The Real Gladstone: An Anecdotal Biography

Whether this peculiarity of Mr. Gladstone’s mind can be referred to the fact that he has not a drop of English blood in his body is perhaps a fanciful inquiry; but its consequences are plain enough in the vulgar belief that he is indifferent to the interests and honour of the country which he has three times ruled, and that his love for England is swamped and lost in the enthusiasm of humanity.’

In an article on the Peelites in Macmillan’s, Professor Goldwin Smith writes: ‘Gladstone does not yet belong to history, and the only part of his career which fell specially under my notice was Oxford University Reform. He opposed inquiry when a Commission was announced by Lord John Russell, and afterwards, as a member of the Coalition Government, he framed what was for that day a drastic and comprehensive measure of reform… It was impossible to be brought into contact with Mr. Gladstone, even in so slight a way, without being made sensible of his immense powers of work, of mastering and marshalling details, of framing a comprehensive measure, and of carrying it against opposition in the House of Commons. I also saw and appreciated his combative energy. The Bill had been miserably mauled in the Commons by Disraeli, with the aid of some misguided Radicals. When it got to the Lords I was placed under the steps of the throne, to be at hand if information on details was needed by those in charge of the Bill. The House seemed very full, but the Duke of Newcastle came to me and said that he did not believe Lord Derby intended to venture on a real opposition to the Bill, as there had not been a strong whip on the Conservative side. “In that case,” I said, “what hinders you from reversing here the amendments which have been carried against you in the Commons?” A conference was held in the library to consider this suggestion, but Lord Russell, the leader of the Commons, peremptorily vetoed it on the ground of prudence. Mr. Gladstone was confined to his room by illness, but, in compliance with my earnest prayer, the question was referred to him. Next day the signal for battle was hung out, and I had the great satisfaction of looking on while a series of amendments in committee – the Commons amendments – were reversed, and the Bill was restored to a workable state.’

In 1868 Bishop Colenso writes: ‘I had a very pleasant letter by the last mail from Mr. Gladstone, to whom I wrote ten months ago with reference to his language about Bishop Gray and myself at an S.P.G. meeting at Penmaenmawr. He had my letter before him for four months, as he says, but he begs me to believe that this long interval of silence has not been due to any indifference or disrespect; and, in short, he writes a very kind and courteous letter, administering a little rebuke to me at the end, “not so much with respect to particular opinions, as to what appears to be your method (technically so called) in the treatment of theological questions.”’ Again, in 1881: ‘I need not say that I am utterly disappointed with Mr. Gladstone and Lord Kimberley, and particularly with the tone of the Daily News, speaking, I suppose, as the Government organ. I cannot help thinking that the present Government has lost a great deal of its power by the feebleness they have shown in their action with regard to South African affairs, where, as far as I can see, they have not righted a single wrong committed by Sir B. Frere, and only withdrawn him under great pressure, and when he had already set on foot further mischief.’ In a little while the Bishop writes more approvingly: ‘It gives us hope that other wrongs may be redressed when Mr. Gladstone is ready, even in the midst of defeats at Laing’s Neck, Ingogo, and Majuba, to hold back the hand of Great Britain from cruelly chastising these brave patriots, so unequally matched with our power, which of course could overwhelm and crush them.’

Count Bismarck is reported to have said: ‘If I had done half as much harm to my country as Mr. Gladstone has done to his country the last four years, I would not dare to look my countrymen in the face.’

Mr. Kinglake thus describes Mr. Gladstone: ‘If he was famous for the splendour of his eloquence, for his unaffected piety, and blameless life, he was celebrated far and wide for a more than common liveliness of conscience. He had once imagined it to be his duty to quit a Government and to burst through strong ties of friendship and gratitude by reason of a thin shade of difference on the subject of white or brown sugar. It was believed that if he were to commit even a little sin or to imagine an evil thought he would instantly arraign himself before the dread tribunal which awaited him within his own bosom, and that his intellect being subtle and microscopic, and delighting in casuistry and exaggeration, he would be likely to give his soul a very harsh trial, and treat himself as a great criminal for faults too minute to be visible to the naked eyes of laymen. His friends lived in dread of his virtues, as tending to make him whimsical and unstable, and the practical politicians, perceiving that he was not to be depended upon for party purposes, and was bent on none but lofty objects, used to look upon him as dangerous, used to call him behind his back a good man – a good man in the worst sense of the term.’

