Gladstone: A Biography (33 page)

The public shilly-shallying of 5–6 February was bad enough, but what followed was worse. These Peelite ministers were sworn in at Windsor on the 8th. On the 21st they all three resigned.
Two other Peelites, Argyll and Canning, remained in the Cabinet. The ostensible and at least half the real reason for going was the decision of Palmerston and of the majority of the Cabinet to
accept the committee of enquiry arising out of the Roebuck motion. Gladstone felt passionately that this was an unacceptable dilution of the power of the executive as well as a slur upon the
Aberdeen government. He also felt that Palmerston’s believing this was inevitable showed that the new government did not effectively command the confidence of the House of Commons. But nearly
all resignations have an underlying as well as a triggering cause, and Gladstone’s was that he had been unhappy at each of the three meetings of the Palmerston Cabinet which he had attended,
and that his discontent was not made less by the knowledge, which cannot have been absent from his mind, that it had been his own conduct, as much as anything else, which had created the
premiership of which he so disapproved.

So ended Gladstone’s second substantial experience of office. He claimed that his resignation speech (of one and a half hours) on 23 February had led to his being ‘much satisfied
with the feeling of this House’. On this occasion even Gladstone must have been overshadowed by John Bright’s unforgettable if somewhat florid eloquence on the same day when he had
called up an image of ‘the angel of death [who] has been abroad throughout the land’ so that ‘you may almost hear the beating of his wings’. But more important than
oratorical upstaging was that Gladstone’s departure and his behaviour over the previous month had left an impression of self-regard, bad judgement and wavering mind. Only his extraordinary
force and talent enabled him to recover so spectacularly from such a setback.

H
EALTH AND
W
EALTH

A
FTER THE 1853 BUDGET
Gladstone, while psychologically in much better shape than during his mid-century crisis, became exhausted and fell into
indifferent physical health. The reaction from his budget strain and triumph followed a familiar time pattern. At first he was buoyed up. Then after about ten days he began to sleep badly and felt
washed out. On 29 April he recorded in characteristically opaque terms: ‘I felt at length a good deal overset: and had recourse to blue pill at night.’ The next day he wrote: ‘I
only had 6 or 6½ hours of business but was all the worse for it and repeated the Blue Pill [presumably a sedative; it had moved to the upper case over the preceding twenty-four hours]
– absenting myself from the H. of Commons.’
¹

Two days after that there occurred the unfortunate Wilson affair. A pathetic young Scot of that name, an unemployed commercial traveller, having seen Gladstone talking to two prostitutes near
the Haymarket, tried to blackmail him with the threat of exposure unless he procured him a public service post, preferably in the Inland Revenue department. Gladstone was both too innocent and too
wise to fall for that, and handed Wilson over to the police. As a result he had to visit Vine Street police station that night, make depositions at Marlborough Street magistrates’ court three
days later, and attend (silently) the trial at the Old Bailey five weeks after that. Wilson was sentenced to twelve months’ hard labour, but was released after two of them as a result of
Gladstone’s pleas to Palmerston as Home Secretary.

The case did not do Gladstone much harm, although it occasioned a few raised eyebrows and no doubt further agitated him at a time of strain and pressure. ‘This day my work touched 17 hours
very nearly,’ he recorded between the committal and the trial, and two days after that he developed erysipelas in his leg (a febrile disease which although local had killed his mother in 1835
and nearly killed his daughter Agnes in 1847). He was half confined to bed for three or four days. His immediate verdict (some time before that at the Old Bailey) on the Wilson incident was:
‘These talkings of mine are certainly not within the rules of worldly
prudence: I am not sure that Christian prudence sanctions them for such a one as me, but my aim and
intention did not warrant the charge which doubtless has been sent to teach me wisdom and which I therefore welcome.’
²
It produced no increase
in prudence, however. That summer his ‘rescue work’ was intense, seven such encounters being recorded in the last week of June. Yet there is a strong impression that the motivation was
less frenzied than had been the case two or three years before.

Mainly as a result of concern about his health, he began that summer a frequent and dutiful habit of riding in London. For 11 May he recorded: ‘Rode: an adventure, after so long a
cessation.’ He kept up the habit for nearly two years, except during the periods when the aftereffects of his recurrent attacks of erysipelas precluded it, and often four or five times a
week. Mostly it was a session of three-quarters of an hour in Hyde Park, but on one day in April 1854 he recorded himself as having ridden for an hour and twenty minutes ‘into the
country’. (What did that mean at the time? Chiswick?) Early that year he rode regularly with Sidney Herbert, but for the most part it was a solitary and somewhat contrived pursuit. On 4 April
1855, as abruptly as he had taken to the saddle in May 1853, he decided that he had had enough and assumed a policy of complete renunciation. ‘Rode: my last; I am glad to get rid of a
personal luxury and indulgence.’
³
However, he continued over that and subsequent summers and autumns in the country occasionally to get on a
horse with one or other of his older children, who were beginning to grow up. Willy was fifteen, Agnes thirteen and Stephen eleven that year. And then, from the following spring, he began to ride
again in London, but always, in contrast with his habit before the renunciation, with a child. This, accompanied by his other habits of giving them regular Latin lessons and seeking religious
conversations whenever possible, meant that they saw much more of him than was common in upper-class families of the time, even when the father was far less occupied than was Gladstone.

