Gladstone: A Biography (8 page)

Evangelicals provided much of the energy and of the enthusiasm of the Church of England. They sustained the Biblical Societies and the Protestant Missions throughout the world. Most of the great
practical reformers and philanthropists – William Wilberforce or Shaftesbury – were Evangelicals. It was a form of religion which released energy rather than satisfied intellectual
sophistication. As Gladstone wrote when he looked back on his youth: ‘The Evangelical movement . . . did not ally itself with literature, art and general cultivation; but it harmonized well
with the money-getting pursuits.’
⁷

The third party in the Church were the liberals or Latitudinarians. They dated back at least to the reign of Charles I, but their wonderful century had begun in 1688. They did not much believe
in religious glory, regarding as almost equally far-fetched Anglo-Catholic views about grace transmitted through the priesthood and Evangelical views about grace spontaneously generated by an inner
experience of conversion. They were the religious beneficiaries of the Glorious Revolution. Their cool rationalism, which had made them hostile to Stuart claims of divine right, made them at home
with a Whig oligarchy and well attuned to the mannered cultivation of the so-called Augustan age. They were somewhat insular (although, if they were rich enough, venturing into the occasional grand
tour and the importation of Italian works of art), which made them anti-Catholic, and they were against excessive enthusiasm, which made them anti-Evangelical. They thought that religion should be
an affair of sense, morals (within reason) and good behaviour. John Locke and Bishop Butler were their philosophers and Jane Austen was the best chronicler of the background against which they
flourished.

This liberal (in ecclesiastical terms) or Broad Church approach has over the three centuries since the Whig Revolution shown a persistent if fluctuating strength and has been the dominant trend
within the Church under different manifestations alike in Butler’s Durham, Trollope’s Barchester and Runcie’s Canterbury. But it was at a relatively low ebb
circa
1830,
when the clerical spirit of eighteenth-century Oxford had encouraged Latitudinarianism to degenerate into lethargy. In any event
it never held much appeal for Gladstone. It was
too cool and detached for him, and it was not religious liberalism but the rival enthusiasms of the Apostolic and the Evangelical Churches which, as in Housman’s
Welsh Marches
,
‘ceased not fighting, east and west, on the marches of [his] breast’.

An important engagement of that continuing conflict occurred during his Italian sojourn in the spring of 1832, when he was just over twenty-two years of age and poised between his Oxford
academic triumphs of December 1831 and his election to Parliament in December 1832. He had travelled for two months, mostly finding English services for Sunday mornings (although having to make do
with Prussian Protestantism in Turin), but also taking in, generally with disapproval, a wide range of Roman Catholic observances. The low mass at the Cathedral of St Gudule in Brussels was
‘an unmeaning and sorrowful ceremony’.
⁸
In Florence he saw two baptisms administered in the Baptistery and wrote of himself as
‘dissatisfied with the matter, disgusted (I cannot use a weaker term) with the
manner
of the service’.
⁹
The next day he went to a
minor church and was at once sad and severe: ‘It is painful to speak disrespectfully of any religious services but these certainly seemed no better than mummery.’
¹⁰
The underlying causes of his trans-European censoriousness were idolatry, the elevation of the Virgin to a position almost above Christ, and the disengaged mumbling of the
services by unprepossessing priests (although he ought to have become used to the last fault by ‘the mumblings of toothless fellows’, as he had expressed it, in Eton Chapel).

On 31 March, his first day in Rome, he went to St Peter’s. He was not at first impressed by the architecture (’my humble homage is reserved for that Gothic style, which prevails in
our own English cathedrals’)
¹¹
and could not easily equate the baroque with a religious atmosphere. Yet the great basilica achieved what must be
adjudged its central purpose and set him meditating on the unity of Christendom in a way that he had never done before. In so doing he made few concessions to the authority of the Holy See:

Yet for all his instinctive disputatiousness (six weeks before, in Paris, he had self-revealingly written: ‘Unhappily my manner tends to turn every conversation into a
debate’)
¹³
, this visit to the areopagus of Christianity did shift his mind. Already the next day, after Vespers at Trinità del Monte,
Gladstone, while regretting that the litany was to the Blessed Virgin and, combining his usual opaqueness with an unusual casualness of introduction, wrote: ‘Speaking of the Virgin, surely we
are as much too remiss, yet not the Church of England, but her members, in commemorations of saints as the Romish Church is
officious and audacious
.’
¹⁴
And six weeks later, in Naples, he recorded:

This was Gladstone’s contemporary version. Nearly sixty years later he provided a grander but not incompatible account of the same occasion. After testifying that ‘the impression [of
that Naples day] has never been effaced’, he wrote:

Thus, in one of the several major paradoxes of his life, was Gladstone moved by his experience in Roman Catholic Europe towards a position which was (and remained) as firmly anti-Roman as,
within the terms of
the Anglican debate, it was both emotionally and terminologically Catholic.

Back in England in the late summer of 1832, Gladstone turned his attention from religion to politics. This has to be qualified to the extent that he would never have admitted that politics was
allowed to exclude religion. For the absence of dichotomy he would have argued first on the inner and therefore incontestable if not wholly convincing ground that politics were for him merely a
means to religious ends; and second, and more empirically, by always being able to show that political preoccupation never interfered with the intensity of either his religious observances or his
theological reading and thought.

