Gladstone: A Biography (18 page)

The politics of the mid-1840s therefore provided Gladstone with no stabilizing counterbalance to his various personal and religious troubles. And when he eventually regained a seat in Parliament
at the general election in the late summer of 1847, neither his new constituency nor the party configuration of the new House of Commons was helpful to his equanimity. The constituency was the
University of Oxford. From 1604 to 1950 the University returned two ‘burgesses’ to Parliament. The thought of this unusual constituency excited Gladstone, but as his need was more for
calming down than for stirring up there was by no means a clear gain. That subjective factor apart, the seat had some advantages and some disadvantages. The first of the advantages, by no means
irrelevant in the year of the Oak Farm bankruptcy, was that it was cheap. There were several grounds of objection to the university constituencies, but an electorate inviting corruption was not one
of them. Indeed the voters were so physically elusive that it was difficult to incur even the normal expenses of an austere campaign. This, however,
carried its disadvantages
from Gladstone’s point of view. In a seat that was never safe for him the man who was becoming the foremost orator of his age was almost uniquely prevented from exercising this form of
persuasion upon his constituents.

Furthermore Oxford exaggerated his natural tendency to mingle politics and religion. The worst convulsions of the Tractarian earthquake were over by the time Gladstone became member, but Oxford
nevertheless remained the central battleground of liturgical and theological dispute, and the representation of the University was determined at least as much on religious as on political grounds.
It is difficult to believe that Peel, for example, with his own unsatisfactory 1817–29 experience there, not to mention his desire to see Gladstone treat Church matters more calmly, could
ever have counselled him to sit for Oxford. Beyond that the pulls of the University electorate were still strongly conservative and even intolerant. It was Gladstone’s early reputation as
‘the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories’ which gave him his initial attraction as a candidate. But already by 1847 he was moving away from that position, and was to do so
with gathering momentum over the eighteen years for which he remained a member for the University. This meant that relations with his constituency introduced an additional dimension of turbulence
into an already tempestuous period of his life. Yet once the possibility of election for Oxford opened before him there was no question of his refusing. He had great need of a seat, and he loved
and respected the institution which on his deathbed he was to salute as ‘the God-fearing and God-sustaining University of Oxford’.

The two members for the University in the Parliament of 1841 had been Sir Robert Inglis of Christ Church, who had beaten Peel in the immediate aftermath of Catholic emancipation, and Thomas
Bucknall-Estcourt of Corpus Christi College, who had sat obscurely since 1826. Inglis was a genial man of reactionary views. His geniality endeared him to the House of Commons (Peel in 1847, and in
spite of 1829, came to Oxford to vote for him – and for Gladstone), as his views did to a large part of the Oxford electorate. He was impregnable in his seat.

Estcourt wished to retire, and Gladstone’s name as a possible replacement began to be actively canvassed in May. Edward Cardwell, recently Financial Secretary to the Treasury, later to be
Gladstone’s Secretary of State for War, was already in the lists with Peel’s support, but he was bundled out of the way. Gladstone was formally nominated in the Sheldonian Theatre on 29
July by the Rector of Exeter (Richards) in a
Latin speech of notable succinctness. Inglis was nominated on the same occasion by a canon of Christ Church, and a third candidate,
Professor Charles Round, by the Master of Balliol (Jenkyns). Round was an Evangelical, procured with some difficulty to run against Gladstone. It was not thought worth running against Inglis.

Gladstone, however, had considerable High Anglican and liberal Church support. Helpfully from the point of view of rallying the Anglo-Catholics, Keble surprisingly described him as ‘Pusey
in a blue coat’. By ‘blue coat’ he probably meant no more than that Gladstone was not ‘of the cloth’, but it was surprising because there were few people who were less
inclined to carry the flashier fashions of the Regency into the Victorian age than was Gladstone; and in any event there was by 1847 hardly anyone other than the first Marquess of Anglesey who
habitually wore a blue coat in London.

