Gladstone: A Biography (72 page)

After Hartington took over as leader for the session of 1875, Gladstone continued to sit on the front bench, which, he said, was what both Hartington and Granville (the leader in the Lords, and
the senior of the two) desired. ‘I . . . took my seat nearly in the same spot as last year, finding Bright my neighbour, with which I was well pleased,’ he wrote to his wife on 18
February.
⁵
His attendance was far from regular, however, and even more noticeable was the absence of the long and late hours in the House which had
previously been his habit. ‘H. of C. 4.30–6.00.’ became a regular entry. Quite frequently he would intervene, often on an unexpected subject, during one of these brief
parliamentary forays. Thus on 15 March (although he then went back to the House after dinner) he spoke on the Regimental Exchange Bill in a way which produced an unforgettable account from Disraeli
to the Queen. ‘Mr Gladstone not only appeared but rushed into the debate . . .’ he wrote. ‘The new Members trembled and fluttered like small birds when a hawk is in the
air.’
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His front-bench colleagues were even less enthusiastic about these sudden depredations than were the fluttering new members or the new
Prime Minister, who was, however, well schooled in preserving in such circumstances a sardonic calm.

Partly to underline the severance of his political ties and partly to economize, Gladstone kept no secretary during the second half of the 1870s. This meant that he spent much of his time
grappling with and complaining about the ‘chaos’ created by his incoming correspondence. Particularly after the Bulgarian and other aspects of the Eastern Question brought him back into
the mainstream of political controversy in the autumn of 1876, the volume of his mail would have been crushing to almost anyone else who tried to handle it with his meticulousness. When he returned
to either Hawarden or Harley Street he was typically confronted with about 300 unopened items, and the daily intake was a substantial proportion of this. The only assistance on which he called
was that of available children – Mary, Helen, Herbert and even Willy, although the last was then a member of Parliament in his late thirties. (But as Gladstone himself
when not merely an MP but a Privy Councillor and an ex-Cabinet minister had been called upon at almost exactly the same age to perform the same function for his own father, there was an element of
poetic justice about this.)

For the most part, however, Gladstone hacked through the correspondence himself, although this involved him in writing letters of a type with which the pens of few subsequent ex-Prime Ministers
can have engaged. The superintendent of the Lost Property Office at Euston Station got a missive in early June 1875, and the stationmaster at Chester as well as the manager of the bookstall there
was a constant recipient of letters which would presumably produce a substantial price today. Perhaps because of these burdens Gladstone had one of the earliest telephones installed at Hawarden. It
was there from 1880. But evidence of use is missing. There were indeed few others with whom he could have communicated. He referred to it as being ‘most unearthly’, and it is indeed
easy to imagine that anyone – Granville seems the most likely target – assaulted down 200 miles of cable by Gladstone’s unmistakable tones would have found the experience
extra-terrestrial and unnerving.

Throughout 1875 and most of 1876 Gladstone’s life was active in the production of pamphlets but quiet in his engagement with politics. The white heat of his opposition to ultramontanism
produced not only his Expostulation of November 1874 but a follow-up entitled
Vaticanism: An Answer to Reproofs and Replies
which was published in February 1875. He had carefully collected
the various ripostes, including a paper of 200 pages from Manning, which his first pamphlet had attracted, and set himself to refute them. Although this second instalment was more violent in tone
than the first (the Roman Church he described as ‘an Asian monarchy: nothing but one giddy height of despotism and one dead level of religious subservience’), it made less impact and
the sales were barely a quarter those of the first. Nonetheless the two together earned him substantial sums, and Granville wrote optimistically from Italy that the ‘enormous profits’
from his pen might render unnecessary the sale of 11 Carlton House Terrace. This was probably prompted by the fact that the royalties were about the only aspect of the pamphlets of which
Granville’s unpolemical mind approved.

