Gladstone: A Biography (71 page)

On the third issue, Disraeli’s Endowed Schools Bill, which was designed to redress the balance of the 1871 settlement, Gladstone’s opposition was in accord with his party, although
the grounds for his objection, primarily that it violated the duty of a government to accept the legislation of its predecessor in the previous Parliament, and secondarily that it was an attack on
the endowed schools commissioners, of whom Lord Lyttelton was one, had a certain particularity about them. Altogether Gladstone’s month in London did little to reconcile him to parliamentary
life, and on 7 August he set off for a Penmaenmawr holiday, his first there for six years, with relief. He lunched that day in Grosvenor Square with Mrs Thistlethwayte, with whom relations had been
active during this London interlude, and she drove him to Willesden Junction to pick up the five o’clock express from Euston.

In North Wales he managed only fifteen sea-bathes that year, suspending the operation for a week from 11 August ‘on sanitary grounds’. (This presumably meant his
own health rather than general pollution, for he spent half the next two days in bed and full of ‘physic’; though it did not prevent his being fairly boisterous during the half days
when he was out of his bed: ‘we went up Moel Ynion: were wet to the skin: forded the stream knee deep: excellent tea in the cottage above Aber 9d a head’.)
¹⁸
His main intellectual activity was writing for the October number of the
Contemporary Review
a 10,000-word article on ‘The Church of England and Ritualism’,
which put into literary form many of the thoughts he had developed and the points he had made in the July-August debates. He was also casting his mind forward to the visit that he was to pay to
Ignaz von Döllinger in Munich in the following month, to the intense theological discussions he was to have there, and to the anti-ultramontane pamphlet, descriptively entitled
The Vatican
Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation
, which he was to launch upon the world in November, and which was to sell nearly 150,000 copies.

His German journey lasted from 7 to 25 September, and was his first escape from Britain since 1866-7 and his first visit to Döllinger since 1845. He took two of his children – Willy
and Helen (the future vice-principal of Newnham College, Cambridge) – with him to Bavaria, but not his wife, despite her temporary distaste for Hawarden.

His first stop was Cologne, where he briefly saw his sister. He reached Munich on the evening of the second day, was put up and generally looked after by the British minister to Bavaria, Robert
Morier (later a notable ambassador to St Petersburg) and then plunged into an orgy of discussion with Döllinger. On the next day he talked with him continuously from 10.30 a.m. to 6.00 p.m.
The day after that they put in another six and a half hours. On Gladstone’s third and fourth days in Munich they had long afternoon walks (and talks) together. On one of them they encountered
the Archbishop of Munich, who three years before had excommunicated Döllinger for his opposition to the Vatican decrees. Döllinger’s position had then become that of an Old
Catholic, believing that Pius IX was doing immense harm to the ancient faith. This position Gladstone found both sympathetic and sustaining. It inspired him to write his expostulatory pamphlet on
his return to England, and it caused him to make on the spot a significant addition to his ritualism article and to send it off for last-minute inclusion. As part of his argument that ritualistic
practices in some Anglican churches carried no threat of the Romanization of England he added the following passage:

This was obviously a profoundly anti-Catholic statement, casting doubt as it did on the civil allegiance of British converts or adherents of the Church of Rome, and Gladstone, when republishing
the article four years later, appended a footnote of convoluted half-denial that this was what he meant. It was a classic example of Gladstone embracing one cause and argument with such enthusiasm
that he did not pause to consider its repercussion on other causes and arguments which over a period were equally or more important to him. And here he obviously ran grave risks to his ability to
lead a party with many Roman Catholic supporters, and in particular to pursue a policy of Anglo-Irish reconciliation. For the moment, however, he gave his religious enthusiasms priority over his
political ones, and was inclined to welcome any personal disqualification which strengthened his case for shedding the Liberal leadership. By 1878, on the other hand, when Bulgarian atrocities had
replaced Vatican aggressions in the centre of his mind, and Midlothian and the return to full political commitment was only just over the horizon, his priorities were different. Hence the
footnote.

These matters for the moment disposed of (and Döllinger having gone to Bonn for an anti-ultramontane conference), Gladstone took himself and his son and daughter on a four-day tour of the
Bavarian and Austrian Alps. It was strenuous (his daughter was commended for being able to keep up with the nearly sixty-five-year-old ex-Prime Minister over twenty-nine miles of far from level
terrain), the scenery aroused his profound admiration, as did one or two other local attractions (‘Saw the Obersee – Bartholomäus Haus – (& the singularly beautiful
waitress)’, was a surprising shaft in the diary) and so, without the future casting a shadow, did a ‘beautiful river walk’ to Berchtesgaden ‘with a Führer . . . who was
a charming specimen of these bold hardy active South Bavarians’.
²⁰
Then he went to Nuremberg and saw a lot of painted churches before
returning to Cologne, where over two days, having got
into the habit of talking subjects to destruction, he had thirteen hours of conversation with his sister, which
discussions (one wonders what was the balance of listening and talking on the two sides) must have formed much of the basis for his determined conviction at the time of her 1880 death that she was
on the brink of return to her Anglican faith.

On Gladstone’s return to England he based himself at Hawarden for the remainder of the year. He paid four country-house visits, all of them only a night or two except for a full week at
Whittinghame with Arthur Balfour (still aged only twenty-six, but ‘how eminently he is
del miglior luto
’ – of more than common clay – Gladstone wrote), for which he
made a special eleven-hour journey from Hawarden. He was deep in religious controversy, his
Vatican Decrees
pamphlet appearing on 7 November and provoking a rash of rejoinders, including
responses from Newman and Manning. Lest there be any danger of the pot ceasing to simmer he wrote a major and stringent review of
The Discourses of Pius IX
for the January 1875 number of the
Quarterly
. He finished the year reading George Eliot’s
Middlemarch
(‘it is an extraordinary, and to me a very jarring book’) over seventeen days. It had been
published three years before, so what with that and with
Vivian Grey
, which was over thirty years old, he was less up to date in 1874 with his novel reading than was his general habit.