So the Anglo-Catholics, rallied by Keble, liked Gladstone because they thought (rightly) that he was a Tractarian sympathizer and because they knew that he had come specially to Oxford in 1845
to vote (unavailingly) against the Heads of Houses and in favour of W. G. Ward, fellow of Balliol and father of Newman’s first biographer, being deprived of his degree for heresy. The
liberals meanwhile hoped that Gladstone would be in favour of reform of the University, if need be by Parliament. This looked to the curbing of the oligarchic power which the Heads of Houses had
appropriated to themselves and which they had used against Ward and attempted to use against Newman’s ‘Tract 90’.

As a result Gladstone was supported by very few of these Heads – only four, as against the sixteen who voted for Round. But this was balanced by a strong Gladstone preponderance among the
fellows of colleges, particularly those who had achieved firsts, double firsts or University prizes. His named supporters included John Ruskin, Arthur Hugh Clough, Frederick Temple (future
archbishop and father of another future archbishop) and Benjamin Jowett, who as a future and still more notable Master of Balliol balanced Richard Jenkyns.

His opponents were equally varied and some distinctly intemperate. He called on Dr Routh, the ninety-two-year-old President of Magdalen, who had held that office since 1791 and had another seven
years still to go, but found him adamantly opposed to having a second Christ Church member for the University. This indeed was one of the counts used against Gladstone throughout the election, but
it was inoffensively factual compared with some of the other charges against him. One was that he was tainted by his sister Helen’s apostasy, and a secret Roman
himself.
Ashley (then a Whig MP, later Shaftesbury) showed that an Evangelical philanthropist was well capable of partisan invective by describing Gladstone as a ‘mystified, slippery, uncertain,
politico-Churchman, a non-Romanist Jesuit’.
⁷

Another and largely contradictory count against Gladstone was that he had already shown his liberalism by voting for the Dissenters’ Chapels Bill in 1845. This charge, however, was a
dangerous one for Round, who was the candidate not only of the Evangelicals but also of the old high-and-dry faction in the University, which was horrified when it came to light that Round had not
only favoured tolerance to Dissenters but was on the verge of being one himself. He had actually attended a Dissenting chapel, once in 1845 and three times in 1846, so he reluctantly confessed. The
fact that the Oxford election was fought among an elevated electorate and on religious rather than political issues appeared to increase rather than diminish the petty backbiting.

A supporter whom Gladstone had difficulty in attracting was his eldest brother Tom. Either out of jealousy or because of the genuine strength of his Low Church principles he wrote to William to
tell him that, while blood might be thicker than politics, it was not thicker than religion, which in his view was what the election was about. William Gladstone was merely offended, but Sir John
Gladstone was outraged. With an even-handed authority matching that which he had exercised against William at the time of Robertson’s marriage a decade earlier, he dealt with Tom, who duly
voted for his brother.

The margin was not such that this was crucial in terms of anything except family relations, but it was not handsomely wide either. Inglis soared away with 1700 votes, Gladstone polled 997 and
Round 824. Gladstone was at Fasque when he heard the result on 5 August and did not come south until 20 October, or visit Oxford until five days later. There was probably nobody much there to visit
until October, and the victory, while it satisfactorily put him back in the House of Commons, was not so glorious as to call for celebration. In any event he had other things heavily on his mind
– Oak Farm and family illness. In the second half of September his five-year-old daughter Agnes nearly died of erysipelas (‘Just twelve years ago my Mother died in this same house of
the same terrible complaint,’ he wrote in his diary before going into a comparison of that deathbed and the current sick room).
⁸
Agnes recovered
and lived to marry Edward Wickham, the headmaster of Wellington College, but the Gladstones were sufficiently oppressed by the threat that when it was removed they installed a window of
thanksgiving, replete with a fine Latin inscription done by William but which he cautiously and modestly noted as needing to ‘pass under the eyes of a fresher and better scholar
than myself’.
⁹

Relief from this anxiety uncovered the problem of his sister. On 3 October he wrote: ‘In the evg I saw poor Helen & was greatly shocked. I thought her voice quite altered, her frame
more emaciated but more utterly shattered; and although she conversed rationally about others her mind quite gone in relation to herself.’
¹⁰
Altogether it was not an easy early autumn and was made no more so by the fact that Catherine Gladstone was in her fifth and perhaps most difficult pregnancy.
¹⁶
When the Gladstones came to London by railway on 20 October (filling a second-class compartment) they had a hostile Helen with them until Rugby, where she was handed over to Tom,
who installed her in a Roman Catholic convent at Leamington. The various family tensions during that long day of primitive rail travel must have been formidable.