In 1865 Carlyle wrote: ‘I had been at Edinburgh, and had heard Gladstone make his great oration on Homer there on retiring from office as Rector. It was a grand display. I never recognised before what oratory could do, the audience being kept for three hours in a state of electric tension, bursting every moment into applause. Nothing was said which seemed of moment when read deliberately afterwards; but the voice was like enchantment, and the street when we left the building was ringing with a prolongation of cheers.’ Again he meets Gladstone at Mentone in 1867, and thus describes him: ‘Talk copious, ingenious, but of no worth or sincerity; pictures, literature, finance, prosperities, greatness of outlook for Italy, etc. – a man ponderous, copious, of evident faculty, but all gone irrecoverably into House of Commons shape; man once of some wisdom or possibility of it, but now possessed by the Prince or many Princes of the Power of the Air. Tragic to me, and far from enviable, from whom one felt one’s self divided by abysmal chasms and immeasurabilities.’ On the passing of the measure of Irish Church Disestablishment, Carlyle writes: ‘In my life I have seen few more anarchic, factious, unpatriotic achievements than this of Gladstone and his Parliament in respect to such an Ireland as now is. Poor Gladstone!’ Again he writes: ‘Ten days ago read Gladstone’s article in the Edinburgh Review with amazement. Empty as a blown goose egg. Seldom have I read such a ridiculous, solemn, addlepated Joseph Surface of a thing. Nothingness, or near it, conscious to itself of being greatness almost unexampled… According to the People’s William, England with himself atop is evidently even now at the top of the world. Against bottomless anarchy in all fibres of her spiritual and practical she has now a complete ballot-box – can vote and count noses as free as air. Nothing else wanted, clearly thinks the People’s William. He would ask you with unfeigned astonishment what else. The sovereign thing in nature is parmaceti (read ballot) for an inward bruise. That is evidently his belief, what he finds believable about England in 1870. Parmaceti, parmaceti – enough of him and it.’ This was written in 1870.

In 1873 the old Chelsea Sage writes more bitterly still: ‘The whole world is in a mighty fuss here about Gladstone and his Bill (Irish Education) – the attack on the third branch of the upas tree, and the question of what is to become of him in consequence of it. To myself, from the beginning, it seemed the consummation of contemptibilities and petty trickeries on his part; one of the most transparent bits of thimble-rigging to secure the support of his sixty Irish votes, the Pope’s brass band, and to smuggle the education violin into the hands of Cullen and the sacred sons of Belial and the scarlet woman, I had ever seen from him before.’ And again: ‘Gladstone seems to me one of the contemptiblest men I ever looked on – a poor Ritualist, almost spectral kind of a phantasm of a man; nothing in him but forms and ceremonies and artistic mappings; incapable of seeing veritably any fact whatever, but seeing, crediting, and laying to heart the mere clothes of the fact, and fancying that all the rest does not exist. Let him fight his own battle in the name of Beelzebub, the god of Ekron, who seems to be his god. Poor phantasm!’ When the catastrophe of 1874 came, and the People’s William was flung from his pedestal, the general opinion was that his star had set for ever, till he saw who it was that the people had chosen to replace him. His mind misgave him then that the greater faults of his successor would lift Mr. Gladstone back again to a yet more giddy eminence and greater opportunities for evil.

‘Finally,’ remarks Mr. Froude, ‘he did not look on Mr. Gladstone merely as an orator who, knowing nothing as it ought to be known, had flung his force into words and specious sentiments, but as the representative of the multitudinous cants of the age, religious, moral, political, literary; differing on this point from other leading men, that he believed in all, and was prepared to act on it. He, in fact, believed Mr. Gladstone to be one of those fatal figures created by England’s evil genius to work irreparable mischief, which no one but he could have executed.’

