Gladstone: A Biography (57 page)

With Laura Thistlethwayte there was for him a strong element of physical infatuation. Yet she was not the equivalent of one of his ‘rescue’ cases, even though he often wrote the
culpatory × symbol (but not the
) one, which he had last inscribed in 1859) after an encounter with her. She had more than
rescued herself. It would not have been much good telling her that she ought to give up Grosvenor Square and the Dorset manor in order to improve herself at the Clewer House of Mercy, which he had
helped to establish at Windsor. Yet Gladstone’s near obsession with her in the autumn of 1869 required the absence of any other woman outside his family whose interest he wished particularly
to arouse and in whom he wished to confide. Hence the importance to the Thistlethwayte relationship of the death of the Duchess of Sutherland.
It also required an effective
cessation of his general ‘rescue’ activities, which indeed was markedly so in that autumn of 1869.

Yet in the phrase ‘near obsession’ at least equal weight needs to be put upon the qualifying adjective as upon the noun. When he returned to Hawarden from Balmoral he began to write
to her intensively, and did so eleven times that October. In the course of the correspondence she appears deliberately to have heightened the emotional atmosphere, provoking a semi-quarrel, the
resolution of which produced a tighter sense of mutual commitment. ‘The letter of yesterday from Mrs Th. caused me to ruminate in a maze,’ he wrote on 19 October. And on the 20th:
‘A letter from Mrs T. much wounded [and] disturbed me. I have a horror of giving inner pain to a woman.’
²⁹
The last phrase sounded
distinctly impersonal, but this was misleading for from this time he (unfortunately) began his letters to her ‘Dear Spirit’, although ending them no more committingly than ‘Ever
yours, W. E. G.’ He also took to wearing an engraved ring which she had given him.

When he returned to London she was away and the letters continued to pour from him – six in the next ten days. Then she returned, and Gladstone took to calling on her in Grosvenor Square.
He was there eight times in the next ten days, in addition to an occasion when he dined with ‘the Thistlethwaytes’, and one call which she made at Carlton House Terrace. The Grosvenor
Square calls were sometimes in the early evening, sometimes after dinner and mostly lasted for one and a half to two hours. They were snatched with great determination. ‘Cabinet 2–4.
Saw Mrs Th. 5¼–7¼’ (10 November),
³⁰
and ‘Mrs Thistlethwayte on the way to G. W. R. Off to Windsor at 5. We dined
with H. M. and a party of 13’ (16 November).
³¹
Gladstone seemed relatively immune from guilt after these encounters, although he had recorded
on 28 October: ‘Wrote to Mrs Thistlethwayte: in great gravity of spirit. Duty and evil temptation are there before me, on the right and left. But I firmly believe in her words
“holy” and “pure”, & in her cleaving to God.’
³²

When he went back to Hawarden for his late-November visit a similar pattern of letter-writing was resumed, as was a pattern of visiting when he returned to London for a cluster of Cabinets on 6
December. Attention was increasingly concentrated on the Saturday to Monday visit which Gladstone had arranged to pay to the Thistlethwaytes’ Dorset house on 11–13 December. It was an
engagement which he had not only arranged but was resolved to fulfil. It coincided with the most crucial period in the difficult Cabinet discussions on the Irish Land Bill.
There had been a Cabinet on the Thursday afternoon, a ‘conclave’ (on the subject) on the Friday morning and the determining Cabinet was due on the day after his return
from the Thistlethwayte weekend. But nothing was going to divert him from Boveridge (the Dorset house). ‘On Monday till evening I shall be out of town,’ he firmly informed the
colleagues with whom he was locked in discussion. And so for the Saturday morning he was able to record: ‘Off at 10.30 with A. K[innaird MP, who appeared to be constantly on hand in the
relationship, performing either a procuring or chaperoning role] to join Mrs Th. and her party at Waterloo. We reached Boveridge in heavy rain between 2 & 3. Saw the fine
stud
. And
walked a little about the place. Saw Mrs Th. several times.’

The Sunday, however, appeared to be the more highly charged day. It began naturally enough with a service at the local church, which was Cranborne, but continued strangely, there being no
service in the afternoon, with Mr Thistlethwayte ‘reading a Sermon of over an hour’. There was also a walk with Mrs Thistlethwayte, in addition to which she ‘came to my rooms aft.
and at night’. Then the lushness of Tennysonian romanticism took over, which was always a bad sign with Gladstone: ‘Miss Fawcett [a maid or a guest, and whose hair?] let down her hair:
it is a robe. So Godiva “the rippled ringlets to the knee”.’
³³

On the Monday he drove to and from a meet of foxhounds with his hostess, before she saw him and Arthur Kinnaird off at Fordingbridge station. He was back at Waterloo at 7.15 p.m., in time for
dinner with his Chief Whip, which comprised ‘3 hours with Fortescue [Irish Secretary] and Sullivan [Irish Attorney-General] on Irish land’. The next day he satisfactorily surmounted a
three-and-a-half-hour Cabinet (three hours of it on Irish land) and got the main provisions of the bill agreed. He had emulated Drake in completing his game of bowls before engaging with the
Spaniards.

