Gladstone: A Biography (4 page)

William Gladstone’s brothers and sisters had no qualities of personality, energy, intellect or success comparable with his own. As he was by any standards among a handful of outstanding
figures of the Victorian age this was hardly surprising. What was perhaps more so was that,
although his three brothers were almost as drawn to politics (local Liverpool politics
in the case of the second) as he was himself, and although in theory at least he was naturally family minded, they constituted no continuing close-knit phalanx of support or even of companionship.
After his marriage in 1839
¹
he saw far more of his wife’s family than he did of his own. This was not only true of her brother, Sir Stephen Glynne,
where there was the special factor of Gladstone’s gradual taking over of his Hawarden estate, although Glynne continued to live there, almost as a guest in his own house, until his death in
1874. It was also so with his wife’s sister’s husband, Lord Lyttelton, whose Hagley Hall outside Birmingham became almost a second country house for the Gladstones. An account of the
political and religious differences, and largely ineffective ambitions, of the other brothers belongs to later in the story, as does the tragedy of the surviving sister Helen Gladstone. William
Gladstone was mostly detached from them during their lives, although occasionally interfering and intolerant, particularly with his sister, and immensely solicitous at the times of their
deaths.

When William Gladstone left Liverpool to go to Eton for the first time in 1821, his eldest brother Tom had been there for four and a half years, most of the time as unhappy as he was
unsuccessful, and his second brother Robertson had just been removed from the school after two years. So far the Gladstones were a determined rather than a successful Etonian family. Tom had
several times asked to be taken away. He was no good at composing Latin verse, which was the basis of the very limited curriculum. He quarrelled constantly with his ‘dame’ (house
matron) and with Keate, the famous flogging headmaster. He found the atmosphere harsh and irreligious, and he made few friends. But his father was determined that he should not leave. To do so
would mean that the Gladstone attempt to infiltrate the citadel of upper-class education had failed at the first encounter. So Tom accepted not merely that he could not leave voluntarily but that
he must submit to several Keate floggings in lieu of expulsion.

Robertson was different. He was not the eldest son, and when it was decided, entirely with his own concurrence, that his future lay in continuing in Liverpool the mercantile tradition of the
family, he was
smartly removed from Eton. John Gladstone’s approach to education was strictly vocational. He was willing to pay to turn his sons into members of the ruling
class. But if they were going to become merchants rather than rulers there was no point in paying. And the cost was surprisingly high, particularly as Eton was not well run at the time, with too
few masters, and those that there were of uncertain quality. Its main advantage was the opportunity to make influential friends. For this the total cost in Tom’s case, according to the
meticulous Gladstone accounts, was £261 for a year, a figure which was somewhat above the average for the all-in expenditure of an Oxford undergraduate 120 years later.

Robertson, who had been doing rather better at Eton than Tom but had acquired no affection for it, was then despatched to Glasgow College, as the 270-year-old university was known at the time.
It was still on its old High Street site around the cloisters of which Adam Smith had recently paced, and its curriculum, while far from narrowly commercial, was thought more suitable for Liverpool
trade than an almost exclusive diet of hexameters. Glasgow seemed to do well for Robertson, an effective and intelligent man of business, who became Mayor of Liverpool before he was forty. Like his
youngest brother but not many others, he moved across the political spectrum to the left as he got older, but his habits of thought and pattern of life were never remotely like those of William
Gladstone. He was an immense mountain of a man, over twenty stone in weight, and he aged early, leading a disorganized and even dishevelled life after the death of his wife in 1865 until he too
died in 1875.

The third son, John Neilson Gladstone, just short of three years older than William, was also entered for Eton. But he was resolved to go into the navy, although it was a bad time to do so
– in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars when the south coastal counties were spattered with small Regency gentleman’s residences from which redundant naval officers looked out in vain
for ships to command. His determination however was great and he went to the Royal Naval College at Portsmouth in 1820. His career at sea was over at the age of twenty-eight, but although he could
not thereafter get a ship he got some promotion and ended as a captain RN. He lived the second half of his life as a Wiltshire country gentleman, settling at Bowden Park, near Chippenham, preceding
Lord Weinstock by a century and a quarter in the acquisition of that estate. He was also intermittently an MP, never tempted by his brother’s transition to fluctuate from his Tory faith.
Although he appeared to have the most robust health and least neurotic temperament of all the Gladstone children, he died the first of the brothers, in 1863.