In her ‘Memories of Old Friends’ Miss Caroline Fox tells us she asked Carlyle, ‘Is not Gladstone a man of principle?’ ‘I did hope well of him once,’ replied Carlyle, ‘in 1867, and so did John Stirling, though I heard he was a Puseyite and so forth.. and so I hoped something might come of him; but now he has been declaring that England is in such a wonderfully prosperous state – meaning that it has plenty of money in its breeches pockets and plenty of beef in its great ugly belly. But that is not the prosperity we want, and so I say to him: “You are not the lifegiver to England. I go my way; you go yours.”’ Mr. Froude, in his ‘Oceana,’ testifies to Mr. Gladstone’s unpopularity in the Colonies. At Melbourne, at the time of the Gordon catastrophe, he writes: ‘They did not love him before, and had been at a loss to understand the influence which he had so long exercised. His mighty popularity must, they thought, now be at an end. It could not survive a wound so deadly in his country’s reputation. They were deceived, it seems,’ adds Mr. Froude, speaking for them and himself. ‘Yet perhaps they were forming an opinion prematurely which will hereafter be the verdict of mankind. He, after all, is personally responsible more than any other man for the helpless condition into which the executive administration of the English empire seems to have fallen.’ ‘Oceana’ was published in 1886.

‘Gladstone,’ writes Professor Fawcett, ‘made the speech of the evening. He is a fine speaker. He never hesitates, and his action and manner are admirable. In fact, in this respect he resembles Bright, but is far inferior to Bright, in my opinion, in not condensing his matter. Again, Gladstone is too subtle.’ On more than one occasion Fawcett seems to have doubted the judgment of his leader.

Sir E. Watkin writes: ‘Sir John A. Macdonald, then Mr. Macdonald, was once taken by me under the gallery, by special order of the Speaker, to hear a great speech of Mr. Gladstone, whom he had not heard before. When we went away I said: “Well, what do you think of him?” He replied: “He is a great rhetorician, but he is not an orator.”

About twenty years ago Mr. Gladstone’s future career as a Minister was predicted with singular accuracy by a very acute observer of men and things, who had held almost every possible office, from that of Ministerial Whip to Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State. Observing from the Peers’ Gallery Mr. Gladstone’s mismanagement of public business when he led the House of Commons in Lord Russell’s short-lived second Administration, he said, in effect: ‘We are coming to new times. Mr. Gladstone cannot manage the House of Commons as other Ministers have done, in the usual way, but he can force great measures through by bringing the pressure of outside opinion to bear upon it. This,’ he added, ‘is the way in which Mr. Gladstone will maintain himself in power. We shall have one violent proposal after another, as the means by which Mr. Gladstone may gain or keep office.’

Mr. John Morley writes: ‘He sometimes shows a singular difficulty in apprehending what will be the average judgment even on ordinary proceedings. He showed this in the mistake concerning Sir Robert Collier’s hardly more than colourable qualification to be made a member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. He showed it again in a blunder of much the same kind – the special pleader’s kind – in the appointment to the Ewelme Rectory of a clergyman who could only by a strained interpretation of the usual rule be regarded as eligible. He showed it more than ever in his attempt to interpret away Lord (then Mr.) Odo Russell’s meaning in the language addressed by him in 1870 to Prince Bismarck on the subject of Russia’s action concerning the Black Sea clause of the Treaty of Paris, and averring the necessity – England’s necessity – for going to war with Russia with or without allies. His hasty resignation of the leadership of the Liberal party in 1874 was a still more important illustration of his rather erratic judgment. The latest instance of it is his letter to Count Carophyl, which shows at the same time, we think, a singularly just appreciation of the diplomatic concessions he had gained, and a singularly inadequate one as to the importance of a proud and lofty tone as one who writes as a spokesman of a great people.’

Mr. Spurgeon, writing to a Cardiff Liberal who opposes Mr. Gladstone’s Irish policy, says:

‘As to Ireland, I am altogether at one with you; especially I feel the wrong proposed to be done to our Ulster brethren. What have they done to be thus cast off? The whole scheme is as full of dangers and absurdities as if it came from a madman, yet I am sure Mr. Gladstone is only doing justice, and acting for the good of all. I consider him to be making one of those mistakes which can only be made by great and well-meaning men.’

In a further deliverance on the question, ‘in answer to many friends,’ and expressing himself as sorry to say what he does, liking to agree with Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Spurgeon says:

‘We feel bound to express our great regret that the great Liberal leader should have introduced his Irish Bills. We cannot see what our Ulster brethren have done that they should be cast off. They are in great dismay at the prospect of legislative separation from England, and we do not wonder. They have been ever our loyal friends, and ought not to be sacrificed. Surely something can be done for Ireland less ruinous than that which is proposed. The method of pacification now put forward seems to us to be full of difficulties, absurdities, and unworkable proposals. It is well meant, but even the best and greatest may err. We cannot look forward with any complacency to Ulster Loyalists abandoned, and an established Irish Catholic Church, and yet they are by no means the greatest evils which we foresee in the near future, should the suggested policy ever become fact.’