Moreover his Boveridge expedition had on the whole been emotionally calming rather than disruptive. He had obviously got himself far into what he had described a little earlier as ‘deep
matters’ and he wrote on his return of ‘how far [he] was at first from understanding her history or even her character’. However, that Dorset weekend, with whatever intimacies
which did or did not take place, appeared in retrospect to have been the high-water mark rather than an instigation to further emotional plunges in their relationship. Letters continued to flow.
Gladstone wrote to her nine times during the Christmas and New Year month that he spent away from London. But there was no
mounting frenzy. Following a pattern familiar from
some of his ‘rescue’ cases, and one which obviously exposed him to a charge of hypocrisy, Gladstone had decided that it was his duty to urge the restoration of full relations with her
husband, but this did not prevent the continuation, although on a gradually diminishing scale, of correspondence and meetings. There could, however, be bursts of resurgence, as in the early summer
of 1871, when he lunched with her (without a party) in Grosvenor Square on seven occasions within six weeks. She lived until 1894, latterly in somewhat straitened circumstances and sharing a
Hampstead ‘cottage’ with a sister of General Ponsonby, Grey’s successor as the Queen’s secretary. Gladstone, mostly then accompanied by his wife, used occasionally to take a
long afternoon’s drive from Downing Street during his last government, with a call upon her providing the destination. He did not however attend her funeral, and there was a sense that he
felt some relief at her departure.

Three questions remain. First, how much did she divert Gladstone’s attention and energies from affairs of state during this crucial early period of his first premiership? Professor
Matthew, whose judgement on any matter relating to Gladstone must always be given first consideration, puts his preoccupation with her lower than that of Asquith with Venetia Stanley. Gladstone
never got near to Asquith’s occasional outpourings of four letters a day. Nor did he write them during Cabinet meetings. On the other hand the tone of Asquith’s Stanley epistles was
consistently lighter than anything which emanated from Gladstone. Asquith provided social and political gossip, laced with amusing and somewhat cynical comment upon his colleagues. Gladstone by
contrast was often peering into the dark places of the soul. What was also true, however, was that in both cases they were bicycling towards the edge of the cliff without much risk or intention of
going over it, or, apart from a brief wobble on Asquith’s part in May 1915, of allowing their capacity for the transaction of public business to be affected by their infatuations.

The second question is to what extent was Gladstone’s reputation, and therefore his authority, damaged by inner-circle knowledge of his temptations. A comment which the newly succeeded
fifteenth Earl of Derby, then a Tory but later to serve as Colonial Secretary under Gladstone in the 1880 government, wrote in his diary for 11 December 1869 is a good indication of the mixture of
knowledge, amusement and mildly mocking tolerance which characterized the attitude of the political class:

The third question is that of how far this extravagance with Mrs Thistlethwayte damaged Gladstone’s relations with his wife. The answer to this must be ‘somewhat’. Catherine
Gladstone can hardly fail to have been at least half aware of some of his peregrinations. She had, for instance, arrived in Carlton House Terrace from Hawarden shortly before his return from
Boveridge on 13 December. However, she was used to him, and there was no evidence of any approach to crisis in their relations. The year ended with the Gladstones apparently in good shape mentally,
although less so physically. Mrs Gladstone was laid up with the family complaint of erysipelas from Christmas Day onwards, and Gladstone took to his bed, this time with some sort of bronchial
infection, for a few days over the period of his sixtieth birthday on 29 December. But he greeted that milestone, which was certainly then regarded as the entry to old age, with aplomb.

Two days later, on New Year’s Eve, he wrote:

I
RISH
L
AND AND
E
UROPEAN
W
AR

E
IGHTEEN-SEVENTY WAS
a less rewarding session than that of 1869. Irish land proved more intractable than the Irish Church. The French and the Prussians
fought each other, and the British government became preoccupied with maintaining its neutrality. The legislative haul was again considerable, but several of the measures did not arouse the
enthusiasm of the Prime Minister. Nevertheless, the year as a whole was one in which he and the government maintained their zest.