On the day in September 1821 when William Gladstone for the first time accompanied his brother Tom to Eton, there was no reason for him to feel exhilarated. He had hitherto had only slight
schooling experience. He had been taught, but not very much or very skilfully, by the Evangelical vicar of St Thomas’s, Seaforth, the church which his father had built and entered in his
balance sheet. The Revd Mr Rawson was imported from Cambridge by John Gladstone and ran a school for about twelve boys in the parsonage.

This instruction singularly failed to excite him: ‘To return to Mr Rawson,’ he wrote at the 1892 beginning of his unfinished autobiography. ‘Everything was unobjectionable
there. I suppose I learnt something there. But I have no recollection of being under any moral or personal influence whatever. . . .’
⁴
But if he
thought little of Rawson he thought still less of himself as a child. He had a strong conviction, in retrospect at any rate, that he was neither a good nor an engaging child. ‘The best I can
say for it is that I do not think it was actually a vicious childhood,’ he continued in 1892. ‘. . . But truth obliges me to record this against myself. I have no recollection of being
a loving or a winning child.’
⁵
The confluence of his lack of response to Rawson and lack of esteem for himself no doubt accounted for the
remarkable absence of any nostalgia for childhood when he paid a return visit to Seaforth Rectory and indeed to the Rawsons thirty-two years later.
²

In these circumstances it was lucky that such a wide new window opened to him when he went to Eton in 1821. The journey to South Buckinghamshire was a formidable one for an eleven-year-old boy,
although he already had a remarkably wide geographical experience for a child of that age in the pre-railway years; he had travelled to London, Cambridge, Bristol, Edinburgh and Dingwall. His 1821
journey (to deduce backwards from his diaries, which he began just under four years later) involved departure from Seaforth in the early afternoon, leaving Liverpool by the Birmingham coach at 3.30
p.m. and getting to that Midland town at about 5.30 the next morning, making an interchange and proceeding onwards by a coach sometimes called the ‘Hibernian’, which presumably came
from Holyhead, and allowed its passengers to breakfast at Leamington and dine at Benson (between Oxford and
Henley) before depositing them at Slough in time to get to Eton at
7.00 p.m.
⁶
Tom’s presence may have given some reassurance, particularly as William was to be in the same house and also to do his fagging under
him. But it must also have been something of a wet blanket, for Tom can hardly have fired him with Eton enthusiasm.

However, William took to Eton like the proverbial duck to water. Despite his later tendency self-consciously to defer to rank, there is no suggestion that he ever felt or suffered from any sense
of inferiority because of his northern trading origin. Magnus thought that he was ‘never a popular boy’ because of his lack of interest in games, but this is implausible. Gladstone was
at school well before the mania for the football field and the cricket pitch spread from Thomas Arnold’s Rugby into the new ‘imperial’ public schools and reached its apogee in
Henry Newbolt’s end-of-the-century Clifton-inspired ‘bumping pitch and a blinding light’. Regency England, which was only a year over when Gladstone got to Eton, thought more of
gaming than of games. He was also there before that new wave of schools imposed on their pupils the standard accent of the southern upper middle classes.

The old schools never did this. Addington, Winchester’s one Prime Minister, nicknamed ‘the Doctor’, spoke like the mixture of Reading apothecary and Hampshire yeoman which was
his provenance. Peel, who went to Harrow from a rich but parvenu northern background very similar to that from which Gladstone came twenty years later, always spoke with a distinct Lancashire
accent. And Curzon, who was a notable Etonian half a century after Gladstone, was famous for his short Derbyshire
a
s, as in bräss and gläss (when complaining that the Foreign
Secretary’s inkstand was that rather than silver and crystal).

In Gladstone’s case, as opposed to Addington’s or Peel’s, there are faint and scratchy wax cylinder recordings which give some indication of the authority, but not of the depth
or melodiousness, of his voice late in life. The accent is faintly northern. Seventy years earlier Gladstone must, if anything, have spoken with more and not less of a Liverpool accent, but this
was neither unusual nor inhibiting to him at Eton. He was an early and central member of the Eton Society (Pop as it later came to be called, or the Literati, giving it a rather different
connotation, as it was known at the time) and at its meetings first showed his unusual command over an oratory which was classical in structure and illustration, yet infused with a fervour and
expounded with a profligacy of words which made it hardly Roman. The stylized nature of the framework, even if not always of the contents, of the debates was
accentuated by the
strange convention, an exaggerated inversion of the ‘fourteen-day rule’ in the early years of political television, that no issue which had arisen in the past fifty years could be
debated. It at least gave the participants a need for historical knowledge and a taste for argument by analogy.

