Gladstone: A Biography (22 page)

These two diary entries were indeed wholly compatible with the most innocent view of Gladstone’s nocturnal activities. There was no indication of his being in a high state of tension
during the days concerned. On 4 May he spent nearly three hours looking at the Academy summer exhibition – ‘there was much to see’ – and in the evening he had been
sufficiently relaxed to write of the banquet, ‘there I sat by Disraeli who was very easy and agreeable’.
¹⁴
But a week later he again
abstained from holy communion, ‘for I have had much wicked negligence to reproach myself with of late as respects particular temptations’;
¹⁵
and when he approached the beginning from 1 June of a new manuscript volume (each one normally covered just under two years) he instituted a new system of noting days of
‘impurity’. However, it appeared to lean even more on the side of catching the venial as well as the vicious. ‘I now think of marking days in two classes,’ he wrote:
‘one those of distinct offence against my rules: the other that of ill impressions without such distinctness of offence. Thus I hope to cover the debatable ground. . . .’
¹⁶
And he marked 1, 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 19, 20, 21 and 22 June as being within his new broad category; 13 and 22 June were also days which received the symbol
indicating the use of the scourge. The diary entries for none of these days contain any indication of the nature of the transgressions. At the end of that manuscript volume (which went up to
February 1852) he added another table which, in addition to 1–21 June (which he repeated without differentiating between the days), he added 7, 21 and 28 July and 2 September, all in 1850.
These dates were accompanied by a gnomic series of figures, letters and signs, of which even Professor Matthew has failed to provide an interpretation, and which might have been qualifying, or
exacerbating or merely otiose.

This second series of dates does, however, bear more relationship to relevant events recorded in the diary than did the first June list. On 7 July he was still much concerned with the death of
Peel, which had taken place on the 2nd, and with his funeral on the 9th. But on the 8th
he recorded an attempted rescue of a prostitute named South. Then around, although not
exactly coinciding with, the two late-July dates, he became much preoccupied with a lady called Emma Clifton. At this time he took up a ‘beat’ opposite the Argyll Rooms in Great
Windmill Street (off Piccadilly Circus). This was a choice of locale which compounded his habitual rashness, for the Rooms were the best-known centre of upper-class dissipation in London. It was
therefore the place where, a hundred years before the television age made leading politicians recognizable by the masses, he was most likely, next perhaps to the entrances of the Carlton Club (of
which he was still a member), Westminster Abbey and the House of Commons, to be identified. But in Great Windmill Street, if his innocence allowed him to contemplate the risk, he could perhaps have
assumed a mutual desire for anonymity. There, on 22 July, he first took up his stand and encountered one E. Herring. But it was on the following (Tuesday) night that Emma Clifton, who became a much
more immanent figure, first appeared in the diary.

He saw Miss Clifton again on the Wednesday evening from 6.00 to 7.30, and again on the Friday, and on the Saturday, when he wrote: ‘Saw E Clifton at night and made I hope some way –
But alas my unworthiness.’ It sounded altogether a day of frenzied and disagreeable activity: ‘Worked on letters, papers and accounts and on draft of will,’ he recorded after the
meeting with Miss Clifton (but his diary was not always chronological within a day). ‘My cough very bad and headach [
sic
] almost unmanageable.’
¹⁷
On the Sunday he composed an ‘MS [manuscript] meant for E.C.’.

On the Tuesday he saw her at night. On the Thursday (1 August) he went into a spate of activity: ‘Before nine I went to find E.C.: but failed: after 1¼ hours came home . . . went
again at 11½ to O[range?] Street, and again failed. Resolved to go to E.C.’s lodgings: I found her there, and left her with the resolution declared of going in the morning by my advice
and with her child at once to Mrs Tennant [at the Windsor Clewer House].’
¹⁸
He returned late to Carlton Gardens, and after only two and a half
hours in bed took the early train to Birmingham for Hagley.

