Gladstone: A Biography (6 page)

From this base on what might be called the University side of Christ Church (with Oriel, Corpus and Merton within a few yards, whereas the other side of the college, looking on to the Meadow or
St Aldate’s, has more the feel of a great liner moored off the shore of the rest of Oxford), Gladstone was a highly successful undergraduate. His continuing Eton friends were Gaskell (who had
rooms alongside his), Doyle, Charles Canning, a younger son of the Gladstone-family hero who himself later became Governor-General of India and an earl, Bruce, who succeeded as eighth Earl of Elgin
and punitively burnt the Summer Palace in Peking, Walter Kerr Hamilton, who later became Bishop of Salisbury, and Henry Clinton, Earl of Lincoln, who succeeded as Duke of Newcastle in 1851 and was
a Peelite Cabinet colleague of Gladstone both in the Aberdeen and in the second Palmerston governments. From outside Eton there were Thomas and Arthur Acland, Rugbeian scions of an old Devon
family, Joseph Anstice, who came from Westminster School and became the first Professor of Classical Literature at King’s College, London, before dying at the age of twenty-six, and Robert
Phillimore, also from Westminster, who became a considerable jurist and short-term MP, which roles he combined with being something of a Boswell to Gladstone, who eventually rewarded him with a
baronetcy in 1883.

From outside Christ Church there were two Harrovians who were later to play a considerable and at times intimate part in Gladstone’s life: Sidney Herbert, a younger son of the Earl of
Pembroke, who was at Oriel and who later became another Peelite colleague of Gladstone,
and also, in Morley’s words, ‘perhaps the best beloved of all his
friends’; and Henry Manning, who at Balliol was then a rather Low Church Anglican, with his ambitions directed more towards marriage and archdeaconries than towards cardinals’ hats and
ultramontanism. But these last two at that stage were more acquaintances than close friends. James Hope (Hope-Scott after, by marrying Sir Walter Scott’s granddaughter, he acquired
Abbotsford, Scott’s house on the Tweed), with whom Gladstone was to have one of his intense friendships in the 1840s, was then in the same category. F. D. Maurice, who had come from Cambridge
to Exeter College in 1830, and Edward Pusey, who became a canon of Christ Church on becoming Professor of Hebrew in the same year, were also influential acquaintances of Gladstone at Oxford. With
Keble and Newman, on the other hand, he had little direct contact, although much aware of them as eminences of the University.

Gladstone was thus far from being a lonely undergraduate. But nor was he a generally popular one. He surrounded himself with a defensive coterie who were all of some distinction but to whom he
was the central figure. When towards the end of his first year he organized them into an essay club, which he hoped might be a counterpart to the Cambridge Apostles, it was known as the Weg, after
his own initials; whether or not because of this label it achieved neither the fame nor the permanence of the Society, as the Apostles were alternatively known. He was much less vulnerable than the
reclusive brass-rubber, Paul Pennyfeather, whose dismayed reaction to ‘the sound of the English county families baying for broken glass’ was immortalized by Waugh’s
Decline and
Fall
portrait of Christ Church a century later. But Pennyfeather and Gladstone were beaten up in somewhat similar circumstances, although in Gladstone’s case the incident started no
sequence of tragi-comic events. Late on a March night in the middle of his second year, Gladstone’s rooms were invaded by a boisterous party of Christ Church ‘bloods’ who had
clearly decided that Gladstone was priggish, pious and self-righteous. Unfortunately his diary reaction was an orgy of holier-than-thou self-abnegation which had it been available to his assailants
would have confirmed them in their worst suspicions:

This was Gladstone at his worst, particularly as he was only twenty at the time. But in general the immense seriousness of his purpose was tempered by the width of his interests, which prevented
his work being too obsessive, just as the delicacy of his conscience was tempered by a sense of fun and a liking for companionship. He did not work excessively hard at Oxford, except perhaps in the
late summer and autumn of 1831, which culminated in his taking two ‘Schools’,
Literae Humaniores
and Mathematics, between 7 November and 14 December, and getting secure firsts in
both. The feat was the greater because he was not really interested in mathematics. He merely absorbed the subject in order to get the coveted scalp of a double first.

Even during this period of pressurized preparation he took five days off in early October to go to London and listen to fifty hours or more of the House of Lords debate which culminated in the
rejection of the Reform Bill. His listening stamina was formidable, even though he was ‘compelled to leave the House by exhaustion’ before the reply of the Prime Minister (Grey). But he
was already both a gourmand and a gourmet of rhetoric. During the debate he thought that Brougham’s speech was ‘most wonderful’, Grey’s (opening) speech ‘most
beautiful’ and Lansdowne’s ‘very good’,
¹⁸
even though they were all on the wrong (Whig) side from his point of view.

