Gladstone: A Biography (83 page)

On 19 July he wrote: ‘H of C 4¼–8¼ & 8¾–3am: much exhausted.’
¹⁷
On the 23rd: ‘A severe
week & rather overdone.’ On the 24th: ‘Abandoned through fatigue the Trinity House Dinner: and went off at 6 to Littleburys.’
^18
103
Then, on the 30th, he was struck down, less violently at first than in the second wave of the attack. ‘Seized with chill
& nausea’ was his initial comment. ‘Better when warmer.’ He then slept for ten hours ‘and got up at 11 seemingly well’.

He saw three ministers and ‘got all ready for the Cabinet at 2. Meantime I had been for ¾ of an hour not shivering but shaking as a house is shaking in an earthquake. I had a fire
lighted, & put on a thick coat & proceeded with my work.’
¹⁹
By 2.00 p.m., however, the Cabinet was forbidden and he was ordered to
bed. His amalgamated diary entries for the next four days (31 July–3 August) read:

The optimistic thought was justified. Thereafter he progressed steadily, getting up on the Saturday a week after he had been stricken, although it required a full month’s convalescence,
including a ten-day
round-Britain cruise on one of Donald Currie’s ships, before he was fully recovered. He had been seriously ill. His congestion of the lungs had been
severe, his temperature had been high, and bulletins had been issued every few hours to an apprehensive public. During a miserable summer for himself and his government he had strained himself to
and beyond the limit of his capacity. Yet that government had nearly another five years of sometimes productive life ahead, and its seventy-year-old head nearly another fourteen in active
politics.

G
LADSTONE
’
S FUNDAMENTAL WEAKNESS
in the 1880 government was that he was trying to hold together too wide a coalition. His
social conservatism had become in uncomfortable conflict with his political radicalism. Although his taste for rhetoric and large audiences led him to an abstract respect for the masses against the
classes, when it came to the choice of colleagues for a government, or to the organization of the Hawarden estate, or to the houses in which he stayed, he liked the style and values of the old
landed ruling class, perhaps indeed attaching more importance to them than did some who had been more completely brought up therein.

He was willing to make a great effort to keep the traditional Whig families within the Liberal tabernacle. He believed that their departure would be bad for the tone and balance of politics. The
trouble was that, as the issues of the 1880s evolved, even before Home Rule appeared like a dividing spear, there had ceased to be any significant disputes on which men like Hartington and Argyll
were instinctively on the progressive side of the watershed. Trying to keep the old mould was a constant trial for them and an incubus for a Liberal government.

Gladstone had one other bias which rivalled what Dilke once called ‘his Scotch toadyism to the aristocracy’,
¹
and that was the
importance which shared classical knowledge played in his personal relations. As a link, although he would have been horrified to admit it, it was really more important than shared religious
belief. Thus all the men to whom he was close, from his school and Oxford friends, through Hope-Scott and Manning, Peel and Aberdeen in his middle life, to John Morley and Rosebery in his old age,
could confidently and happily exchange Latin and Greek quotations with him. In Morley’s case this ability outweighed his agnosticism. Unfortunately, however, neither of the two Liberal
politicians whose support on Ireland was vital to Gladstone were classicists. Chamberlain, although surprisingly cultivated for a screw
manufacturer who had left school at
sixteen – he spoke French adequately and was quite widely read – did not include the dead languages in his intellectual armoury. And Hartington preferred quadrupeds to hexameters.

Gladstone could do without one man but not without both. He would probably have done better to have cultivated Chamberlain and, if necessary, to have let Hartington go before 1886. But he could
not bring himself to appreciate Chamberlain. Hartington at least had the advantage of being indisputably patrician, even if he did not know his Virgil. But there was no instinctive rapport between
Gladstone and either of these crucial figures. Nonetheless, given the sulphurous state of their mutual relations throughout the 1880–5 government, it was a remarkable feat of
man-mismanagement to drive them into each other’s arms by 1886–7.

This reversal of alliances was however still well in the future in the early days of Gladstone’s second government. Once he had recovered from his pneumonia, he had a relatively tranquil
1880 autumn, although he knew that the shadow of Ireland lay heavily over the prospects for the 1881 session. In his seventy-first birthday thoughts on 29 December 1880, he referred to a
‘disturbed’ anniversary after which he ‘must wait for a calmer session before I trust myself to say what a year it has been, and why’.
²