Then came ten days of relative peace there, followed by another three in the Rectory at Hawarden. But on 15 August he wrote: ‘Mrs Tennant’s letter this morning showed that matters
had not moved with respect to E. Clifton: and after consulting with C[atherine] I thought it my duty to go to town. I reached my house at 8pm – failed in finding E.C. for the evening,
although I did all I could.’
¹⁹
The next day he devoted himself to seeing the officers of various charities which might (if she wished)
have provided Emma Clifton with support, but concluded, ‘I failed in getting at night a separate commun[icatio]n.’ On the following morning he returned to North Wales
– ‘5¾–2½ from my door to Hawarden’,
²⁰
as for those who like precision and railways he satisfactorily put it.
Euston to Chester (179 miles) must have consumed about six of the eight and three-quarter hours of journey time.

Hawarden, after four hard years, was looking faintly up in that summer. ‘I am now at the bottom I think of his [Stephen Glynne’s] difficulties, which although lessened are still
frightful,’
²¹
Gladstone wrote on 28 August. All the family were still in the capacious Rectory, but there was a prospecting visit of William and
Catherine Gladstone to the Castle and discussion of the possibility of setting up a joint residence there with Stephen Glynne. This was in a way made easier by another family tragedy in early
October. On 15 September, when the Gladstones were at Fasque for three weeks, Lavinia Glynne gave birth to a fourth daughter, who lived until 1940 and as Lady Penrhyn became chatelaine of the vast
stone castle of that name which at the time of her birth was arising out of both the profits and the products of the North Wales quarries. But two weeks after the birth the mother died and with her
went the likelihood of a Glynne male heir. The way to the passing of the Hawarden property to the Gladstone side of the family was thus opened up.

At the time of this event, at once tragic and seminal, Gladstone was in London, and indeed engaged in two further fruitless sorties for Emma Clifton, but that seemed to be the end of his
preoccupation with her. He went back to Hawarden for the Glynne funeral, then grouped his party of wife, daughters and servants in London, and on 18 October set off for another long Italian
expedition, of which the centrepiece was a sojourn of over three months in Naples. He did not return to London until 26 February 1851, and Catherine Gladstone and the children were away until 10
April.

This Naples winter was immensely agitating to his mind on the iniquities which he discovered within the Bourbon kingdom and led to his putting into circulation the first of the great liberal
phrases which came to be associated with his name. ‘This is the negation of God erected into a system of Government,’ he wrote in a public letter to Lord Aberdeen in April
1851.
²³
It did, however, appear to calm his
sexual tension and to diminish both the forms of temptation to which it gave rise. He
recorded no ‘days of impurity’ or encounters with ‘fallen women’ while he was away, and in consequence there were no applications of the scourge or deep outbursts of
remorse. (He inverted the habits of many rich Victorian Englishmen who did things ‘abroad’ which they would not have dreamt of doing at home. He, on the contrary, was far more rash in
Covent Garden than outside the San Carlo theatre, or even at the top of the Duke of York’s steps, where a famous incident was to take place in 1882, than in the Place de la Madeleine.)

Even on his birthday, normally a day for great diary self-prostration, he was relatively restrained in Naples. After noting that the year had been ‘one of anxiety and of labour’, he
complained that he ‘would to God I could add that it has been one of progress in obtaining the mastery over my most besetting sins which I think are impurity and lukewarmness’.
(‘Lukewarmness’ was surely a most extraordinary fault for the raging tornado that was Gladstone, who was currently engaged in gratuitously – although admirably – stirring up
a Europe-wide agitation against the Neapolitan government, to attribute to himself.) The year ‘has sorely taught me . . . how little even sorrow has in
itself
a virtue to overcome sin
. . .’.
²²
But this was very mild stuff by the standards of some other years.