His slightly weary ‘why-does-he-make-such-a-fuss’ disapproval was, however, mild compared with that of Cardinal Cullen, who in 1874
ordered prayers that
Gladstone might see the error of his ways to be said in every Catholic church in Ireland, and three years later was still sufficiently resentful that when Gladstone called upon him in Dublin he
managed a cool rebuff which few other than the Queen could have achieved: ‘You know Mr Gladstone we could have given you a warmer reception had it not been for certain pamphlets which we in
Ireland did not like very well.’
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But nor of course did Gladstone like Cullen, remembering too clearly his part in the death of the Irish
University Bill.

By the time of that Irish visit in the autumn of 1877 the iniquities of the Pope in Rome and the Vatican Council had been largely superseded in Gladstone’s mind, and this process was
reinforced by the death of Piux IX three months later and the election of Leo XIII, who, while hardly ecumenical (he proclaimed the invalidity of Anglican orders, although he also laid the
foundations of Christian Democracy with the encyclical
Rerum Novarum
), was markedly less ultramontane, and made Newman a cardinal four years after Manning had been elevated by Pio Nono.

Gladstone turned from what he called ‘my polemical period’ in a variety of directions. Over the summer and autumn of 1875 he was unusually free of any sustained intellectual task,
although as there was always work to progress on one or other of his eccentric Homeric monographs the threat of idleness was kept at a far distance. But over much of that year’s recess his
effort was more physical than mental. He was preoccupied with getting the thousands of the Carlton House Terrace books which he had not sold into an orderly amalgamation with his previous Hawarden
ones. Thus for 6 September he wrote: ‘3½ hours work on books, carrying and arranging. 2¼ hard work on getting my tree down. Rather overtired,’ he not surprisingly
concluded.’
⁸

In the spring of 1876 the appearance of G. O. Trevelyan’s life of Macaulay provoked him to a major appraisal of the then sixteen-years-dead Whig historian and poet who had coined the most
memorable (and mocking) of all the phrases about Gladstone’s early career. But there was neither rancour nor sycophancy about Gladstone’s review, and it remains one of his best literary
pieces and a remarkably balanced judgement of Macaulay – and balance was not normally Gladstone’s foremost quality.

In that summer he turned to the content rather than to the frontier battles of his religion and worked on the outline of a never completed book on Future Punishment (that is, Hell). This
produced a clutch of
papers on which, when putting them aside, he wrote: ‘From this I was called away to write on Bulgaria.’
⁹
And with that call there began another chapter which led to Midlothian, to his return to the premiership and the leadership, and eventually to the Irish crusade of his
last active decade.

The withdrawal from politics was therefore short-lived, at most from Easter 1874 until the return began in the closing months of 1876 and gathered momentum during 1877. But while it lasted it
was genuine enough both in interest and in the change in his pattern of life. Apart from his concentration on mainly religious writing, he was also much preoccupied with family affairs: deaths,
marriages, even a birth, and settlements. Robertson Gladstone, the brother to whom he had latterly been closest, died in Liverpool in September 1875, and with his death the extent of the
mismanagement of the Seaforth property, and indeed of the other remaining family interests in Liverpool became even clearer. Robertson had several sons, all of whom died unmarried and fairly
unprosperous too, so that 1875 was effectively the end of the strong Gladstone mercantile presence in Liverpool, which John Gladstone had started eighty-eight years before. Then, in April 1876,
George Lyttelton threw himself into the staircase well of his Marylebone house and died without regaining consciousness. There were another twenty-two years of married life still ahead for the
Gladstones, but the other couple in the Hawarden double wedding of the summer of 1839 were both dead, the one at forty-three, the other at fifty-eight.

In the spring of 1875 William and Catherine Gladstone had become grandparents for the first time. Agnes Wickham, as she had become in 1873, was the mother. Five of the other six Gladstone
children were then still unmarried, and Willy, at the age of thirty-five, and nine years after he had become an MP, had only recently married Gertrude Stuart, daughter of Lord Blantyre and
granddaughter of Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, at St George’s, Hanover Square. The London celebrations, at an unfashionable time of year, were muted, but when the couple came to Hawarden a
few weeks later there were fantastic estate junketings. On two successive nights there were dinners of 400 and 450 people with balls afterwards. ‘Carving and speaking’ was how Gladstone
described his role. On the fourth night he recorded: ‘A servant’s ball this evening closed at length our part of the marriage festivities. Our guests have been nearly 2500: one third
children.’
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These events were also in the train of the Hawarden wedding of Gertrude Glynne, the orphaned daughter of the former rector, with
the heir to Lord Penrhyn,
and grandson of the creator of the massive granite fort of Penrhyn Castle, fifty miles further along the North Wales coast.

