Gladstone: A Biography (112 page)

T
HE
C
LOSING OF THE
D
OORS OF THE
S
ENSES

T
HERE WERE JUST OVER
fifty months between Gladstone leaving office and his death. During this twilight zone he was half-blind and half-deaf. The first
infirmity greatly restricted his reading but not to any comparable degree his writing. Equally the second made him an inhibited listener (and transactor of any form of business) but left his
ability to talk, in favourable circumstances, mainly anecdotally and reminiscently but sometimes analytically, largely unimpaired. He was untormented by the loss of office and, with the exception
of one issue, viewed the political scene with detachment, feeling little enthusiasm for the Rosebery–Harcourt government, which staggered on for fifteen months, and only limited virulence
against its successor, the third Salisbury administration, which included Liberal Unionists. Only one issue, and that at one remove a nostalgic one, the Armenian massacres, constituted enough of a
jerk upon his memory to cause him, once in 1895 and again in 1896, to make his final political speeches. This state of semi-infirm equilibrium persisted until the autumn of 1897 when, at the age of
almost eighty-eight, he became afflicted with a painful disease, which after a few months was diagnosed as terminal, and which made him long for the end, an event for which over many years
previously he had regarded it as necessary, and even easy, to be well prepared.

Nevertheless, three and a half years before the beginning of the 1897 plunge, he had experienced a significant and downward change of gear in his life. On 24 May 1894 he had a cataract
operation. It was carried out in Rendel’s house at 1, Carlton Gardens by a young but leading St Thomas’s eye surgeon. Mary Gladstone (Drew) wrote a typically graphic account: ‘Mr.
Nettleship came at 9 with Dr H[abershon] and without any delay drew out the cataract. Father had cocaine drops in his eye and was totally unagitated; it only lasted a moment and was perfectly done.
Mama and I in the next room with the door open. . . .’
¹
This led to six weeks of rough convalescence, much of it lying in darkness. On 2 July
he went to
Pitlochry (which he had enjoyed after the 1892 election) for a brief convolecence, but he was back in London by 19 July, when Nettleship conducted an examination and
pronounced that the results of the operation were not wholly satisfactory. A supplementary operation on 20 September at Hawarden was envisaged, but although Nettleship duly attended in North Wales
at that time, he decided against a further attempt. Hope of a significant improvement was therefore abandoned, although Gladstone was substantially more physically mobile and intellectually active
from early July than he had been during the six weeks following the operation. At the beginning of August he went to Hawarden and his regime there included a daily drive, an occasional short walk
and making the maximum use of the hours of daylight (when he could see better) to sit at his desk and do written work. Against the habits of his lifetime he could no longer go each day to early
church because bowel trouble somewhat obscurely prevented his getting up before ten o’clock.

More important as a station on the way to the tomb than the partial failure of the operation, however, was the fact that it caused him (or maybe provided an excuse) to give up writing his
journal. His last daily entry, after sixty-nine years and ten and a half months, was for 23 May 1894. He next made an entry for 19 July (there had been illness breaks before, but always much
shorter), and then, after only two intermediate entries, he defined on 1 September his diary policy for the future: ‘After breaking up the practice of seventy years, I now mean to proceed by
leaps and bounds, making an occasional note.’
²
In fact he added only a dozen subsequent entries over the next two and a half years, his final
one being on 29 December 1896, his eighty-seventh birthday.

For the outside observer this drew across his life a new screen of opaqueness which was almost as obfuscating as the perpetual fog in which he had complained to Morley of having to live. It
became no longer possible to trace his day-to-day movements and activity from a single source. Obviously a great deal can be put together from letters, from the records of others and from his own
sporadic writings. But there was no longer a wholly reliable budget of time against which the recollections of others and indeed of himself could be measured. This had the objective effect of
putting the short remainder of his life more in the shadows.

It may also have had a considerable subjective effect. Once the discipline of the diary had gone, so a significant part of the framework and of the purpose of Gladstone’s life had gone
with it. The diary was not just a record. It was his account book with God for his expenditure of ‘the most precious gift of time’. As such its filling, particularly with
items of duty, whether they were letters written or journeys completed or meetings conducted or books read or articles composed, gave him a sense of fulfilment, and indeed an
incentive to keep his nose to the grindstone in order to be able to make the entries. Once that was gone his life was much more a matter of drifting towards the end. Minutes became more for passing
than for saving.

His vitality and the width of his interests were such that he could endure this loosening of incentive and framework without sinking into the torpor which most would regard as natural for the
second half of their eighties (and some for their sixties or earlier). He abandoned his old pattern of travel. He no longer made expeditions, either at home or abroad, for sightseeing or political
reasons, but only for those of health, which broadly meant avoiding the not very fierce North Wales winter. His Italian days were over. So with one exception were his Scottish ones. He stayed with
Armitstead in Perthshire in the early autumn of 1897, but he never went for a last look at Fasque, or even to say goodbye to the Edinburgh constituents when he ceased to be their member in the
summer of 1895. Just as he could accuse the Queen of treating him as he had treated his Sicilian mule of 1838,
¹⁴¹
so others could have accused him of doing
the same with his several constituencies.

