Gladstone: A Biography (9 page)

Dim that February speech certainly was, with much of it inaudible and the subject the hardly inspiring one of the defence of the alleged corrupt parties in Liverpool local elections. But it was
not by William Gladstone, who did not make what he and others regarded as his maiden speech until 3 June, although he had uttered a few sentences on both 30 April and 21 May when presenting
petitions. Then (on 3 June) the subject-matter was little more elevating for he chose to speak in opposition to a Slavery Abolition Bill and did so very much as a ‘West Indian’
representative. Both the Gladstone boys made pietistic starts in the House, defending not only their father’s interests but his name as well. However, it was a fully effective speech, which
Gladstone recorded in his diary as having lasted for fifty minutes and being ‘very kindly’ received by the House so that ‘my
friends
were satisfied’.
²¹

Thereafter the House of Commons careers of the two Gladstones could hardly have diverged more sharply. William went on to be the
dominant parliamentarian of the century,
outpacing Canning, Peel and Disraeli by the sheer length of his span in the House of Commons, and elbowing aside Palmerston and Lord John Russell by the greater fervour of his oratory. Tom
Gladstone’s parliamentary experience, by contrast, was if anything still less glorious than that of his father. He suffered in an extreme form from the family disability of rarely being able
to keep a seat over two elections without either defeat or unseating on petition. For the 1830 election the almost unknown Kent town of Queensborough, lurking in the shadows of the Isle of Sheppey,
had been procured for him. He lost his seat on the poll, but a few months later retrieved it on petition. For the 1832 election he transferred to the Irish Midlands borough of Portarlington and
secured a majority of its 150 electors. But by the next general election in 1835 he had got on to such bad terms with almost every local interest that there was no question of his even contesting
Portarlington. He contemplated both Nottingham and, bizarrely, Orkney, but settled upon Leicester. He sat for this town until 1837, when for the last time a change of sovereign involved the
dissolution of Parliament, which resulted in Tom Gladstone’s temporary disappearance from it. At the 1841 general election he contested Peterborough, and although again defeated reversed the
result at an 1842 by-election. But he had overdone his enticements to the electors and was unseated on petition. For the remaining forty-seven years of his long life he was never again in the House
of Commons.

John Neilson Gladstone had an almost equally chequered electoral experience. When he could no longer get a ship he sought a seat, and in 1841 he won a by-election at Walsall. He was petitioned
against for corrupt practices, but that year’s general election intervened and the petition was overridden by his defeat. In 1842 he won another by-election at Ipswich and sat there until the
next general election of 1847, when he was again beaten. In 1852 he secured at Devizes a seat in a county which was his own (by adoption at least) and survived there until his death eleven years
later, which was a long constituency association by the standards of all members of John Gladstone’s family other than William, and a moderate one even by his.

William Gladstone’s parliamentary service covered sixty-two and a half years, with a break of twenty months in 1846–7. But this great span was divided between five constituencies as
disparate as Newark, Oxford University, South Lancashire, Greenwich and Midlothian.

The inescapable conclusion is that John Gladstone and his three parliamentary sons were both peripatetic and opportunistically
coldhearted in their approach to
constituencies. The father and the two elder sons were unsuccessfully so; William by contrast, despite the problems which might have been caused by his move across the political spectrum, had an
almost complete command over what he wanted. He changed constituencies like an exigent hunting man demanding a new horse whenever he felt the old one was tiring. Admittedly much greater mobility in
this respect was usual in the nineteenth century. Canning, Peel, Russell, Palmerston, Disraeli were all wanderers, although the last two, after early strayings, settled down to thirty years in,
respectively, Tiverton and Buckinghamshire.

The single constituency throughout a political lifetime and the geographical identity which goes with it came in only with Joseph Chamberlain, whose pattern in this respect if not in most others
was followed in the twentieth century by such diverse figures as Lloyd George, R. A. Butler, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher. In the nineteenth century before Chamberlain there
was by contrast no figure of the first rank who stuck to a single constituency. Nevertheless the Gladstones, taken collectively, were unusually fickle. Between them, and including constituencies
considered as well as fought, they spattered the map of England, Scotland and even Ireland with as many red spots as did the British Empire on an old globe. Only Wales was free from their
attentions, which was strange both because it provided much of the hinterland to Liverpool and because William Gladstone lived there, even if barely over the border from Cheshire, for half a
century. However, his brother-in-law, with whom Gladstone cohabited at Hawarden, was a Flintshire member for fifteeen years and thus repaired the Gladstone omission.

The residence, the brother-in-law and the tenuous Welsh parliamentary connection followed from his marriage into the Glynne family. This, however, did not occur until 1839, shortly before his
thirtieth birthday, and in his seventh year as a member of Parliament. This was despite determined attempts from 1835, involving two failures, to find himself a bride. Those refusals, and his
ultimate success with Miss Glynne, belong to the next chapter.

A C
LUMSY
S
UITOR

T
HE TEN YEARS
from his 1833 entry into the House of Commons to 15 May 1843, when he was promoted to Peel’s Cabinet as President of the Board of
Trade, were on the surface a period of vaulting success for Gladstone. In politics it was mostly a Whig decade, but nonetheless one in which the cohesion and reforming zeal of the 1832 majority
gradually dissipated themselves, and the Tories, although requiring three general elections over which to do so, came back from the rump of 160 among whom Gladstone first sat to a party of
approximately 360 with a majority of 80. Each of the general elections had gone smoothly for Gladstone. In 1835 and 1837 he was unopposed at Newark, and in 1841 he was top of the poll, with Lord
John Manners, his new running mate, three votes behind him, and the sole Whig challenger nowhere near either of them.