Dominating all this was the imminence of formal escape from the leadership. For all practical purposes he had renounced the obligation nearly a year before, but it was nonetheless a considerable
relief and help towards ‘the winding out of the coil’ when, on 3 February 1875, Hartington, with a reluctance wholly appropriate to the empty vessel which he was offered, took over the
role. Gladstone at sixty-five saw himself as having a last five years or so of life in which to make peace with his God and war against his religious enemies, whether they be presumptuous Roman
pontiffs or Erastian low churchmen. He underestimated his longevity as much as he overestimated his ability to remain politically quiescent.

W
HEN
G
LADSTONE CAME BACK
to London from Hawarden on February 12 1875 he was freer of parliamentary and other political
obligations than at any other time since he had joined the Palmerston government in June 1859. He nonetheless continued to observe the pattern of the parliamentary year, more so indeed than in
1874, when he had expressed his chafing at the wheel of duty through long absences during the session. In 1875, by contrast, he did not return to Hawarden, except for a Whitsun week, until 7
August. In London, however, he was both unsettled in his residence and undiligent in his attendance at the House of Commons.

Within two weeks he (or his agent) had found a purchaser for 11 Carlton House Terrace in the shape of Sir Arthur Guinness, grandson of the first brewer of the black gold of Ireland and himself
then head of the family business and Conservative MP for Dublin City until he was made a peer in 1880. Gladstone’s view that the Terrace had become suitable only for men much richer than
himself was amply underpinned by the status of his purchaser. The transaction was completed on 15 April, when the Crown lease was assigned to Guinness for £35,000. Gladstone wrote of the
departure as being ‘like a
little
death. . . . I had
grown
to the House, having lived more time in it than in any other since I was born.’
¹
He did not, however, react against the ‘usurpers’, Tory and plutocratic though they were. In the summer of 1876 he recorded: ‘Tea at No 11 C.H.T. – Lady
O. [Olivia Guinness was the daughter of the Earl of Bantry] kind & simple. Went over the altered rooms.’
²
Most of the furniture had been
disposed of in an on-site sale, but some of it was taken over by Guinness, a great supporter of the Anglican Church in Ireland, which aroused an ironic but not unfriendly reflection from Gladstone:
‘Sir A. G. has the chairs & sofa on which we sat when we resolved on the disestablishment of the Irish Church in 1868.’
³

Later that spring Christie’s held a four-day sale of the paintings, porcelain and
objets
which had been collected over nearly forty years. The receipts were £9351. One Italian
picture (Bonifazio’s
Virgin
) made £483
and the next best price was £430 for Dyce’s Marion Summerhayes portrait, Lady with the Coronet of Jasmine,
which was thus propelled on its journey to the Aberdeen Art Gallery. A picture which Gladstone had bought as a Giorgione made only £85 and an equally doubtful Murillo only eleven guineas.
Nonetheless Gladstone’s cash and income position was substantially retrieved. The leasehold house had provided the equivalent of nearly £1¾ million in today’s money, and
the decorative sale came to nearly £500,000 on the same basis. When his London books, less a substantial number removed to Hawarden, had been valued a few weeks earlier Sotheby’s put
the Hansards at £150 (how delighted would be most modern MPs to get the equivalent £7500 for their accumulation of those freely issued pale-blue volumes) and the rest at £670
(£33,000). They all appear to have been acquired by Lord Wolverton, formerly his Chief Whip George Glyn, presumably at valuation price.

For the remainder of the parliamentary session of 1875 the Gladstones rented another but much smaller Carlton House Terrace house fifty yards from their previous one. This (No. 23) he described
as ‘our new and humble nest’, although they were quickly giving breakfast and dinner parties there for around ten guests. For his few autumn nights in London he was in Arthur
Balfour’s house at 4 Carlton Gardens, and for the winter three months at the beginning of 1876 he rented that for £300, again a substantial sum by Victorian standards.
⁸⁹
During February he had settled on 73 Harley Street, then regarded as a relatively modest and remote residence, as a more permanent establishment, and bought a
thirty-year lease. It was mid-May before they could move in, and after Easter he was back in the ‘Carltons’, staying with the Frederick Cavendishes at 21 Carlton House Terrace, and even
in the following September when he came to London unexpectedly (and excitedly) he stayed with Granville at No. 18. There is no doubt that, even though he thought it inappropriate to the modesty of
his wealth, Gladstone regarded that strip of semi-palatial London as his metropolitan village. When his tenure of the Balfour house came to an end he wrote that it was ‘a departure from a
neighbourhood
where I have lived for forty years, & where I am the “oldest inhabitant” ’.
⁴
For the Harley Street house he
never showed much affection. In spite of the thirty-year lease he gave it up soon after he again became Prime Minister in 1880. In this second premiership 10 Downing Street had
to serve as a residence as well as an unregarded office. And when he was again in opposition, first in the second half of 1885 and then for five and a half years until 1892, he spent much of his
London time in the sylvan but suburban remoteness of Dollis Hill, an Aberdeen-owned villa north of Willesden and Neasden. This was commemorated both by the grounds of the house becoming the public
Gladstone Park in 1981 and by an adjacent telephone exchange bearing until 1971 the appellation of GLAdstone.