On the third day of the new year of 1881 a figure from the remote past re-entered Gladstone’s life. Lady Lincoln (restyled Lady Susan Opdebeck by virtue of her Scottish ducal parentage and
her terminated Belgian second marriage) called on him in Downing Street. He had not seen her since his ludicrous Italian pursuit of her in 1849. His diary entry read: ‘after some 32 or 33
years I felt something & could say much.’ Could he easily relate her to that figure whom he had first described as ‘once the dream of dreams’, and whose escapade had later so
excited his prurience as well as engaging him in twenty-seven days of expensive wild-goose chase? His immediate reaction to the visit was to go to the Lyceum Theatre in order ‘to unbend after
the strain’.
³
More constructively and with typical concern, he then wrote to her no less than four times in the next fortnight and made
continuing strenuous efforts to get the Newcastle estate, itself hardly affluent, to provide some money to relieve her poverty. To this end he stayed on for another year as a Newcastle trustee, an
obligation from which after decades of devoted service he had not unnaturally become eager to retire, and also enlisted, somewhat mysteriously, the services of Mrs Thistlethwayte,
herself by this time in financial difficulty, as an advocate of Lady Susan’s claim on the Newcastle estate. The rationale of this appeared to be that it was through the late
Duke (formerly Lincoln and Lady Susan’s husband) that Gladstone had first met Laura Thistlethwayte in 1864.

Gladstone’s reaction to this twitch upon the thread was symptomatic: already by this second government an important part of his life had come to be lived in the past. As his seventies wore
on he became isolated, in the sense that most of his contemporaries had died, much more than, in the same decade of his life, he would be today. And, while in some ways he was young for his age, in
at least as many others he was old. In spite of his frequent retreats to a sickbed, he remained physically hard, sparse and energetic. Staying two days at Balmoral (for the first time for thirteen
years) in the autumn of 1884, he climbed Ben Macdui, at 4300 feet the highest point in the Cairngorms, taking seven hours forty minutes to do the twenty-mile round trip. He confessed to ‘some
effort’ but it may also have been thought some achievement at the age of nearly seventy-five.

He contrasted that day of mountaineering with life in the House of Commons, where his assiduity remained exceptional. He could sit on the Treasury bench for rather similar periods – seven
or so hours – with only the shortest breaks, and without any recorded tendency to go to sleep. He spent more time in the Palace of Westminster than any subsequent Prime Minister with the
exception of Baldwin. But he devoted his long hours there to the chamber, always listening, often intervening, whereas Baldwin was much more in the corridors, dining room and smoking room, alien
territories to Gladstone, gossiping and absorbing atmosphere rather than directing business. Gladstone also continued his voracious general reading, his night walks in London, perhaps once a week,
his tree-felling at Hawarden, and his extraordinary capacity, however heavy the press of official burdens, to get on with postponable tasks, such as the arrangement of books and papers, the keeping
of his own accounts, and the writing of family or eleemosynary letters, like those to Lady Susan Opdebeck.

On the other hand he had indisputably come to look an old man. The change set in during the late seventies of the century and the late sixties of his life. Until the end of his first premiership
he still looked middle-aged. Then, for the mid-1870s, there is a paucity of photographs. They were the years of his withdrawal, and the photographers were perhaps taking him at his word, although
likenesses in those days were a product more of visits to studios than of enterprise and intrusion. By
1878, when Millais painted his first Gladstone portrait (there was a
second in 1884–5), and still more by 1879, when he was both photographed and (more flatteringly) painted by Franz von Lehnbach in Munich, he had passed over the divide. His hair had become
white and wilder, his clothes more dishevelled and his general air slightly disordered.

Soon afterwards he began to suffer from an old man’s chronic ailments as opposed to the sudden onset of illnesses from which he quickly bounced back. His eyesight weakened. He had several
bouts of insomnia (although not as bad as those of his wife), and at Hawarden he sometimes alternated between sleeping in the castle and sleeping in the rectory in a somewhat illogical search for
the more reposeful bedroom. He was not as bad in this respect as his Midlothian patron and Prime Ministerial successor Rosebery, nearly forty years his junior, who refurbished Barnbougle, a ruined
tower on a Forthside promontory in the park at Dalmeny in the vain hope that it might provide a haven against sleeplessness. Gladstone also had trouble with his teeth and, more seriously, with his
voice, which was the equivalent of a great pianist being threatened with a stiffening of the fingers.

In spite of these infirmities he remained a most formidable beast of the political forest, a target for lesser animals who wished to earn prowess by taking a nip out of his haunches. He was
unmatched in authority or experience by any of his colleagues or opponents, the more so since Disraeli’s death in the spring of 1881. Beaconsfield, to give him at the end his designation of
the last five years, expired on 19 April in the Curzon Street house on which he had recently taken a seven-year lease, and to which he was confined for four weeks of bronchial decline. Before that
he had been about and even active in his waxen way, ‘an assiduous mummy’ in Lytton Strachey’s terrible phrase, moving ‘from dinner party to dinner party’. He had last
spoken in the Lords on 15 March, and he had last seen the Queen, at Windsor, two weeks before that. Gladstone had twice called at Curzon Street to enquire about the patient but (as he expected) had
seen only a secretary (Lord Barrington) and a doctor.