Gladstone: A Biography (35 page)

A few days later he went to London for three weeks, but returned to Homer as soon as he got back to Hawarden. ‘Began the Iliad,’ he wrote on 6 August, ‘with serious intentions
of working out something on old Homer if I can.’
¹²
Thereafter he worked at the
Iliad
or the
Odyssey
or the writings of others on
Homer for a substantial part of every day (except Sundays) of the next two months, half of them at Hawarden and half of them at Penmaenmawr, to where he seemed to have transported enough books and
other material to be equally well equipped as in the Temple of Peace.

The exclusion of Sundays was an odd habit. Gladstone did not practise a strict sabbatarianism. He normally went to church twice, but in London he frequently dined out, and he used part of the
day for his general correspondence as well as for reading, which while not strictly devotional had more of a religious bias than was his pattern on weekdays. When, for instance, in the spring of
1858, a few months after its publication, he read
Barchester Towers
(as he did most of the great mid-Victorian novels, although rather eschewing Dickens) he consumed it in six days, which
pointed to a high degree of interest and engagement. He nonetheless missed the intervening Sunday, substituting A. F. Rio’s study of four martyrs, which he obviously regarded as more suitable
for the day than a portrayal of diocesan life if seen through eyes as worldly as Trollope’s.

Homer might have been expected to rank more with Rio than with Trollope, for a main part of Gladstone’s object in writing about him was to propound the improbable thesis that his work was
part of the headwaters of Christianity. This gave it more of a religious than of a scholarly or aesthetic purpose. Gladstone was no doubt not alone in feeling some unease at the contradiction
between a ruling ethos which elevated godliness above everything else and an educational system (for the upper classes and educated bourgeoisie) which was based almost exclusively on a study of the
literature and history of pagan civilizations. In the easy-going eighteenth century it had not seemed to matter much. The fervour of Victorian religion made the contradiction more awkward. Where
Gladstone was almost alone, however, was in believing that he
might resolve the issue by proving that part of the same divine revelation was made to the Greeks before it was
made to the Jews. The attempt – in Magnus’s good formulation ‘to catholicize Hellenism and to canonize Homer’ – was a tribute at once to his innocence and to his
daring. It was not a success.

The Oxford University Press (perhaps influenced by his position as senior burgess for the University, Inglis having died in 1855) published
Homer and the Homeric Age
in three volumes in
1858. The critical response was unfavourable. No one thought that Gladstone had advanced classical scholarship or shown a high critical facility. What he had done was to try to promote a religious
cause and in so doing to provide himself with an intellectual hobby which lasted intermittently over the next twenty years. It was Gladstone in his Lord Longford mood, showing indifference to
mockery, vast reserves of both energy and self-confidence and more enthusiasm than scholarly fastidiousness. Fortunately he did not himself suffer from great illusions about either the academic or
the popular quality of the work, and he advised a friend to start with the third volume because it was probably the ‘least unreadable’.

At the beginning of March 1857, Gladstone delivered another of his thundering, government-shaking parliamentary orations. Palmerston was engaged in punitive action against the Chinese for
arresting a British-registered boat on a charge of piracy.
⁴⁶
Cobden moved a vote of censure. Gladstone spoke, relatively briefly for him – he was a
little less than two hours – at 9.30 on the night of the vote. The faithful Phillimore wrote of the speech as ‘the finest delivered in the memory of man in the House of
Commons’.
¹³
Even allowing for elements both of exaggeration and of sycophancy in this judgement, it was undoubtedly a polemic of the highest
class, and helped to secure an ‘aye’ lobby of 263 (containing not only Cobden and Gladstone, but such variegated auxiliaries as Disraeli, Bright and Russell) against the 247 which was
all that Palmerston, who was surprised as well as discomfited by the result, could rally. The next laugh, however, lay very much with the Prime Minister. He dissolved, and was strongly vindicated
by the result of the general election. Cobden and Bright both lost their seats, as did most of the other Manchester School ‘pacifists’. In Flintshire, where Gladstone did most of his
campaigning, Sir Stephen Glynne also went down.

Gladstone himself was lucky to be unopposed at Oxford. However, he treated the national outcome as a personal rebuff and as an invitation to observe a period of silence. He
hardly opened his mouth in the House of Commons for the next four months, and attended only fitfully. Carlton House Terrace was let for six weeks from late May (for the remarkably large sum of a
hundred guineas a week – about £5000 today), and he spent most of June at Hawarden. He was not proud of his disengagement, and on 29 May, for the first time for several years, scourged
himself as a retribution for ‘half-heartedness’.

He was brought back into committed politics, and for no more than a short month, only in order to fight what turned out to be his last pitched illiberal battle. The Palmerston government
followed its election victory by introducing a bill for what could be roughly described as the opening to the middle classes of the possibility of divorce. Hitherto the upper classes had been able
to proceed by the prohibitively expensive method of private Act of Parliament. This bill made it possible to proceed, even if over very considerable obstacles, by ordinary civil suit. This aroused
Gladstone to a frenzy of opposition, although the Aberdeen government had published but not proceeded with a very similar measure. He regarded it as a major depredation of the authority of the
Church, despite the fact that in the House of Lords, where the bill had started, it had been supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury and nine other prelates, including even the normally
intransigent Dr Phillpotts of Exeter. (The equally formidable Bishop Wilberforce was, however, on Gladstone’s side.) And he fought it
à outrance
, despite his being peculiarly
vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy in view of the part that he had played in collecting evidence in support of the Lincoln divorce – carried through by private Act, of course. Furthermore
his period of strenuous opposition coincided with the slow decline to death, following her twelfth pregnancy, of Catherine Gladstone’s forty-three-year-old sister Mary Lyttelton. It might be
thought that he could have done more practical good for the institution of marriage by sustaining his own distraught wife at Hagley than by vainly fulminating for its inviolable principle in
London.

