Gladstone: A Biography (19 page)

His attitude to the ‘Jew Bill’ did not (just) prevent Gladstone being given an honorary degree by Oxford in the following July. It had long been the custom for the University to
confer a DCL (doctorate of civil law) upon its burgesses. There was some attempt to break the convention with Gladstone, but the Hebdomadal Board held firm to precedent, and on 5 July 1848, not
without trepidation, he duly presented himself. The Encaenia, as described by Gladstone, was not very different from today, although it appears that Chancellor Wellington (then aged seventy-nine)
was not present:

A year later, in July 1849, Gladstone indulged in a fresh burst of eccentricity verging on the unbalanced. The Countess of Lincoln, born Lady Susan Douglas, daughter of the tenth Duke of
Hamilton, after seventeen years of marriage to Gladstone’s long-standing Eton, Christ Church and political friend, had bolted to Italy with Lord Walpole, heir to the Earl of Orford, and
descendant of the first Prime Minister. She left not only her husband, who was dismayed although less agitated than Gladstone became on his behalf, but also her five children, for whom Catherine
Gladstone unsuccessfully provided vice-parental care,
¹⁹
and her prospect of becoming a duchess (her father-in-law was to die in 1851). Most people other
than the impetuous and beneficently interfering Gladstones would have assumed that she knew what she was about. Gladstone, however, strongly supported by his wife, decided that it was his duty to
go in search of ‘dearest Suzie’ (as Catherine addressed her in an accompanying letter), persuade her of her sin and bring her back. Manning was an alternative candidate for the task,
but the then Archdeacon and future Cardinal shrewdly decided that his Sussex parochial duties made him much busier than an ex-Colonial Secretary and opposition front-bencher. Catherine was within
two months of her sixth confinement, which produced the second Helen Gladstone (the choice of name marked some improvement in his relations with his sister), who became vice-principal of Newnham
College, Cambridge. Otherwise Catherine Gladstone might have come too.

As it was William Gladstone set out alone on 13 July 1849, with Europe still in a considerable state of chaos following the 1848 revolutionary upheavals and with some ambiguity both of
destination and of what his function was going to be when he reached it. Obviously his optimum objective was to redeem the fallen and bring Lady Lincoln back to a renewal of conjugal duty. But did
he also envisage the fall-back role, which he ended up playing, of acting as a witness of her adultery before the House of Lords, when her husband in the following year sought a divorce by private
Act of Parliament, then the only possible way of proceeding? And did he apprehend that such a position might leave him looking ridiculous and even a little squalid?

But he rarely feared ridicule, he was a keen traveller, he loved Italy,
he thought Naples the most promising site for his quarry, and he set off with enthusiasm on a journey
according to his own most careful calculations of 3010 miles and twenty-seven days, during which he spent only eleven nights of an average length of five hours ‘in bed
ashore’.
¹³
He was preoccupied by his sad mission, but not to the extent of wasting his time or missing any sightseeing. He arrived in Marseille
(which he had not previously visited) in great heat and after a testing fifty-hour journey from Paris, and had to wait there for a couple of days before getting a boat to Genoa, Livorno and
Civitavecchia. During this delay he dealt with a lot of travel arrangements, read three books, climbed up to Notre Dame de la Garde, ‘purchased a cask of the wine of the country to send
home’ (not too locally of the country, one hopes), dined twice at the table d’hôte of the (extant) Hôtel Beauvau, on the first occasion talking animatedly to an Italian
neighbour on one side and a Peruvian on the other, and after one dinner going to a play and after the other to hear Donizetti’s then relatively new
Lucia di Lammermoor
.

He reached Naples eleven days after leaving London, but discovered that the birds had flown, probably to Milan, and so set off north again, mainly by sea. Five days later he got to Milan, and
there had a splendid day except for the thought that ‘the business I was about was really horrible’. Having reached the city at 10.30 a.m. he:

At Como the pursuit turned into an encounter of a sort, with an obtruding mixture of farce and tragedy (from the point of view of the Lincoln marriage, which Gladstone regarded as
sacrosanct).

The ‘horror’ was that Lady Lincoln was heavily pregnant, not, it need hardly be said, by Lincoln, and that ‘the departure’, really a flight from Gladstone’s heavy
intrusion, brought on her confinement. Magnus thought that the flight was to Verona, but as Gladstone followed by steamer this would have been an improbable journey. In fact she went to Lecco, at
the foot of the other arm of the lake, and Gladstone had an agreeable lake cruise to Varenna, higher up that same arm, and then down to Lecco to discover that she had decamped to Bergamo. Although
the city of Montagues and Capulets was not on the itinerary, the
Kiss Me Kate
couplet (‘we opened in Verona, we went on to Cremona’) was beginning to sound appropriate to the
musical-comedy aspects of the tour. These had included his being disguised as a mandolinist in order to get near the villa and observe the departure from Como.

After that Gladstone never again glimpsed Lady Lincoln. At Lecco he called off the chase. Perhaps he was beginning to accept her determination not to see him or to respond to his numerous
letters. He returned to Como, collected evidence from Dr Balzari, who sounds like a good Donizetti character, and from the Villa Mancini, which had been her
nid d’amour
, and departed
for Varese, Lake Maggiore and Switzerland. In Lausanne he was desolated by there being no Anglican Sunday afternoon service (he had rushed ‘unwashed and unshaven’ to the late-morning
holy communion), contemplated going to the Free Church, but thought better of it, and reflected on the failure of his mission and the tragedy of the errant wife:

This was classic Gladstone: sanctimonious and judgemental, perhaps over-concerned, made prurient by the recollection of the beauty of the fallen one, oppressed by her sins, yet in no way reduced
to inactivity by this or by the rejection of his overtures. It was not even as leisurely as ‘off to Besançon in the morning’. It was off that night and in London four days later.
Failure could leave Gladstone dismayed and censorious, but almost never without energy for the next move.

