Gladstone: A Biography (13 page)

Gladstone was always incapable of glossing over things where others might have thought it wiser to do so. Thus, well before this marriage excursion, he had already taken Catherine through the
Farquhar and Douglas campaigns. She had retaliated by giving him the names of her previous suitors, rejected and rejecting, which he wrote in his diary in a continuous stream of Greek characters,
presumably as a modification of his habit of always there expressing difficult or prurient thoughts in French or Italian. This had the effect, when translated, of sounding like either a cricket
team (which should have pleased his brother-in-law) or a courtesan’s engagement sheet: ‘Seymer Newark Hill Vaughan Egerton Anson Harcourt Lewis Mordaunt’.
⁵

However, they both appeared to survive these mutual bombardments without undue casualties, and on 14 January 1840 they left Hawarden together and proceeded by railway to Wolverhampton, where
they
separated, Catherine going to Hagley and he on to London. A week later he went for a few days to Hagley and then brought her to London on the 27th. Gladstone was a great
early user of railways. He had so travelled from Euston to Crewe (and then on by road) before his wedding, and had then written: ‘9–9. 200 miles to Hawarden. Dust from engine annoying
to the eyes and filthy in the carriage. I had dreaded the motion backward.’
⁶
Of the shorter journey from Hagley he merely wrote: ‘11¼
to 7½ . . . by B[irmingha]m Railway. C. weary.’
⁷
On 8 February he concluded an arrangement with the Marquess of Cholmondeley to take over
his deceased mother’s house at 13 Carlton House Terrace. Three days later, having taken over most of the furniture as well, they were able to move in.

It was a very grand house for a young MP of bourgeois origin, even one who had married into the upper squirearchy. However, the Gladstones survived in proximate grandeur for thirty-five years.
He transferred to 6 Carlton Gardens, which his father made over to him, in 1847. And then in 1856 he moved back the few hundred yards to Carlton House Terrace, this time not to No. 13 but to No.
11, which was a bigger house. Only in 1876 did he finally abandon the ‘Carltons’ and retreat to Harley Street. After he lost his Prime Minister’s salary of £5000 a year, he
complained that he was left with a residual and encumbered £6050 of his own, while everyone else in the Terrace had £25,000 or more. In 1840 he calculated his income at £4260 and
his expenditure at £2168. By 1846 the figures had risen to £6987 and £4007. The near doubling of expenditure was more surprising than the surge in income, which was, however, very
much the boom before the slump.

In the summer of 1840 Catherine Gladstone gave birth to their first child and William Gladstone to his second book. The book was entitled
Church Principles Considered by their Results
,
was written in the same spirit of intolerant Anglicanism as was the first, but fell much flatter. Manning and Hope-Scott had again been his principal consultants. Those others who noticed it at all
(for instance Dr Thomas Arnold) thought it as theologically unsound as it was politically opinionated.

The only parliamentary significant event for Gladstone in his first session after marriage was his speech on 8 April 1840 denouncing the so-called Opium War which Palmerston as Foreign Secretary
had launched against China. It was his first major speech since his defence of the West Indian sugar planters three years before, and was very different from it both in motivation and in impact.
Unusually the diary
gives some indication of preparation: ‘Wrote to Mr Campbell – Mrs Hickey, read on China. House 4–6 + 7–10½. Spoke 1¼,
heavily: strongly agt the Trade & the war. . . .’
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Of the motivation he wrote (several weeks later), ‘I am in dread of the judgements of
God upon England for our national iniquity towards China.’
⁹
Undoubtedly, however, another part of it was his growing dislike and distrust of
Palmerston, whom he saw as bumptious, chauvinist, libertine without guilt, and compounding his sins by claiming to be the heir of Canning. Gladstone in general, while moralizing easily on issues,
was personally tolerant about political opponents and allies – his progress across the political sky meant that at one time or another most were both – but there were two major figures
who, throughout his middle political years, he could not abide. The one was Palmerston and the other was Disraeli. His desire to keep away from both of them had an almost astronomic quality to it.
It was, however, impossible in the cosmology of mid-nineteenth-century politics to do both at the same time, and for the last six years of Palmerston’s life Gladstone was his independent,
powerful and warily detached Chancellor of the Exchequer. Palmerston was the earlier of the two in engaging his antipathy, for by 1840 Gladstone had had little more contact with Disraeli than
meeting him at a dinner party of Lord Lyndhurst’s in 1835 and finding him ‘rather dull’, although noticeable for the foppery of his clothes. Disraeli compensated by irritating
Gladstone for sixteen years after Palmerston had gone.

