Gladstone: A Biography (11 page)

Later that spring he attended in the Hanover Square Rooms a fashionable series of lectures (at one the packed audience included seven bishops and the Duke of Cumberland) by Thomas Chalmers, a
famous Edinburgh divine, on the role of the state in relation to established Churches. Gladstone knew Chalmers well. During the two previous Edinburgh winters he had been considerably more
successful in achieving relations with him than with Lady Frances Douglas. But he did not approve of Chalmers’s relatively liberal doctrine, which left the state unconcerned with theology,
and able, comfortably and calmly, to support one form of establishment in England and another in Scotland. Gladstone was shocked by this easy-going attitude, incompatible as it was with his belief
in a theocratic state, which he assumed, both curiously and complacently, would uphold exactly his own doctrinal position. Whether he would have seriously advocated imposing Episcopalianism
upon Scotland is not clear, but he was certainly then terrified by the dangers for the (Anglican) Church of Ireland which might follow from the easy acceptance of the national position
of the Scottish Presbyterian Church.

Negatively inspired by Dr Chalmers, although not in direct refutation of him, he set about producing the first of his books, and did so, as became his frequent habit, with white-hot enthusiasm.
He wrote most of the manuscript of
The State in its Relations with the Church
during late June and July 1838. This was a substantial work of 500 or so pages. Gladstone was never economical
with words. To do it in little more than a month was to do it in a foolish hurry, particularly as he had been warned that continuous writing or reading was bad for his eyes. But this
hurtling-torrent approach was always Gladstone’s way. Packages of manuscript were rushed off to his currently trusted friends and advisers, John Murray the publisher was persuaded to bring
the book out by the end of the year, and then the parcels began to fly to Murray as quickly as they came back from the advisers. The rush was as unnecessary as it was potentially dangerous for a
young and at least half-ambitious politician, of not notably steady judgement, writing without experience on a delicate subject on which he held extreme views. His first plunge into authorship
begins to give point to Archbishop Tait’s superficially most surprising remark about him. ‘What I fear in Gladstone’, he said much later, ‘is his levity.’
⁸

Gladstone’s principal friends and advisers for the purposes of the book were James Hope, Henry Manning, Philip Pusey and Thomas Dyke Acland. Only Acland had been continuously close to
Gladstone since Oxford. He and Pusey, the elder but less interesting brother of Edward Pusey, whose name symbolized High Anglicanism after the mid-century defections to Rome, were members of
Parliament. Manning was a rural dean and Hope was a lay
dévot
; if anyone took Hallam’s place in Gladstone’s affections it was Hope. Although Manning in particular seemed
miles away from this precipice in 1838, they were together to shatter Gladstone by being received into the Roman Catholic Church on the same day in April 1851. Gladstone petulantly struck out
Hope-Scott (as Hope had become) as an executor of his will, but he was later more forgiving of him than he was of Manning. They had both come strongly into Gladstone’s life in 1836–7.
Manning had the devout air and cool but black-and-white mind which made the Barchester-like (and married) clergyman of the 1840s become such a convincingly ultramontane prince of the Church under
Pius IX by 1870. Hope was a much less
cool zealot who until 1851 was a strong but unsteadying influence on Gladstone.

As he completed his book Gladstone made one of his then rare descents on the House of Commons to speak and vote against the renewal of the government grant to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth
in County Kildare. He argued that the £9000 subvention to the cause of indigenous education and religion in Ireland ‘contravened and stultified the main principle on which the
Established Church of England and Ireland was founded’.
⁹
Both the future Roman Catholic converts were in favour of this act of unyielding
intolerance, which was to build up vast trouble for Gladstone in the mid-1840s. It must be said, however, that there was no greater irony in Manning, the future leader of the authoritarian populist
tendency, largely Irish supported, in British Catholicism, being against Maynooth than there was in Newman, the future patron of a gentler, older, more educated, more English approach to an
apostolic and universal Church, having played a key role in driving Peel out of his Oxford University parliamentary seat because of his support for Catholic Emancipation in 1829.

With his book at the press, and somewhat disenchanted with the British scene, both political and matrimonial, Gladstone set off in August 1838 on another six-month European tour. First he spent
nearly a month at Bad Ems, a spa near Koblenz which was to achieve fame during his first premiership by producing the famous diplomatic telegram which sparked off the Franco-Prussian
War.
⁶
His purpose there was to help settle in his sister Helen, who was causing trouble already but not nearly as much as she was to do in the 1840s, and
who, it was felt, needed a season away from Fasque, where domesticity and being her father’s sole companion were sitting oppressively on her unstable and exhibitionist temperament. He also
dealt at Ems with his proofs and sent them back to Hope, who was an eager intermediary.

The crucial although intermittent companions of this tour were the Glynne family. All of them, two brothers, two sisters and fragile mother, were committed to an autumn and early winter in
Italy, and the prospect
of joining them in Rome was sufficient to keep Gladstone heading south when he was seized by doubts in both Milan and Florence about whether concern for
Helen, or his father, or his eyesight, or even his constituents, ought not to send him back to Ems or England. However, there was also a Gladstone pull on the Glynnes for they turned up briefly in
the Rheingau spa at the end of August, and Ems was by no means a necessary staging point on the road to Italy. When Gladstone began to concentrate his attention on Catherine Glynne is not clear. He
had noted her presence, with that of her sister, at a London ‘breakfast’ (really an early luncheon) party in July, but it seems that it was the whole family, although no doubt with her
as the salient point, which was assuming a special attraction for him. This was at once strange and symptomatic. It was strange because the Glynnes, with the exception of Catherine, had become a
somewhat effete family, singularly lacking in his own quality of pulsating energy. It was symptomatic because Gladstone did in a sense marry the whole family. So far as way of life went he
transferred his allegiance from Fasque to Hawarden and took over many Glynne values (although never quite mastering their self-conscious private language) before gradually taking over their estate
as well. It was Gladstone rather than Catherine who left home on marriage.

