Gladstone: A Biography (118 page)

1.
This seems to have been the watershed, for at the first (1832) election he was supported by his two brothers who were not themselves
fighting seats. They were indeed in the constituency before he arrived.

2.
See pp. 179–80 below.

3.
‘Ar. Pol’, for instance, requires the help of the expert editors of the diaries to become a clear indication that he had
been reading Aristotle’s
Politics
.

4.
There was some ambiguity about the status of Magdalen Hall, later Hertford College, at this stage.

5.
It was an odd quirk that he should chose the exhibitionist wife of the Russian Ambassador, first in London then in Paris, Antoinette
de Lieven, as a frequent recipient of letters of personal confidence, and an even odder one that she should also have been the acknowledged mistress of the austerely intellectual François
Guizot, Louis-Philippe’s chief minister in the 1840s when he and Aberdeen (as Foreign Secretary in the Peel Government) produced better Anglo-French relations than at almost any other time in
the nineteenth century.

6.
In July 1870 King (later Emperor) Wilhelm I, taking the waters at Ems, gave an audience to Benedetti, the French Ambassador, about
that perennial question of the Spanish Succession. He sent an account of the audience by telegram to Bismarck in Berlin. Bismarck, with von Moltke, proceeded to alter the telegram so as to make it
appear that the Ambassador had been peremptorily dismissed (which was not so) and then published it. Napoleon III, frivolously and disastrously, chose to treat the altered version as a
casus
belli
.

7.
See below, p. 621.

8.
Lord Stanley, later fourteenth Earl of Derby and three times (briefly) Tory Prime Minister, and Sir James Graham, Home Secretary
1841–6, were two of Peel’s principal colleagues.

9.
Although his own career was obscure he was the uncle of the William Vernon Harcourt, who was to be one of Gladstone’s Home
Secretaries and Chancellors of the Exchequer as well as his successor as Liberal leader in the Commons; the girl who supplanted Miss Glynne was Lady Charlotte Jenkinson, a daughter of the third
Earl of Liverpool and a niece of the long-serving Prime Minister.

10.
Now is the stately column broke,

The beacon-light is quenched in smoke,

The trumpet’s silver sound is still,

The warder silent on the hill.

11.
See Chapter Seven below.

12.
But see Gladstone on Aberdeen, p. 42, above.

13.
The basic Corn Law had been introduced by the Liverpool government at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and provided for a prohibitively
high duty on foreign corn if the domestic price fell below 80 shillings a quarter (eight bushels). It was a measure of high protection for the landed interest at the expense of the consumer. In
1828 a sliding scale of duty had replaced this sudden activation of full protection. In 1842 Peel had reduced this sliding scale. The argument which dominated the remainder of his government was
about whether the duty should be completely eliminated.

14.
The dukes were pretty strong on the issue, and put on almost a dress rehearsal (although there were a few changes of cast in the
meantime) of their 1893 and 1909 performances against Home Rule and the Lloyd George budget. Both Newcastle and Marlborough refused to let Peel supporters be re-elected for their family boroughs,
while Richmond and Buckingham went even further and demanded resignations from sitting MPs.

15.
While the Prince Consort was alive Gladstone was on good and close terms with the Queen.

16.
This fifth child, Mary, sometimes called Mazie, was born on 23 November 1847.

17.
A very odd phrase; there seems to be no other example implying that Gladstone (in fact of medium height or a little more for the
period) thought of himself as small, except when he was a boy and grew late. Precision about his height is, however, elusive. Professor Shannon resolutely attempts it by saying that in 1859 he was
5 feet 10 inches ‘in slippers’ (but how thick were the slippers?), and weighed 11 stone 10½ pounds in 1861. Gladstone himself recorded that he was 5 feet 9 inches when he was
eighty-four, but had been 5 feet 11 inches.

18.
All Souls had not then assumed its generous catering role.

19.
With one exception, they all turned out disastrously.

20.
The date of his thirty-seventh birthday; but why he thought this anniversary should free him from the proscription does not begin to
be clear.

21.
Thomas Grenville (1755–1846), statesman and book-collector, as he is described in the
Dictionary of National Biography
.
Parts of his huge library were sold after his death two years earlier.

