Gladstone: A Biography (15 page)

He saw that the demands of good government pointed in precisely these directions. But he also feared that it might be a backdoor undermining of the position of the Church of Ireland; and that it
might be dishonourable if he, who had written as he had done in 1838, even though he had two-thirds changed his mind in the meantime, were to remain a member of a government which implemented a
policy contradictory to his previous beliefs. He therefore spent the whole of 1844 plaguing his colleagues with his conscience. As at that time the Conservative Party was racked by the issue of
whether it would allow Peel to usher in the much more stable and prosperous Britain of the third quarter of the nineteenth century or whether it would respond to what became the atavism of
Disraeli, Stanley and Bentinck, and as on the big issue Gladstone was wholly on the side of Peel, his obsession was totally lacking in proportion. Peel’s comment that ‘I really have
great difficulty
sometimes in comprehending what Gladstone means’ seems in the circumstances remarkably restrained.

Into the midst of this troubled year Gladstone threw a bizarre spanner. In July he wrote to Peel suggesting that he should resign his Cabinet post, his parliamentary seat and almost anything
else within striking distance in order to become special British envoy to the Vatican. (Peel and Aberdeen, the Foreign Secretary, were thought to be contemplating the opening of diplomatic
relations.) He told Peel that if he did not like the suggestion he need not reply. Peel took him at his word and did precisely that. And fifty years later Gladstone provided his own commentary on
his 1844 behaviour. ‘I have difficulty at this date [1894] in conceiving by what obliquity of view I could have come to imagine that this was a rational or in any way excusable proposal: and
this, although I vaguely think my friend James Hope had some hand in it, seems to show me now that there existed in my mind a strong element of fanaticism.’
²⁸

Although diverted from this particular piece of foolishness, Gladstone continued for another six months (two and a half of them at Fasque, fortunately for ministers’ patience) to keep his
colleagues on tenterhooks about whether or not he would resign on the Maynooth issue. They combined an irritated amusement at the delicate twists of his conscience with a surprisingly strong desire
that he should not go – a fine tribute to his other qualities of energy, intellect and eloquence. Eventually, on 3 February 1845, he did resign, and explained his reasons to the House of
Commons in an hour-long speech on the following day. No one was much the wiser at the end, but his opacity at least had the advantage that the danger of bitterness was drowned in
incomprehension.

Disraeli, without ill will, complacently thought that Gladstone’s career was finished, and Sir Robert Inglis, with whom Gladstone was soon to share the representation of the University of
Oxford, assumed that he was freeing himself to join him in the fight for diehard causes, beginning with opposition to the Maynooth Bill itself. Inglis could not have been more mistaken. The
resignation was not the first but the last departing swallow of Gladstone’s theocratic intolerance. Since 1838 he had lost his faith, not in God, but in the ability of any government or state
to act as the agent of God. His ideal of rule by a clerisy was not possible. It was better therefore for government (if not necessarily for the Church) to respect different routes to God. In fact
Gladstone’s 1844 support for the Dissenting Chapels Bill (which underpinned the rights
of Unitarians and others to their buildings and endowments) was more significant for
the future than his Maynooth resignation.

He confounded Inglis and confused a great many other people by not only voting for the Maynooth Bill but speaking (for two and a half hours) in its favour. His resignation was the discharge of a
debt to the past, and maybe an expiation of what he was coming to see as the foolishness of
The State in its Relations with the Church
. His support for the bill, even though he confessed it
‘opposed to my own deeply cherished predilections’, was an obeisance to the cause of sense in government. That was something which he was learning, even if slowly and unevenly, from
Peel.

O
RATOR
, Z
EALOT
AND
D
EBTOR

G
LADSTONE’S BEHAVIOUR
during the 1840s was nevertheless distinctly erratic. Although it was to be another twenty years before he achieved his
unique quality as a platform orator, which both set him apart from all his contemporaries and scandalized many of them, he was already a formidable and fearsome parliamentary performer. He did not
have a great advocate’s gift of rendering complexity wholly lucid. He had the still rarer gift of keeping his meaning convoluted and often obscure, yet making his presentation of it
compelling and persuasive. It stemmed from the intensely physical nature of his eloquence: ‘his falcon’s eye with strange imperious flash’ in Morley’s unforgettable phrase,
and his ‘great actor’s command of gesture, bold, sweeping, natural, unforced’, which also had something of ‘an eager and powerful athlete’ in it.
¹
And it explained the paradox that he was often as unreadable in prose as he was riveting in speech.

His oratory aroused apprehension as well as admiration. This was particularly so when, as in the 1840s, his always tempestuous nature became like a huge wheel spinning loose. After his Maynooth
speech his next significant House of Commons eruption (and his last for two and a half years) was in July 1845, when from his new independent position he replied for another two and a half hours to
a Palmerston attack on the government for its handling of colonial sugar duties in relation to its treaties with Spain. When he sat down Peel turned round to him and said, ‘That was a
wonderful speech, Gladstone.’ This gave him particular pleasure, for as he also noted, ‘Peel was the most conscientious man I ever knew in spareness of eulogium.’
²
But there was probably relief as well as praise in Peel’s reaction. For once the big gun had pointed in the right direction. It had done a fine job, but an
ensuing period of silence from it could be borne with equanimity.