Whether riding did his health any good, which was its ostensible purpose, seems more doubtful. He was in bed for most of two or three days (again with erysipelas in a leg) in early June 1853, he
described himself as ‘pretty well knocked up’ at the end of the session in mid-August, and two weeks into his Scottish holiday trip he became severely ill. On 3 September he (and
Catherine and Willy Gladstone) arrived at Dunrobin Castle on the Moray Firth to stay with the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland. On the 4th he took to his bed with his old friend ‘erysipelas
inflammations’ (as he then put it) and remained there for
eight days. Then he got gently better, but was unable to leave Dunrobin until his projected visit of a week or
so had turned into a twenty-six-day one. Fortunately, as he recorded, ‘the welcome was the kindest possible’. Then the Gladstones proceeded on a westerly arc which took them via Oban
and Greenock to Drumlanrig in Dumfriesshire, where they stayed with the Buccleuchs for two days only, and without mishap.

They regained Hawarden on 1 October, but did not settle down there for an extended autumn, as had been Gladstone’s habit at Fasque in the 1840s and was to become so, although a little more
intermittently, at Hawarden itself in the later 1850s and 1860s. This was not simply a function of his being in office. No habit of presence in London, let alone a regular attendance at the
Treasury, was expected of a Chancellor, or forthcoming even from one as diligent as Gladstone, during the months when Parliament was not sitting. It was more a function of the main house at
Hawarden, which the Gladstones shared with Stephen Glynne until his death in 1874, only gradually being got back into shape after its Oak Farm-induced closure from 1847 to 1852. There were also
frequent commands, issued more on a personal than a political basis, to stay with the Queen and Prince Albert at Windsor, which led him to graft on to these Windsor excursions London visits, which
he used for encounters with both his Cabinet colleagues and his ladies. Thus he was at Windsor for two nights on 25 and 26 October (followed by one in London) and for three nights (this time with
Catherine) from 9 to 12 November (followed by twelve in London and a veritable flurry of nine late-night excursions), and then at Windsor yet again from 4 to 6 January 1854. It was a strong
indication of how good were Gladstone’s relations with the royal couple during that noontide of their marriage. The relations of court and government were also generally closer than
today.

Gladstone’s first absence from Hawarden that autumn of 1853 was however occasioned more by his first tentative approach to demagogy than by any courtly devotion. On 10 October he went on a
five-day visit to Manchester. He had never done anything like it before, and he was not to do so again until nine years later when he went to Newcastle and its surrounding shipyard towns, was
received with even more enthusiasm and spoke with still less discretion than at Manchester. Thereafter these excursions among the populace were regarded as a Gladstone speciality, and one which
became considerably disapproved of by, among others, the Queen and the majority of metropolitan politicians who, partly because they could not themselves evoke much enthusiasm in the
provinces, decided that such activity was a vulgar pandering to the appetites of the masses.

This side of Gladstone’s activities was to reach its peak in the Midlothian campaigns of 1879 and 1880, but it all began in Manchester in 1853 where the enthusiasm of his welcome and the
continuing demands for oratory pleasantly surprised him as much as it dismayed his opponents when reports seeped back. The visit took place under the most respectable of auspices. The central
purpose was to unveil a memorial statue to Sir Robert Peel on a site which was then in front of the old Royal Infirmary but which has since become Piccadilly Gardens. The Mayor and all the
principal civic leaders and men of business were involved in welcoming and entertaining the visitor. He was accompanied throughout by his old friend ‘Soapy Sam’, the redoubtable Bishop
Wilberforce of Oxford, who, whenever there was a pause in Gladstone’s oratory, obligingly intervened with a powerful sermon. The double act was much in evidence at the luncheon in the Town
Hall (which was not Waterhouse’s 1868 masterpiece but its less exciting predecessor). Gladstone, who had gone on ‘to the cracking of my voice’ at the morning unveiling ceremony,
gave them a further one and a quarter hours at the luncheon before the Bishop ‘laid a strong hand upon the company’.
⁴

Manchester, then known as ‘Cottonopolis’ and perceived throughout the world as the epitome of the whirling fierceness of the industrial revolution, was approached by the visitors
with the slightly bewildered awe with which European travellers looked at New York and Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. They were appropriately impressed with the size and
advanced nature of everything from ‘Mr Whitworth’s tool manufactury to Mr Walton’s innovating card-setting and other most curious machines’. But it was the size and
composition of his audiences which most impressed Gladstone. His Peel speech was ‘before a great assemblage – of men almost exclusively, and working men’. His Town Hall one and a
quarter hours ‘was greatly helped by a singularly attentive and favourable audience’. And on the next day, at the laying of the foundation stone for a new school, ‘I had again to
speak to an assembly of the
people
.’
⁵

All these speeches, most of them impromptu, were made by Gladstone in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish war, and attention was naturally much focused on what tilt he
could give to British government policy, hitherto unannounced on this issue. Morley wrote in rare criticism that he was ‘cloudy’, whereas Shannon thought that he ‘ranged himself
ostentatiously beside Aberdeen’ (as opposed to
the bellicosity of Palmerston, the leader of the pro-Turkish faction within the government). The two judgements are not
incompatible. For Gladstone both to be cloudy and to put himself firmly alongside the Prime Minister required only an adequate degree of cloudiness in the attitude of Aberdeen, and that he was
fully willing to supply. Gladstone committed himself to the maintenance of the integrity and independence of the Ottoman Empire, although with so many reservations about the ‘political
solecism’ of a Muslim (or, as he called it, Mahometan) sovereign exercising despotic power over twelve million Christians as to drain away any possible enthusiasm for fighting to uphold this
integrity. Furthermore he extolled all the non-martial virtues, denounced the ‘glare of glory’ and regretted that the policy of peace and negotiation, which was the only basis of the
‘real moral and social advancement of man’, sometimes failed to sustain itself against the false glamour and romantic excitement of war.