There was a brief intercourse between the two, creditable to each. In 1838 Macaulay writes: ‘I found Gladstone in the throng, and I accosted him, as we had never been introduced to each other. He received my advances with very great empressement indeed, and we had a good deal of pleasant chat.’

In 1839 appeared the celebrated work on ‘The State in its Relations to the Church.’ Macaulay bought it, read it, and wrote to Jeffery: ‘The Lord hath delivered him into our hands. I see my way to a popular and at the same time gentleman-like critique.’ Again: ‘I do think I have disposed of all Gladstone’s theories unanswerably, and that there is not a line of the paper even so strict a judge as Sir Robert Inglis would quarrel with as at all indecorous.’ Again Macaulay says: ‘I have received a letter from Mr. Gladstone, who in generous terms acknowledged, with some reservations, the fairness of the article. “In whatever you write,” continues Gladstone, “you can hardly hope for the privilege of most anonymous productions; but if it had been possible not to recognise, I should have questioned your authorship in this particular case, because the candour and single-mindedness which it exhibits are, in one who has long been connected in the most distinguished manner with a political party, so rare as to be almost incredible… In these lacerating times one clings to everything of personal kindness, and husbands it for the future; and if you will allow me, I shall earnestly desire to carry with me such a recollection of your mode of dealing with a subject on which the attainment of truth, we shall agree, materially depends on the temperament in which the search for it is instituted and conducted.”’ ‘How much,’ writes Macaulay’s biographer, ‘this letter pleased Macaulay is evident by the fact of his having kept it unburned, a compliment which, except in this single instance, he never paid to any of his correspondents.’ ‘I have seldom,’ he writes, in reply to Mr. Gladstone, ‘been more gratified than by the very kind note which I have just received from you. Your book itself, and everything that I have heard about you – though almost all my information came, I must say, to the honour of our troubled times, from people very strongly opposed to you in politics – led me to regard you with respect and goodwill.’ Again Macaulay wrote: ‘I have no idea that he will ever acquire the reputation of a great statesman. His views are not sufficiently profound or enlarged for that.’

In 1853 Mrs. Beecher-Stowe, the far-famed author of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ was in London, and dined with Mr. Gladstone at the Duke of Argyll’s. She writes: ‘He is one of the ablest and best men in the kingdom. It is a commentary on his character that, although one of the highest of the High Church, we have never heard him spoken of among the Dissenters otherwise than as an excellent and highly-conscientious man. For a gentleman who has attained such celebrity, both in politics and theology, he looks remarkably young. He is tall, with dark hair and eyes, a thoughtful, serious cast of countenance, and is easy and agreeable in conversation.’

When the Commercial Treaty with France was being discussed, Cobden wrote: ‘Gladstone is really almost the only Cabinet Minister of five years’ standing who is not afraid to let his heart guide his head a little at times.’ In 186 °Cobden wrote to Bright: ‘I have told you before that Gladstone shows much heart in this business… He has a strong aversion to the waste of money on our armaments. He has no class feeling about the services. It is a pity that you cannot avoid hurting his feelings by such sallies… He has more in common with you and me than any other man of his power in Britain.’ Again: ‘I agree with you that Gladstone overworks himself. But I suspect that he has a conscience, which is at times a troublesome partner for a Cabinet Minister. I make allowances for him, for I have never yet been able to define to my own satisfaction how far a man with a view to utility ought to allow himself to be merged in a body of men called a Government, or how far he should preserve his individuality.’ In 1862 Mr. Cobden writes: ‘Then Gladstone lends his genius to all sorts of expenditure which he disapproves, and devises schemes for raising money which nobody else would think of.’ Cobden’s last reference to Gladstone seems to have been at the time of the Danish War, when he once more laments the fact that Palmerston was still Premier and able to use all parties for his ends. Cobden writes: ‘With Gladstone and Gibson for his colleagues, and with a tacit connivance from a section of the Tories, there can be no honesty in our party life.’