22.
‘La metà di una statua bellissima, bella oltre misura’ (
Diaries
, iv, p. 440).

23.
In fact he disclaimed authorship of the phrase, said that it was one that he had heard used in Naples, and for good measure gave it
also in the original Italian: ‘
E la negazione di Dio eretta a sistema di govern
o’.

24.
The editor of the
Diaries
transcribes this word as ‘trusts’, but ‘trysts’ makes more sense and is an
equally possible interpretation of Gladstone’s handwriting.

25.
One of the ‘Sicilies’ in the odd title was the so-called Regno or mainland part of the kingdom, with Naples as its
capital.

26.
Pironti, also sentenced to twenty-four years, was a Neapolitan lawyer and judge. Braico was a young man of twenty-six who had the
advantage of an aunt who combined temerity and ingenuity. She accompanied Gladstone and told the gaolers that he was a halfwit named Michele di Santo, who ‘understood nothing up there’
(pointing to his head). Not even Mercellina’s kindly gaoler father Rocco in
Fidelio
would have been taken in.

27.
Whether the giving of it was a damaging act for Poerio remains an open question. His imprisonment continued for another eight
years, after which ‘King Bomba’, almost at the end of his own life and apparently fearful of the effect on European opinion if the Baron should either die in chains or become insane as
a result of ten years in them, commuted his sentence and that of sixty-five others to life exile in the New World. At Lisbon they were transferred to an American ship, the captain of which put in
at Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland, no doubt to pick up Irish immigrants. But he there lost at least some of his Italian prisoners, including Poerio, who made his way to Bristol, where he was
given a public banquet, and then to London, where Gladstone gave him a Carlton House Terrace dinner party of sixteen on 6 April 1859. (Morley,
Life of Gladstone
, I, p. 401, and
Diaries
, V, p. 384.) In 1867, in return, Poerio presided over a dinner given to Gladstone in Florence (the temporary capital) by the Chamber of Deputies of the newly united Italy.

28.
On the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. See pp. 131–2 below.

29.
The calm final sentiment was based on a long view. The last previous Cardinal resident in England, Pole, had been in the reign of
the Sovereign to whom those in the tradition to which the Russell family firmly belonged were inclined to refer as ‘Bloody Mary’.

30.
To get to his eight million, Bright included the Irish.

31.
Which begins ‘Scilicet et tempus veniet, cum finibus illis / Agricola, incurvo terram molitus aratro’.

32.
To add to the general confusion he had by this time changed his name. He became the fourteenth Earl of Derby when his father died
on 30 June 1851. This resulted in the Prime Minister Derby’s son, later the fifteenth Earl, who was himself to be Foreign Secretary under Disraeli and Colonial Secretary under Gladstone,
ceasing to be Mr Edward Stanley and becoming Lord Stanley, although not a peer. Differentiation was not made simpler by their all being christened Edward.

33.
For budget debates and other tax-raising proceedings the House traditionally sat as a Committee of Ways and Means, with the
chairman of committees presiding from a seat at the clerks’ table and no one in the Speaker’s chair. This symbolized, as did the mace being below and not on the table, somewhat more
informal rules of business, the most significant difference being the ability (in committee) of members to speak more than once in the same debate. The same considerations apply when the Committee
Stage of a bill is being taken on the floor of the House. Recently, however, the tradition has been modified so that the Speaker now presides over the opening of a Chancellor’s budget.

34.
Which was important to the dispute about the spuriousness or otherwise of Disraeli’s surplus.

35.
Requesting the renewal of the private-secretary services of Stafford Northcote, at that time a civil servant. (See p. 165,
below.)

36.
Wood, later the first Viscount Halifax, was not only the outgoing Chancellor from whom Disraeli had bought the furniture and the
robes, but also Gladstone’s current Cabinet colleague as President of the Board of Control.

37.
Denison was true to his word. As late as 1885 he wrote and published what the
Dictionary of National Biography
describes as ‘a
violent political diatribe against Gladstone’.

