Gladstone, Vol.1: 1809-1865

290 Pages·1982·22.531 MB·English

by  Richard Shannon

ABOUT THE AUTHOR RICHARD SHANNON
Richard Shannon, born in the Fiji Islands and bred in Auckland,
New Zealand, and Cambridge, has taught history at the univer
sities of Auckland and East Anglia and was Professor (and is
now Emeritus Professor) of Modem History at University of
Wales Swansea. He is the author of Gladstone and the Bulgarian
Agitation, 1876, The Crisis of Imperialism, 1865-1915, and, in the
Longman History of the Conservative Party, The Age of Disraeli: GLADSTONE
The Rise of Tory Democracy, 1868-1881 and The Age of Salisbury:
Unionism and Empire, 1881-1902. The second volume of this
biography, Gladstone: Heroic Minister, 1865-1898, is published by
Allen Lane.
I
1809-1865
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
List of illustrations ix
Preface xi
Abbreviations used in Footnotes xvi
1 The Formative Values, 1809-1832: 'I Hope to Lead a Severe
Life'" 1
2 First Vocation, 1833-1841: 'I Have Been Long Ago Pledged to
the Service of the Church' 43
3 'A Further Declension in the Religious Character of the State of
These Realms': 1841-1845 112
4 'My Work is Gone': The End of the Ideal of State and Church,
1845-1851 165
5 'This Whirl Which Carries Me Off Balance': Foundations of a
New Vocation, 1851-1855 238
6 'What Connections can be Formed with Public Approval':
1855-1859 307
7 'The Horizon Enlarges, the Sky Shifts, Around Me': 1859-1862 383
8 'Some Better Gleams of Light': 1862-1865 471
Index 557
Illustrations
1 Doodles by Gladstone at Oxford, 1829. (Trustees of the British
Library)
2a Gladstone, by Heinrich Miiller, Rome, 1839. (By courtesy of the
National Portrait Gallery, London)
2b Catherine Gladstone, nee Glynne, 1840, by F. R. Say. (By courtesy of
Sir William Gladstone)
3 Gladstone as a young man, an engraving by F. C. Lewis from a
drawing by George Richmond. (Athenaeum, Liverpool)
4 James Hope {later Hope-Scott), by George Richmond (Scottish
National Portrait Gallery) and Henry Manning, by F. Holl after
Richmond. (Fotomas Index) _
Sa Sir Robert Peel, by J. Linnell, 1938. (By courtesy of the National
Portrait Gallery, London)
5b George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen, by John Partridge,
c. 1847. (By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)
6a Hawarden Castle, near Chester. (Katz Pictures Limited)
6b Cliveden House, Taplow, Buckinghamshire, from the Illustrated
London News, 1866. (Mary Evans Picture Library)
7a Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, by F. X. Winterhalter, c. 1850. (Katz
Pictures Limited)
7b Maria Summerhayes, by William Dyce, as 'The Lady with the
Coronet of Jasmine', 1859 (City of Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums
Collections)
8 Gladstone. A photograph, c. 1847. (Hulton Getty)
Preface
This book is offered on the assumption that a comprehensive new reading
of Gladstone is necessary and possible. The quantity of fresh materials
made generally accessible since 1968 at St. Deiniol's Library, Hawarden,
at the British Library, and in The Gladstone Diaries constitutes something
of an invitation in the imperative mood. Such, at least, was my sense
when Messrs Hamish Hamilton invited me in 1974 to undertake a
biography of Gladstone.
There has never been any stint of materials in Gladstone's case.
Anyone who has had the temerity to contemplate tackling them in bulk
will echo the awestruck comment of the first man so to do, John Morley:
'The first sight of the huge mountain of material at Hawarden might well
make the stoutest literary heart quail.'1 Subject only to the completion of
the publication programme by the Clarep.don Press at Oxford of the
remainder of The Gladstone Diaries for the 1868-1896 period, one is now
back in the situation in which quailing Morley stood when in 1898 he
secured the commission from the Gladstone family to prepare the
biography published by Macmillan's in 1903. We now have all the
materials in our view. That view is no less daunting. As with a closer
prospect of the Alps, 'Alps on Alps arise'.