This Opium War speech was both Gladstone’s main political incursion in that flat session of 1840, during which the Melbourne government subsided and the Whig decade came to an end, and his
first foreign policy foray. Eighteen-forty-one, by contrast, saw a general election with a major turnover of seats, and a new government which marked as dramatic a change of political weather as
1906 or 1945 or 1979. The new model Conservative party (as the Tories were coming to be called) of the Tamworth Manifesto, accepting the Reform Bill and attempting to embrace a good proportion of
the new manufacturing class as well as the Church and state squirearchy, was in office with a majority of eighty. And Peel, who was the epitome of the new Conservative balance, was beginning his
first period of secure power.

Peel was not only Gladstone’s leader but his political mentor. He and Gladstone had a similar social provenance, and even more strikingly, with a gap of a short generation (twenty-one
years) between them, did their careers follow similar courses. They were both the sons of rich
first-generation baronets who had made their money in Lancashire. Peel’s
father was more a manufacturer than a merchant, and somewhat richer even than John Gladstone. The sons both retained distinct accent traces of their county of origin. Peel was one of Harrow’s
seven Prime Ministers rather than one of Eton’s eighteen, but he was as naturally a Christ Church man as was Gladstone, and there produced as notable an academic result as Gladstone was to
do.

Within a year of Oxford, again as with Gladstone, Peel was in the House of Commons, in his case as member for Cashel, a Co. Tipperary borough which made Gladstone’s election for Newark
look positively democratic. They were later both members for Oxford University over sizeable spells, and were both eventually turned out by the electorate of graduates (a high proportion of whom
were then country clergy) for liberal sins, Peel for promoting Catholic emancipation, which he had hitherto strongly opposed, and Gladstone for a cumulative list of similar offences. As a young MP
Peel’s career prospered even more than Gladstone’s was to do. He became Chief Secretary for Ireland (the post which Gladstone coveted in 1841) for a six-year period at the age of
twenty-four, and Home Secretary for five years at the age of thirty-four.

They both began their effective premierships in their fifties, having each fashioned a new-style political grouping to sustain him in that role. Peel at fifty-three became in 1841 the first
Conservative
Prime Minister with a majority (there had previously been Tories), and Gladstone at fifty-eight became in 1868 the first
Liberal
Prime Minister who had nothing of
Whiggery about him, except for some of the followers by whom he was sustained. And towards the end of their lives they both caused considerable mayhem in the parties they themselves had created.
They both had phenomenal energy, and were by any standards towering statesmen, Peel the most effective between Pitt and Gladstone himself, and Gladstone still more pre-eminent, dominating both the
third and fourth quarters of the nineteenth century at least as completely as Peel had dominated the second quarter.

Beyond this, however, there were very substantial differences. In the first place Peel had no old age and no possibility of return to Downing Street after 1846, whereas Gladstone had the longest
twilight and the greatest number of encores in the history of politics. Peel was cut down at the age of sixty-two, falling off his horse on Constitution Hill, and dying dramatically in his
Whitehall Gardens house three days later. It needed the nature of his death to infuse his end with drama, for he was
in many ways a cool man, even in external manner a cold one.
There is some doubt whether it was his smile which Daniel O’Connell compared to the silver plate on a coffin, but there was in any event some applicability about the simile. This could never
have been said of Gladstone.

Peel was a commanding figure, prickly and vain, although attracting loyalty and even affection, but never tempestuous. Bagehot’s critical view of him was that he had ‘the powers of a
first-rate man and the creed of a second-rate man’. By that he meant that Peel, who in the case of ‘almost all the great measures with which his name is associated . . . attained great
eminence as [their] opponent before he achieved even greater eminence as their advocate’,
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always changed his mind at the time when the average
man and not the pioneer did so. This made him a wise and truly Conservative man of government, but it did not give him Gladstone’s swoop of an eagle’s flight.

