Gladstone: A Biography (2 page)

Gladstone, however, was uniquely matched to nineteenth-century Britain. The evolving size of the electorate suited him perfectly. During his active lifetime and keeping very good step with his
increasing democratic enthusiasm it moved from half to a million to a little over five million, large enough to accommodate his taste for mass audiences but restrictive enough to prevent his
instinctive sense of hierarchy becoming obviously anomalous. It also suited him well that Britain was the most powerful country in the world. He hated ‘jingoism’ (a phrase coined only
in his sixty-ninth year) and deeply disapproved of the showy imperialism which he saw as Disraeli’s hallmark. The Concert of Europe was his frequently reiterated lodestar. ‘
Securus
judicat orbis terrarum
’ (the united verdict of the whole world must be accepted as conclusive), which was Newman’s ultimate reason for joining the Church of Rome, did not lead
Gladstone in that particular direction. The concept nonetheless had a most powerful impact upon his later policy positions, in relation particularly to justice for Ireland. As, however, he liked
pronouncing with great moral force upon international issues, it suited him well that he was able to do so from such a pulpit of power. Britain’s reduced late-twentieth-century status would
have been less suited to his style.

He was also lucky that his sixty-three years of active politics embraced no war which threatened Britain’s vital security. The Napoleonic Wars were over when he was five. The First World
War was nearly a generation after his retirement. Of the two medium-grade conflicts, the South African War began in the year after his death, and the Crimean War was the only one for which he bore
any responsibility. He had no natural martial spirit and his uneasy experience with the Crimean conflict underlined his good fortune in not having, like Asquith, to try to turn himself from a
peacetime to a wartime leader. Unlike the two Pitts, Lloyd George and Churchill, therefore, he was not tested in a fight for survival.

Perhaps for this reason I hesitate to claim that he was Britain’s greatest Prime Minister. He made many mistakes, failed to carry his last endeavour of Home Rule for Ireland, and left a
squabbling Liberal party which was excluded from office for a short generation after his withdrawal. But I have no doubt that he was the most remarkable specimen of humanity of all the fifty who,
from Walpole to Major, have so far held the office of British Prime Minister. This was partly a question of his prodigious energy. He lived for nearly eighty-nine years, a more unusual feat a
hundred years ago than it is today, and although he spent a surprising amount of time on a sickbed he always bounced back with devastating vigour. He read over 20,000 books. He chopped down
innumerable trees. He could walk vast distances in Snowdonia or the Scottish Highlands, but sometimes just in the ordinary course of his life, from Chester station to Hawarden, or around the less
respectable parts of the West End of London, trying to redeem prostitutes, but filling himself as a result of these irresistible excursions with far more guilt than self-righteousness. He was a
great classicist, although perhaps a powerful rather than a subtle scholar. Homer and Dante were his literary heroes, but he also read contemporary fiction (and in the prolific mid-Victorian period
there was a lot of it) in a way that no subsequent Prime Minister has done.

At the same time he claimed, and to some extent justified the claim, that religion was more important to him than politics. He was deeply involved in all the theological and liturgical battles
of the nineteenth century. He was a compelling orator who, despite his addiction to endless sentences, convoluted constructions, and classical allusion and quotation, could hold both the House of
Commons and popular audiences transfixed for hours at a time. This was largely a function of his physical magnetism, his flashing eye and the eagle’s swoop of his cadences. He had all the
earnestness of Victorian England, yet he was rarely dull. He was always the biggest beast in the forest, and he had inherent star quality, difficult to define but on the rare occasions when it
exists easy to recognize. Everything he did he infused with a touch of magic. In this respect he was comparable among his near contemporaries with Newman, with Tennyson, with Darwin, maybe Carlyle,
and some (but not I) would say with Dickens. In any event it was a select company.

To attempt to write afresh about such a creature, by and about whom the number of books is already incomparable and whose papers, in the British Library Catalogue, amount to 750 volumes, is
obviously a formidable undertaking. This mammoth bibliography, at least ten if not twenty times that relating to Asquith for instance, does not however comprise much in the way of recent general
biography. In this category Disraeli has proved far more of a modern honeypot. One or two long essays apart, there has been nothing written as complete biography since Sir Philip Magnus’s
Gladstone
, which appeared forty-one years ago. Magnus still reads freshly and is in the idiom of modern biography, although to my mind wrong on a number of points, including in particular
Gladstone’s motivation in his prostitute-reclaiming activities. And the interval back to Magnus is now almost as long as the fifty-one years separating his work from John Morley’s
massive and splendid three volumes which appeared simultaneously only five years after Gladstone’s death. Morley’s was a commissioned ‘tombstone’ life, although one at the
very top of this category, and inevitably therefore now appears somewhat dated in format and over-respectful in content.