The first great cache to be made publicly accessible was the political
papers arranged by A. Tilney Bassett and deposited by the family in the
British Museum in 1930. Though but a part of the whole, these 750
volumes remain still the largest archive of any of our statesmen, and the
only one to be accorded the distinction of a separate catalogue by the
Library. 2 Moreover, Gladstone published almost as voluminously as he
corresponded or memorandised. A Bibliography of Gladstone Publications at
1 Quoted by M.R.D. Foo.I, 'Morley's Gladstone: A Reappraisal', Bulletin of the John Rylands
Library, Ii (1969), 370. This and Foot's introduction to the first two volumes of The Gladstone
Diaries (1%8) provide the indispensable detailed information on the fortune both of
Morley as biographer and of his materials. See also R. J. Olney, Gladstone Papers
1822:...1977, PMP, iv appendix 3.
2 Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts: 111e Gladstone Pr1pers, Add. Mss. 44086-44835,
British Museum (1953).
xii Preface Preface xiii
Saint Deiniol's Library compiled by Patricia M. Long (Hawarden, 1977) lists They bear the character of Gladstone's witnessing against himself; the
348 titles of books, articles, pamphlets and speeches: comprising 37 'self-criticisms of morbid stringency' form a 'series of notes for the
classical items, 41 on history and literature, 76 on domestic politics, 60 on prosecution'. 1
foreign policy, 32 on Irish policy, 70 on religion and philosophy, and 32 The question of what to do about the Journal had exercised the
miscellaneous. And Gladstone spoke copiously. He is estimated to have Gladstone family ever since Gladstone's death in 1898. It was clearly
filled 15,000 columns of Hansard and to have featured in 366 volumes of immensely important but also immensely dangerous. It contained matter
that publication in over sixty years as a Member of Parliament (1832-1846, of intense religiosity which could be subject to hostile misrepresentation.
1847-1895). Nor was he much less copious 'out of doors'. St. Deiniol's More to the point, it contained matter about Gladstone's relationships
Library contains thirty-eight volumes of Speeches and Pamphlets and with prostitutes, and, in particular, relationships with certain especially
eleven volumes of Speeches and Writings, mostly press clippings. attractive courtesans which went beyond the strict necessities of a
These published materials had always been available at St. Deiniol's, mission of rescue and redemption. Gladstone's life had been subjected to
Gladstone's own foundation (as, in many cases, elsewhere); but it was a susurrus of rumour and scandal; it was not likely that he would be
the removal in 1968 of the mass of private and family papers from spared posthumously. When Morley undertook his commission it was
Hawarden Castle to St. Deiniol's which marked the second great step in made dear that he should eschew any attempt to deal with Gladstone's
giving access to Gladstone. Scholars and historians such as J. L. interior religious life, which included Gladstone's mission to rescue and
Hammond and Sir Philip Magnus had been permitted, subject to certain redeem prostitutes.·This restriction accorded well enough with Morley's
restrictions (which in a greater measure had applied to Morley himself), own predispositions. He wanted to produce a grand public and Liberal
to avail themselves of knowledge of the personal and intimate dimension monument. It was of no high moment to his purposes that, of all great
of Gladstone's life. And indeed it was Magnus's Gladstone of 1954, the. public men, Gladstone's interior and exterior lives were the most
first study to treat this dimension in some depth, which prompted the integrally inseparable. Morley's use of the most intimate materials of his
notion of a full publication of Gladstone's Journal, since 1928 in the subject was thus fleeting, embarrassed, often tendentious, and in general
keeping of the Archbishops of Canterbury in Lambeth Palace Library. gingerly insipid. Herbert (Viscount) Gladstone, the stateman's youngest
The first steps to this end were taken in the later 1950s on the advice of son, remarked in 1928 that 'luminous and interesting' as were Morley's
M. R. D. Foot, then Professor of Modern History at the University of pages, they did not 'present, for those who did not know Mr. Gladstone,
Manchester. It was the appearance in 1968 of the first two volumes of The a true and complete view of his personality'; for 'the tendency of the
Gladstone Diaries, edited by Foot, which in turn prompted as a logical modern writers' was 'to seek the truth about great men from the habits
complement the transfer of the personal and family papers to St. and affairs of their private life'.2 The thought of what Lytton Strachey
Deiniol's. A further important step in this logical process was taken in might have made of Gladstone's Journal indeed gave pause. What
1970 when Messrs Macmillan deposited in the British Library ten volumes gave even longer pause was the thought of what a Strachey might have
of political papers reserved by Morley as being too sensitive for general made of an edited version of the Journal. Such a version was in fact
availability .1 prepared in typescript by Herbert Gladstone in 1917, and made available
Publication of the complete text of The Gladstone Diaries (now under the ·to the eyes if not the pens of discreet scholars in due course, along with
editorship of Dr. H. C. G. Matthew at Oxford) constitutes the fourth and correspondence of a similar intimacy: 'to be seen but not published'.