Apart from his generally unquiet nature there were a number of special reasons for Gladstone’s perturbation in these years. The first was the reception of his sister Helen into the Roman
Catholic Church in May 1842. Dr Wiseman, Gladstone’s acquaintance in Rome at the end
of 1838, was the agent of her conversion, which took place at Oscott College near
Birmingham, where three and a half years later Newman was to go to be confirmed, also by Wiseman, immediately after he had made his first Roman confession at Littlemore.

Gladstone took Helen’s move as a major family scandal and a direct personal affront. His relations with her were close – much more so than with any of his brothers by this time
– but not easy and often unfriendly. As his attitude to his brother Robertson’s marriage had shown, he regarded himself as in charge of family discipline on religious matters. In the
six years that had gone by since then he may have begun to move to greater tolerance in public policy, but this did not extend to what he thought was permissible within the family. And Helen was
more serious to him than was Robertson. He in no way identified with the latter, but he might well have seen in Helen something of his own susceptibility to temptations. Furthermore he always felt
a special responsibility for defending the narrow and crucial line between his own High Anglicanism and what he regarded as the insinuating indulgences of the Church of Rome. He saw himself, in a
phrase he (not then dreaming of the apostasy which was to come from that quarter) was to use about Hope-Scott, ‘as one of the sentinels of the Church of England on the side looking towards
Rome’.
³

He was therefore in favour of the most unforgiving sanctions. He advised his father to turn Helen out of Fasque and himself forbade her to see his children. Once again John Gladstone was more
tolerant and sensible. He quite rightly regarded Fasque as Helen’s home (much more than it was William Gladstone’s), continued to make her welcome and permitted her (much to William
Gladstone’s disgust) to be visited there by her confessor. This gentler treatment did not prevent her becoming increasingly addicted to opium and anxious to get away from any family
interference or supervision. In the autumn of 1845 she was in a terrible state in Baden-Baden, and William Gladstone, always the most officious member of the family, set off to bring her back,
although it was a task which could probably have been more neatly exercised by any of the other brothers. But he was the one who, in spite of being much busier, always had the energy to be
available.

He appeared to have given up denunciation and even went to Birmingham to get a letter from Dr Wiseman telling her that she should obey her father (from whom Gladstone also had a letter) and
return. In Birmingham Gladstone was in a relatively ecumenical mood, recording himself as being ‘most kindly received’ and visiting the new Catholic
cathedral of St
Chad.
⁴
Having got the letter, however, he did not rush to Helen but spent two weeks on the way, calling on Guizot in Paris, and devoting six days to
theological discussion with Dr Döllinger in Munich.

When he eventually reached Baden-Baden he found Helen worse than he had expected. There was an horrific scene when, having taken the vast dose of 300 drops of laudanum and become partly
paralysed, she had to be held down by force while leeches were applied. Gladstone stayed in and around Baden for five gloomy weeks, doing his clumsy best. Eventually, assisted more by his
father’s threats to cut off money than by his own persuasiveness, he got Helen to travel with him (and a priest and a doctor) to Cologne. There, however, she stuck, and Gladstone ‘after
much deliberation’ had to go home alone. After three weeks she followed, but to her father’s house in Carlton Gardens and certainly not to her brother’s a couple of hundred yards
away.

While Gladstone was away, indeed almost exactly when he was witnessing Helen’s convulsions, John Henry Newman was being received into the Roman Catholic Church. Rather as with
Hallam’s death, Gladstone did not learn of this until some time later, and then it was more of a depressant than a shock to him. Magnus, indeed, says that he accepted the news ‘with
equanimity’, but that is an exaggeration. Gladstone reacted to very few things with equanimity, and insofar as he was not bowled over by the Newman news it was because he had been expecting
it for nearly two years. He knew the contents of the letters which Newman had written to Pusey and Manning in the autumn of 1843. When he received this 1843 intelligence he was thrown into a state
of extreme shock and himself wrote to Manning: ‘I stagger to and fro like a drunken man. I am at my wit’s end.’ He was censorious as well as shocked. Some of Newman’s
language struck him as, ‘forgive me if I say it, more like expressions of some Faust gambling for his soul than the records of the inner life of a great Christian teacher’.
⁵
But censorious although he might be – his next letter to Manning referred to Newman as ‘a
disgraced man
’ – he could not doubt the
disintegrating blow that the departing enchanter had delivered to the High Anglican movement, a cause which had been gathering momentum only a short time before and about which Gladstone cared
deeply.

Gladstone and Newman were never close to each other. They both had too much star quality for either to be comfortable too close to the other. But there were several similarities as well as some
sharp contrasts between them. Almost without trying, they both infused nearly
everything they said and did with an excitement which was in no way diminished by uncertainty about
what would come next. Beyond this their religion had much more in common than the obvious apostolic historicism. They both retained considerable traces of the Evangelicalism of their youth.
‘Fear’, Geoffrey Faber wrote in
The Oxford Apostles
, ‘is the driving force of [Newman’s] arguments. . . . Again and again in his sermons it seems as if he had to
force himself to speak of God’s love and mercy.’
⁶
Condemnation and sin were more real to him. This was equally true of Gladstone, who had a
pervading sense of human sin, and of his own special contribution to it. They were both essentially religious pessimists, trying to erect ramparts, whether in the form of a new church building, a
new argument or a new hymn, against man’s terrifying prospects.