In the same way his appetite for sermons stemmed as much from his growing connoisseurship of oratory as from his devoutness. On a normal Sunday, whether in Oxford or at home in Liverpool or with
his family in one of their spa towns, he would almost invariably listen to two and occasionally to three sermons. His diary for 6 March 1831 provided a fairly typical example of such a day, except
that the Newman comment added a special piquancy:

In and around Oxford Gladstone walked a lot and also rode. But he engaged in no country sports nor in any organized games, although he occasionally watched both cricket and
rowing, including an expedition to Henley (which he described as ‘an exceedingly pleasant day’) to see the first Oxford and Cambridge boat race in June 1829. His principal recreations
were conversation and debating. He gave and went to frequent wine parties, and paid some attention to the quality that was served. He was never censorious about alcohol indulgence in himself or
others, and noted with satisfaction the delivery of wine stocks to his rooms.

Gladstone’s debating was centred upon the nascent Union Society, which had been founded less than five years before, and was then very different from the imitation Palace of Westminster,
gothic-designed and pre-Raphaelite-decorated, in which Asquith, Curzon and F. E. Smith later disported themselves. Gladstone was the first of the household gods of the Union but he had to make do
with a primitive version which was more frequently and prosaically called the Debating Society, had only just acquired permanent but rented and modest premises in the High Street (the St
Michael’s Street site was not acquired until 1853), and attracted audiences of very limited size. On the evening of 14 November 1830, when Gladstone was elected president (for a term), his
motion to censure the Wellington government for its pusillanimity in accepting Catholic emancipation was carried by only 57 to 56 votes, as compared with the nearly 600 who voted at the end of the
Munich debate in 1938. After his most notable speech in the Union, on 17 May 1831 and in vehement opposition to the Reform Bill, he carried the motion by 94 votes to 38. He spoke for forty-five
minutes. The debate was an ingrowing affair for he came immediately after Gaskell, who had followed Lincoln. It was his first speech of compelling power. ‘When [he] sat down,’ Francis
Doyle wrote, ‘we all of us felt that an epoch in our lives had occurred.’
²⁰
Charles Wordsworth, nephew of the poet and son of the Master
of Trinity (Cambridge), described it as ‘the most splendid speech, out and out, that was ever heard in our Society’.

It was hardly a moderate speech. Its thesis was that the Reform Bill, if carried, would break up the social order not merely in Britain but throughout the civilized world. Chesterton’s
satire on F. E. Smith’s claim ninety years later that the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill had ‘shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe’ could have been
applied with an equally deflating mockery to Gladstone’s
onslaught on the immorality of reducing the number of rotten boroughs.

Gladstone himself in later life was to be only mildly embarrassed by the direction and extremity of his views at this time. When Disraeli in 1866 not unreasonably mocked him for these opinions,
he replied, semi-complacently: ‘My youthful mind and imagination were impressed with some idle and futile fears which still bewilder and distract the mature mind of the right honourable
gentleman.’
²¹
And he also claimed, latterly and blandly, that ‘while I do not think that the general tendencies of my mind were, in the
time of my youth, illiberal, there was to my eyes an element of the anti-Christ in the Reform Act’.
²²
His more serious and self-critical mature
view was that while Oxford taught him to respect truth it did not teach him to love liberty.

Nor did it teach him to avoid excess. But excess was always one of his salient qualities. He could lie back from a subject because he thought that the time for it was not ripe. But, once he had
engaged with it, he did so with a commitment which excited his allies on the issue (who were often surprising because of the oscillating nature of his interests and views), affronted his opponents
and filled his long-term friends with apprehension. As a result many of his most memorable speeches did him more direct harm than good, although at the same time they built up, as a stalagmite
grows, the respect for and fear of the most formidable orator in Parliament.

His Oxford Union anti-Reform effusion, by contrast and measurably, brought the most direct benefit. It led Lord Lincoln, in no way offended by being out-orated, successfully to recommend him as
a parliamentary candidate to his father. This fourth Duke of Newcastle, whose distinctions were mainly the accidental ones of holding the dukedom for fifty-six years and of having so many boroughs
more or less at his disposal that the great Reform Act, which he opposed as vehemently as Gladstone but less articulately, merely ruffled his feathers in this respect. One of his boroughs, Newark
in Nottinghamshire, he bestowed upon Gladstone. It was a fine parliamentary property to acquire at the age of twenty-two, but it came very much as a leasehold and not as a freehold.

A G
RAND
T
OUR
E
NDING AT
N
EWARK

T
HERE WAS A YEAR
between Gladstone leaving Oxford and his election to Parliament, and he spent half of it making his grand tour. He was always a natural
traveller, geographically somewhat restless in spite of his great powers of concentration and love of book learning, curious to see new sights, and powerfully resilient against the fatigue of long
days and nights in bumping coaches. He liked planning journeys and he enjoyed moments of departure, particularly if they came after periods of high strain. Thus, on 14 December 1831, the day on
which he did his last examination papers in the morning, and received the news of his mathematical (and hence double) first in the afternoon he managed after an evening of letter-writing, packing
and farewells to leave by the night coach to London, where he stopped only for breakfast before proceeding to Cambridge for a five-day visit (during which he was ‘excellently lodged’
with the Master of Trinity). In much the same mood, when he was a leading politician and the railways had come, he would mark the beginning of a holiday from London business by a dawn departure
from Euston to Chester (for Hawarden) or Birmingham (for Hagley), sometimes walking the final six or twelve miles from the railway stations to the country mansions which were his destinations.