Gladstone: A Biography (43 page)

Gladstone, however, was not in a mood to enjoy the farce, although his tastes in humour often inclined in that direction. It was altogether a miserable summer for him. His immediate post-budget
prestige collapsed much more quickly than it had done in 1853, and he came to be widely regarded in both Cabinet and Parliament as hectoring and rather wild. He was often unwell: at the end of
April he was intermittently in bed for five days (‘Nipped again by the East Wind on my chest’); in
mid-July he had another two days of incapacity with a stomach
bug; and at the end of that month he was once again in bed for a day with an unspecified complaint. He was several times on the brink of resignation, against military expenditures, or in favour of
paper-duties repeal, or against inactivity in response to the House of Lords. Although on Saturday, 2 June (at Cliveden, where, with the Sutherlands he spent five weekends that summer) he wrote;
‘My resignation
all but
settled,’ there is an underlying feeling that he had no steady wish to go. His state of mind was perhaps best summed up in a letter which he wrote to
Argyll on 6 June, describing to the Duke a meeting which he had just had with Palmerston, during which Palmerston, ‘kind and frank’ in manner, had stressed his own determination to
press ahead with a full programme of fortifications
⁵⁵
and warned Gladstone of the ‘evils and hazards’ which would attend him if he did resign.
Gladstone appeared not to resent this warning but concluded:

So Gladstone teetered on the brink. But crucially, from the point of view of his evolution into the heir of Palmerston and Russell, he did not go. He suffered, however, from being thought
‘anxious to wound but afraid to strike’. His reputation as a blowhard resigner whose threats need not be taken too seriously stemmed to a large extent from the events of that summer. He
also suffered on 20 July from the further indignity of having a Savings Bank Monies Bill defeated in the House of Commons on a thin division by 116 to 78. Small though the figures were, the
division entailed the loss of the bill and suggests lack of active support on the part of the government whips. He noted it as ‘my
first
defeat on a measure of finance in the H. of
C.’, but endeavoured to take it in one his St Sebastian moods: ‘This ought to be very good for me, & I earnestly wish to make it so.’
¹⁸

The session also dragged on uncomfortably long, and he found
himself attempting to deal with his Treasury correspondence (‘44 envelopes to open’) in the absence
of his private secretary as late as 21 August and taking minor debates in the House as late as the 23rd. Eventually he got to Hawarden on the 27th, and then had the full month of September at
Penmaenmawr, as well as most of October at Hawarden. He had no major holiday task on hand (although he made an abortive attempt at ‘a paraphrastic translation of [Aristotle’s]
Politics’, which never saw the light of day. As a result he had rather too much time to spare, and devoted an excessive amount of it to agitating himself and others about the possible
remarriage of his clergyman brother-in-law Henry Glynne to a Miss Rose, who had been governess to the Glynne girls. It would be easy for the uncharitable to think that Gladstone’s objection
was to any marriage which might produce a Glynne male heir and so upset the Hawarden succession, but Miss Rose was also open to some
ad feminam
objections.
⁵⁶
It was, however, another example of Gladstone getting too excited about other people’s marriages when he might have been much wiser to let them make their own decisions
without his influence.

Altogether the year of 1860 was not an obviously good one for Gladstone. Nonetheless his usual birthday summing-up on 29 December was less breast-beating than had often been his custom. His main
concern was the secular and not unusual one of growing older: ‘began my 52nd year. I cannot believe it. I feel within me the rebellious unspoken word, I will not be old.’ He concluded
with an expression of ‘the unbounded goodness of God and of [my] own deep deep deep unworthiness’,
¹⁹
but that for him was no more than
par for the course.

Less obviously, however, 1860 had been an important stage in his advance to pre-eminence. Despite the evaporation of his popularity during the summer, he had added another formidable budget to
his record of achievement. And, perhaps even more important, he and Palmerston had begun to acquire the habit of living together if not in harmony at least without rupture. They had taken each
other’s measure, and had survived in the same government. By the end of 1860, therefore, Gladstone was already well on the way to meeting the main provision for his succession to the Liberal
leadership, which was that he should not resign.

T
HE
P
EOPLE’S
W
ILLIAM

G
LADSTONE’S EXPERIENCES
in the summer of 1860, both with the Tory House of Lords and with his Whig Prime Minister, did much to drive him towards what became
in some but not all respects an advanced Liberalism. This process was aided by two parallel developments. First death removed nearly all his close political associates. Aberdeen, the
‘tutelary deity’ of the Peelites as Gladstone had described him in 1855, subsided in December 1860 at the full age of seventy-six. Then in August 1861, Sidney Herbert, who had been
forced by ill health to resign from the War Office in July, died at only fifty. Gladstone was desolated by this, the more so perhaps because of their recent disputes within the Cabinet.

