Gladstone: A Biography (12 page)

P
EEL’S
A
PPRENTICE

T
HE FIRST HALF OF
1839 was not politically prosperous for Gladstone. After his return to England on 31 January he came gradually to understand that his
State and Church
book had not been a success. Macaulay’s
Edinburgh Review
polemic, which appeared at Easter, he could have dismissed as the howling of the Whig dogs. It at least
suggested that the book was attracting attention, and it put into the English language the first of several phrases which are inseparable from Gladstone’s name: ‘the rising hope of
those stern and unbending Tories’ has retained its resonance after a century and a half. Like most of the best phrases, however, it was doubtfully accurate. Not only was it to be belied by
Gladstone’s future political development. In addition the book was at the time ill regarded by the most influential Tories, and their distaste for it was such as temporarily to hinder
Gladstone’s prospects of rising.

They mostly considered it a foolish book, making up in portentousness (it was, for instance, dedicated to the University of Oxford) for what it lacked in sense and judgement. Gladstone noticed
their silence more than he divined the cause. ‘Not a word from him [Peel], S[tanley] or G[raham] yet,’
⁸
he wrote on 9 February, ‘even to
acknowledge my poor book.’
¹
Peel was reported as having thrown it on the floor in annoyance at Gladstone’s crassness in gratuitously giving
to fortune the hostage of such an extreme and impractical piece of writing. It was probably lucky for the author that, when Melbourne offered his resignation as Prime Minister in May of that year,
the Queen’s stubbornness in refusing to install some Tory ladies of the bedchamber led to Peel’s declining to form a government. Had he done so, Gladstone might well have been
excluded.

The only self-protective aspect of
The State in its Relations with the
Church
was that it was extremely difficult to read. Few can have penetrated its opaqueness to
the full monstrous intolerance of the doctrine, which broadly amounted to a policy of no public service jobs throughout the British Isles (although maybe the pass had been most undesirably sold in
Scotland) for anyone who was not a communicating member of the Church of England. The plenitude of Gladstone’s extremity was underlined by his one ‘moderate’ concession: the
doctrine might be difficult to apply in India.

Among the scarce benefits to flow from the book, and almost the only bonus of Gladstone’s 1839 spring, was that one of the few who did get through it from beginning to end was Miss
Catherine Glynne. She even copied out some chosen passages and endeavoured to learn them by heart. It was perhaps the only way in which she could avoid the immediate erasure from her mind of what
she had read. Many years later her daughter Mary (Drew) thought that this indicated that her mother who, despite her many gifts of character, personality, and a spontaneous even if disorganized
intelligence, rarely then read a book or even a newspaper, must have been something of an intellectual in her youth. It seems more likely that it was a sign of her growing absorption in Gladstone.
Had Gladstone been more worldly or less literarily vain he would surely have regarded a detailed acquaintance with
State and Church
as a certain sign that he had at last succeeded as a
suitor. As it was he remained on tenterhooks until 8 June, when she formally accepted him during a riverside walk away from the concourse at a Fulham garden party.

Although Gladstone had come to her via the Farquhar and Douglas setbacks, and although one reason why she may have been so slow to accept was that she had been heavily jilted in 1837 by Colonel
Francis Harcourt,
⁹
neither approached the marriage as in any way a
pis aller
. They were totally engaged with each other, and each recognized from
the beginning, as indeed turned out to be abundantly so, that they had been lucky to be available because rejected.

Catherine Glynne was almost perfectly suited to be Gladstone’s wife. In the first place she was healthy, unlike the female members of his own family, out-survived him by two years (in full
vigour until nearly the
end) and died only in 1900, at the same age of eighty-eight which he had attained. She was also buoyant, self-confident and high-spirited, as well as
physically graceful and on the edge of beauty, less fashionably and glossily but more vitally so than Miss Farquhar. She was moderately careless of convention and well at ease within her own skin,
very much a part of which were her high family connections – Grenvilles, Pitts, Wyndhams – and her chatelaineship of Hawarden, exercised almost since girlhood owing to her
mother’s valetudinarianism and her brother’s bachelordom. Her commitment to Hawarden, which was her home for the whole of her eighty-eight years, fortified much less crucially by a
large London establishment, meant that she never showed signs of sulky neglect in the face of the frequent preoccupations and occasional infatuations of Gladstone.

It could be argued that their marriage was not particularly close. They were often and sometimes unnecessarily in different houses, conjoined only by regular but not notably intimate letters.
Gladstone nearly always signed himself to her ‘Ever yours affty., W. E. Gladstone’. Later in life he occasionally alternated this with ‘From your old WEG’. For decades,
however, he never varied in writing ‘Mrs W. E. Gladstone’, as though it were a business communication, across the bottom of the letter. But when the last of the wives of his three elder
brothers had died, he suddenly shifted, with an extraordinary sense of precedential precision, to writing ‘Mrs Gladstone’.

Catherine Gladstone was passionately engaged with the success and wellbeing of her husband, but not very interested in either politics or the intricacies of religious doctrine and observance,
the two subjects which most interested him. On religion her (1956) biographer describes her as
Anima naturaliter Christiana
²
– a soul
turned instinctively towards God – which was a description Gladstone had applied to Arthur Hallam. This might be interpreted either as a tribute to her spontaneous piety or as a determination
to put the best possible explanation on her lack of interest in religious instruction. She never reacted against Gladstone’s religiosity, being affronted neither by the letter which so upset
Clement Attlee nor by his engrossment within minutes of her Thameside acceptance of his proposal, in explaining his attitude to the Church. She was appropriately regular as a parson’s sister
and a famous layman’s wife in her own public devotions. Yet she cannot be regarded as a wifely sycophant. Her middle-life ‘Oh, William dear, if you weren’t such a great man you
would be a terrible bore’
³
must be accounted a rarely illuminating expression of exasperated affection.