38.
Gladstone on this visit was in a very benign sightseeing mood, in sharp contrast with, say, his attitude at Strasbourg seven and a
half years before. He was enchanted with Salisbury Cathedral, then unrestored, and thought it ‘a wonder of harmony and beauty’, and impressed by Stonehenge, ‘a noble and an awful
relic, telling much, and telling too that it conceals more’. The Bishop (of Salisbury) coming to dinner was ‘another treat’. Compared with these excitements he was unmoved by the
classical splendours of Wilton House.

39.
J. A. Stuart-Wortley was a fellow of Merton College and later Solicitor-General.

40.
By the end of Gladstone’s life these proportions had changed to 21 per cent for debt servicing, 37 per cent for defence and 20
per cent for civil government.

41.
Some of the phrases in this passage have a slight sense of bathos when it is recalled that the total yield of the tax at that stage
was no more than £5½ million a year.

42.
‘He [Aberdeen] said how could he bring himself to fight for the Turks? I replied we were not fighting for the Turks, but we
were warning Russia off the forbidden ground.’ (Entry for 22 February 1854,
Diaries
, IV, p. 595n.)

43.
William Gladstone (assisted by Robertson) could not be said to have managed the property well, favourably placed though it was to
benefit from the northward growth of the docks. He allowed the house to become derelict instead of selling it while it was in good condition, and eventually lost £12,000 (or nearly half a
million at today’s values) on the whole enterprise.

44.
The Rawsons were the Revd William Rawson, the Cambridge Evangelical who had been Gladstone’s first schoolmaster more than
thirty-five years before, and his wife. The diary passage has a secondary interest in that it is the first mention in that vast journal of ‘luncheon’ as a meal or a social occasion.
Socially and nutritionally his London life had all been geared to late breakfasts and relatively early dinners. The fashionable meal pattern did change substantially in the third quarter of the
nineteenth century, with breakfast diminishing, dinner becoming later, and lunch emerging. But it was an odd reversal of the normal dissemination of fashion that Liverpool led while London
followed, and Gladstone’s first experience of a luncheon party was in a parsonage beyond Bootle.

45.
Catherine Gladstone, however, upstaged him in 1861 by bathing at Rhyl as late in the year as 7 November.

46.
The incident and surrounding circumstances were well chronicled in The Arrow War, written in 1967 by Douglas Hurd, who
subsequently achieved an alternative claim to fame.

47.
The meaning of the ‘we’ is a little obscure in the context, but probably refers only to himself and Sidney Herbert
rather than to the wider group.

48.
Gordon, however, was more easily replaced than got rid of. This may have been because he had become infatuated with Agnes. In any
event he was still around until Gladstone returned to England, and indeed frequently reappeared in the Gladstones’ lives, sometimes at Hawarden, over several decades. In Corfu he had the
compensating advantage (more obvious perhaps to a biographer of his chief than to the chief himself) that he wrote vivid letters of detailed description of Gladstone’s adventures and
encounters. Also, by writing much later in his life the good standard biography of his father Aberdeen and also a memoir of Sidney Herbert, he had the last word on many issues.

49.
The most fashionable hotel, in the Ka¨rntnerstrasse, although the construction of the Ring which was then in progress meant
that the age of the Imperial and the Sacher was only just over the horizon.

50.
To 1915, when the last purely Liberal government dissolved itself in the Asquith coalition.

51.
Perhaps the most revealing was in a letter to Sir William Heathcote, his colleague since the 1855 death of Inglis in the
representation of Oxford. Although Gladstone claimed to be untroubled by doubt it was nonetheless remarkably defensive in tone. There were two main points at issue: first reform, and second foreign
policy. Reform he desired to see settled. Derby had lost all chance of doing this by dissolving. (Why then did he vote for him in the 10 June division?) He ought therefore to ‘assist those
who may perhaps settle it’. On foreign policy (by which he presumably really meant Italy) he pronounced himself ‘in real and close harmony with the new premier, and the new foreign
secretary’. ‘How could I,’ he concluded, ‘under these circumstances, say I will have nothing to do with you, and be the one remaining Ishmael [presumably using the word in
its rare sense of an outcast] in the House of Commons?’ (Quoted in Morley,
Life of Gladstone
, I, pp. 627–8.)