Gladstone’s mind meshed well with Eton teaching. He later claimed that ‘we knew very little indeed, but we knew it accurately’.
⁷
This was perhaps true so far as the limited and severely classical curriculum was concerned. Gladstone liked conventional learning, and was good if not brilliant at Latin and Greek composition. He
had great application and muscular intellectual strength. But he had no special verbal facility in English, and probably not in the dead languages either. For an outstanding orator, which he was
already on the way to becoming, he was singularly lacking in neatness of phrase. He was too periphrastic and too addicted to qualifying subordinate clauses. His force depended essentially on his
flashing eyes and the physical authority of his presence. Thus the printed records of his speeches do not compare with those of Chatham or Burke or Canning or Abraham Lincoln, or even with the
contrived epigrams of Disraeli, whose flippancy was so antipathetic to Gladstone. There was also a degree of sentimentality about Gladstone’s later speeches, ‘intellectual
sentimentality’ Morley called it with a well-chosen oxymoron, which was absent from the oratory of the other five just cited. Even in the sentimental category, however, John Bright made finer
arches out of hackneyed but emotive images. Gladstone’s oratory was a most powerful vehicle for moving men’s minds on a particular issue rather than an art form which stood on its own
because of the limpidity of the construction.

Nonetheless Gladstone did a good deal better at Eton than Lincoln or Bright would have been likely to do. Unlike Tom he attracted the interest of and got on well with the best masters. Although
occasionally beaten by Keate, he appears to have both liked and respected him. Certainly he persuaded himself that this was so and wrote in his last years of Keate’s enthusiastic reception at
an 1841 banquet to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the school as ‘one of the most moving spectacles that in my whole life I have witnessed’.
⁸
But it was E. C. Hawtrey, Keate’s successor as headmaster from 1834, later Provost and the maker of Victorian Eton, from whom Gladstone claimed that, about Easter 1822, he
first received a spark –
divinae particulam aurae
– which opened his mind and set him on a determined course of acquiring knowledge.
⁹

Hawtrey was a great schoolmaster, but he was unlikely to have been as necessary an agent as Gladstone retrospectively suggested. Gladstone had phenomenal energy, both mental
and physical, a blotting-paper mind, and an imbued sense that the highest challenge of life was to satisfy God of the most effective possible use of time. William Gladstone respected the minutes as
much as John Gladstone respected money. Just as the father meticulously kept count of how he spent his pounds so the son equally meticulously kept count of how he spent his quarter hours. His
diary, which he began in July 1825 at the age of fifteen and continued until he was eighty-five, with an entry for each day of nearly seventy years, was as unique and impressive a document in the
round as it was often bleakly factual in its individual entries. It mostly eschewed comment, for its essential quality, as Gladstone expressed it when trying to persuade his youngest son to follow
his example, was as ‘an account-book of the all-precious gift of Time’.

Gladstone’s combination of energy, eclectic interest and feeling of intellectual accountability to God made him develop at Eton into a voracious reader. Throughout the whole seven decades
of the diary he kept a comprehensive (although sometimes cryptic)
³
record of what he read, whether books or pamphlets, everything indeed except for
newspapers, which he also devoured although without individual record. As a result it is possible in a way that cumulatively is almost without parallel to see the whole vast sweep of his literary
input: theology, politics, history, science, poetry, fiction, all the main controversial publications of the year, but also many chance works of information which just happened to catch his
interest made up the almost unbelievable total of nearly 20,000 works which he recorded as having consumed in the course of his life. He started early. Thus on 28 February 1826, when he was just
sixteen, he ‘Read Memoirs of Sir Rt Walpole in Biograph. Dict; finished
L’Avare
: read a speech of Huskisson’s on Silk Trade. Capital. Began Lyrics (Greek iambics, instead
of usual) and read about 160 lines of the second Georgic. . . .’
¹⁰