In an ‘Essay on the British Parliament’ a writer gives the prize of eloquence to Mr. Gladstone. It is, as he truly says, ‘Eclipse first, and the rest nowhere.’

‘Mr. Gladstone is an appreciated man, but he is not understood. Why not? The first duty of a pretty woman, it has been said, is to let everyone know that she is pretty. Extending that kind of code to the other sex, it is surely the first duty of an intellectual man to be intelligible. In this age there is more of the suspicion that Mr. Gladstone is Talleyrandizing, and using his copious vocabulary for the concealment of thought… He sees so much to say on all sides that he never clearly defines on which side lies the preponderating reasoning. He sums up controversies, rather than ranges himself in them. Debate is with him pure debate – a division appears, in his apprehension, rather to disfigure the proceedings… If Premier himself, he could ally himself on one hand with Mr. Milner Gibson, and on the other with Mr. Spencer Walpole. He is the juste milieu of the day, and, biding his time, he offers to his contingent supporters “chameleon’s diet – eating the air promise-crammed.’” – ‘Political Portraits,’ by E. M. Whittey, published in 1851, p. 226.

Mr. Hill, in his ‘Political Portraits,’ writes: ‘If Mr. Gladstone has to make up his mind while he is on his legs whether he will or will not answer a delicate question, he will express himself somewhat after this fashion: “The honourable gentleman, in the exercise of that discretion which I should be the last to deny to any member of this House, least of all to one so justly entitled to respect as my hon. friend, both on account of his high personal character and his long Parliamentary experience, has asked me whether the Government intend to bring in a Bill for the establishment of secular education in Ireland. Now, the discretion which I freely concede to the hon. gentleman in regard to the proposal of this question, I must, as a member of the Government, reserve to myself in considering whether or how I shall answer the question. I have to consider it not only in itself, but in regard to the time at which it is put, and the circumstances which surround the topic.” Mr. Gladstone then, perhaps, will say, what Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell would have said in a single sentence, that he must decline to answer it.’

Count Beust said: ‘Independently of the demerits and dangers of Mr. Gladstone’s Home Rule scheme, he has, to my mind, little or no excuse for introducing it, and the parallel he draws between it and the dual system I inaugurated is utterly fallacious. Agrarian agitation is the plea which he uses for giving the Irish people a separate Parliament. I believe that the agrarian system in Ireland has for centuries been a bad one, and the land legislation of 1881 – whatever people may think of it from a moral point of view – will unquestionably bring about good results. But how these results are to be beneficially increased by giving Ireland a separate Parliament, and handing over its government to the avowed enemies of England, I cannot see, for one of its first acts would be to pass laws – virtually decrees of expulsion – against the landlords, to banish capital from the land, and materially to aggravate the general condition of the peasantry. As an old statesman, I should consider that the establishment of an Irish Parliament, raising, as it unquestionably would, aspirations on the part of the people to free themselves from the English yoke, and increasing the power of political agitators, is fraught with the gravest danger to England. I cannot understand Mr. Gladstone quoting Austria-Hungary as an example, for, independently of the great dissimilarity between the two systems, Mr. Gladstone forgets the condition of Austria when the Hungarian Parliament was established. Austria had been beaten after a short but most disastrous war; Prussia had forbidden her any further interference in German affairs; the country was almost in a state of latent revolution; and an outbreak in Hungary, promoted by foreign agents and foreign gold, with Klapka doing Count Bismarck’s bidding, was in the highest degree probable, and would, had it occurred, have led to almost overwhelming disaster. Knowing this, I felt bound to advise the Emperor to accede to the views of the Déak party, securing the solidarity of the empire by the guarantees afforded through the systems of delegations and joint budget. Mr. Gladstone cannot urge upon your House of Commons the same reasons for granting Home Rule to Ireland. England has not been, and I trust never will be, beaten as Austria had been beaten. No foreign foe has been dictating terms at the gates of London. No revolution is latent, and, a point also worthy of consideration, the population of Ireland is only about five millions, including those Protestants who are against the Home Rule scheme, as compared with what I should think was the wish of the great majority of the thirty millions composing the population of Great Britain; whereas the area of Hungary is greater than that of Austria proper, and its population is nearly one-half of the total population of the empire.’