
first,’ Gladstone wrote, ‘a large share of cultivated domestic education: with a father absorbed in diversified business, I had little or none’.
¹¹
Hallam leaves the impression of being not only a Whig but also a minx. In 1826 he wrote to his sister that he was ‘walking out a good deal, and running the changes on
Rogers, Gladstone, Farr and Hanmer’. This was after Gladstone had managed to arrange that, although they were in different and widely separated houses, they could breakfast for alternating
weeks in each other’s rooms. Gladstone went to Oxford in 1828 and Hallam, after more than a year in Italy, to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met Tennyson, in 1829. But already before
they separately left Eton their relationship was over its crest. Gladstone, late in 1829, wrote an account of it which combines the flavour of a shop-girl’s romance with that of the prickly
and etiolated jealousies of Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey in the Cambridge of seventy years later:

Prickly and defensive this may have been, but it was a good deal better than the pompous and dismissive letter which Hallam wrote to Gladstone nine months later:

Three years after writing this tiresome missive Hallam died of apoplexy in a Vienna hotel. Gladstone heard the news (a month late) during the first of his autumn visits to his father at Fasque
and ‘walked upon the hills to muse upon this very mournful event, which cuts me to the heart’. Nonetheless he intermingled reality with nostalgia and wrote on that same day of Hallam as
‘my earliest near friend’, and of his ‘attaining almost to that ideal standard, of which it is presumption to expect an example in natural life’.
¹⁴
Tennyson felt less need for qualification and wrote of:

What was most remarkable, however, was that, as Professor Robert Martin’s life of Tennyson points out, ‘sixty years after his [Hallam’s] death the Prime
Minister and the Poet Laureate were still jealous of each other’s place in his affections’.
¹⁶
Gladstone and Tennyson, whom Martin jointly
and uncompromisingly described as ‘the foremost of all Victorians’, spoke well of each other in public but met only occasionally and with some restraint over their relationship until
they went together on a Scandinavian cruise in 1883, during which the Prime Minister persuaded the Laureate to accept the rare offer of a literary peerage.

On 10 October 1828 Gladstone and about half of his Eton friends went to Oxford, and almost without exception to Christ Church. However, Hallam and Wellesley went to Trinity, Cambridge, and
Selwyn to St John’s College in that university. Christ Church then had an Oxford dominance much greater, leading and unusual a college though it has remained, than it has enjoyed in the
twentieth century. When Gladstone was matriculated there had been twenty-one Prime Ministers and six of them had been at Christ Church. In addition another two – Peel and Derby – who
were subsequently to attain that office had already passed through the House, the somewhat solipsistic sobriquet, derived from
Aedes Christi
, which it liked to give itself. Another four came
after Gladstone.

As a seedbed for Prime Ministers, from Grenville in 1763 to Home in 1964, Christ Church has been unmatched in either university. However, its 1828 prestige cannot be measured solely by its
position in the Prime Ministerial stakes. Despite having to accommodate a cathedral and the canonries which went with the diocesan church it was a genuine college for the education of the young,
and not merely a closed society for the delectation of the fellows, as was then the case with a number of other Oxford houses. It had well over a hundred undergraduates, and, although predisposed
to the rich, the titled and the potentially famous, was not much bound by obligation to founder’s kin (Henry VIII’s three regnant children were not in any event fecund) or to special
localities producing dim but entitled aspirants. There were perhaps too many from Westminster School (with which there was a more formal link than with Eton), and Christ Church began to suffer from
this as the quality of Westminster declined towards the middle of the nineteenth century from its high seventeenth- and eighteenth-century level. But this was after Gladstone’s day. In 1831,
Gladstone’s final year, five of the ten first classes awarded in the University examinations went to Christ Church men. In addition the college had managed to get a
proprietary grip on one of the two Oxford University seats in Parliament. The second might be competed for among the other eighteen or nineteen colleges
⁴
which then made up the University, but the first was a
chasse gardée
. Paradoxically this was a disadvantage for Gladstone when he contested the University in 1847.
The other seat was already in the Christ Church hands of Sir Robert Inglis, who until he died in 1855 always polled better than Gladstone. For Christ Church to take the second one as well was
presumptuous even for the House.

Nor were the other main colleges then in a position to mount much of a challenge. Oxford was only hesitantly rubbing its eyes after its long eighteenth-century sleep, when it had mostly been
little more than a seminary for the Anglican Church. Christ Church unusually had kept its grip upon secretaryships of state as well as rectories. In the 1820s Oriel, where was congregated the
remarkable constellation of Pusey, Newman, Keble and Samuel Wilberforce, led the awakening. But it was essentially a religious awakening. None of these four was exactly a blushing violet. Pusey had
a movement named after him and Keble a college. Newman became the most famous British cardinal since the Reformation, and Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford and Winchester, although sometimes known as
‘soapy Sam’, was more widely given the admiring label of ‘the great diocesan’. But they all became religious leaders rather than rulers of the state, and although the Oriel
Common Room was at the time the most brilliant and vital in Oxford, it was unworldly, if not notably saintly, in the vehemence (and even vindictiveness) with which its doctrinal disputes were
pursued. Nonetheless, as Newman reflected in his 1852 Dublin
Idea of a University
lectures, there was at that time a unique spirit working within the ‘hemmed-in small plot of
ground’ which was Oriel. It might well have attracted Gladstone, but the possibility does not seem even to have been considered, so well trodden was the path from Eton to Christ Church.

Christ Church was the most privileged college, but Gladstone (or his father) did not claim the most privileged status there. Unlike several of his friends (the Acland brothers and Lincoln) he
did not pay the extra fees to be treated as a gentleman-commoner (sometimes called nobleman-commoner). Whether such a status was open to him is not clear. No Gladstone had attained rank as opposed
to wealth by that stage, but money has always been a great lubricant of the transition to nobility.
Whether or not because of this abstinence William Gladstone at first did not
get good rooms. He was turned out of one set. Then he was in a dark ground-floor corner of Chaplain’s Quadrangle (since demolished), which required distempering to make the rooms even
tolerable. Then he moved (probably when after four terms he had been made a student – a special and elevated rank at the House, more or less equivalent to a fellow elsewhere) to what he
described to his mother as ‘the most fashionable part of the college’. This was on the first floor to the right (on entering) of the back gate in Canterbury Quadrangle which had been
designed by James Wyatt thirty-five years earlier. And writing of the Oxford of a hundred years later John Betjeman in
Summoned by Bells
still envied ‘the leisured set in Canterbury
quad’. These rooms were for a time preserved as a sort of Gladstone shrine (a rare Oxford distinction shared by Newman but by very few others) and were for some years devoted to the editing
of the Gladstone diaries by Professor H. C. G. Matthew.