Turmoil began again when he got back to London. Although he had always intended to return in advance of his family, a short-term political upheaval brought him across the Channel from Paris more
quickly than would otherwise have been the case. The excitement was occasioned by the defeat in the House of Commons and resignation of Lord John Russell, which led to the Queen offering Stanley
the commission to form a Conservative government. For this, Stanley felt he needed the support of the Peelites and offered Gladstone almost any position within it. But he proposed to restore a
small duty on corn and that for Gladstone and the others was a sticking point. Although Gladstone psychologically needed office (he had been out for four and a half years) it took him only about
six hours after his morning arrival at London Bridge Station on 26 February to dispose of Stanley’s offer. In general he admired Lord Stanley (he had described him on 17 June 1850, as making
on the Greek question, that is against Palmerston’s Don Pacifico policy, ‘the finest speech I ever heard from him’, and almost exactly a year later at the Merchant Tailors’
banquet, he was to bring his acclamation up to the absolute by writing that ‘Lord Stanley made the best after dinner speech I ever heard’). But he was not willing to countenance any
return to protection.

This refusal had the effect of leaving him on his own and relatively unoccupied in London for a month and a half, gloomily awaiting the defection of Manning and Hope-Scott
from the Church of England, which event duly occurred on 6 April. The combination of circumstances amounted to an almost perfect recipe for sending him back to his night prowls. On both his third
and his fourth and again on his seventh, eighth and tenth evenings in London he was scouring the purlieus of Shaftesbury Avenue for Emma Clifton. On these nights he never found her. But he had a
number of other encounters, some specified and some anonymous and, perhaps because this more generalized intercourse strengthened the missionary and weakened the sexual aspects to his activities,
he recorded no evidence of subsequent remorse.

Then at the end of March he became more particularly involved with P. Lightfoot (her Christian name never emerged). On the first evening (28 March) that he met her he recorded, ‘Saw . . .
P.L. a singular case indeed,’ which was his way of confessing to a special interest. The next evening he searched for her, it appears in vain. On the third day, a Sunday, he gave Manning an
argumentative paper he had written for him, and thereby provoked a depressing, indeed shattering, discussion, followed by another encounter with Miss Lightfoot which led him to the already quoted
confession of carnality in his habitual obscurity:

The next evening he was less sanguine about the absence of harm:

Then followed a period of relative calm on this front, even though it included the actual (although already somewhat discounted) reception of Manning and Hope-Scott into the
Church of Rome. On 9 April Gladstone was in Paris to meet his wife and daughters and bring them back to London. He indicated pleasure at having them back, but in less than another week was off,
without them, on nearly a month’s Easter visit to his father at Fasque. There he reverted on ‘Easter eve’ to writing one of his budgets of guilt. ‘But I must write a bitter
thing against myself. Whether owing (as I think) to the sad and recent events (of the 6th) or not, I have been unmanned & unnerved & out of sheer cowardice have not used the measure which I
have found so beneficial to temptations against impurity. Therefore they have been stronger than usual in Lent: and I had no courage!’
²⁵

In July, that aspect of his courage revived and there were three
symbols, the first for more than a year. They coincided with the
peaks of his erotic obsession with young women whom he was genuinely (but almost always unsuccessfully) endeavouring to rescue from their life of sin. In May he had been only mildly involved,
although he saw P. Lightfoot again on the 28th, but on 11 June, after listening to Stanley’s oratorical gem in the Merchant Tailors’ hall, he had his first meeting with Elizabeth
Collins, who was to be an obsession for the rest of that summer: ‘Saw Collins – Seymour – and a person from Stourbridge – in the first I was much
interested.’
²⁶
He did not, however, record seeing her again until the 27th, although there was the ‘sad case of some flowergirls’ on
the 16th. Then he was with her for an hour and a half, maybe saw her again on the 30th (the text is corrupt) and then on 4 July, after writing to her in the morning, went unavailingly to meet her
in the evening. He wrote to her again on the 7th and saw her at night, mysteriously writing ‘and closed with advising a day visit and appeal to C[atherine] for advice’. Then next day he
again saw her ‘but did not advance in the matter’.
²⁷