On politics she never betrayed any views of her own beyond a fierce loyalty to her husband and a more moderate one to others whose personality and behaviour earned her
approval. This ideological detachment, which put her firmly in the category of a Mrs Baldwin or a Mrs Attlee rather than a Mrs Asquith or a Mrs Roosevelt, was perhaps as well in view of the
meteoric progress across the political sky which Gladstone pursued in the course of his marriage. It also meant that Gladstone’s early decision to tell her all his political secrets (in a
typically Manichaean way he thought the alternative was to tell her none), to which he stuck throughout his life, was made safer. In the early days she occasionally betrayed one through
carelessness, but never at any stage by malevolent or even benevolent intent. The ideological detachment was, however, accompanied by a willingness, when in London and after the birth of her eighth
and last child more or less coincided with the completion of Barry’s new Palace of Westminster, to spend long hours in the old grille-covered ladies’ gallery of the House of Commons. It
was indeed a legend of the pre-1941 House that, just as the despatch boxes bore indentations caused by the vehemence with which over the years Gladstone had pounded them with his heavy rings, so in
the ladies’ gallery there was a patch of brass railing in front of her habitual corner seat which Mrs Gladstone had polished bright with her gloved hand. (The length of her husband’s
speeches ensured that both the despatch boxes and the railing had plenty of time in which to receive punishment or massage.)

The question which arises is whether Catherine Gladstone’s disorganized self-confidence amounted to a gushing self-satisfaction. There are one or two signs which point in that direction.
‘Glynnese’, the private family language, which Gladstone had the independent good sense never fully to master, was surely a most tiresome affectation. The use of ‘young
mawkin’ for stranger, of ‘hydra’ for disorder or of ‘with a magpie’ for underdone was surely more a search for exclusivity and a sign of self-regard than an aid to
clear communication. Glynnese makes Winchester ‘notions’ appear almost rational. And Catherine Gladstone was near to being the keeper of the shrine of this piece of nonsense. Her
familiar names were also a little arch. As girls she and her younger sister Mary were known as the ‘two pussies’. Gladstone, happily, never took to this name and preferred
‘Catherine’ or ‘Cathie’ or ‘C’. However, on her side of the family Mary surrendered the joint claim and taught her own children (an even greater quiverful of
twelve) to refer to ‘Aunt Puss’ or ‘Auntie Pussy’.

Catherine’s influence upon Mary was so strong that the latter announced her own engagement three days after her sister’s betrothal with Gladstone. When her sister
had hesitated, so did she. When her sister decided, she followed suit. Mary’s husband-to-be was George Lyttelton, of Hagley Hall, Worcestershire, who had succeeded as the fourth Lord
Lyttelton of the second creation in 1837 when he was still an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was only twenty-one at the time of the engagement (four years younger than Mary Glynne)
and had a somewhat immature appearance. Nonetheless his later achievements were considerable. He became a fellow of the Royal Society, received honorary degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, was
the first Principal of Queen’s College, Birmingham, and the first President of the Midland Institute there. He was the leader of West Midlands intellectual life.

Among his children (he added three by a second wife to make a total of fifteen) were Lucy, who married Lord Frederick Cavendish, the assassinated Chief Secretary for Ireland in Gladstone’s
second government; Lavinia, who married Edward Talbot, the effective founder of Keble College, Oxford, and later Bishop of Rochester, Southwark and finally Winchester; and Alfred, the great
cricketer who was Colonial Secretary under Balfour. George Lyttelton himself was as enthusiastic a cricketer as he was an intellectual, and one of the reasons for his excessive number of children,
which led to the searing death of his wife, aged forty-three, in 1857, was said to be his desire to produce a family eleven. He was a tragic as well as a gifted figure. In a fit of melancholia he
committed suicide at the age of fifty-eight.

In 1839, however, he like Gladstone was an eager husband-to-be and they agreed to a double marriage at Hawarden in July. Both the bridegrooms, against more recent custom, took themselves there
nearly two weeks before the wedding and naturally attracted considerable attention in the estate village, where Gladstone, taller, more handsome and eight years older, contradicted the impression
that he had made on Caroline Farquhar at Polesden Lacey by causing a group of villagers mistakenly to murmur: ‘It is easy to see which one is the lord.’ The wedding passed off well on
25 July as a great estate and families celebration (John Gladstone was delighted with the match), and the two bridegrooms were sufficiently pleased with each other and their brides that, after a
brief separation when the Lytteltons went to Hagley and the Gladstones stayed at Hawarden, they all four set off on what proved to be a rain-sodden tour of the Scottish Highlands.
Then the Gladstones settled down for a quiet October and most of November at Fasque. After that they did a month’s tour of Edinburgh, the Borders, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and
Nottinghamshire, including a brief visit to Newark (and Clumber), before returning to Hawarden for Christmas.

They spent two days at Dalmahoy, Lord Morton’s house in Midlothian. Lady Milton, as Lady Frances Douglas had become, was there, and Gladstone wrote of her in his diary with somewhat
elephantine delicacy: