Gladstone: A Biography (16 page)

Their eloquence was at once a similarity and a difference. They were both remarkable although utterly contrasting orators. Newman was the more delicate. Matthew Arnold’s description of his
preaching in the University Church of St Mary’s at Oxford (of which he was vicar from 1828 to 1843) is not easily forgotten. Arnold wrote of ‘that spiritual apparition gliding in the
dim afternoon light through the aisles of St Mary’s, rising into the pulpit and then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious
music – subtle, sweet, mournful’.
⁷
Newman’s sentences were always carefully prepared, which was in contrast with Gladstone’s
flashing eye, thundering tone and cascades of spontaneous words. But this did not mean that Newman was more austere in his use of rhetoric, or that, although he never addressed great multitudes,
his command over the spoken word was a less necessary part of his armoury of argument. To quote Faber again: ‘Other men have known better how to stir up a sudden tempest of emotions; others
have argued as skilfully, but few, if any, have equalled him in the art of using reason as a lever for the prising of hearts.’
⁸

Another quality which Newman had in common with Gladstone was the ability to recover from a failure, which sometimes led in his case to a collapse. Faber says he did so in a way which
‘went just as far above normality as the collapse had fallen below it’. Aberdeen’s remark about Gladstone ‘in the rebound’ immediately springs to mind. Even though
detached from and even censorious of Newman, Gladstone therefore had quite enough understanding of his power and importance to know that it shattered the movement which had begun with Keble’s
Oxford ‘Assize Sermon’ in 1833 and in the slipstream of which Gladstone had
hitherto lived his whole adult life. Since leaving Christ Church Gladstone’s
religious life had never been physically centred on Oxford, although he had closely followed the liturgical controversies which had convulsed the University in those schismatic years.

Gladstone’s London spiritual home had gradually become the Margaret Chapel north of Oxford Circus, which the polychromatic architect William Butterfield later rebuilt as All Saints,
Margaret Street. Here he became part of a Tractarian lay brotherhood with a membership of fifteen, which included the Acland brothers (who were the initiators), Frederic Rogers, J. T. Coleridge,
Roundell Palmer (who as Lord Selborne became one of Gladstone’s Lord Chancellors), Butterfield himself and James Hope. The rules of the brotherhood mainly related to liturgical observance,
but they also contained provisions for devoting proportions of both time and energy to ‘some regular work of charity’. This ‘engagement’ as it came to be called was at first
directed towards male or female destitution and was centred on the House of St Barnabas in Rose Street, Soho. But as the 1840s wore on it came in Gladstone’s case to concentrate on the
attempted reformation of prostitutes, many of whom were far from destitute.

This concentration led Gladstone somewhat to disengage from the brotherhood, which in any event showed signs of faltering. However, the framework of his work among the ladies of the streets was
eminently respectable, even if there is more room for doubt about some of his motives.
¹¹
When in 1848 he set up the Church Penitentiary Asociation for the
Reclamation of Fallen Women his principal collaborators were Bishop Blomfield of London and Bishop Wilberforce, who had just been translated to the see of Oxford from the deanery of Westminster;
and when a few years later he helped to found (for the same purpose) the Clewer House of Mercy at Windsor his wife too was closely involved in the project.

He was also centrally involved in major ecclesiastical building. His plans for a new church in Leicester Square proved abortive, although he did establish a small chapel of ease off St
Martin’s Lane, but in Scotland he was more successful. He got Trinity College, Glenalmond, an Episcopalian public school for 160 boys on a greenfield site in Perthshire, built and opened by
1846. And in the grounds of Fasque there arose a public St Andrew’s Chapel.

His collaborator in most of these enterprises was James Hope.
Throughout the 1840s Hope and Manning were Gladstone’s closest politico-religious advisers. But Gladstone
loved Hope, whereas he did not love Manning. He said many years later that he could only look ‘at him [Manning] as a man looks at the stars’;
⁹
and the stars are clearest on a cold night. Hope, he said, possessed ‘the most rare gift, the power of fascination, and he fascinated me’.
¹⁰
Hope was one of the three men whom Gladstone loved. The first was Hallam, and the second and the third (it is difficult to place these two in chronological or other order)
were Hope and Sidney Herbert.
¹²
The only one of the three who did Gladstone no harm (although he was sometimes obstructive to him in Cabinet) was Herbert.
Hope did him the considerable harm, given Gladstone’s already surging temperament, of always stirring him up and not calming him down. He was like a wife who encouraged rather than corrected
her husband’s misjudgements. Mrs Gladstone was if anything the reverse, but she did not much engage with matters for decision. And Hope, who was very close – the godfather (with
Manning) of Gladstone’s first child, an executor of his will – egged him on, over the hurried publication of his book, over his Maynooth resignation, over Helen, over disapproval of
Newman. And then, to crown it all, Hope himself deserted his post on the ramparts and betrayed Gladstone, as the latter saw it, by being received as a Roman Catholic on the same day in April 1851
that Manning went over.

To add to these various destabilizing factors there came in 1847 the major financial embarrassment of Oak Farm, a curiously rural and gentle name for an establishment which was to cause such
upheaval in Gladstone’s life and wreak such havoc in the fortunes of his wife’s family. At the time of the Gladstone–Glynne marriage in 1839 Sir Stephen Glynne had been a rich
bachelor, not extravagant (except perhaps on election expenses), who pottered comfortably along on an annual income of over £10,000 (about £500,000 at present-day values) coming mainly
from agricultural rents. Of this, £2500 went under a generous settlement to his mother, who took to living mostly with her Lyttelton daughter at Hagley. But he had few other family
obligations, for the Gladstones were self-supporting and his younger brother, as already noted, had the £3000 a year benefice at Hawarden. However, great possessions, even among the gentle
and unthrusting, by no means always provide an immunity against the desire to accumulate more. When therefore Stephen Glynne saw other landlords becoming
magnates as a result of
turning their fields into coal mines or ironworks, and when Oak Farm, a property of his detached from the main Hawarden estate and on the edge of Worcestershire and Staffordshire, near Stourbridge,
showed itself rich in mineral deposits, he was tempted.

Glynne began to exploit Oak Farm in 1835. When the double marriage took place in 1839 he got both Lord Lyttelton and Gladstone to take one-tenth shares in it. In 1840 he sold land for
£55,000 in order to put the money into the ironworks. In that same year Oak Farm provided a revenue of £9454 as against £12,300 from the traditional estate rents. But by 1841 the
first clouds were gathering. John Gladstone had to provide credit, and disliked doing so, partly because of his distrust of Boydell, the manager, and partly because his old merchant’s
nostrils (although he was never an industrialist) disliked the smell of the business. It was, however, six years between then and the crash, and it seems almost incredible that, during that period
and so forewarned by the only close observer who knew anything about business, the three partners could not at least staunch the potential liability. On the contrary it became a pre-enactment of
Charles Kingsley’s poem of 1869 immortalizing the legend of the sands of Dee, visible appropriately enough from the mock battlements of Hawarden, and from which, once the mist came down and
the suction set in, there was no escape.

In late 1844, when John Gladstone had become more urgent (disengage ‘at almost whatever sacrifice may be required’; ‘events the most disastrous are
possible’),
¹¹
the three partners tried to end their unlimited liability by retiring to the position of mortgagees. But they could not avoid the
fact that the future of the whole Hawarden estate was committed to the declining fortunes of approximately ninety-four acres of ill-fated and ill-managed land on the edge of the Black Country.