Nevertheless Newark, about which his electoral caution was justified, did require and receive considerable attention. His visit in late September 1832, for which he had posted so hurriedly from
Torquay because he was informed that ‘the canvass’ had already begun, lasted well into October. Apart from general canvassing, which took a surprisingly modern form, with Gladstone
recording the few occasions when he was refused a handshake (‘principally by
women
’), he had to underpin his position with the Duke of Newcastle, whom he had not previously met.
He was ‘most kindly’ received at Clumber and indeed subsequently wrote to his father about the Duke almost in terms which might have been employed by the Revd Mr Collins of Lady
Catherine de Burgh. Patron and protégé both dismayed and comforted each other with agreement on the awful impending threats to the social and moral order. Gladstone appears to have
thrown in the possibility of the downfall of the Papacy, to which the Duke looked forward with more complacency than did Gladstone. What they mutually accepted as more decisively good were
‘the virtues of an ancient aristocracy, than which the world never saw one more powerful or more pure’ than that epitomized at Clumber.
¹⁷

The Duke, however, was by no means all-powerful in Newark, and Gladstone had to deal not only with independent-minded burghers of that borough but also with magnates who had segments of
influence smaller than but separate from those of the Duke. The Earl of Winchilsea and Nottingham was wholly supportive but regretted that his tenants had not been as ‘warm and
unanimous’ towards Gladstone as he would have wished. He would endeavour to apply corrective measures. Lord Middleton, on the other hand, replied from Wollaton House, the fine Tudor mansion
on the edge of Nottingham, with a heavy rebuke for Gladstone’s approach to him: ‘as an entire stranger to me, I
must be allow’d to express my surprise that you
should thus early have applied to me’.
¹⁸

However, despite this, a bumpy passage on the slavery issue and other rebuffs within the town, where it does not appear that his candidature aroused much enthusiasm, Gladstone did win. Indeed,
in an election for two seats, he came top of the poll, an experience which, even though he had then become famous, was subsequently to elude him in Oxford, South Lancashire and Greenwich. At Newark
there were three candidates for the two seats. The second Tory, Handley, was quasi-anonymous. The sole and defeated Whig was far from this. He was already a well-known lawyer, bearing the
rumbustious advocates’ title of ‘Serjeant’. Later, transformed from Serjeant Wilde into Baron Truro, he was to be Lord Chancellor in Lord John Russell’s first government.
Gladstone, who on the day of nomination spent six and a half hours on the hustings, was even at twenty-two a near match for him in debating skill and stronger in influence, polled 887, the dim Mr
Handley 798 and the future Lord Truro 726.

On the declaration of the poll, which was at nine in the morning of 14 December 1832, Gladstone spoke for ‘an hour or more – Serjeant [Wilde] procured me a hearing – but a cold
one’.
¹⁹
This might seem early evidence of Gladstone’s life-long taste for inflated oratory in even the most inappropriate circumstances.
But the point of the example is somewhat weakened by the fact that Serjeant Wilde followed him for one and a half hours.

There had been a number of the features of Eatanswill (Dickens’s caricature of a corrupt borough in
The Pickwick Papers
) to the Newark contest, not least the distribution of far
more money on Gladstone’s behalf than he was aware of or subsequently approved. However, it was not quite scandalous enough to lead to a petition against corrupt practices, the usual
Gladstone family experience. There was also a good deal of boisterousness, with stones missing Gladstone’s head by only ‘twelve inches’ (his usual precision), but he had
sufficient cohorts to be ‘most powerfully escorted [back] to the Clinton Arms’. In that hostelry, appropriately named to mark the Newcastle influence, Gladstone dined on the evening of
his election in the company of the members of the ‘Red Clubs’ which were vigorous in the constituency. Red was the local Tory colour, evoking a partisanship comparable with the waving
of the ‘bloody shirt’ by the Republican Party in the American presidential elections of 1872 and 1876. Even seventy years later (although this was after the words of the ‘Red
Flag’ had been added to the tune of
‘Tannenbaum’ to make a socialist hymn) Morley recorded without irony that the most intense Tory partisan and cheerleader
had proclaimed: ‘I was born Red, I live Red, and I shall die Red.’
²⁰
The most notable feature of Gladstone’s own speech was an
attempt, based no doubt on the new confidence of having the seat under his belt but also somewhat bumptiously maladroit for twenty-two, to solve the problem of his dependence on the Duke of
Newcastle with a syllogism. ‘You need not ask’, he said, ‘whether I am your man or the Duke’s man, for the answer is that we are both of us, the Duke and I, equally your
men.’

The new Parliament met two months later, and Gladstone first entered the House of Commons as a member on 7 February 1833. He and his brother Tom walked down together from Jermyn Street, where
they were both temporarily lodging, although removing to Albany a month later, and took their seats side by side among the ranks of 160 which was all that the Tories were able to muster in the
first reformed Parliament. In George Hayter’s painting of the old chamber, done in 1834 a few months before the fire which destroyed most of the Palace of Westminster, they are visible, still
together, sitting on the back row but one. Tom, misleadingly, looks the more distinguished. They were nonetheless shown as being remarkably alike, and Tom’s first speech in that Parliament
(he had been in the previous one for about a year), which he delivered on 21 February, was attributed by Hansard to William. This misattribution created lasting confusion and led to William’s
alleged maiden speech being described as late as 1971 as ‘a dim début’.