He abandoned also those tours of English cathedral cities, interspersed with halts at conveniently situated great houses, which had been an earlier feature of his life.
¹⁴²
The only exception was in the spring of 1895,
when he went for four days to the Lincoln deanery, to which epitome of close splendour he had appointed his
Wickham son-in-law in one of his last and entirely appropriate acts of patronage. He went only rarely to London, and then mostly as a staging post to somewhere beyond. An exception was in July
1896, when he perhaps unwisely attended a royal wedding (that of the Wales’s daughter to the future King of Norway) and thought that the Queen (in contrast to the Prince) took inadequate
notice of ‘a lady [Mrs Gladstone] of 84 who had come near 200 miles to attend the service’.
³
On this occasion, as on a few others, the
Gladstones stayed, not out at Dollis Hill, but with their son Henry and his Rendel wife in Whitehall Court, part of the pinnacled palace, built by Waterhouse mainly for the National Liberal Club,
of which Gladstone had laid the foundation stone in 1884. It was on the site of the house, among others, in which Peel had died forty-six years earlier.

Among old resorts, Gladstone went for a three-week visit to Penmaenmawr at the end of October 1896. It was the first return for nearly ten years. There was no sea-bathing or even climbing of the
Gwynedd hills, but he found the house – Plas Mawr – more comfortable than hitherto, and the visit left a sufficient glow of pleasure that Catherine Gladstone went back in 1899 during
her two brief years of widowhood. On the other hand Biarritz was never revisited during the interval between office and the grave. It was superseded by Cannes, where the comforts of Lord
Rendel’s villa and the relative beneficence of the winter climate convinced Gladstone that it would massage his constitution. But it was all for health and not for interest. At Biarritz, a
few years before, he could at least look at the wild seas and make inland drives into the Pyrenees. At Cannes, apart from Lord Acton’s intermittent presence, it was healthful repose rather
than stimulus which was on the menu. It was an old man’s rest home, and it was appropriate that when he left it for the last time in February 1898 he should have gone immediately to
Bournemouth, its nearest English equivalent, for a final and unhappy month away from home.

Cannes was central to his years of decline. He was there from early January to late March 1895 (with a side excursion to Cap Martin), from the end of December 1895 to early March 1896, and from
January 1897 for another couple of months, and then for a final painful visit from late November of that year to the retreat to Bournemouth in February 1898. It was extraordinary the virtues which
the English of that epoch attributed to the unreliable winter weather of the Côte d’Azur. Its exaggerated reputation brought Queen Victoria to Cimiez for a season
during Gladstone’s penultimate visit, and they met briefly in a Cannes hotel for the last time. The Queen came over to Cannes to visit what Gladstone described as ‘a
copious supply of Hanoverian royalties’. Princess Louise, later Duchess of Argyll, got the Gladstones to come to tea with her, and then slipped them into her mother’s presence. It would
be difficult to present the occasion as one of reconciliation. The Queen wrote: ‘Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone came in for a moment, both looking much aged’
⁴
(which appeared to give her satisfaction). Gladstone set the visit at ten minutes rather than ‘a moment’, but made it clear that the Queen had brought it to an end
and propelled them into a mêlée of Hanoverians. ‘To speak frankly,’ he wrote, ‘it seemed to me that the Queen’s peculiar faculty and habit of conversation had
disappeared.’
⁵

The Queen in the South of France was composing herself for the rigours of her Diamond Jubilee, which took place on and around 22 June 1897. Although he was the senior Privy Councillor (he
believed himself to be the second senior, but a search even with the aid of the Privy Council Office fails to reveal a rival) as well as the most famous British statesman, the Gladstones do not
seem to have been invited to perform any special participatory role. In view of the highly imperialist tone of the proceedings this was perhaps as well, but it was an added slight. The Colonial
premiers, however, made a pilgrimage to Hawarden after the London festivities, and the Prince and Princess of Wales were also briefly there in that summer.

Apart from these three long sessions in the Alpes Maritimes, Gladstone’s only other expedition beyond the shores of Britain was another northern-waters cruise for a fortnight in June 1895.
Sir Donald Currie was again the provider, and the places visited were Hamburg, Kiel for the Kaiser’s opening of the new canal, and Copenhagen. Gladstone recorded it in a then rare diary entry
and in a mixed but above all flat way, contrasting with his previous exuberance of holiday enjoyment: ‘Cruise to the Baltic in the Tantallon Castle. We did not see the places we mainly
wished, but the weather was very good, the hotel incomparable [Where? How one misses the daily entry!] and the sanatory effect admirable!’
⁶

His intellectual vigour at least for the two years or so between his recovery from the cataract operation and the end of 1896 was greater than might be inferred from this somewhat flaccid
account of his sea trip. Indeed immediately after his return he exceptionally spent five days in London, mostly working in the British Museum on material relating to the eighteenth-century divine
Joseph Butler, Bishop first of Bristol
and later of Durham, to whom Gladstone devoted the main part of his post-Prime Ministerial energies. He prepared and annotated a new
edition of Butler’s works, which was published in February 1896, and was followed a few months later by a 150,000-word theological volume of his own, entitled
Studies Subsidiary to the
Works of Bishop Butler
. Although it bore the Clarendon imprint, which is the Oxford University Press’s seal of academic quality, it was bereft of an index, a deficiency much more common
then than a century later. But it was a spirited work of not very subtle theology, including some philippics against ‘Mr Bagehot, Mr Leslie Stephen and Mr Matthew Arnold’ (two of them
dead), whom he saw as detractors of Butler.