In the autumn of 1847 there was a Stock Exchange crash and a general financial shake-out. Oak Farm fell under its impact as predictably as does a windfall apple to the puffs of autumn wind. It
left a liability on Hawarden of approximately £250,000 (£12½ million today). There were bankruptcy proceedings at Birmingham provoked by Lord Ward (the future Earl of Dudley),
who was the principal creditor. For the handling of these (including what he called an ‘indecent cross-examination’) Gladstone accepted responsibility, Glynne having been packed off to
Constantinople, for it was thought he was better out of the way. Gladstone then devoted himself with portentous care and some ingenuity to clearing up the mess. He had been little use so long as
there was life in the company. But, true to his longstanding proclivity for
deathbed scenes, the closing of the eyelids released a storm of activity from him. Freshfields were
the solicitors and they received from him no fewer than 140 letters on the subject. They must have groaned when yet another franked envelope in the well-known handwriting arrived.

At the decisive family conclave Sir John Gladstone advocated the financially sensible course of selling off the whole Hawarden property, which would enable Stephen Glynne to discharge the Oak
Farm debt and be left with a comfortable income of approximately £4500 a year. But it would also have left him rootless, a Lord Lieutenant (who would probably have had to resign) without a
county base. And it would have left Gladstone without a dimension which had already become important to his life over the previous nine years (Tom Gladstone and not he was the heir to Fasque),
Catherine Gladstone without the house in which she had been born and was to live in for nearly nine decades, and Henry Glynne as a squire-parson sitting on a very isolated branch.

So they decided on a more heroic course. They kept the estate and paid off the Oak Farm debts by a period of stringent economies. Sir Stephen Glynne tried to live on £700 a year. Hawarden
Castle was closed with the thought of letting it (a tenant was never found) and did not reopen until early 1852. Even old Lady Glynne suffered a reduction in her jointure from £2500 to
£1500. Gladstone, who was largely the instigator of this plan of economies, suffered no reduction in his own circumstances comparable with those of Stephen Glynne (but nor should he have
done; he was only a one-tenth partner). His own income was, however, reduced for a time by about 30 per cent, and from first to last he sank £267,500 of his own or his father’s money
into the Hawarden estate. But he was also the ultimate beneficiary. After the 1852 return to the big house he increasingly became the head of Hawarden. In 1851, with the death of Parson Henry
Glynne’s wife, the likelihood of a Glynne male heir had disappeared (although Henry Glynne caused agitation with one or two lurches towards remarriage), and Stephen Glynne, securely
unmarried, was apparently content, not only to become a subsidiary figure in his own house, although he always sat at the head of the table, but also to see the property settled on the Gladstone
children. In 1867 Gladstone paid £57,000 to secure its full reversion to himself and his heirs after the deaths of the two Glynne brothers (which both occurred within seven years).

The only (ambiguous) indication of resentment which Stephen Glynne ever showed was to develop a habit of referring to the Gladstones as ‘the great people’. But so of course they
were. Gladstone gave
Hawarden a fame comparable with that which Franklin Roosevelt gave to his Hyde Park mansion on the Hudson seventy or so years later. And Gladstone should
not fairly be regarded as a cuckoo in Stephen Glynne’s nest. He did not tip him out but treated him with affectionate regard. And, apart from anything else, there would, without
Gladstone’s prodigal expenditure of energy in the late 1840s, have been no remaining nest. Far busier than anyone else, he was the only one on the scene who had the vigour to engage with and
clear up a disastrous situation. He always subsequently claimed that this immersion into private business was an immensely valuable training for his several chancellorships of the Exchequer.
Without it he could not have understood the commercial problems of mid-Victorian England. This was Gladstone in his self-flagellating mood, thanking God for His goodness in allowing him to be
beaten up by the bloods of Christ Church in 1829 or brutally examined by the Birmingham inspector in bankruptcy in 1847. The connection between private and public financial skill is minimal. Pitt
was a great public financier who left his own affairs in confusion. Most of those who have best served their country have done so at the expense of their own personal wealth. Oak Farm was in no way
necessary to make Gladstone a great Chancellor. What it did, before giving him the important and safe harbourage of Hawarden, was substantially to increase both his burden of work and the sense of
personal strain and perturbation which was such a feature of his late thirties and early forties.