last great step. Six volumes covering the years 1825-1868 have so far This was a perfectly sensible arrangement. It was a question of awaiting
appeared. Gladstone himself referred in April 1895 to 'a succinct and very the right time. Meanwhile, the Journal was stored at Lambeth and a
arid Journal which I kept for about 70 years'.2 Succinct and arid the preparatory typescript made by H. W. Lawton. And, just as the 1917
forty-one volumes of this Journal largely are; they are in form an account version was made discreetly available at Hawarden without reference to
rendered of expenditure of the divine allowance of precious time. But Lambeth, so the Lambeth version was slipped to Tilney Bassett by the
they are also more substantially the record of intimate revelations of the Rev. Claude Jenkins while Librarian there without reference to Hawar
utmost importance for any approach to an understanding of Gladstone's den. This was helpful to Bassett in his edition of Gladstone's letters
interior life. They need accordingly to be used with care and discretion. to Catherine Gladstone, Gladstone to his Wife (1936). This, together
1 These became Add. Mss. 56444-56453. 1 Foot in Diaries, i, xxxiii; and to the present author, February 20, 1982.
2 Add.Mss. 44776, 146. 2 After Thirty Years (1928), xiii.
xiv Preface Preface xv
with D. C. Lathbury's Correspondence on Church and Religion of W. E. Williams typed intrepidly as well as accurately. Nor must I neglect to
Gladstone (2 v., 1910), did something to fill the gaps left by Morley. mention that my Gladstone special subject class at Swansea has been a
Eventually the signal to go ahead with a complete ·publication of the constant and fruitful stimulus.
Journal was, as has been indicated, given by the success of what, in effect,
was the ballon d'essai of Magnus in 1954.
The present work attempts to take all this into account. It attempts also Richard Shannon
to take into account important recent scholarship on Gladstone: espe University College, Swansea
April 1982 .
cially the suggestive introductions by H. C. G. Matthew to the two series
of the Diaries published respectively in 1974 ,and 1978, and his seminal
articles on Gladstone's religion (Studies in Church History, xv, ed. D.
Baker, 1978) and budgetary policy (Historical Journal, 1979). The crucial
aspect of Gladstone's sense of the relationship of religion and politics has
been much illuminated by Deryck Schreuder (The Conscience of the State,
ed. P. Marsh, 1979) and by the former assistant-editor of the Diaries, Perry
Butler, in Gladstone: Church, State and Tradarianism (1982).
To the extent that this book succeeds in such ambitiously comprehen
sive attempts it is indebted to the expertise, kindness and patience of
many people. Sir William Gladstone provided generous hospitality at
Hawarden in 1979, and his permission to make use of material in the
Gladstone collections is most gratefully acknowledged. My debt to M. R.
D. Foot is threefold: as first editor of the· Diaries, as pathfinder for
Gladstonian scholarship in his 1968 critique of Morley, above all as close
and alert and unsparing reader of my draft, immensely to its benefit.
Professor Derek Beales of Cambridge has likewise put his copious
Gladstonian learning liberally at my disposal in his attentive reading of
the text. Professor John Vincent of Bristol and Mr. Neville Masterman at
Swansea (whose father abridged Morley in 1927) have been invariably
helpful friends of this book. Mr. Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson of
Hamish Hamilton has been an editor of rare patience and fortitude. Mr.