Gladstone had also got as early (and substantial) a bite at office as the minority position of his party made possible. At the end of 1834, when William IV rashly dismissed his Whig ministers,
Peel hurried back from a Roman holiday to form a government. He took several weeks on the journey, for the railway age was still just over the horizon. After his arrival, however, he quickly sent
for Gladstone, who was also inconveniently placed in Edinburgh, but who managed to get back to London in time to accept a junior lordship of the Treasury on Christmas Eve. The January election
brought a gain of nearly a hundred seats but no majority for the new government and a fortuitous outcome for Gladstone. The Under-Secretary for War and the Colonies (J. S. Wortley) was defeated in
Forfar and Peel gave Gladstone the vacancy.

This was a desirable slot because the Secretary of State was Lord Aberdeen, and the under-secretaryship therefore carried the sole spokesmanship for a major department in the Commons. It also
fitted Gladstone well. It matched what he thought of as his continuing ‘Liverpool’ interests (there was also room for embarrassment there, but the government did not last long enough
for them to develop), and he formed a lasting affection and respect for Aberdeen, whom he had not previously met. Aberdeen, in turn, was equally impressed, although he
stated
his first approbation in terms which failed to do justice to Gladstone’s force and turbulence. ‘He appears to be so amiable that personally I am sure I shall like him,’ he
wrote.
¹
Aberdeen quickly corrected the blandness of this view and became an affectionate and occasionally amused connoisseur of the eccentricities and
extravagances of Gladstone’s genius. Their lives were closely intertwined for a quarter of a century, and Aberdeen’s political influence upon Gladstone was second in intensity only to
that of Sir Robert Peel. Furthermore he was able to exercise it for ten years after Peel had fallen off his horse.

George Gordon, fourth Earl of Aberdeen (1784–1860) is the most elusive of all the post-1832 Prime Ministers. He was cultivated, pacific and public-spirited, with a withdrawn charm. His
reclusiveness was perhaps to be explained by a combination of his lonely childhood and grief-ridden second twenty-five years. His father died when he was seven, his mother when he was eleven. His
grandfather, the third Earl, neglected both his heir and his estate and was not on speaking terms with his daughter-in-law, who when widowed had migrated with George (who had then become Lord
Haddo) and her other sons to England. After her death Haddo was taken into the London household of Dundas (later Lord Melville), the legendary manipulator of Scottish patronage under Pitt, and saw
much of both Prime Minister and proconsul. They, rather than the reprobate and remote third Earl, procured his education, first at Harrow and then at St John’s College, Cambridge.

He saw little of Scotland, however, which he never visited between the ages of eight and twenty-one, even though he had succeeded to the earldom, Haddo Castle and large surrounding tracts of
land when he was seventeen. When he did see them, in 1805, he was appalled, disliking equally the house, the neglected bog-ridden countryside and the neighbours. A decade or so later, with
considerable improvements already effected, he was converted to the attractions of Haddo, began to retreat there as frequently as possible, and became a great Scotsman, much involved for instance
in the Scottish Church controversies leading to the schism of 1843, although showing a much cooler religious spirit than Gladstone would have done.

His bereavements began with and were always dominated by the death of his first wife, the daughter of the then Marquess of Abercorn, when he was twenty-eight. He was exceptionally devoted and
continued to wear mourning for her throughout the remaining forty-nine years of his life. She left him with three daughters under five (the couple had also had a stillborn son), all of whom died
before they were twenty-one.
In 1815 Aberdeen had made a second marriage to his first wife’s sister-in-law, the widow of Abercorn’s recently dead heir. She died in
1833, when Aberdeen was still under fifty. Their fifteen-year-old daughter followed the next year. Three sons, however, survived, one of whom (Arthur Gordon) makes several subsequent appearances in
Gladstone’s life and in this narrative.

In view of all these tragedies Aberdeen’s reclusiveness was hardly surprising. A note of disinterested would-be withdrawal was one which he frequently and genuinely struck. ‘You look
for interest and amusement in the agitation of the world and the spectacle it affords; now I cannot express to you my distaste for everything of the kind. . . . I have had enough of the world . . .
and would willingly have as little to do with it as is decent.’
²
So he wrote to the Princesse de Lieven in 1838.
⁵
And in 1845 he informed Sir Robert Peel, ‘I have no wish ever to enter the House of Lords again.’
³

Nonetheless he was always a sought-after figure and had in many ways a dazzling career, in both early and middle life. And although his premiership, like the end of Asquith’s, was vitiated
by his being a man made for the arts of peace caught up in the toils of war, he was venerated in old age, at least by those who knew him well, which category notably included Gladstone. Because of
his early succession, he was, together with Rosebery, the only Prime Minister since 1832 who never served in the House of Commons and one of only a few even before that date. His range of public
service over half a century was nonetheless wide. He was offered but refused the embassy to Sicily at the age of twenty-three. He was a Knight of the Thistle at twenty-four (and a Garter at
seventy-one, again with Rosebery one of the few men ever to hold the two orders). He accepted at the age of twenty-nine the embassy to Austria, which involved not the comforts of Vienna but a rough
mission to the field headquarters of the Emperor Franz II during the campaign which extruded Napoleon from the Germanic lands. The rigours of this involved bivouacking for a night in a Thuringian
hayloft with Chancellor Prince Metternich – himself then only thirty-nine. Fortified by these
experiences Aberdeen became Foreign Secretary for the first of several tours
in 1828 at the age of forty-four.