The central purpose of the celebrations, however, was to authenticate Willy Gladstone as squire of Hawarden and heir to the Glynnes. Yet, in his generation, it never worked. It was not the
spirit of the Glynnes which obstructed him. Much more inhibiting was the omnipresence of his father, anxious that the property should be firmly in the hands of his son, yet quite incapable of not
dominating it, him, his new wife and everything else within sight. For his remaining fourteen years of life there is no evidence that Willy Gladstone exercised an independent squirearchical role.
He lived at least as much in the shadow of the ‘great people’ as had Sir Stephen Glynne.

In the same year, however, a Gladstone son – Herbert, the youngest – did at last achieve some academic distinction. He had broken with the rigid Christ Church tradition of his father
and his elder brothers and gone from Eton to University College, Oxford. But the change had not made him do other than follow his brothers in not getting a first in Classics (Willy and Stephen had
both got seconds; Herbert did worse and got a third). But he then switched to History and was placed in the first class for that school, followed by a teaching post at the new Keble College. The
School of Modern History was no doubt not quite the equivalent of Literae Humaniores in his father’s eyes, and the Warden of Keble was admittedly his cousin by marriage, but it was
nonetheless an achievement on the part of the future Liberal Chief Whip, Home Secretary and Governor-General of South Africa, which made it the best Gladstone academic performance since his
father’s triumphs of 1831.

Another feature of Gladstone’s life during these few years of semi-withdrawal was his perennial interest in seeing different parts of Britain and the careful foresight with which he
planned visits to this end.
⁹⁰
This was always an underlying feature of his life, but it was one which was able to come more to the surface in these few
years of relative freedom. A spectacularly concentrated and illustrative day was Tuesday, 5 October 1875. It was the end of a four-day visit to the eighty-five-year-old Lord Bathurst at
Cirencester, where Mrs Thistlethwayte was also a guest. He set off in the morning to return to Hawarden, a mildly
difficult cross-country journey by twentieth-century
standards. The interest was the number of cameos which he hung upon the necklace of his journey: ‘Expedition to Gloucester and Worcester Cathedrals. After 50 years! Both most interesting
– Worcester sumptuous. . . . At Gloucester we had most of the service and saw Canon Harvey. At Chester went to the Theatre for a spell – short but long enough.’
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Having regained Hawarden (the journeys apart from perhaps the Cirencester–Kemble and Chester-Hawarden stages were of course all done by train), he
finished one book and read parts of another two before going to bed.

A month or so later he went for a stay of no less than eight days to Chatsworth, where the seventh Duke of Devonshire had two of his sons, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Hartington, who in
differing ways were to impact so sharply upon Gladstone in 1882 and 1886, to help entertain him. Then he went on for a few days to Hickleton, the Halifax house in the Yorkshire coalfield. On the
last day at Chatsworth he heard the news of Disraeli’s capture for the British government of the controlling interest in the French-built Suez Canal, and reacted strongly, with Whig approval
both there and at Hickleton, against what he regarded as this showy, vulgar and internationally disruptive
coup de théâtre
.

Between September 1876 and November 1877 he made three major tours within the British Isles, each lasting around three to four weeks. The first was to Yorkshire, Durham, Northumberland and the
Scottish Borders. He stayed at Raby Castle, the Deanery in Durham Close, Ford Castle at Coldstream, Alnwick, Jervaulx Abbey and Castle Howard. Then in January 1877 he went to the near West Country,
staying at Longleat, the Bishop’s palace at Wells, Dunster Castle, Orchard Neville near Glastonbury, Bowden Park near Chippenham (with his nephew) and Savernake near Marlborough.
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