C. J. Williams of the Clwyd Record Office and the Rev. Peter Jagger of St.
Deiniol's Library and their staffs have been of great assistance. To the
Right Hon. the Earl of Clarendon and to Mr. E. G. W. Bill of Lambeth
Palace Library and to the Oxford University Press and to the trustees of
the Mountbatten Settlements I offer due acknowledgment of their
permission to quote copyright material in their care. -My former colleague
at the University of East Anglia, Dr. Michael Sanderson, has been a mine
of information about Gladstone and the Theatre. My colleague at
Swansea, Dr. Muriel Chamberlain, has generously allowed me to read
the text of her forthcoming biography of Lord Aberdeen. The University
of East Anglia and the University College of Swansea have been generous
with funds to assist my researches. Mrs. Pat Rees and Mrs. Nancy
CHAPfER I
THE FQRMATIVE VALUES, 1809-1832:
'I HOPE TO LEAD A SEVERE LIFE'
[1]
In November 1832, shortly before being elected to the House of
Commons, Gladstone confided to his diary that his 'State' was 'at present
one of danger'. His cup overflowed with 'personal blessings'. He had
loved Eton; he had loved Oxford no less, and graduated in an aura of
conspicuous brilliance. He had completed a -grand tour of the Nether
lands, France, Switzerland, Italy and southern Germany of the utmost
interest, profit and enjoyment. Now, shortly before his twenty-third
birthday, he was the candidate of the Duke of Newcastle for the Duke's
borough of Newark. Reserving with Evangelical scruple, as always, his
deficiencies in godliness and mastery over his sins, Gladstone indeed
confessed that he knew 'not what to desire'. But set against these
blessings was danger of a 'singular kind': the circumstances of his family
were far different from his own. He was acutely aware of a disturbing
tension. He, the youngest of four brothers, was the one item of
undoubted and satisfying success in a family dedicated to very compre
hensive notions of success.
As Gladstone put it with rather opaque allusiveness, God Almighty
had seen fit to overrule 'many plans and prospects which had been
entertained'. By this it can be inferred that he had in mind primarily his
father's thwarted ambition to crown a prosperous mercantile career with
the parliamentary representation of Liverpool, his adopted city. By 1832,
also, it was clear that Gladstone's eldest brother, Thomas, was not going
to fulfil his father's hopes of carrying the Gladstone name into the first
rank of politics. The two middle brothers, Robertson and John Neilson,
had settled for careers of public inconspicuousness, the one in his father's
Liverpool business, the other in the Navy. Almighty God, moreover, had
often clothed his 'visitations' upon the Gladstone family in the form of
sickness. Anne, the eldest child, the admiration and pride of the family
for charm of personality, intellectual talent and saintly piety, had died
after a lingering decline early in 1829, in her twenty-sixth year. Glad
stone's mother had lived most of her life as an invalid; and indeed had
2 Gladstone 1809-1832 3
less than three years to live. The youngest child, Helen, then aged with that of others whom in native talent and energy he much
eighteen, was bidding fair to emulate her mother as a professional surpassed. '1
invalid, as well as displaying incipient signs of the hysterical eccentricity It was all, indeed, rather a sad disillusionment of so many expectations,
which was to make her publicly conspicuous in a manner highly constituting in fact, in William's view, a 'noble trial' for himself
embarrassing to the family. personally, to 'exercise a kindly & unselfish feeling', if· 'amid the
On top of all this, Gladstone's analysis of the way in which his family excitements & allurements' now near him he was enabled 'duly to realise
had been 'singularly dealt with' focused, with a sense of what almost the bond of consanguinity, and suffer with those whom Providence has
could be called grievance, on the circumstance that it was, for practical ordained to suffer'. John Gladstone, nearly seventy in 1832, had almost
purposes, homeless. John Gladstone, the father, had set himself up anot~er twenty_ years to live on his Scottish estate, lively, busy, always
handsomely in Liverpool and in a substantial country house at Seaforth formidable, a widower from 1835, but consoled by the vicarious pleasure
outside Liverpool. The first reflected his station as a merchant prince of of wit~essii:'g hi_s _youngest son's rise to political fame. He had early
