Gladstone: A Biography (21 page)

The second list was made up of six dates between 13 January and 29 April 1849 against each of which there was placed the symbol
,
presumably, as is suggested by the editor of the diaries, because of its resemblance to a whip. As a mixture of retribution and possible cure Gladstone had from the beginning of 1849 adopted a
policy of scourging or self-flagellation. Exactly how he applied it, and to which part of his anatomy, bearing in mind that the most obvious part must surely have been excluded by the fact that the
discipline was self-administered, or exactly what form the instrument took, is not clear. What seems certain, however, is that the chastisement was solitary and that there was never any other
person, male or female, involved in administering it. Nor did any spiritual counselling seem to have been sought, either before or after the punishment. Gladstone, perhaps surprisingly, for its
absence separated him from many of his Anglo-Catholic friends, never sought relief from his tensions in the confessional box. Judged by the ethos and outlook of today it must seem highly unlikely
that, even had he done so, he could easily have discussed, still less found any encouragement for, his self-scourging practices. By mid-nineteenth-century standards, however, this is far less
implausible.

Newman used a scourge and, with considerable attention to detail, described one ‘studded with nails’ in his 1848 novel
Loss and Gain
.
Edward Pusey asked
James Hope-Scott to bring him such an instrument from France (in view of French views about
le vice anglais
this might be regarded as an example of coals to Newcastle), and hoped that Keble,
his confessor, would advise him to use it. Another curious feature about Gladstone’s self-punishment was that, while it was undoubtedly solitary, it did not require excessive privacy. When he
first used the scourge at the beginning of 1849, he was at Fasque, in the family surroundings already described, which while not exactly overcrowded were certainly not hermit-like.

If there was a lifting after three months’ use of the scourge of the temptations of erotic reading it seems likely that this was not so much a cure as a transference to a different, more
famous and interesting, maybe more dangerous ‘vice’. This was Gladstone’s well-known involvement with prostitutes. In some form this dated from as far back as 1827 when he paid
his pre-matriculation visit to Oxford (in 1848 he also dated his pornographic ‘plague’ as having lasted ‘more than twenty years’), and in the mid-1840s he had directed the
charitable efforts of the Margaret Street brotherhood towards the redemption of ‘fallen women’. But it was only in May 1849 that he began systematic late-night encounters with
identifiable women, several of whom he saw many times over, occasionally accompanying them back to their rooms for long conversations. Moreover he came to regard some of them not as poor, deprived
and bedraggled creatures but as ethereal dreams. ‘Half a most lovely statue’, he wrote (in Italian) about one Elizabeth Collins on 1 July 1852, ‘beautiful beyond
measure’.
²²

The traditional view of Gladstone’s activities in the field, which was long accepted apart from a few sniggers of cynicism, was that it was no more than a particularly bold form of
charitable work in which he had chosen to engage (and continued with until well into old age). It clearly exposed him to certain risks, but his mixture of innocence and moral authority enabled him
to stride through the murk while hardly accumulating a single stain. He might equally well have applied himself to rescuing deserted children or caring for elderly alcoholics. Instead he applied
himself to what was in a sense a nobler task because it was work which very few men of substance, even had they not been Privy Councillors and potential Prime Ministers, would have dared to
undertake.

This was probably the view of most of his contemporaries, including
those who knew him best, although his friends were frequently frightened for his reputation, and maybe a
little puzzled themselves. There is an 1882 story of Granville and Rosebery tossing a coin to determine which of them should undertake the intimidating task of delivering a warning to the Grand Old
Man. Granville was then his Foreign Secretary and the urbane and easy-going Whig (a group from which Gladstone’s close friends did not often come) with whom he found it easiest to get on.
Rosebery, who lost the toss and therefore had to perform, was over thirty years younger, more prickly, less nice and altogether less suitable for the task, but was at the time close to Gladstone
because he had been his host and sponsor during the Midlothian campaign of 1879–80. What were the assumptions (perhaps hidden from each other) on which these two worldly figures proceeded?
What is certain is that Rosebery got nowhere with his
démarche
, Gladstone blandly assuring him that he was not going to break the habits of half a century and that the night walks
were beneficial to his health. In 1886, when Gladstone’s vulnerability to calumny had been made greater by the bitterness of the Home Rule split, Edward Hamilton, his principal Downing Street
secretary, got a somewhat more forthcoming response from the seventy-six-year-old Prime Minister to a similar warning. Even then, however, Gladstone did not entirely desist.

