Gladstone: A Biography (139 page)

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Authors: Roy Jenkins

Tags: #History, #Politics, #Non-Fiction, #Biography

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Gladstone flanked by his official family of private secretaries,
circa
1883: Horace Seymour, Spencer Lyttelton, George Leveson Gower and Edward Hamilton.

General Charles Gordon, the prototype of a
Boy’s Own Paper
hero, whose grip on public opinion Gladstone gravely underestimated.

Dinner at Haddo House in September, 1884. The hosts are the seventh Earl (later first Marquess) of Aberdeen, the grandson of Gladstone’s old chief, and his wife. Lady Aberdeen has Gladstone on her right and Rosebery on her left. (Painting by A. E. Emslie, now in the National Portrait Gallery.)

Gladstone and D
ö
llinger photographed by Lehnbach in Bavaria, September 1886. Lord Acton (far right) and Helen Gladstone (seated at the table in white) are also in the picture.

A constant but fatal attraction:

Charles Stewart Parnell

Katherine O’Shea

Gladstone reading in the Temple of Peace, his Hawarden library (probably late 1880s).

And writing, with great difficulty, seven or so years later. Sight was one ‘door of the senses’ which was indeed closing.

Tennyson in 1890, six years after accepting Gladstone’s peerage offer, two years before his death.

The fifth Earl of Roseberry, Gladstone’s sponsor in Midlothian and (unchosen) successor as Prime Minister: sometimes as ally, but often a tiresome one, and always pricly and self-regarding.

Sir William Harcourt, an effective parliamentary bruiser, sometimes called ‘the great gladiator’, but a difficult colleague.

John Morley, the author-statesman who, while not without his own brand of prickliness, was a more loyal prop of Gladstone in his fourth and last government than either Harcourt or Rosebery.

H. H. Asquith as a young Home. Secretary in 1894. While not intimate with the Prime Minister, he was the most successful ‘new man’ in this fourth government and, when Liberalism recovered in 1906, Gladstone’s effective long-term heir.

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