the greatest English port apart from London; the second reflected his r~cogmsed m ~-1ll1a~ the outstanding family talent - 'you shall be my
ultimate ambition to represent that great corpor~tion by the side of b10grapher, W1ll1am, he had remarked to his fifteen-year-old son• - and
Canning or Huskisson at Westminster. But the obstinate refusal of ha~ the satisfaction not only of having his own eminence and philan
Liverpool tc;> fall in with John Gladstone's plans, relegating him to the thropy marked by the honour of a baronetcy in 1846 but of living to see
unsatisfactory recourse of representing, with varying degrees of exorbi Willi~m a privy councillor and a secretary of state already widely
tant expense, vexation and brevity, the dim boroughs of Lancaster, mentioned as a future prime minister. He also had the satisfaction in 1851
Woodstock and Berwick, soured his relationship with the city. His wife's of dying at the head of a commercial, agricultural and investment concern
invalidism fitted in conveniently with John Gladstone's gradual with valued at something like three-quarters of a million3•
drawal from Liverpool life. He was quite content to manage his
multifarious business concerns by post from spas and resorts in the south:
Malvern, Gloucester, Bath, Torquay, Leamington. William Gladstone
was acutely aware of this rather odd pattern of family life. His vacations [2]
from Eton or Oxford would as likely be spent in a spa hotel as at home in
Liverpool or at Seaforth House: 'snatched', as he put it, 'from a position In retreating to Fasque, John Gladstone had consciously returned to his
when we were what is ell.lied entering society, & sent to comparative Scottish roots. The Gladstones were of purely Scottish descent on either
seclusion, as regards family establishment'. side. John's father, Thomas Gladstanes or Gladstones, had migrated
John Gladstone's frustration led him in 1829 to signalise his spuming of from Biggar to establish himself at Leith as a modestly successful
Liverpool by purchasing the estate of Fasque, with a large new castle-like merchant. He married, advantageously, Nelly Neilson, the daughter of a
house, in Kincardineshire. But it would not be until 1833 that he moved in merchant in Springfield, near Edinburgh. His was a family without
and the Gladstones could think of it as the family estate. Meanwhile the pr~te~sions. Wi~iam lat~r made the best of an unpromising genealogy by
Liverpool establishments were let out. This, together with John Glad insisting that while adffi!ttedly there was no trace of their gentility among
stone's abandonment of parliamentary ambitions, 1 represented a distinct the Gladstones since 1660, he had 'never heard of them in Scotland until
defeat: 'prevented,' as William summed it up, 'from assuming the after the Restoration otherwise than as persons of family'. 4 John, born in
situation which seems the natural termination of a career like my 1764, the oldest of what was to prove a total of seventeen siblings, was the
Father's'. 2 That career, after all, had been no less than the stabilising and ~ost talente~ ~nd forward of their sons. He was tall, strong, craggy
rationalising of grain provision for the Lancashire of the early industrial VIsaged, of dnvmg energy and obsessive determination to succeed in the
revolution: a system crowned by the mechanism of the Liverpool Corn ~n~ of merca1:1tile line of life open to one of his obscure origins and
.fachange. Looking back in his old age, William concluded that even for h~te~ education. He_ em~lated and surpassed his father's migratory
all his fa the r' s success as a merchant, 'considering his long life and means P?licy m ~~87 by selecting Liverpool as a mercantile centre appropriate to
of accumulation the result represents a success secondary in comparison his capaaties. Once settled in Llverpool he dropped the 's' from his
1 His last effort was actually a humiliating failure at Dundee in 1837. 1 GP, 44790, 17. 2 D, i, 66:
2 D, i, 584-85. 3 Cheddand, 414-15. 4 GP, 44790, 13.
4 Gladstone 1809-1832 5
surname, as being commercially ambiguous (though this in fact was not Evangelicalism was the prime ingredient of the anti-slavery campaign.
legally regularised until 1835'). He married in 1792 Jane Hall, daughter of This was a tension which remained long unresolved, far beyond indeed
a Liverpool merchant. It was not a brilliant match, but there were the legislative success of the abolitionist agitation in 1833. And it caused
promising connections with the Church and Eton. To receive his wife and William acute embarrassment in his election at Newark in 1832.