Morley in his massive 1903 biography virtually ignored the whole subject. Later, in 1927, Herbert (Viscount) Gladstone, former Home Secretary and Governor-General of South Africa, assisted by
his elder brother Henry (Lord Gladstone of Hawarden), managed to circumnavigate the general rule that courts of law cannot be used to protect the reputation of the dead. One Captain Peter Wright
published a book which contained some scurrilous material about William Gladstone’s relations with his prostitutes, whereupon Herbert Gladstone countered with an attack of such vehemence that
it took Henry Gladstone’s breath away.
⁷
He sent it first direct to Wright, who did not immediately rise, and then to the secretary of the Bath
Club, of which Wright was a member and Herbert Gladstone one of the founders. The Committee decided to expel Wright, nominally on the ground that he had used the club’s address in
controversial public correspondence on the issue, but omitted to give him a hearing. Wright then mounted two legal actions: one against the club, which he won on the procedural point and was
awarded £125 damages; and the other against Herbert Gladstone, which became a very much bigger affair. The case turned on the truth or otherwise of Wright’s original allegations. He
failed to sustain them
under a destructive cross-examination from Norman Birkett, and the outcome was a triumph for Herbert Gladstone and his father’s reputation. Mr
Justice Avory delivered a withering summing up against Wright, and the jury requested permission to add a rider recording their unanimous view that the evidence had ‘completely vindicated the
high moral character of the late Mr W. E. Gladstone’. When the Gladstone brothers came out of the Law Courts into the Strand they were greeted by a cheering crowd. Rarely has a statesman been
able to arouse a favourable public demonstration twenty-nine years after his death.

Magnus in 1954, while devoting far more attention to the streetwalking issue than Morley had done, took as wholly exonerative a view as did the 1927 judgement. He wrote:

Following the publication of the diaries, it is no longer possible to take so sacerdotal a view. Nor, still more to the point, did Gladstone himself. What is indisputable from the diaries is
that, while there was a strong beneficent aspect to his rescue work, and while his self-discipline held him back from a full use of his protégées’ services, there was also (at
least during his middle-life crisis) a powerful element of sexual temptation, which he found impossible to resist, about his nocturnal forays. So far from having ‘schooled himself early in
life to sublimate absolutely the tensions which seethed inside him’, he was irresistibly led by them to actions which filled him with remorse. On one occasion Gladstone referred to his
‘rescue’ activities as ‘Carnal, or the withdrawal of them would not leave such a void’.
⁹
On another he described them as
‘the chief burden of my soul’.
¹⁰
And, after the first months of its use as an anti-pornography corrective, he began to use the scourge as
a possible but on the whole ineffective remedy against excessive involvement with prostitutes.

This self-punishment appears to have continued until the summer of 1859, when the
sign appears in the diaries for the last time.
Yet it is
not always easy to tell whether Gladstone’s records, meticulous and self-accusing though they were, embraced all his peccadilloes (or worse, as he regarded
them) or what was the exact sin for which, on a particular occasion, he was endeavouring to punish himself. On Sunday, 22 April 1849, he both brought to an end his lists opened in October 1845
(except for a solitary subsequent entry for the following Sunday, 29 April, but with no indication of the reason), and summed up his three months’ experience of the use of the scourge. He
thought he might have been depending upon it too much (as opposed to the observance of his other rules) and he doubted whether it was proving as useful as he had at first found. He thought
‘the sin of impurity’, while not showing quite the force of the previous year, had ‘lingered more’. As a result he abstained from taking holy communion for two successive
Sundays.

There is a sense of a change of gear at this stage, but to what exactly? There is no mention of any concourse with prostitutes until 25 May, as indeed there had not been since the generalized
and clearly charitable rehabilitation efforts of the mid-1840s. And it then comes in such a casual entry as to raise a doubt whether it could have been the beginning of a new pattern. At this time
he was leading a very active parliamentary and social life. On Thursday the 24th he spoke in the House of Commons in the early evening, gave a small dinner party (ten) at Carlton Gardens for the
intriguing combination of Manning and the Duchess of Buccleuch (they both subsequently became Roman Catholics) before returning to the House for the wind-up. On Friday the 25th he (briefly) spoke
again, dined at Lord Wenlock’s, went to an evening party given by Lady Essex and then ‘Conv with one of those poor creatures, a very sad case’.
¹¹

Five weeks later there occurs the only
sign for that summer but without any explanation. As there is no reference to any night
walk it was presumably for the old pornographic sin, although his reading list for the day does not provide much sustenance for this: ‘Read Irish Eviction papers – Lords Railway Audit
Report. Quintilian – Simpson – Newman on the Soul.’
¹²
Perhaps Quintilian was the trouble, although it was not the first diary entry
showing that he was engaged with that exponent of classical oratory and literature, who is not in any event widely regarded as notably corrupting or depraving. His Lady Lincoln expedition occupied
him in the late summer of that year, and then, after a Hawarden interlude, there was his long October–January visit to Fasque. During this period there were his self-abasing fortieth-birthday
reflections but no return either to the sign of the whip or to accounts of
late-night encounters until May 1850, three weeks after the tragedy of Jessy. Then on 2 May he
laconically recorded, ‘Conv at night with an unhappy woman’, and on 4 May after the Royal Academy Banquet he encountered her again and was more informative, although in a way which
indicated much more charitable concern than erotic excitement. ‘Found again the same poor creature at night. She has a son to support: & working
very
hard with her needle
may
reach 6/- per week as a maximum: pays 5/- for lodging – sends her boy to school at 6d a week. Lives No 6 Duke’s Court.’
¹³