Up to his middle age Gladstone was always a little unhinged on anything to do with the institution of marriage. Its disciplines had to be preserved at all costs. It was reminiscent of an
intoxicated guardsman who could prevent himself falling over only by standing too rigidly to attention. This lack of balance was shown by his uncharitable censoriousness towards the unions,
projected and actual, of three of his
brothers and sisters, by his foolish gallivanting for the sake of Lady Lincoln’s virtue, and above all by his frenzied opposition to
the 1857 legislation. He made seventy-three interventions against that bill, twenty-nine of them in the course of one protracted sitting. He was in a small minority which often failed to muster
more than a few dozen votes.

Fortunately and surprisingly, however, he did not carry his intolerant censoriousness into the next generation and his role as a father-in-law. Five of the seven surviving Gladstone children
married during their father’s lifetime (Helen, the vice-principal of Newnham, never did, and Herbert, the future Home Secretary, did so only in 1901) and their spouses were a fairly mixed bag
(and a less fashionable one than that acquired by the Asquith offspring a generation later): one curate, one headmaster, one daughter of a Tory Scottish landowning peer, one of another peer who was
a late Gladstonian creation, and one of a Liverpool doctor. William Gladstone appeared content with them all as sons- and daughters-in-law, although one of the latter (Mrs Henry Gladstone) was to
evolve into a silly and pretentious middle-aged lady.

A S
HORT
O
DYSSEY FOR A
B
RITISH
U
LYSSES

T
HE
D
IVORCE
B
ILL
A
PART
, Gladstone followed a pattern of political detachment in
1857 and 1858. He let the Palmerston government get on with it, and he got on with Homer. Between 18 August 1857 and 16 February 1858 he was in London only for ten days in early December and four
days in late January. He slept 153 out of 172 nights at Hawarden during that long parliamentary recess, the highest proportion of static rusticity in any year of his life until 1886–7. His
Carlton House Terrace residence was closed, and even when he at last removed himself semi-permanently back to London in February it was to lodge at the convenient address of 18 Great George Street,
Westminster, with a Mrs Talbot, who was a distant family connection through the Lytteltons.

Within three days of his return he had the satisfaction of both speaking and voting for the defeat of the government on the Conspiracy to Murder Bill. It was an ironical issue, for Palmerston
was arraigned for being too subservient to a foreign government. An Italian terrorist, Felice Orsini, operating from a British base, had attempted to assassinate the Emperor Napoleon III.
Responding to a strong despatch from Foreign Minister Walewski, whose birth and office were in combination a symbol of the continuity of the First and Second Empires, Palmerston introduced one of
those criminal justice measures which fall within the category more of gesture than of efficacy. Gladstone was torn between his dislike of Palmerston and his belief in the Concert of Europe, but he
was able to resolve the issue by bringing in a third libertarian factor, and voted ‘234:215’, a remarkably small vote (on both sides) for a division which toppled a government.
Palmerston, although within nine months of his 1857 electoral triumph, nonetheless resigned.

Derby came in, for the third of those Conservative attempts at government which punctuated the 1850s like short showers in a fine (or at least a non-Tory) summer. He asked Gladstone and other
Peelites to
join him. The offices were not specified. For once the Exchequer does not seem to have been on offer. But the Colonial Office, then a major secretaryship of state,
almost certainly would have been, particularly as it was eventually filled by Derby’s son, who must have been expendable. The offer clearly embarrassed other Peelites, at least Herbert and
Graham. These two and Gladstone met together with their erstwhile chief in an almost instinctive feast of abnegation at Aberdeen’s house after (for Gladstone) evensong at Westminster Abbey.
There was no particular reason why they should refuse: Gladstone liked and even admired Derby, and was going through one of the less vehemently anti-Disraeli phases. Refuse they nonetheless did.
The Peelites were becoming a group of vestal virgins. Their enthusiasm for saying no had become a form of self-indulgence. ‘The case though grave was not doubtful,’ Gladstone wrote.
‘. . . we separated for the evg. with the fervent wish that in public life we might never part.’
^1
47

Despite this wish the Peelites were in disarray, with Graham and Herbert pulling increasingly towards the Whigs, while Gladstone was experiencing the last Conservative tug upon his heartstrings.
On 19 April he delivered a friendly speech on the budget, in sharp contrast with the denunciation which Disraeli’s previous budgetary essay had called forth five and a quarter years before,
and in contrast too with his hostility to Cornewall Lewis’s efforts in 1855–7. On 4 May Gladstone followed this with one of his major moralizing foreign policy philippics, this time in
favour of the rights of the inhabitants of Wallachia and Moldavia (later Roumania) against both the Turks and the Austrians. This was much more critical of the government, but it was not conducive
to a Whig alliance either.