the family he hoped to have by her he had a fine house built in Rodney But those were circumstances remote from John Gladstone's calcula
Street (then no. 1, now no. 62) in an area on the south-east of the town tions in 1800. His second wife, frail and delicate like his first, but more
being developed and in which John made large and judicious purchases. beautiful, proved also more fertile. She bore six children: Anne Mack
Jane, however, was sickly and left him in 1798 a childless widower. By enzie in 1802, Thomas in 1804, Robertson in 1805, John Neilson in 1807,
this time he was worth something like forty thousand pounds. William Ewart (named after John's principal friend and business col
In 1800, on April 29, in St. Peter's Church, Liverpool, John took as his laborator) in 1809, 1 and Helen Jane in 1814. By the time of the birth of his
second wife Anne Robertson, daughter of Andrew Robertson, the last child John Gladstone was fifty, with patriarchal habits and manners,
Provost of Dingwall in Ross-shire. The Robertsons were a family in not least in a confirmed disposition to need to dominate any environment
genteel circumstances, mixing landowning, local politics, and the law in he found himself in. In this respect his home life was no problem, since
laird-like degrees, and, though worth nothing like as much as John Mrs. Gladstone was wholly self-effacing, asking only to set the religious
Gladstone in realisable cash, possessed qualities he recognised as not tone of the household at a somewhat fanatical level. of intellectually
merely desirable but essential to a way of life far transcending anything undemanding piety, and to guide her husband and immerse herself in a
old Thomas could have dreamed of in Leith. The Robertsons were suitable variety of philaothropies and charities. She found the duties in
Episcopalian; indeed William Gladstone would later characterise them, an alien land of running two large houses distasteful and the obligations
on the strength principally of the pedigree of Andrew's wife, nee of being the hostess of a rising business and political luminary quite
Mackenzie, as 'stoutly Episcopalian and Jacobite'. 2 Mrs. Robertson's clan terrifying. For her, ill-health became a way of coping with pressures she
chief (at least in her own estimation) was the Earl of Seaforth; and, when could not otherwise deal with.
John Gladstone came in 1815 to build an imposing country house on an Nor did John Gladstone have serious problems in imposing his
estate to the north-west of Liverpool between Bootle and Crosby dominance in business. He had a talent for quarrelling and an effective
overlooking the Mersey estuary, he named it Seaforth House in deference technique for choking off rivals in his partnerships. Thus he got rid of his
to his wife's putatively impressive connections. John accordingly relin brother Robert in 1821. All his other six brothers were clustered about
quished his family links with the Kirk, and its Unitarian manifestations in him in Liverpool in positions of dependence. Nor did it appear that
Liverpool, and adopted his wife's denominational colouring, which was unchallenged dominance of Liverpool politics would be beyond his long
not merely Episcopalian, but - of immense consequence to the later reach. Originally a Whig, he shifted his ground towards support of Pitt's
development of the family and especially William - of pronouncedly war policy, and in 1812 was foremost among the citizens of Liverpool who
Evangelical tinge. Evangelicalism of the kind relished by Mrs. Gladstone invited the illustrious George Canning to become one of the members for
was not in fact available in Liverpool, whose Anglicanism was of an the city. John Gladstone became Canning's agent and prided himself on
unregenerate and unenthusiastic character. John Gladstone attested his his mentorship of the brilliant younger man, a relationship characterised
commitment to his new ecclesiastical lqyalty by building his own by a certain clumsy deference on his part and a patient politeness,
churches and installing his own incumbents both in Liverpool and at occasionally wearing thin, on Canning's.
Seaforth. To the latter he added a school, where his children could be For John Gladstone, Canning was an image of what he would have
given their preparatory education under strict and immediate parental liked to have been, but could not be. Canning was a feasible model also
supervision. for what John Gladstone's sons might become. An upstart of dubious
This he could well afford to do. By 1820 he was worth over £333,000. origins in an intensely aristocratic social and political world, Canning
Nearly a third of this fortune was derived from investments in estates in exemplified what innate talent combined with the processing offered by
Demerara in the West Indies worked by slave labour. This was perfectly Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, could achieve. The Gladstone children
in accordance with the traditions and habits of Liverpool, a port grown were bred up in an atmosphere heavy with devotion for this image and
rich on the slave trade. But it caused problems for the Gladstones, for this model. The resonances of the great metropolitan world of affairs and
1 Checkland, 16, 283. 2 GP, 44790, 13. 1 December 29, at Rodney Street.
6 Gladstone 1809-1832 7
the ideal of the pagan polish of a classical education permeated the aged father's domestic prop. Released from this burden sixteen years
Gladstone household, mingling uneasily with the native forces of later, she gravitated immediately out of the family orbit, spinning
provincialism and sanctimony. The tensions thus set up afflicted the erratically, much to the dismay and scandal of her very proper brothers.