He also left the Glynnes in Naples quite soon after he had found them in Rome and set off on a most testing twenty-five-day tour of Sicily and Calabria, accompanied by Arthur Kinnaird, Whig MP
for Perth, who had been his travelling companion southward over the Alps but who, except on the road, was never one of those closest to him. Storms raged, fleas bit, crowds surged, bandits
threatened, Etna erupted, but Gladstone survived it all, including 400 miles on a mule for which he could form no affection, and of which he was reminded, with himself in the role of the mule, by
the coolness of Queen Victoria’s final farewell to him as Prime Minister in 1894.
⁷
There was, one suspects, an element of bravado about it, of
showing to Miss Glynne that he had a vitality and toughness to which she was unused.

He was nonetheless very glad to be back in Naples with her and ‘the luxury of a reasonably good bed’,
¹⁰
although certainly not both at
the same time. Indeed so far was he from contemplating such an arrangement that when he went to see the San Carlo ballet he was shocked enough to leave abruptly. (But why, in view of his Munich
bookshop
temptations of seven years later? Was it only to impress the Glynnes? But it is not certain that they were even present.) Thus, by a fine irony, the ‘Murderer of
Gordon’, as he was hyperbolically to be described during his second premiership, reacted in exactly the same way to ‘les femmes à demi-nues’ (Gordon could bring himself to
write about them only in French) as that somewhat brandy-sodden general was to do when he passed through Naples forty-two years later. The Bourbon monarchy might have fallen in the interval but the
undress of the San Carlo
corps de ballet
was more stable.

Gladstone then returned to Rome and received almost simultaneously copies of his book and the news that Helen had used the Ems autumn to engage herself to marry a Russo-Polish count, and that
her conversion to the Orthodox Church and removal to Russia seemed to be imminent. Perhaps the allure for an author of copies of his own book, particularly the first, and the knowledge that the
Glynnes were following him from Naples helped to steady his mind, for he did not rush off to Ems. This was wise, for the Count’s parents satisfactorily (to the families at least) killed the
marriage, and Gladstone settled down to a rewarding Advent, Christmas and New Year in Rome.

Apart from the Glynnes, with whom there were constant dinners, teas and expeditions, the city was sprinkled with Gladstone’s friends and acquaintances. Lord Lincoln, Gladstone’s
Christ Church friend, was there with his Scottish ducal wife of six years’ standing, which made the circumstances very different from those in which Gladstone was next to engage with Lady
Lincoln in Italy in 1849. Thomas Babington Macaulay, standard-bearer of Whig intellectual commentators, was there and amicably encountered Gladstone as they emerged after observing from different
angles of scepticism the Pope at Christmas Eve Vespers in St Peter’s. Macaulay had not then seen
The State in its Relations with the Church
and was as unaware as was Gladstone that he
was to subject it in the April 1839 number of the
Edinburgh Review
to one of the most famous of mid-nineteenth-century critical polemics. (Macaulay was more vicious against Peel than against
Gladstone, whom he treated with a polemicists’ well-known trick as an honest and clear exponent of the views which his leader held but wished to obfuscate.) Manning was also in Rome, and
Gladstone persuaded that slightly suspicious Rural Dean, who then disapproved of the Roman tendencies of the Oxford Tractarians, to accept introduction to Monsignor Wiseman. (In 1838 Wiseman was
head of the English College in Rome. In 1851, with the setting up of the hierarchy in Britain, he became the first Cardinal Archbishop of
Westminster. In 1868 Manning succeeded
him in that metropolitan see.)

Miss Glynne, as was indeed to be her experience throughout life, had thus to face considerable competition for Gladstone’s attention. In this Roman winter she triumphantly overcame this
competition. But whether this was then her intention is by no means clear. She was certainly not repelled by Gladstone as had been Miss Farquhar and Lady Frances Douglas. But neither did she find
him an easy suitor. She and her family called him Gia, a name suggesting a mixture of affection and faintly mocking respect. Gia chose well his
mise en scène
for a declaration. It was
in the Colosseum under a full moon on 3 January 1839. But his words may have lacked the clarity and even the glow of the moon’s beam. When, a fortnight later, he put his proposal to her in
writing (at least not on this occasion to her father or brother) she claimed to be taken by surprise. His letter was unmistakable in intent if not succinct in expression. Lord Attlee,
Gladstone’s successor but eleven as head of a government and not normally regarded as one of the most romantic of Prime Ministers, when he read it reproduced in Magnus’s 1954 biography,
was almost as shocked by it as Gladstone had been by the San Carlo ballet. ‘He really was a frightful old prig,’ Attlee wrote. ‘Fancy writing a letter proposing marriage including
a sentence of 140 words all about the Almighty. He was a dreadful person.’
¹¹

Gladstone was not a dreadful person. He was in many ways the greatest figure of the nineteenth century, and taken in the round the greatest British politician of that or any other parliamentary
century. But he could be portentous and a little ridiculous, particularly when dealing with young women, and his twenties, which were nearly but not quite over when he wrote this letter, were not
his best decade. It was understandable that Attlee should take against the letter, but it was both a little narrow and carrying his laconic dismissiveness too far to build a general censure upon
it. Fortunately Miss Glynne took a more perceptive view. She did not say yes, but she did not say no, and Gladstone travelled back to London at the end of January, in the company of her elder
brother and in a state of reasonable hope.