Thus the two politicians with whom he felt the closest emotional links, one of a previous and one of his own generation, had both gone within eight months, and the latter event in particular
filled him not only with sadness but with morbidity. When Herbert had come back through London on 31 July, after an unavailing health journey abroad, Gladstone went to look from a window of a
neighbouring house in order to watch him as he came and went from his house in Belgrave Square. ‘Alas it was a sore sight.’
¹
Two days
later Herbert died at Wilton, where a week after that Gladstone attended the ‘alike sad and soothing’ funeral. There is a view that, had Herbert lived, he and not Gladstone would have
succeeded to the Liberal leadership after Palmerston had died and Russell had withdrawn. This is hardly more plausible than the view that Oliver Stanley, a somewhat similar figure who died in
somewhat similar circumstances in 1950, would have frustrated Harold Macmillan in 1957.

Less than three months later James Graham died unexpectedly at sixty-nine. Gladstone had not been as emotionally close to Graham, a less highly strung character, as to the other two, but he had
been the one upon whom he most depended for sensible advice, and Graham’s last significant Commons speech, in support of the 1861 budget, had been made in response to a direct appeal from
Catherine Gladstone that an intervention from him would make her husband feel less isolated.
Newcastle, Gladstone’s contemporary like Herbert, survived only three years
after Graham. In June 1862, Charles Canning, another contemporary and the son of Gladstone’s first political hero as well as himself a former Governor-General of India, also died, and the
Peelites, apart from Gladstone himself and Cardwell, who although able and ambitious, was never central to the group, became collectively extinct. Thereafter Gladstone had no partners with even a
claim to equality.

Not only the Peelites were vulnerable in the early 1860s. Within the government, Campbell the Lord Chancellor died in June 1861 and George Cornewall Lewis the Home Secretary in April 1862.
Office is normally a preservative, and it was unique for a Cabinet to have a third of its members struck down in office, four of them within a year. It was made the more remarkable by the fact that
its chief, healthily imperturbable, sailed on to an age at which nobody had previously contemplated presiding over a government. (Gladstone overtook him when he formed his fourth
administration.)

Outside the British government, Cavour went of a fever in June 1861, the Prince Consort of, maybe, another one in December of the same year, and John Neilson Gladstone in February 1863. Of these
deaths, that of the Piedmontese statesman who had so kindled Gladstone’s Italian enthusiasm in 1859 was affecting (‘What a deathbed: what a void’
²
was his characteristic comment on reading an account of Cavour’s end) and that of his brother with whom he had first seen Italy thirty-one years before much more so. The
attention which he devoted to performing every possible fraternal service at and after the death of J. N. Gladstone was remarkable by any standards, and particularly so for someone carrying Cabinet
responsibilities. He went to Bowden Park, near Chippenham, three days before his brother’s death and stayed there for ten days, returning to London only after the funeral. He wrote long
harrowing accounts of the deathbed scene, the tone of which can be judged from his concluding sentences:

Gladstone then spent a week comforting his seven orphaned nieces (and one seven-year-old nephew), arranging the funeral, and clearing up the estate, both legally and
physically. His slightly officious sense of family
duty, his morbidity and his religious commitment united to make him an exceptional mourner. Tom and Robertson Gladstone were
also present at the death and the funeral, as indeed was Helen, but they, although largely unoccupied, neither stayed for long nor took the central responsibility.

It was nonetheless the demise of Prince Albert which not only carried its extraordinary panoply of national mourning but also made the greatest difference to Gladstone’s future. He had
been staying at Windsor only fifteen days before the Prince’s death, and although he was subsequently to pass many long weeks as minister in attendance at Balmoral as well as continuing to
make occasional one- or two-day semi-official visits to Windsor, his position as one of the Queen’s favourite politicians, his diligence and loyalty as a minister fortified by her interest in
and close knowledge of his wife and children, began to decline almost as soon as the Prince became a sacred but frozen memory and not a present adviser. This was well before Disraeli had major
opportunities to ingratiate himself and poison the springs of the Queen’s relationship with Gladstone.

The papers-duties issue and the antipathy to the Lords which arose out of it gave Gladstone what was, until then, one of his few popular causes. The issues on which he had hitherto fought his
strongest parliamentary battles were not calculated to make him a hero of the people. Standing out against anti-papist hysteria, denouncing the excesses of Lord Palmerston’s jingoism as in
the Don Pacifico debate, resisting an enquiry into the mismanagement of the Crimean War and then advocating an early peace with Russia rather than outright victory, keeping divorce as a wholly
exceptional upper-class privilege, defending small boroughs as ‘the nurseries of statesmen’, and upholding the full rigour of church rates on Dissenting parishioners may all have been
appropriate issues for thundering speeches from the member for Oxford University. But they were not likely to win him a mass popular following.