family in a manner which William, the only one who surmounted the This leaves Willy, who unquestionably succeeded his elder sister Anne
problem successfully, half sensed but could not, in the nature of such as the darling and favourite of the family. Everything, indeed, rather
things, accurately explain. They set John Gladstone off on his painful and conspired in his favour. He wasJhe youngest son of fairly elderly parents:
ultimately futile quest for national political eminence. They reduced Mrs. his father was forty-five ~hen he was born, nearly sixty when he started
Gladstone to feeble nullity. Anne had the wit to cope, but not the at Eton, nearly seventy when he graduated at Oxford. His elder brothers
strength. As soon as she was of years of discretion, she effectively stood, in effect, as buffers between him and the full impact of John
replaced her mother as the domestic linch-pin. As William's godmother Gladstone's alarming personality. Unlike Tom, William did not have to
she played a crucial role in his early intellectual and religious formation. be the first of his family and generation to brave the outside world:
Thomas was hit hard. He was too old to be sustained by his sister. On his indeed, when William went to Eton in 1821, Tom was still there to ease his
shoulders, as the eldest son, rested the burden of living up to his youngest brother's passage, which he did with fraternal unselfishness.
formidable father's requirements. After a cosy childhood education at the William had Robertson and John Neilson to stand between himself and
family school at Seaforth, he was abruptly thrust into the rude and their father's wish for a son to go into the family firm. There was nothing
boisterous world of Eton. Neither of his parents could offer him any help, very obvious or immediately important that William had to live up to.
nor indeed had any notions of what help he needed. All they could do Moreover, William had the benefit, denied to his older brothers, of the
was veto Tom's pathetic pleas to be allowed to leave Eton. ripening maturity of mind and character of their sister Anne, much the
Robertson, a decidedly more robust character, avoided direct con i)Cutest brain, apart from himself, in the family. Anne took her duties as
frontation with the family problem by being willing to fall in with his William's godmother seriously, and was the first influence upon him of a
father's desire that one of his sons should follow him in the business. For distinctly fine intellectual kind. 'In her later years,' as William wrote quite
this purpose Robertson was removed after a brief passage at Eton and truly, 'she lived in dose relations with me & I must have been much worse
sent to the Glasgow Academy for a sound, practical preparation for a but for her. '1 It was Anne who first made William aware of the deeper and
commercial career. Robertson alone stayed on in Liverpool, prospering, wider spiritual and intellectual values of their religion, a feat quite beyond
and asserting his independence by marrying a Unitarian and later the capacity of their mother and quite outside the interests of their father.
professing that creed/ and by moving in a distinctly radical political Anne began, in fact, on the issue of baptismal regeneration, in 1828, that
direction. John Neilson also avoided the problem by the simple expedient movement in William's mind that led him shortly after to repudiate the
of removing himself from the family circle by insisting, much against his stifling narrowness and mental meanness of the religious discipline of his
father's desire, on a career in the Navy. This, in the end, came to a boyhood.
commandership in 18421; and John Neilson eventually followed his eldest Certainly there was little else, other than Anne, which might have
brother Tom in ineffectual and rather resentful mediocrity as a backbench given William that first, vital impulse to transcend the values of the
member of parliament. Helen was the only one of the children who could family. Gladstone later recorded, probably quite accurately, that he was
be said to have reacted strongly against her family. Much of her later not by nature a 'devotional child', and had no recollection of 'early love
rather bizarre career, from her conversion to Roman Catholicism to her for the House of God and for Divine Service'. 2 He accepted the religious
financial scandals and bouts of alcoholism and drug addiction, has about attitudes current 'in the domestic atmosphere without question and
it something of an unconscious mode of revenge. Fifteen years of age without interest'.3 He had 'no recollection of being under any moral or
when her elder sister died, Helen became her mother's companion in her personal influence whatever' from Rawson, the Evangelical clergyman
career of ill health, cures, spas, doctors and medicines, taking on, selected by his father (on the advice of the great Simeon at Cambridge) to
whether by sympathy or self-protection, much of her mother's habits of run the church and school at Seaforth.'
invalidism. When Mrs. Gladstone died in 1835 Helen became in turn her It was not, however, such incipient capacities for criticism which
endeared Willy to his parents and siblings. He was a child of much natural
1 Although G was shocked by this, the family had regularly attended Unitarian services in
Liverpool until John Gladstone provided himself with his own church and amenable 1 GP, 44790, 11. 2 lb., 19.
Anglican preachers. (MRDF). 2 Captaincy on retirement in 1860. 3 GP, 44791, L 4 GP, 44790, 23.