Yet a combination of filial duty and conventional acceptance of the view that the autumn was not a season for London led him into four subsequent months of bucolic Scottish
quietism. Soon after his return from Italy, Catherine’s sixth confinement took place in the Rectory at Hawarden (the Castle being closed as a result of Oak Farm) and five weeks later the
whole family sailed from Liverpool to Greenock and hence across to Fasque by train. They stayed there until the end of January 1850, interrupted for Gladstone only by three days with Lord Aberdeen
at Haddo, one night in another Scottish house and a twenty-four-hour dentist excursion to Edinburgh. It was the penultimate autumn at Fasque. For the following one they were in Italy, and in
December 1851 Sir John Gladstone died within a few days of his eighty-seventh birthday (sixteen months younger than the age his fourth son was to attain), and Fasque passed to Tom, the new baronet.
Thereafter William Gladstone virtually severed his connection with Fasque. His 5000 books were moved to Hawarden. At intervals of about five years, sometimes nearer ten, he would call in for a very
few days during a round of visits to other Scottish houses, at which the sojourns were mostly appreciably longer.

During that lengthy autumn and early-winter visit of 1849–50 Gladstone’s days were not passed in idleness or even (much) in country pursuits, but were gripped in his usual rigid
framework of unrelenting activity, conducting his voluminous correspondence (as well as his father’s), writing a long essay on Giacomo Leopardi for the
Quarterly Review
, teaching Latin
to his nine-year-old son, pursuing his variegated reading, and making the fullest possible use of the new and adjacent St Andrew’s Chapel. It was nonetheless odd that at a period of such
agitation in his life he should for so long have accepted such geographical and domestic confinement. There was hardly any non-family company, apart from his three specified overnight visits away
there was virtually nowhere outside the estate that he could go, and, substantial though the house was, the presence of his father, his wife, his six children, his sister Helen and numerous
servants inevitably made it a restricted terrain.

This might have been satisfactory had his mood been more contented and calm. It was far from that. During the long visit he reached his fortieth birthday. It is at once a tribute and a surprise
that all his previous achievements, vicissitudes and eccentricities should have occurred in his twenties and thirties and before he even reached that early climacteric. Yet he marked it with no
sense of satisfaction:

Some reasons for this late-1840s dismay have already been indicated: the undermining of his ‘Church and state’ certainties and the defection of Newman; the break-up of Peel’s
Conservative party; the trouble with Helen; and the Oak Farm disaster. This last he singled out in his birthday budget as the ‘only one personal [item] that I venture to indicate in
conditional prayer: it is for a lightening of the load of pecuniary cares and anxieties upon me’.

Helen had achieved what was literally a miraculous cure in Edinburgh during the autumn of 1848. She produced a near repeat of her Baden-Baden condition, with locked jaw, clenched hands and an
insistent demand for oblivion-promoting drugs. Dr Wiseman arrived with a holy relic, apparently the knuckle bone of a female saint, conducted some sort of makeshift service, touched her jaw with
the bone and effected an instantaneous cure. The proceedings were watched and reported with some cynicism by the (presumably Scots Presbyterian) Edinburgh doctor under whose care she had been
placed. Gladstone regarded his sister as having been subject to a ‘deplorable illusion’, typical of the showy trickery of the Church of Rome at its worst. But, if trickery it was, Helen
was delighted to take part in a trick which enabled her to recover with drama. She became well enough to resume looking after her father for the last couple of years of his life, and then to
withdraw first to the Isle of Wight and subsequently to Germany, where she caused no more trouble until her death.

The Helen amelioration apart, however, the upheavals of Gladstone’s early forties were if anything worse than those of his late thirties. In April 1850 there came the harrowing and already
described death of his daughter Jessy. Over that spring there also hung the shadow of the Gorham judgement, which dismayed Gladstone, as it did all Anglo-Catholics, and which was the major cause of
the next great secession to Rome. G. C. Gorham was a Low Church clergyman, a fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge, who at the somewhat advanced age of sixty was in 1847 nominated to the
living of Brampford Speke in Devon by the Lord Chancellor, the patron of the parish. It was part of a pattern of Whig Erastianism. In the same year Dr Hampden, whom Oxford had
pronounced heretical seven years before, was made Bishop of Hereford. But the Bishop of Exeter (Phillpotts) was not a man for running before the storm. He simply refused to install
Gorham on the ground that his views on baptismal regeneration were not those of the Church of England. Bishop and vicar were equally intransigent, and fought each other through a series of legal
actions. The Court of Arches – an ecclesiastical court – upheld the Bishop, but when Gorham appealed from it to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council – a lay court, although
one which took the precaution of enrolling the Archbishop of Canterbury (Howley), the Archbishop of York (Musgrave) and the Bishop of London (Blomfield) as assessors – they overturned the
Court of Arches, found against the Bishop of Exeter, and by so doing proclaimed the rights of the courts of Queen and Parliament to overturn those of God and Church on a matter of religious
doctrine. It was this which outraged those who believed that, even in the Church of England, doctrinal authority descended from St Peter and not from the Glorious Revolution.