The other gulf between them was in their attitude to religion. Peel is said to have gone beyond the demands of observance normal in the first half of the nineteenth century and to have been on
the threshold of private devoutness. But he was not tortured or obsessed by religion, and he did not allow it to obtrude on to his political decisions. Professor Gash, his 1972 biographer, wrote:
‘Peel’s own religion was a simple, rational, pious Protestantism. The enthusiasm of the “Saints”, the high sacerdotal principles of Gladstone, were as foreign to him as the
intellectual pessimism of Melbourne or the tortured self-examination of Lord Ashley [Shaftesbury].’
¹¹
He may have been less cynical than
Melbourne but, adjusting for the fact that he was the leader of a more clerical party, he was nearly as Erastian as any Whig. Although he had a fine rational mind, he was essentially unable
(perhaps because unwilling) to understand what Gladstone was going on about. Whether or not he threw
State and Church
on the floor, the depth of the chasm which separated them on the issue
with which it dealt is even more strongly (because more calmly and dismissively) expressed by his reported comment: ‘that young man will ruin a fine career if he writes books such as
these’.
¹²

Gladstone was Peel’s political heir. As Morley puts it: ‘we cannot forget that Peel and Mr Gladstone were in the strict line of political succession’,
¹³
and Morley, relying on his own experience as a minister under Gladstone (which experience only began thirty-six years after Peel’s death), then proceeds to pay
eloquent tribute to the way Gladstone’s whole habit of conducting public business still owed a great deal
to Peel’s assumptions, his methods and even his phrases (as
revealed in his published correspondence). Gladstone also proudly called himself a Peelite for a full decade after the death of the eponym. Of the distinguished band who originally bore this label
the others – Aberdeen, Goulburn, Graham, Sidney Herbert – were all dead by 1861. But Gladstone’s pre-eminence stemmed from much more than a capacity for survival. He was indeed
the one political figure of the nineteenth century whose quality and fame came to exceed that of Peel himself. And it may be that a presentiment of this – on both sides – was part of
the reason why, despite all the centripetal factors, relations between Gladstone and Peel were never as close as might have been expected. There was always some delicate curtain between them.
Gladstone was loyal to Peel, but not with quite the spontaneous and affectionate loyalty which he had felt towards Canning as a very young man, and which the memory of Canning continued to excite
in him. Peel used, recognized and three-quarters admired Gladstone’s qualities, yet stood a little back from him and queried his sense of proportion. ‘That young man [might] ruin a fine
career’ was a phrase which almost perfectly expressed his conditional benevolence.

Nothing is more difficult in the chemistry of politics than to bridge the time gap and to think how two men who served together in a senior-junior relationship would have adjusted had the age of
the junior moved upwards while that of the senior remained constant so that they had to coexist as near equals. Asquith and Churchill (between whom the age gap was exactly the same as that between
Peel and Gladstone) got along thoroughly well so long as Churchill could regard Asquith as a great if somewhat detached judge and Asquith could regard Churchill as a talented but amusingly
impetuous young minister. What balance would have been struck had they been in a competitive position is another matter.

When Peel died in 1850 Gladstone’s reaction was surprisingly cool. This was the more striking because of the dramatic nature of the tragedy, with the former Prime Minister lying poised
between life and death for eighty hours in the heart of the capital, with the street outside his house thronged not only with the carriages of a stream of enquiring callers but also with a
sympathetic concourse of the general public. Official and popular London hung upon his fate, and when he eventually succumbed he was mourned as the greatest statesman of his time and the nation
operated at half-mast for several days. The House of Commons suspended effective business, except for tributes, for two
days. Gladstone seconded the motion for the adjournment
on the first, the moving of which apparently took him by surprise, and he spoke no more than a few sentences, recalling however Walter Scott’s lines in memory of Pitt,
¹⁰
and adding to them the comment, at once measured and convoluted, that these words had been addressed ‘to a man great indeed, but not greater than Sir Robert
Peel’.
¹⁴