In London they were confronted with the prospect not only of a new baby, a new Parliament and a new constituency but also of a (to them) new house. John Gladstone no longer came to London, and
particularly with the drain of Oak Farm it had become a ridiculous extravagance to keep up both 13 Carlton House Terrace and 6 Carlton Gardens within a couple of hundred yards of each other. The
William Gladstones accordingly prepared to give up the former and take over the paternal house.

Despite these preoccupations Gladstone paid significant attention both to Oxford and to Parliament during the remainder of the autumn. But what he did in Parliament, while courageous, was not
strengthening of his position in Oxford. He paid two five-day visits to the University (with calls on all the Heads of Houses) within a single fortnight, which was far more than he had ever done at
Newark after his 1832 introduction to the town and more too than he was to do anywhere else until he got to Midlothian in 1879. Oxford might free him from the rigours of an actual campaign but it
certainly did not free him from the need for courtesy visiting and patient discussion.

Gladstone balanced these social obeisances with no concessions to the politico-religious prejudices of the University. His first House of Commons speech for two and a half years was in favour of
a minor Roman Catholic Relief Bill, and he made an appropriately minor speech. But it was not calculated to propitiate his Oxford critics. Then, eight
days later on 16 December,
he made a more substantial speech on a more important issue, that of ‘the Jew Bill’, as it was habitually called. It arose out of the election of Baron Lionel de Rothschild, the current
head of the Rothschild banking house and the father of the first Lord Rothschild, as member for the City of London (jointly, as it happened, with the new Prime Minister, Lord John Russell).
Rothschild could not sit because he could not take the ‘Church and state’ oath. (Disraeli, thanks to his father’s sudden lurch towards baptizing his children, was subject to no
such inhibition.) Russell moved a bill to allow his City and Whig colleague to take a Jewish oath. Gladstone, to the surprise of almost all his supporters from his father to Edward Pusey, and to
the collective indignation of the University, on whose behalf Sir Robert Inglis presented a petition of opposition from Convocation, spoke and voted for the bill, which got through the Commons but
failed in the Lords. Rothschild, several times re-elected, had to wait until 1858 to be allowed in. It was a less convulsive pre-run of the drama of Bradlaugh (who was an Anglo-Saxon atheist and
not a theocratic Jew), which from 1880 onwards was to dominate the life of the second Gladstone government, and substantially limit its effectiveness.

Why did Gladstone do it? His speech, which it is difficult to believe can have been one of his more successful, provides neither directly nor indirectly much explanation of motive. His old
friend Thomas Acland had begged him beforehand, if he had to speak, to be direct. Despite this advice, which Gladstone engagingly believed he had followed, the subordinate clauses hung like
candelabra throughout his oration with few of his sentences containing less than seventy words, and some twice as many.

His conclusion has long seemed overwhelmingly right, but most of his arguments must have appeared specious. First he erected a very pompous theory about his duty as member for Oxford University.
This, he claimed, put him in a different category from other members. They were superior to their constituents ‘in mental cultivation and opportunities of knowledge’, and were therefore
clearly entitled to exercise their own judgement. His constituents, on the other hand, were ‘either superior or, on the least favourable showing, equal to myself’. Nevertheless he must
also be free to speak for himself and not for them, a worthy Burkeian sentiment, but one which made the distinction pointless.

Much of his argument was a
de minimis
one. There were not going to be many Jews in Parliament even with the removal of the disability. This was a perfectly sensible argument of
expediency, but it sat ill with any
high statement of principle. The central theme of the speech was, however, an uncharacteristically defeatist piece of historical analysis
which probably stemmed from his difficulty in evacuating the untenable ground of
The State in its Relations with the Church
without allowing the withdrawal to become a rout. He said:
‘we have now arrived at a stage in which, after two or three generations had contended for a Church Parliament, and two or three generations more contended for a Protestant Parliament, each
being in succession beaten, we are called upon to decide the question whether we shall contend for a Christian Parliament.’
¹¹
And his answer to
that was only the very modified affirmative implied by his argument that there would not be many Jews elected in any event.