Complete biographies apart, there is the dense, informative and controversial half-life by Professor R. T. Shannon of Swansea. The first volume (up to 1865) appeared in 1982, and was obviously
intended to be followed by another, but as that has not yet been forthcoming there arises some doubt whether the half will become a whole. Then there are the collected introductions of Professor H.
C. G. Matthew, the doyen (in spite of his relative youth) of Gladstone experts, who has just brought to triumphant completion the fourteen-volume edition of Gladstone’s diaries, which work of
dedicated and brilliant scholarship he took over from Professor M. R. D. Foot twenty-three years and twelve volumes back. The two volumes of Professor Matthew’s introductions between them
cover the complete life, with an 1874 break point, but they were not written as a whole or with an explicit biographical intention, even though the result, almost as a by-product, has been a
considerable biographical achievement.

Nonetheless Gladstone biographical territory is not over-populated, and, although I encountered many difficulties in comprehending some facets of Gladstone’s multifarious interests and
activities, I never found myself short of new things to say about him. My book is written from published sources. I have no new cache of material, as I did in the case of Asquith with the then
unused letters to Venetia Stanley. But the published sources are in Gladstone’s case so vast and variegated that I in no way felt that this constrained me to move only along over-trodden
paths.

Throughout I have been anxious to set Gladstone in the context of other British Prime Ministers and proximate political figures, those who have come after him as well as those who came before. I
have also tried to relate nineteenth-century patterns of political life to those of today, although often more by contrast than by affinity. For this purpose I have drawn extensively on the details
of Victorian habits, travel arrangements, meal-times, property values, for which Gladstone’s diaries are an unusually rich and detailed source, as well as on my own experience of modern
political life. I have also tried to retain Gladstone’s vivid interest in landscape and buildings. Relating Victorian
mentalité
, particularly in matters of religion, to that of
today has presented a more difficult problem. Yet it is impossible to write adequately about Gladstone, even more during his first forty than during his last twenty years in politics, without
engaging closely with both the framework and the content of his religion.

This has been the more necessary because I have to some extent adopted a policy of ‘front-end loading’. The image of Gladstone which readily springs to most people’s minds is
that of a somewhat wild-eyed and wild-haired old man in a hurry, a prophet from the Midlothian hills to his admirers, a destructive obsessive concerned only with Ireland to his detractors. Yet
Gladstone’s career cannot possibly be seen in perspective if his old age is allowed to obscure either his talented if somewhat priggish youth or his occasionally unhinged but immensely
productive middle age. He was a Cabinet minister at thirty-three. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer for fourteen budgets between his forty-third and his fifty-seventh birthdays and was so
successful that he enhanced not only his own career but also the long-term status of the office. And until almost his sixtieth year his interest in Ireland was less than that of the average British
politician.

His life will not be seen in focus if it is looked at primarily through the telescope of his last two or even his last three premierships. I have therefore given full weight to the earlier
period, devoting nearly half the book to the years before even the first of his four premierships. This was made easier by my belief that he led the most interesting pre-Prime Ministerial life of
any of his predecessors except for the Duke of Wellington.

I have accumulated many debts in the process of bringing the large ship of Gladstone into some sort of harbour. My agent Michael Sissons and my then publisher Roland Philipps were responsible
for the original idea. Michael Sissons has remained an invaluable adviser and Roland Philipps’s successors at Macmillan, William Armstrong and Tanya Stobbs, have provided much publishing
skill and attention. Peter James has once again, as with my autobiography
A Life at the Centre
, been an exceptional freelance editor, and Douglas Matthews, former librarian of the London
Library, has once more compiled a complicated index. None of them would, however, have been able to function had not Mary Rundell transformed my increasingly elusive handwriting into a series of
typescripts of diminishing inaccuracy.

Outside the process of book-making my largest debt is to Professor H. C. G. Matthew. The Gladstone diaries, in spite of their author’s taste for obscurity, are made almost pellucid by the
quality of his editing. And, once understood, they constitute a unique background of detailed fact, like a fine tapestry dominating one wall of a library, against which to construct a Gladstone
narrative and try out Gladstone theories. In addition Colin Matthew was good enough to apply his eagle eye to any inaccuracies in my manuscript, while standing well back from its opinions and
interpretations.

My second debt is to Sir William Gladstone, the present holder of the baronetcy which Peel conferred upon old John Gladstone in 1846, and also the proprietor of both the Hawarden and the Fasque
estates. By several times welcoming me to Hawarden and straightening out some of my topography (and occasionally my history as well) he has greatly facilitated my task.

East Hendred

February 1995

P
ART
O
NE

A TALENTED AND TORTURED YOUNG MAN

1809–1852

A L
IVERPOOL
G
ENTLEMAN
?

W
ILLIAM
E
WART
G
LADSTONE
was born in Liverpool at the end of 1809. When, just over half a century later,
he had introduced the pattern-setting budget of 1860, Walter Bagehot recorded this description of him: ‘Ah, Oxford on the surface, but Liverpool below.’
¹
Bagehot, founder of the
Economist
, was in many ways the nineteenth century’s best substitute for Dr Johnson. He could aphorize at the drop of a hat, and often with
wisdom. But was he right on this occasion? Gladstone undoubtedly became a great Oxonian, an accomplished scholar in his youth, a member of Parliament for the University for seventeen years in
middle age, and towards the end of his life its most famous ornament. The town of his birth, on the other hand, faded into the background while he was still a very young man. Did he nonetheless
remain ‘Liverpool below’?